Talentless Nana – 09 – Going Green

As expected, Nana doesn’t have Habu’s incriminating phone on her person anymore. She ditched it before she gathered the others to the cliff to tell her story. Specifically, she left it on and with the text ready to send with a zombie’s finger placed on the “send” button, knowing that as the afternoon sun rose the finger would melt, placing sufficient pressure to hit “send.”

With Kyouya proven wrong in sight of everyone, Michiru demands he apologize to Nana”-shan”, while Nana takes the high road and shakes hands to make up with him. Still, Kyouya still thinks something is off…he merely checkmated Nana too early. Now he’ll have the dual tasks of scrounging up sufficient evidence and rebuilding the trust of the others.

That night, while Nana would prefer to get some sleep, she remains on guard in order to keep up appearances as heroic class leader. She heads her inner debate off at the pass about who among the students is “good” or “bad”; she’s here to do her duty. Michiru visits her and insists she close her eyes and rest while she keeps watch for her. When Nana wakes up, she has a box-cutter at her throat…held there by Michiru.

Now represented by green light to Nana’s red and Kyouya’s blue, Michiru demands to know Nana’s real power. Nana uses her deductive skill to “read” Michiru’s mind, then snatches the cutter when she drops her guard for a moment. This only adds to the intrigue for Michiru, who now knows Nana has combat training and is “no ordinary girl.”

So yeah, Nana was fooled by sweet lil’ Michiru this whole time, huh? We all were, it would seem. The next day, Michiru tries to expose the fact Nana can’t really read minds, making her exhaust all of her excuses and picking away at her credibility in the eyes of the class. However, yet again Nana outsmarts her adversary, pinning a note on her back that everyone else is thinking about, proving she can read their minds.

Nana has Michiru meet her at the cliff to ask the question: Where is the real Michiru? For one thing, Nana has noticed she hasn’t been addressing her with the cutesy “-shan” article. For another, her hand is bandaged, while the real Michiru would have healed herself. With nothing to lose by doing so, “Michiru” then reveals his true identity: Tachibana Jin.

Jin is five years older than Nana and the others, having been part of a previous class on the island. Unlike the present class so far, Jin’s class gradually stopped going to class, split into factions, and fought a bloody civil war amongst each other, while the faculty simply fled the island as if to let it happen.

He tells her his backstory over coffee in a moonlit cove, how after the last of his classmates died he transformed into a bird and flew home, only to be approached by shadowy government officials who wanted him dead. He flew back to try to stop history from repeating, but now finds there’s a new variable in the equation: Nana, a serial killer hidden among the others.

Jin was the cat Nana saved from the burning shed, and he commends her for bringing Yuuka to justice, so in order to avoid a repeat of the civil war, he’d like to make a deal with her: she’ll tell him what he wants to know, and he’ll keep quiet about her true intentions on the island. Nana says no deal, as she’s loath to make them with people who don’t notice their coffee was poisoned.

As Jin apparently dies, Nana prepares to call the “Committee” to report his presence on the island when her phone is pulled out of her hand…by “Kyouya”. Moments later, it’s Michiru, telling Nana “a magician always fails at the start of the show to misdirect the audience,” citing Michiru’s bandage as a feint. He then transforms into Seiya to restrain Nana’s foot with ice.

Turns out Jin Talent isn’t just “playing dress-up”, but copying the Talents of those he copies as well. He reveals he won the battle royale by killing everyone else. If he can copy Kyouya’s appearance, it means he’s invincible…albeit only in Kyouya’s form. That slight loophole could be all Nana has against him—he can only be one person and have one Talent at a time.

It could also mean it’s time for Nana and the real Kyouya to join forces…if she’s able to even escape from Jin’s clutches and gaze. In any case, their deal is probably off. Jin has enough evidence to expose and convict her, but considering he killed his whole class to assert his superiority, they’d seem no better with him leading them!

Talentless Nana – 08 – Another Long Day

Nana may be rid of Yuuka, but her troubles are far from over. Shinji’s desiccated corpse and all of Yuuka’s zombies remain out in the open, and Nana will have been suspiciously absent from class when two more classmates died. Kyouya is the only one whose suspicions of her she must clear, so she devises a plan, using the class gyarus as pawns.

