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It was 9pm. Ryoko had started her shift at 7am this morning. She was supposed to finish at 4pm but ran way overtime because an entire floor of an office building lost power to a lot of server stacks and the entire network needed rebuilding; file structure, group policy, etc. She even needed to create everybody's account from scratch one by one. She couldn't stop working until their business was back up and running.

She was finally finished. The employees at that office, many of whom she was still on the phone with, thanked her but stated that mostof them would now be working overnight, and they would call her if there were any other IT issues. After hanging up, she packed up her laptop and headset into a rucksack, put her phone in her pocket, and left her one-room apartment. She caught the bus to the library, as she still needed to submit a paper for college by tomorrow morning. She was almost finished but she'd still need to spend a few hours bringing all of her research together, tidying it up and making it digestible and professional in the final paper. All the while she could get a work call at any moment. She bought a can of coffee from the vending machine outside the library then headed in.

She couldn't concentrate. The caffiene hadn't made her any less stressed or tired. It had just made her buzzed and irritable on top of still being stressed and tired. It took much longer than it should have to finish her paper due to the constant threat of her phone ringing. She couldn't live like this much longer. Thankfully her dissertation was coming along nicely, and the final deadline was in a few months. All she needed to do was hang on and run out the clock for a few more months and she'd be home free.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd had fun. All of her time was spent on college, work, or recovering from those. She knew that she wouldn't get out of bed tomorrow, on her day off, until 3pm. Maybe not even then. In a twisted way, she liked being kept so busy. It distracted her from the all-encompasing mental black hole that was her current depressive episode. She didn't have time to think about how little fun her awful life was when she was too preoccupied with her awful life.

She was doing it again. She'd already promised her parents that when there's less to distract her, and when she finlly has room to breathe, she'll start going to the gym and to therapy. She knew they were concerned. But there was no point trying to make things better yet. She walready had too much on her plate. She just needed to hang on. It was only a few months!

Ryoko almost slammed the desk, but the realisation that she was in a public library calmed her down. She never was called by work, thankfully, and finally, at 4am, she submitted her completed paper. She packed up her laptop and headset again, and headed out. She walked back to the bus stop in a daze. She was on auto-pilot. Too fatiqued to pay attention to the world around her. She saw but didn't look. Heard but didn't listen. It took a sudden bright light to her left side, and the blaring horn of a truck in her ear, to realise that she was currently in the middle of the road while the walk signal was red.

[color=DBC721]"Oh."[/color]