The screen flashes from black, to a moment of static, to the image of Arachne sitting in a Café in his hometown back in Japan. He’s smoking a cigarette (not of the hand-rolled variety that he’s usually seen smoking, but rather a generic cigarette with tobacco inside) and drinking a cup of coffee. The steam rises from the coffee like steam rises on a lake early in the morning, dancing about in the air before fading into oblivion and becoming as unseen and unknown as sasquatch. The business men around Arachne are also drinking coffee, some of them smoking, most of them reading newspapers or business journals and/or talking on cell phones. The noise from the room, which is actually many sounds combining into a symphony of telephones ringing, people conversing and glasses clanking, fades into the background as Arachne begins to speak. His microphone makes the background noise nothing but white noise behind him.
Arachne: There is a famous nursery rhyme that begins with Humpty Dumpty Sat On A Wall. It was written in England sometime around the early 1800s, or so scholars would like to tell us. The truth is that Humpty Dumpty was a premonition that a poet had not some silly riddle or story. The story of Humpty Dumpty is a premonition of my existence, of my childhood, and of the heartache that I would hold for the rest of my life. I didn’t fall off a wall like some ridiculous egg or clumsy oaf, depending on whose interpretation of the rhyme one scholarly believes in. Rather I was dropped from the wall of a delightful childhood and was instead broken and turned into the drug addict who is the “most inconsistent superstar in GCWA history” you see today. All sorts of servants working to try to put together and egg makes no sense… an entire village hoping to save the life of a child who had a hard life makes sense. But all the horses and men from my village, though, no matter how hard they tried couldn’t put me back together again. I’ll show you today how I became the broken individual that I am now. I’ll show you the truth.
An Asian man about three tables away from Arachne breaks from being ‘white noise in the background’ when he begins shouting into his cell phone. Arachne looks over at him and shakes his head. He then looks back at the camera with eyes that are clearly from a very sad individual.
Arachne: Ryan Rage? What sort of name is that? Why are you so full of rage? I guess I’d be full of rage too if I was as ugly and vein-covered as you. YOU SUCK RYAN RAGE~!
The screen flashes to black and when it brightens again, Arachne is dressed in an egg-costume and sitting on a wall. Then he falls and his shell cracks. Many horses and men run around in a panic, but he remains laying there in a broken state.
Arachne Dumpty Sat on a Wall…
Arachne Dumpty had a great fall…
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…
Couldn’t put Arachne together again.
