Unhealthy Obsessions

Qualified people apply here, right...?  Umm, thank you for meeting with me on such short notice, Mikage-senpai.  Only I don't quite understand what I'm interviewing for.  To be honest, I came here wondering if there's some kind of dark secret behind your seminar.  Esoteric knoledge, that kind of thing.  Maybe that sounds dumb.  Except I think about that sort of stuff all the time.

Secrets could be hidden anywhere.  Don't you think that's a romantic idea?  Back in the old days, it was harder for spies to comunicate with their headquarters.  There weren't any cell phones or emails.  Deep in enemy territory, making drops was tough, too.  Sometimes the only way of passing messags was to hide them in other messages.  There was a whole art to it.  Steganography, it was called.  Anything could be a vehcle for a hidden message.  Letters.  Newspaper ads.  Radio broadcasts.  It was always designed to look totally innocent.  You could only see the message if you knew the rule.  Like, only read the first letter of every sentence.  That's an obvious example.  It could also be written in invisible ink.  Or typoraphical errors.  Or Morse code hidden in radio static.  One guy wove a code into colorful yarn and gave it to a courier to wear, so it wouldn't be found if he was searched.

Yes, go deeper, exactly!  The real world must be made of puzles like that even today.  Because if it isn't, then reality is just surfaces, you know?  I don't think I could stand it if there wasn't a hidden meaning.  Being alive today isn't like it was back then.  You can live and die today without knowing what a Vigenere cipher even is.  But everything people did then had significance, I'm sure of it!  When they wrote, they got out a pen and thought about every word before they wrote it, because they didn't have a backspace key.  Even writing was like painting on canvas.  They probably lived their whole lives that way, like an art.  Today...

Everything we do today is disposable!  We forget everything the instant we read it.  We don't eamine anything, we just save it to the hard drive.  No one pays attention to anything, no matter how thoughtfully it was made.  Or how much it meant.  So... there must be people who hide their secrets in the static, right?  Sometimes I send them out myself, little pieces of me, flying into the ether, visble if someone would just look deeper.  There must be other people who are listening!  Someone has to understand me!

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JURI: And they say I have problems.
SHIORI: I kind of relate.  Haven't you ever buried your secret thoughts somewhere and sort of hoped someone would notice them?
JURI: Uh.  Now that you mention it...
SHIORI: Well, let's get going!
JURI: Huh?
SHIORI: They must have hidden a message in here, right?  Like a password or something!  We should look for it together.
JURI:  Oh!  Right, I guess that makes sense.  Then, shall we start at the beginning?