Hope slowly cocks her head. You can feel her digging through your thoughts with ease, ignorant of the concept of privacy as she stares into your memories. You can feel her questions as she unveils your hidden doubts with ease, her own doubts and questions responding to yours, like an uncertain echo. Your thoughts of Stein are forced to the surface, as she questions his image, and why he's fixed into your mind, without a single word uttered. She floats forward, towards the portal, which she senses you dread as well as seeking it. Despite her uncertainties, she senses what you wish of her, and moves ever closer to her doom.
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Stein smiles, as he stares through the portal. His hands are on his scalpel, his mind racing with thoughts of blood and death. His grip on Sota was strong, he was distracted, but he was no fool. A grin crept up his face as he drank from the uncertainties in the air, his glasses reflective, his eyes hidden from sight. Their glare held the deaths of his wife and daughters, the family he had cherished above all else. He had killed for Mia, and released his sanity to do so. And yet, in the blink of an eye, he had seen them taken from him, stricken from this world by the hands of a cruel God, the end of all he had loved, all he had wished for. A pain deeper than the darkest of pits, spilling out from his soul and mind, clinging to those around him, growing stronger and stronger, a vicious cycle that had formed a monster of a man, an obsessive demon stuck in it's own horrors, forever stuck in it's agony. An agony it would inflict upon all others around it.