The tan Habu just happens to be out hunting frogs and snakes to eat in order to survive (her Talent is poisonous saliva), but Habu and her friend Kaori have had a falling out due to the latter’s missing blue contacts. Step One: Nana poisons Habu, gets her phone password, then deposits Habu’s body among the zombies.

Step Two: Nana informs Kyouya, Michiru, Moguo and Seiya that Yuuka is dead and explains the circumstances: Yuuka was the true necromancer, and an EoH possessed her to chase Nana with an army of zombies. Nana used Shinji’s thoughts to convince her to stand down, and she threw herself off the cliff. She uses Moguo’s fire Talent to burn Shinji’s body and the group of zombies—among which happens to be Habu’s body.

Kyouya lets the corpse-burning happen as a practical matter, but he’s not letting Nana out of his sight the rest of the day (hence the day’s longness for Nana). When he brings up the very fair point that Nana is always missing when someone ends up dead, suddenly there’s a scream from the dorms: Kaori has been found dead.

While this would seem to clear Nana as she was by Kyouya’s side, it’s clear Kaori died while clawing at her eye. He tastes the contact solution and detects poison (which doesn’t kill him, but isn’t pleasant either), meaning her murderer could have poisoned the solution at any time. Kyouya isn’t moved by Michiru’s constant pleas for him to lay off Nana.

When he searches the room again, he discovers the odd state of the window, which can only open one way, and recalls that when he was suffering the effects of the poison, Nana opened it without any trouble, as if she’d opened it before—which of course she did. It’s a major slip-up on Nana’s part, and no doubt the result of a lack of sleep and proper time to plan her murders of late.

When the ever-loyal-to-Nana Michiru produces Kaori’s phone (unlocked with Kaori’s fingerprint), she discovers a text sent while all of them were out with Nana as she told them about Yuuka and Shinji. But seeing the phone switches on a light bulb in Sherlock’s brain: he thinks he’s finally figured it out, and warns Michiru to get away from Nana.

First of all, he realizes that Nana had Muguo burn all of the zombie corpses because Habu was among them. Nana messed up her face and put her in a boy’s uniform so she wasn’t instantly recognizable, but it was Habu. Then he posits that Nana took Habu’s phone and used it to text an apology to Kaori, so she’d use the contacts Nana poisoned.

Nana’s last line of defense is the phone’s passcode; even with her mind-reading Talent she can’t ask “specific questions”. Kyouya swats that away easily: she just used the finger of Habu’s corpse to unlock her phone. Since he’s been watching her all day, he suspects she still has the phone in her pocket, which is how she sent the pre-written text while they were away from the dorms.

After Yuuka’s status as a worthy adversary fell apart due to her emotional attachments and general mental instability, Kyouya continues to possess unflappable physical and mental fortitude. It all comes down to what’s in Nana’s pockets.

Was she able to toss Habu’s phone—and/or her poison needles—in the odd moment Kyouya didn’t have his eyes on her; say, when he first started reacting to the contact poison? With Michiru and five other classmates present for the search of her pockets, she’d better have, or it’s Game Over!

Talentless Nana – 07 – Just Girl Talk

When Yuuka scoffs at Nana’s barb, Nana tries a different tack, stating “Humans don’t believe the truth. They believe people.” Even if Yuuka knows what Nana tried to do, Nana has the trust of the others, while Yuuka is someone who screws her dead boyfriend. So Nana proposes a deal.

She’ll keep Yuuka’s dirty secret and even read her beloved Shinji’s thoughts if Yuuka releases her. Because Yuuka is “a hopeless romantic” she falls for the ruse, and Nana says Shinji is thinking “Kill Nana”, which Shinji later confirms is the true, though Nana was again simply bluffing. Bottom line, she gets the hulking Shinji off her back and flees into the woods.

During the ensuing nighttime game of cat-and-mouse, Nana gains crucial intel on Yuuka’s powers. Yuuka needs a”relic” (an item the deceased has touched) to raise someone. This culminates in her having a whole pile of weird stuff under her bed, and Nana is chased not just by Yuuka and Shinji, but a whole zombie army composed of dead students and teachers.

The presense of so many dead people ont he island suggests that the “Committee” Nana serves didn’t tell her everything, but she’s too busy trying to survive to give that the thought it deserves. That brings us to Yuuka’s other weakness: her zombies, including Shinji, only “work” during the night.

