She's a reporter.

Or - she was a reporter. Once upon a time. Not too long ago, actually.

She'd been the stellar reporter for a little gem newspaper, one that putters on despite the pressure to turn to online reading material, and she'd been damn good at her job. Always keen to pounce on the juiciest story, pen perpetually in hand and charmspeak on her tongue so that she could gain access to even the most hush-hush of locations.

Unfortunately for Ikehara Kaori, her nosy persistence ended up being her undoing.

She knows that, understands it perfectly. It's a fault she's had all her life, stretching all the way back to her childhood, when she scaled the chainlink fence encircling her neighbor's apartment building in order to figure out where that horrible stench was coming from.

(That had been her first dead body, incidentally, though everyone thinks she was innocent to the morose dealings of life until she took up journalism)

But she can't help herself. She's tried, countless times, to rein in her instincts, to back off from a route once she's seen how dangerous is it. It's just no use. She lives for the thrill of the chase, and she'll follow the story wherever it leads her, no matter the consequences. That's how she's lived her life up until now, and one little setback (losing her job) isn't going to ruin her.

Now, Kaori sits in her car, fingers tapping relentlessly atop the steering wheel. The ignition's been cut, the key dangles from her outstretched little finger, jingling with every tap-tap-tap. And she sits there, staring ahead through the drizzle of rain that started up soon after she arrived - staring at her next fence.

This is it, the reason she cut her ties with her boss just two weeks prior. She'd practically begged for the chance to herald the story about the "Closed Ward," and he'd shut her down instantly. Too dangerous, he said, and there isn't anything to see there anyway. Nothing at all. So of course Kaori fought him on it, pressing and prying until he snapped - and fired her.

Kaori, undeterred, decided she would tell this story even if she wasn't being paid for it. She thinks she owes the public that. She thinks they deserve it.

That clinches it.

Drawing in a deep breath and steeling her nerves, Kaori hooks her fingers over the door handle and pushes it open. Cold, wet air smacks into her face as she gets out of the car, and rain quickly gathers on her lashes, falling like tears down her cheeks whenever she blinks. She wipes away the water, but after a while she doesn't bother with it anymore, finding the endless cycle tedious. Kaori pulls up the hood of her jacket and cinches the belt at her waist, closing herself off at least partially to the miserable weather. She sniffs, somewhat disdainfully; it's been awhile since she's gotten caught in the rain, and she likes it as much as the last time it happened. That is to say, not at all.

The heels of her boots click against the slick asphalt as she makes her way down the empty road. It's just the wind and the rain in her ears, and the sound of her heart just beneath that, steady in its beating. The sharp scent of water only just manages to overpower the underlying scent of rot and decay, and she wrinkles her nose the closer she gets to the rusted, fifteen-foot-high fence. From what little information she could scrounge up, this fence trails around the entire city, walling it off from prying eyes and inquisitive teens.

The city is abandoned. A forgotten relic of a forgotten war between the ghouls and the CCG. Rumor has it that at one point it was taken over completely by the ghouls, made into a sort of haven for them, but it didn't last long. Within a year the CCG had won it back and decimated the ghouls' numbers; some apparently slunk away and integrated themselves into other wards. Again, so the rumors say. Nothing's for sure with this ward, as so few even know of its existence, and even fewer have anything pertinent to say about it, beyond the fact that it's uninhabitable. Kaori doesn't even know how long it's been this way, how long ago this war took place - she only knows that it did.

Kaori curls her fingers through the links of the fence, nose pressed to the grating metal. It's too dark to see, with no moon and no stars, and this haze of rain; but it feels empty. Utterly devoid of life. Forlorn and desolate. Nothing stirs, not even shadows, between the towering buildings she can make out just a few hundred feet inside the barrier.

She smiles. It's better than she could have hoped for.

It doesn't take long for her to decide what to do; she steps back for a moment, moves her phone from her bag to the pocket of her jacket, then slings the pack up and over the fence. It lands with a muffled thump on the other side. She surveys the fence for all of ten seconds before she has her hands fitted through the links and her toes searching out similar footholds. Hand over hand she climbs; the metal is cold and wet, and it bites harshly into her skin, but she doesn't care, because she soon reaches the top. That proves more difficult to navigate, given the previously undetected presence of barbed wire, and Kaori rolls her eyes.

She should have prepared for this.

Because she's here and because she can't bring herself to go back empty-handed, Kaori swallows thickly.

The public deserves to know.

Then she swings a leg over the barbed wire.

The initial cuts only burn - not terribly, but enough to snag her attention. She ignores them, moving to bring the rest of her body over the fence. Tears appear on her jacket, deep, burgundy lines cut through her exposed skin. Kaori grits her teeth.

