Stair/Case/Rendipity

NVL-style Kinetic Visual Novel with 74k words

A Youkai Detective School Mystery!?

Catholic All-Girls School Setting...

....And hell, too!

Content Warnings

Body dysmorphia, textual descriptions of gore/cannibalism, religious imagery and themes, death, bullying, ableism

Kotsujou Eishi (虚妬城 影茨) is hailed as a brilliant prodigy amongst the oni detectives of Buddhist hell... Specialized in dealing with the capturing of lost souls so as to  return them to the karmic cycle, oni detective are often seen as being the hands that turn the wheel of samsara... But Kotsujou does not view herself in such a lofty way. She personally knows that for as much as hell may praise her, she'll only be a prodigy for so long until she's the same as all the other disposable oni hell uses. Besides, she knows she's not particularly good at her job because she's actually skillful or anything. It's simply that she can easily connect with lost souls. For she feels she's lost something herself. Her right arm. At some point, it was no longer there. Was it even there to begin with? It didn't matter. Kotsujou decided to search for it regardless. But without any success. She knew it wasn't going to be easy. It might not even exist anyways. But searching for something she lost made her feel something. As if she was close to getting a sense of meaning. A high that's always cut off short in her job. Perhaps it simply became that high that she wanted rather then her arm... And so the cycle of searching and searching continued...until it was all she ever knew in her free time.

But one day while mindlessly searching...Kotsujou came across a  human girl. The darkness of the night obscured her figure and appearance. Regardless, the girl was radiant. For she had the same silhouette as Koutsjou. Lacking an arm... Had she finally found what she wanted...? But it's shameful for an oni to view humans in such a way. Nothing good would come from attending to such feelings. These encounters are meant to only happen in dreams. So just like a dream, the memory of it will surely disappear quickly, becoming nothing...

Yet the dream continued. Persistently so. Wishing to be recognized as real.

Rumors of a supernatural staircase started spreading around town. It was typical of the trite school urban legends shared amongst human students.  Students were inexplicably falling down their schools' stairs. As if they were being pushed. But there was no one to push them. Surely it must have just been caused by a missing step. Not the business of hell's supernatural detectives to deal with.

Yet, all who fell seemed to have inexplicably known their invisible culprit's name...

Ibaraki-san.

The oni of old folklore who lost their arm.

The one Kotsujou Eishi hated being compared to so much.

She knew she wasn't related to this mystery. But she couldn't deny herself from it. It was already too late. The moment she made that encounter into a dream, anything was possible. That human girl without her arm... A mirror of Kotsujou...

Her mind circled around, like a spiraling staircase...

Character art/designs, writing, and programming were all done by me, Venux!

All music is used royalty-free from DOVA-SYNDROME, with most of the used tracks being composed by Waraya Takashi

Backgrounds, textures, and other photo-images used throughout are sourced from Wikimedia Commons and edited by me.