Nana proves that theory by putting her life on the line, locking herself in Shinji’s cabin where zombies are lying in wait. They fall asleep once the sun rises over the horizon, so she’s safe for the time being, but then Yuuka locks her in the cabin for the day, content to finish the job once the sun is back down.

When Yuuka and Shinji return to the cabin after going to class (during which time Kyouya mentions how the clasp of Yuuka’s necklace is damaged and loose), Nana is nowhere to be found. There’s a nice double fake-out when I figured Nana was pretending to be the zombie girl with a similar hairstyle, but that was a red herring.

Nana not only managed to escape from the cabin, but gets the jump on Yuuka as she’s carrying a dormant Shinji during the next sunrise. Then she pulls the real relic Yuuka uses for Shinji from her back pocket. The necklace was a decoy; the scrap of a test is the real thing. And now that it’s in Nana’s possession, Yuuka is in her pocket.

Nana explains that while it looked like she was panicking and barricading the door to the cabin to seal herself in, in reality she was removing screws from the lock, then covering it with tape so Yuuka wouldn’t notice. That’s why she was able to escape the locked room…it wasn’t really locked. She then replaced the screws before Yuuka and Shinji returned.

When Yuuka offers to do anything for Nana, Nana is perhaps a bit too cruel in saying “I’m a cat person…I don’t need another dog,” referencing Michiru. She then has Yuuka return her needles, but drops the scrap of paper off the cliff anyway. With no more relic, Yuuka will be unable to revive her undead boyfriend…he’s gone forever. But that’s not the end of the story.

Nana is curious why Yuuka chose something so flimsy for a relic for someone so important to her. Breaking down the details of Yuuka’s story about their movie date and ensuing fire, she determines that Yuuka and Shinji were never boyfriend and girlfriend; that Yuuka was merely a stalker, and she set the fire to kill the girl he was going with.

This sends an already crazed, despair-ridden Yuuka fully off the deep end, but Nana doesn’t bother pushing her off the cliff. Instead, she kills her with a needle, and the phone confirms she saved 500,000 lives by doing so. Her greatest threat thus far has been eliminated, but in the process a lot has been revealed about just how little she knows about the people who hired her. She could well be struggling and fighting for the wrong side!

Talentless Nana – 06 – My Chemical Necro-mance

Convincing Michiru that the photo was just Tsunekichi’s dream is child’s play for Nana, who was ready to murder her if she showed any sign of being suspicious. Still, Nana knows that Talented’s abilities can evolve, and Michiru doesn’t mind sacrificing her lifespan to heal others, so she still plans to kill her later.

At Tsunekichi’s funeral—the first of those killed so far—Kyouya voices his intention to perform an autopsy, since the police aren’t coming to the island. Nana takes him aside and protests desecrating a classmate’s body, only for another classmate, the necromancer Kazama Shinji, pulls Tsunekichi’s corpse right out of the coffin, ready to ask it what really happened.

As Shinji declares he can draw out the dead’s memories and even use their Talent, his old friend Yuuka rushes to his side, arguing that he’s really a good guy. Nana then tosses a Hail Mary, declaring she can hear Tsunekichi’s soul suffering. This turns the class against the idea of continuing with the necromancy, and Shinji stands down.

Later that night Nana spots Shinji and Yuuka together, deeming them a close couple. Kyouya is also out patrolling, knowing that if there’s a serial killer out there they wouldn’t want someone with the Talent to make the dead incriminate them.

When Yuuka mentions a movie theater fire where Shinji’s hand was scarred by burns, Nana admits he’s probably a good guy, but “a mission is a mission”, so she kills him with a poison needle in his sleep the next day.

In order to do so without detection, she feigns exhaustion then slips out of the infirmary. While on her way back she discovers a cat stuck in a drain, which is actually lucky because Kyouya and Michiru are already in the infirmary before she can return to the bed. By putting the cat’s welfare first, she opens herself up to suspicion of killing Shinji, but also serves to further confuse Kyouya, noted cat-lover: how can anyone who helps cats be a serial killer?

