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Zachariah was returning home from an extraordinarily long day at a co-working space.

He did not particularly enjoy working with people, but the change of pace had allowed him to break out of some of the cobwebs that were haunting his mind from looking at the same computer screen at the same desk against the same wall every day for a solid week. Combined with the annoyance of the endless rings to his telephone of numbers that didn't make any goddamned sense, he found himself haunted with exhaustion that he couldn't escape and it had been making it hard to get any work done in the apartment. So he packed up. He settled elsewhere. He barely tolerated a day of pretending to care about working with other people. Did they matter? No. Did anything matter? Hardly. Zachariah hardly saw the point of even holding this job considering their surroundings: what was the point of concerning oneself with menial boring tasks when there was the problem of a soul-consuming, energy-draining entity afoot?

People had their priorities all wrong.

Zachariah stayed until all of his co-working co-workers left, and stayed even longer until the person running the space told him he did not have to go home, but he could not stay there. Disappointing. Zachariah had finally started getting into something of a rhythm in his work once he had finally been left alone, getting through a couple of smaller coding projects with a speed that had even impressed himself. Perhaps it was because he simply did what most developers did; he searched on the internet for some approximation of an answer to the specific problem he had, tweaked a few elements, and called it complete.

Really, most of this garbage could have been done by automated machines by now. He wondered who would be the first person to code him out of a job. Perhaps himself. Perhaps he would be the one to write a web-scraping bot that would use some sort of machine learning technology to figure out which answers on overflow were the most relevant to the particular problem at hand.

No matter.

The walk was long and dreary, and Zachariah found himself innately bored to death as he walked the familiar route. The co-working space was about a few blocks from his apartment; he could take a bus, but there still would have been no point. Something about becoming a senshi made him want to try a bit harder. At the very least, if he walked correctly, perhaps he would have been able to bolt when it was actually necessary.

He wasn't sure. He wasn't sure any amount of being cursed out by even guardian cats like Faust would have made him fast enough to have been able to bolt. He started to jog for a few moments to test that. He stopped. He decided that was a simple fool's errand and resumed his steps at a slow, depressed pace.

He nearly tripped over something in the process and made something of a squawk of alarm before his gaze shifted down to what had suddenly stymied him. His assumption was the normal things he would find, perhaps a piece of trash discarded from one of the people who didn't know or care what a trash can was, perhaps a small animal that he would have apologized to if they didn't immediately flee, perhaps a water bottle that had simply missed the nearby recycling receptacle. He guessed he should try to be a good person and pick it up and put it back, but what he found was nothing of any of the sort of anything he had been predicting he would see.

A small and glowing ball-like item sat in front of him, simply bobbing in the air as if it was alive. He bent down, blinking at it as if its existence would be explained by refreshing his eyesight a few times. The first thing his mind thought of was simply a ghost; he had played enough video games to see ghosts represented by a small blinking sprite that often had something to say as they breezed by in the chaos of the dungeon. It certainly wasn't complaining at him, though, and this was assuredly not a video game despite his life's seeming resemblance to the same.

Perhaps his life was a good analog for the game Going Under.

The thought breezed by him as he reached out to the wisp, testing to see if it would stay stable under some level of pressure; to his surprise, his hand didn't slip through it, nor did it seem like he could squeeze any part of it. It stayed there like it was meant to be there, softly illuminating his hand and not making any particular effort to leave his grip. He rose to his feet with it. In his hand it remained, not attempting to escape back to the ground even as he wondered how it wasn't simply floating away. He glanced down at his laptop bag for one moment. Perhaps...

He slipped it inside.

The wisp made no effort to escape, simply warming the side of his bag and his leg. It struck him that perhaps he shouldn't leave it in there terribly long; the object was warm and he had no interest in overheating his laptop. It had cost him far too much money to afford one that could run all of the programs he needed, for one. Laptops in general were cheap. Laptops that had thirty-two gigs of RAM inside of them? Not so much.

As he walked, he spotted another one of the wisps on the ground. He bent down to pick it up and found it behaved the same. Once again, it stayed in his hands. Once again, it softly glowed and made no effort to escape. Like the first, it found itself easily gathered and stored inside his bag without question or another thought.

Bizarre.

There was a moment Zachariah found himself concerned that perhaps these were some element of Chaos lurking on their planet, but when he transformed quickly, he sensed no sort of ill-energy leaking from them.

He supposed he would hang onto them for now. Perhaps they would prove themselves useful yet.