Dennou Coil – A Circle of Children – 15

Rejoice: Dennou Coil is back! Apparently, the break and recaps weren’t meant to give the animators some time off, or to catch up or something similar; the timeslot for Dennou Coil was just occupied with baseball. Sorry about that. Anyway, with this episode, the story gets fired off again, with a very high emphasis on mystery. Being a mystery-fan, I like this a lot, and It’ll be interesting to see whether the mystery is going to develop as well as in other great mystery-series as Higurashi, Night Head Genesis and Ergo Proxy. So far, it’s making a great start. Basically, in this episode Yasako gets lost. After being chased by a bunch of children, mistaking her for Isako (apparently, Daiichi and the others aren’t the other she mercilessly used), she gets saved by a young boy of about her age: Takeru. He uses the same drawings on the ground that we’ve seen Isako use. He claims that this was drawn there before he came, though I don’t really believe that (see below). Anyway, it seems that Yasako was quite close to her neighbourhood without actually noticing it, so Takeru decides to give her a bit of a tour through the area. Then after a while, Yasako starts to have deja vus, where she’s almost certain that she’s close to the place where she got lost when she was small, right before meeting Yonyon nii-san. The two of them search a bit, but Yasako’s memory is just too fuzzy to remember. She however, remembers that something big happened. There’s one place that looks like the stairs we’ve been seeing in a few episodes, though there are a few differences. Takeru then suggests that it might have been a cyber-place on an old place in the town, with the white fog and all. If that’s the case, and the place was really a shrine, there is a possibility that the place is still there somewhere. Takeru then explains about a phenomenon called “Imago”. It’s a psychic ability to find old buildings and spaces with your glasses. A person with Imago is supposed to be guided by strange voices, but it’s supposed to be just an urban legend. I suspect though, that Yasako has it, because she has heard these whispering voices once before. Yasako then wonders why Kyuu-chans are erasing so many old buildings, and Takeru replies it’s because illegals caused a child to get killed (aka: Kanna). Then, Yasako hears the voices again, and they lead her to the place where she was lost when she was young. She then begins to recall her memory. She ran into a small shrine, and something was hiding inside of it. It turns out that this was a human-like illegal that was searching for Yonyon nii-san. Furthermore, we then switch to the part of her memory when she was with Yonyon nii-san, probably fifteen minutes later. Yonyon nii-san was then swallowed up by that very same illegal. He urged Yasako to leave before this happened. Unfortunately, the Kyuu-chans erase the fog that was causing the whispers, so Yasako isn’t able to remember more. After this, Takeru talks about a few more “urban legends” about these “cyber areas”. I suspect that these are the same as the one we saw Densuke escape in in episode 1, but these ones are accessible to humans as well, it seems. Supposedly, you can’t stay within them for too long, otherwise your cyber-body and real body will disconnect and you’ll lose your soul (I hope I understood this part well). There’s another urban legend that says that you must never, under any circumstances take of your glasses in such an area, otherwise you’ll never be able to return. The two of them then say goodbye. When Yasako arrives at home, her mother tells her that she got a phone-call from her teacher. Apparently, a classmate of her called “Mayumi” is going to transfer to Hokkaido, but to be honest, I completely forgot who she is. Wasn’t she the third girl-member of the biology-club? The one we saw in episode 8 and 9? Anyway, the episode closes with Takeru, making a suspicious phone-call with what sounds like his employer. He tells him or her about Yasako, and how she’s got Imago, the same as with Kanna. This episode finally confirmed that the real and the Cyber-world aren’t two entirely separated things, and that people have been known to have an unconscious effect on the cyber-world (Imago; I’m actually starting to believe that it was this Imago that caused Kanna’s navigation-system to screw up, not the Illegals) and that there have been cases where people were just “taken” into the cyber-world, leaving no traces in the real world apart from memories. Isako’s brother is either Yonyon nii-san, or he suffered this fate of being in a cyber-area and he either stayed for too long or he took off his glasses. Apparently, the power of Michiko-san is useful in getting him out of there. In any case, Yonyon nii-san is still out there somewhere, as we heard him talk with Haraken in episode 9. If Yonyon nii-san and Isako’s brother are indeed the same person, it’s quite ironic, as Isako was actually quite close in being able to talk to him. I wonder why she hasn’t discovered this yet. I also wonder, is there a link between Yonyon nii-san and Imago? Are the whispering voices actually his, and if tat’s the case, did Kanna meet the guy somewhere in her past as well? The question also remains: what is Takeru’s role going to be? That’s about the only bad thing about this anime: kids who are barely twelve years old already are expert hackers, and instead of playing games, they’re already involved with shady businesses. I’d rather see some more development regarding this plot-hole. Is it usual for kids around that age to have a part-time job like that, or are Isako and Takeru exceptions? And to close off this post: what surprised me as well was to see Yasako being surprised by a life dog, not a cyber one. It really seems that pets in this age have become less and less common for people to have, with the arrival of cyber-pets who are much easier to maintain. Still, there remain people who didn’t buy them, and stuck with the real ones for different reasons.]]>