Unfortunately, it’s again not Kyouya Nana has to worry about this week. When she tries to kill Yuuka with a needle in the night, she’s bashed on the head from behind…by Shinji. Turns out he doesn’t just look sickly; Shinji is an actual zombie, controlled all along by the real necromancer: Yuuka herself!

It’s a great twist because like Nana I assumed she was Shinji’s super strong tomboy girlfriend, and her seiyuu Tomita Miyu really sold that presumed persona well. Yuuka revises her story about her date with Shinji at the movie theater. She was able to escape the fire, but he died saving everyone else. So she used her Talent to “bring him back”.

Now we know what she meant when she said the two of them were “stuck with each other!” As Yuuka and Shinji go back and forth with each other, Nana labels Yuuka as “insane”, likening the situation to split personality disorder.

Crazy or not, Yuuka isn’t ready to kill Nana yet, but it doesn’t take her long to pin all of the deaths so far on her. It’s unlikely Nana’s “Amateur Theater Hour” is going to work this time. She’s in quite a spot! So what does she do? Smirk an admit to killing them all.

I doubt even she knows quite how to proceed—perhaps by somehow exploiting Yuuka’s mental instability?—but one thing’s for certain: the mission can’t end like this. It’s her toughest spot yet, and I’m very interested to see how she wriggles out of it!

Talentless Nana – 05 – Photo Finish

As evidenced when he immediately blackmails Nana into being his girlfriend, Hatadaira Tsunekichi is clearly a scumbag, and thus not really worthy of any sympathy. Of her victims so far, he’s the one least interested in being a hero. But he’s also a big ol’ weirdo!

Perhaps due to a life lived knowing what the future holds via photography, he’s adopted a habit of having dialogues with himself as he holds up his two hands. It’s not his scumbaggery, but his mental instability that makes him such a wild card for Nana’s plans.

Nana could have reasonably expected Tsunekichi to try to make an unsolicited move on her their “first night” together. Instead, he’s primarily concerned with keeping her holed up until the time of the damning P.E. shed photo arrives. Since he’s still alive in the photo, he feels untouchable enough to fall asleep with Nana in his room.

That’s when Nana watches his precog photography in action—it happens when he’s asleep—and one of them in particular makes her do a double take. She seemingly hides that photo but Tsunekichi finds it on her person. And as soon as I saw it—depicting her being strangled—I assumed she staged it so he’d believe he’d turned the tables in their future scuffle.

But even with such a predictable development, thinks don’t go exactly as planned for Nana in that P.E. shed. That boils down to her not being certain that the fate of the photos is inescapable. Tsunekichi can only take five future photos at a time, so who’s to say there isn’t another limit he hasn’t revealed? Nana changes the time on his watch to make him ten minutes late for the fated encounter, but he manages to free himself from her jump rope hold.

It turns out he’s “hyper-aware” of time and knew she changed his watch, but he assumed he’d was the one to pill her top off based on the photo of her being choked. Sure enough, it was a selfie she staged, and Tsunekichi didn’t notice it wasn’t one of his. Due to her her position on the floor, she was able to grab a poison needle that was out of reach when he first entered—and stick him with it, killing him.

But what of the real fifth photo she replaced with her selfie—the one that gave her a double take? As Nana says, that’s where “the real ordeal begins.” It’s a photo of Kyouya and Michiru entering the shed and discovering her with Tsunekichi on the ground. Naturally, Nana plays the victim, using school scuttlebutt that day about Tsunekichi calling her his girlfriend.

When Michiru is unable to find a wound or heal Tsunekichi , Nana details his attempted blackmail of her with what she says were nude photos of her. With a reliable ally (and surrogate to the rest of the class) in Michiru beside her, Kyouya’s alternative theories can only go so far, not matter how close they are to the reality of what happened.

Even so, Nana is sloppy, returning to Tsunekichi’s dorm and being caught there by Kyouya. Fortunately, at no point does he see the incriminating photos, but as we learn from both his and Nana’s inner monologue, he’s sharp enough to latch on to even her smallest mistakes.

Under the circumstances, it’s impossible for her to be perfect, but going forward she has to be as close to perfect as possible if she’s to succeed in the mission. Before she commits to doing so, another imperfection reveals itself: she only has four of Tsunekichi’s five genuine precog photos…the fifth one—the one we saw last week in the cafeteria—is missing.

