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When Rika wakes up the room is cold. Bitterly so. Her head lulls from side to side, trying to figure out more about where she is even as the ice in the room bites at her fingers.
Ice? Biting at her fingers? Sitting up she now takes in her surroundings. Dry frost climbs up shelves of food. Someone had locked her in here to be a corpse. How had she gotten here? Who did this? Was it even really worth trying to find out if she’d forget this loop anyway? Getting up, her hair flips small shards of ice on it. She had been in here for a while in that case.
In the small window that she can see a face in, it’s framed by blonde hair and piercing purple eyes. Wincing as her skin tries to hold her to the ground, she fights her way up to hit at the window in the hopes that she’d be able to get out of her icy demise.
“Satoko! Unlock the door please! I’m cold!”
Sakoto only continues to stare at her with the blank stare of displeasure. Could she even hear Rika? Slowly a hand reaches up to scratch her neck, and it sends a centipede of ice crawling through Rika’s skin a million times colder than the room Satoko had trapped her in could ever have been.
Hinamizawa syndrome. Sakoto had been infected, and that sinking feeling manifesting as something under her skin makes Rika wonder if she had been too. Not that she could take her violent impulses out on anyone else should they arise, given that Satoko was taking a sick pleasure in having shut Rika in and watching her freeze to death.
The only kind of power that Rika could possibly exercise here would be to either curl up in a ball and let tears freeze on her face or end it all right here right now and wake up to another humid June 1983. Another time dying miserably to the sound of cicadas screaming in the woods. A luxury that she wasn’t even afforded right now.
Eventually Sakoto leaves. There’s the strong possibility that she was merely bored watching her captive slowly feel the blood in her body still until she either went to sleep and never woke up in this timeline again or decided to violently end her own life. At the very least it would give Rika some peace to not have her chilly final moments under the watchful eye of her friend that wasn’t in her right state of mind.
The first few hours are barely tolerable. Even hunching her shoulders and trying to keep as much warmth as close to her as possible, her fingers are turning a grave purple. Her whole body is shivering, and all she has besides her own body heat is the school uniform she was wearing. One that doesn’t nearly provide enough warmth to stop Rika’s slow and painful death.
It’s becoming unbearable, and the ice centipede rears its ugly head once more. She peels herself from the floor, and finds herself fixated on the icicles growing on the shelves of the food storage. Now, it becomes simple and obvious to make this choice, because nobody was coming to help her.
Forcing the joints in her fingers to stretch out and snap one of them off, it freezes her hand at a faster pace than huddling for hours had. Rika can barely stand to close her bloated fingers around it. Her fingers are trembling, bringing the natural blade to the place where her heart should be.
And uses all the force she can to break bone and puncture her lung. Collapses on the floor and chokes on her own blood in half the time it would take to freeze to death.