“That would be inaccurate, and you still do not need a eulogy.” “Rem, add ‘nobody loved me’ to my eulogy.” “I’m dying and this is the treatment I get,” he moaned pitifully, ignoring the snicker he got from Laiha in response. Riku groaned, flopping his head back down onto the couch again. “Eh, he’s just buying something for Dien,” Laiha shrugged, looking down at him with amusement as she snidely added, "He’s less likely than you to come home with an entire PS4." “What, not gonna tell me I shouldn’t have trusted him with it?” And finally looked up, frowning, as the expected response never came. “Gave him some of mine,” Riku said, and then waited. Makes sense,” Laiha said, and then, softly, made a confused noise as something else occurred to her. “Said he was gonna go buy Dien his own hoodie, ’cause he keeps trying to steal Belial’s.” It still felt weird to hear her using his name without a lot of anger attached to it, but that was the state they’d somehow reached recently. He attempted to shrug without changing his face-down position on the couch. Laiha probably nodded, before coming up with her next question. “Nope,” he replied simply, too tired to elaborate any further. “Still no clue where these things are coming from?” He could imagine the patronizing look on her face perfectly well as it was. Laiha walked over to sit on the very end of the couch, shoving at his legs until he folded them out of her way, all the while making dismissive noises at him. And so, without any solid leads, the best they could do was destroy the robots as they showed up… They were still counting on the fact that Belial didn’t seem to realize he’d switched universes since the last thing he remembered, lest he also realize there was no Empera in this one. Not that he was going to bring that up right now. Riku’s current best theory was that they were from Belial’s home universe, who'd probably heard about the whole criminals are cloning Belial thing and were presumably thus trying to keep a lid on it. They still didn’t know why the robots were after Belial in particular. Didn’t help that this would be the one time they’d kind of have a point.
With all these robots, though, and with them obviously targeting Belial, he could only imagine that the ‘what if it’s Ultraman’s fault that we’re being attacked at all!’ crowd was getting into full gear again. That had taken some of the pressure of public opinion off of him. Ugh.Īt least the reporters seemed to have, hesitantly, mostly decided that Belial wasn’t an active threat, last he’d checked. (If there was another one tomorrow, so help him…) He didn’t even want to think about what the news was going to have to say, either. They were up to five robots destroyed now, and two of those had been back-to-back this week, one yesterday and one today, and Riku was tired of it. In spite of (or perhaps because of) Belial’s hopes, the robots did not at all stop showing up.
Well, what did he expect, when it was just RE.M. chided him, over the sound of a loud scoff from elsewhere in the room, and he groaned again.
“I’m dying, guys,” he told the room at large, swiping around at the floor with his arm until he located his stuffed octopus, pulling it up to comfort his demise, “Rem, write me a really nice eulogy, okay…” Riku flopped down onto the couch, face-down, with a long groan, and laid there pathetically.