The public deserves to know.

It's a mantra she repeats to herself, over and over, something to distract her, to encourage her, as she maneuvers herself over the rusted metal traps, sleeves pulled up to give at least partial protection to her soft palms. Her legs aren't so lucky, as the thin fabric of her leggings offers little resistance to the razor-like wires.

The public deserves to know.

The public deserves to know.

The public--

Her toes catch on the links a few feet below the barbed wire, and Kaori quickly lowers herself - still hand over hand - until she's able to push off and land on the ground. The impact jostles her ankle but it's a relief to just be free of the fence.

There's a reason for that barbed wire, she reminds herself, tucking her bleeding arms against her sides. There's a reason they don't want civilians here. A reason to keep everyone out. And that's reason enough to keep going, for Kaori, at least.

Her bag lies just inside the fence, dampened from the rain; she grabs for it shakily, misses on the first try and snags it on the second. She slings the bag over her shoulder but doesn't return her phone to it. Might as well keep it close now that she's in the danger zone.

Kaori bites back another ill-timed smile. No one knows she's here, because anyone she cares about enough to tell wouldn't have let her go. And she couldn't have that, not when the implications of this case go far beyond her own little world. There's something wrong here, in this forgotten ward, something the CCG doesn't want to admit to - and that's where she comes in, where she always comes in. Kaori's a rule-breaker, a freedom-fighter. She doesn't back down from a challenge, and it's the challenges she loves the most when it comes to her work.

This case is important to her, probably the most important thing she's even done with her career, even if that technically ended with her latest termination.

Latest...

Whatever her ideals, maybe she should think long-term when she applies for her next job.

Clenching a hand around the thin, wet straps of her bag, Kaori digs out her phone with the other, thumbing past the lock screen to bring up her camera. She holds up the phone in front of her as she walks, traipsing through the sea of darkness and intermittent puddles alike. She wants a record of this, even if she can barely see two feet in front of her now that she's entered the ward, but even the proof that she's breathing right now in a place closed off from the rest of Japan... it's somehow satisfying to her adventurous heart.

Plus, it's something she can rub in the face of her former boss so he regrets cutting her loose all the more.

The chill hadn't bothered Kaori much throughout her climb, but now that the physically demanding portion of her investigation is finished, it's creeping up on her, sticking to the drying blood coating the inside of her arms and legs. She shivers; her teeth chatter with such vigor that she bites sharply on the inside of her cheek to quiet them. She's never liked the cold, and more than once Kaori's called in sick to work to avoid leaving the comfort of her kotatsu. The rain is just making matters worse.

Sighing, Kaori lowers the phone for a moment, slipping it back into her pocket to rummage through her back in search of a tissue or a napkin, something she can use to wipe away the growing mess leaking from her nose. When she finds none, she irritably runs the edge of her sleeve under her nose, then fishes out her phone again, checking to make sure it hasn't stopped recording. She almost regrets that it hasn't; she's not sure she really wants the world to hear her sniffling into her jacket sleeve.

"This is Ikehara Kaori, reporting from within the infamous 'Closed Ward,'" she says aloud once she's back to filming the unchanging black scenery.

She walks the empty road, the clack of her heels now swallowed by the resounding silence of the ward. Trash and debris filter through the scene, scuttling across the road and drowning in the increasingly pounding rain. Kaori worries about the state of her phone but ultimately dismisses it; as long as it keeps filming for now, she can do something about its waterlogged casing later.

"The ward is, as promised, abandoned; I've yet to encounter another living soul, lending support to the CCG's formal reports of the situation here. But the question is why is it abandoned in the first place? Was it really captured by ghouls two years ago, then turned back over to the hands of the CCG just a few months later? And if that's the case, why close it off from the public? What danger still exists here? What is the CCG trying so desperately to hide?"

Kaori runs that over in her head a few times. She can't say she's on her best game right now, what with the pain threading up and down her limbs and the cold seeping through her sopping-wet jacket beginning to numb her to the bone. But it's passable; she can work with it later.

"I'm here to expose that secret," she continues, speaking to the phone. She turns it around in her hand to capture her determined smile. "I, Ikehara Kaori, will learn the truth of the 'Closed Ward' and share it with you, everyone who's been denied access to the government's wealth of knowledge. Because you deserve it - we all do--"

Kaori cuts off abruptly, in the same moment her phone clatters to the ground, its screen cracking down the middle. It still films despite the injury, though the position of its fall only allows it to view the faint trail of blood Kaori left, leading to this exact spot. Even that vanishes as the rain falls, and swirls of red wash away down into the sewers.

The sounds, though, carry above the driving rain, the screams, the guttural, animalistic sounds...

They are all too audible.