It’s the photo of Nana pushing Nanao off the cliff, and it’s not in Tsunekichi’s dorm, nor did Kyouya find it. Nope, it’s kind, trusting Michuru who finds it on Tsunekichi’s person while trying in vain to heal him! I was expecting her to find the puncture wound and extract the poison, but it looks like the book on Tsunekichi is closed.

Finding the photo now puts Michuru square in the crosshairs…unless Nana can somehow convince her to keep quiet about it. Considering how sinister Nana’s aura is when she walks into the shed, you could assume Michiru’s time on this world grows short—especially considering she’d already fulfilled her task of compiling a list of the other students’ Talents.

Will Nana have to get rid of Michuru earlier than scheduled—or will she find another way to spin straw into gold? As always, I’m eager to find out!

Talentless Nana – 04 – A Useful Idiot

Nana contemplates her next target when the two class Gals pick on Inukai Michiru, the meekest, most guileless member of the class, with a love letter Nana knows is just a fake. Michuru spots a scrape on Nana’s leg and proceeds to reveal her Talent: a tongue that heals all wounds. It’s a scene that happens so suddenly you almost overlook the yuri/BDSM subtext.

Nana also determines that Michiru could cause the deaths of 150k (still not sure how that algorithm works), and thus as good a next target as any. The only problem is, Kyouya is still breathing down her neck. Nana decides she’ll play her part, first in informing poor Michuru that her after-school rendezvous will be a bust (the love letter was fake), then cheer her up with some lunch.

That night, Nana arms herself with an icepick to do the deed, but finds Kyouya sitting right outside her door, “guarding”, i.e. watching her out of “concern”, i.e. suspicion. She then proceeds to play loud music and sneak out her window—which she should have done in the first place! It appears as though Nana is going to stab Michiru in the back, and Kyouya hears a scream from Michiru’s dorm…but when he arrives, it is Nana on the floor with a stab wound.

She claims she heard the Enemy’s inner-voice and raced to save its target, Michiru. Detective Kyouya can use this latest incident and connect it to past info however he wishes, but everyone else in the girl’s dorm is immediately united behind Nana when they see what she did for Michiru.

Kyouya later considers that Nana could have stabbed herself—which of course she did—but Nana presents to him and everyone else a lie (an invisible monster) more feasible than the truth.

Kyouya’s lack of concrete evidence to support his accurate suspicions to a class now fully trusting of Nana essentially paralyzes him. His theories remain in his brain, harmless to her efforts. She’s even able to get Ice Prince and Fire Thug to agree on something: that SHE should be their new leader in Nanao’s stead. Since her self-inflicted attack is accepted as an attack by an invisible Enemy of Humanity, she can use them as cover for all subsequent killings. Nana is flying high—ultimately too high.

Her arrogance gets the better of her when she instructs an enthusiastically willing Michiru to talk with all of the other students and record their Talents in a book. This would seem to be a no-brainer considering what a Chatty Kathy Michiru is (and she can be offed when no longer useful), but the benefits are quickly nullified by an unexpected setback: Michiru’s probing tips off Hatadaira Tsunekichi, a psychic photographer who has acquired a photo of her killing him in the future.

Whelp, there’s the concrete evidence Kyouya needs so desperately to prove his suspicions! Thankfully for Nana, Tsunekichi comes to her first. He demonstrates with devastating accuracy that every photo he takes ends up happening without fail. Even when Nana changes her order, she ends up with a face-full of soba. Then he pulls out one more dagger: a photo of her shoving Nanao off the cliff.

This would put Nana in check, but for the fact that, as far as we know, only she and Tsunekichi have seen these photos. Tsunekichi also seems to have doomed himself: If there’s a photo of him being killed, and everything in his photos happens, then he must be resigned to die. So, will Nana succeed in killing him before anyone else sees the photos? Or will they be leaked, forcing her to use all her leader capital to defend herself?

It’s definitely a tricky new corner she’s been pushed into. Like Michiru, Nana considers Tsunekichi an imbecile, and I definitely can’t rule out her managing to outwit him and turn him into another victim of the Enemy. But his power exposes a huge flaw in her execution of this mission: Why the heck did she start killing anyone before she learned the powers of everyone? Assuming she gets out of this fix, what other surprise Talents could compromise her, all because she killed too fast?