Urasekai Picnic - Vol. 13 Ch. 71 - Pandora in the Next Room IV

[Colonel-Picquart]

The amount of panels where it's clear these two want each other carnally is driving me insane!!!!! The way they look at each other is just so ugh

 

[dumbziri]

Before she looked at the mirror, she remarked that it reminded her of a story about a mirror that drove ppl insane after a ritual, claiming the neighbours (in that story) lives too.

And she only got affected by the mirror after she moved the hair away and looked straight at the mirror.

It's not the mirror that drives people insane, it's the drawers underneath the mirror. The mirror harms Sorawo because it's a gate and she's using her blue eye to look through it, it's not a major part of the ghost story.

 

[LTalon]

The other thing to remember is that just being around Otherside stuff can mess with your mind. Sorawo is sleep deprived, drawn to the Otherside, and already somewhat corrupted: paranormal phenomena don't need a lot to get their hooks into her.

 

[beThereShortly]

Genuinely creepy drawings as always.
Thank you for the chapter!

 

[74HC595]

Some pretty good horror this time. A psychological hazard, an unnerving legend, and a connection to something hidden within yourself that you can only feel would be terrible if you learn about it. While I dislike forbidden knowledge as a narrative theme, it really does wonders at stomach churning dread.

 

[fight2live]

if this is the end of this mystery, it feels a bit anti-climactic

 

[feha]

Yeah Sorawo do careless mistake sometimes, although this is not the first time they got bamboozled with cognitive hazard entity (that early chapter with a man searching for his missing wife come to mind)...

Sure, but this was 8 panels (or like ~5 seconds in their universe's time) directly after having just said "they found a mirror stand, and those who looked inside lost their minds and never recovered"

Well, how else have they solved literally all of their otherworld problems? Sorowa looks at it with her eye and Toriko shoots it or uses her hand. As the story progressess, more and more of the otherworld incidents are seemingly designed to trap the pair. Makes sense to try capturing Sorowa before Toriko has a chance to do anything.

I have a couple ideas just off the top of my head:

1. destroy the mirror she knows drives ppl mad from the story she narrated moments before, without even taking the cover off
2. walk around its back, and then take off the cover and let ghost-hand feel it out
3. try moving/dismantling it and separating each component
4. sell it to the lab, whole

It's not the mirror that drives people insane, it's the drawers underneath the mirror. The mirror harms Sorawo because it's a gate and she's using her blue eye to look through it, it's not a major part of the ghost story.

She quite clearly said it was the mirror stand, not the cabinet. Though she did warn her partner that the drawers [in the cabinet] likely are hazardous too.

 

[Kampfarsch]

So did she scream or nah
Anyway see through object sucking is weirdly erotic

 

[MapleMakarov]

This series is so impressively well crafted. It's not even done yet and rereading the whole thing brings new perspectives and the foreshadowing is kind of crazy. Most non-sense scenes end up significant one way or another which I find wild. Like, at some points I'm tempted to check out the novel just to see if it's just as well crafted or if these are thing's added by the manga to polish things up.

The manga is pretty much 1:1 with the novels, minus Sorawo's (completely bonkers) narration.

The story is really well crafted, and I think for two reasons. First, Miyazawa is a guy who cut his teeth in the TTRPG world, contributing to scenario design for a few different games. He's mentioned in interviews that at the start, he didn't really have an overarching plan for the series. He took a very DM approach to writing by focusing on characterization and dropping in character/narrative details that would be available for him hook into later. Second, I saw a tweet from him a while back mentioning his spreadsheet of netlore and ghost stories grouped by themes or motifs, which I would guess is how he finds these weird connections between disparate stories and manages to make them land every time.

 

[shittycoolusername69]

if this is the end of this mystery, it feels a bit anti-climactic

This is the end of 'Pandora in the Next Room', so right now the manga is in the middle of volume 4 of the novel series. Even though the Pandora itself was fairly easy to exorcise when Sorawo finally let Toriko help, a lot of what came up in this arc and the previous one ('The Matter of That Farm') will be relevant in the next two arcs from the same volume.

The manga takes an average of 21 months to cover one volume of the novel series. When I read this volume, I could complete it in just a few hours. If you got this far in the manga, I really can't recommend picking up the novels enough; the story will flow much better that way.

 

[brjoaoed]

The more I read this manga, the more I think about something like "And this is the early days of one of the most important members of the O5 council when they were active on field before joining the SCP foundation."

But to be fair, the way in which Sorawo treat the supernatural, she would be more likely to Join the GOC (Global Occult Coalition) instead.

 

[YamiTheWitch]

The manga is pretty much 1:1 with the novels, minus Sorawo's (completely bonkers) narration.

The story is really well crafted, and I think for two reasons. First, Miyazawa is a guy who cut his teeth in the TTRPG world, contributing to scenario design for a few different games. He's mentioned in interviews that at the start, he didn't really have an overarching plan for the series. He took a very DM approach to writing by focusing on characterization and dropping in character/narrative details that would be available for him hook into later. Second, I saw a tweet from him a while back mentioning his spreadsheet of netlore and ghost stories grouped by themes or motifs, which I would guess is how he finds these weird connections between disparate stories and manages to make them land every time.

It's crazy to have such internally consistent logic and well laid out plot then, for what basically amounts to improv.

 

[Manchura]

My question was more about why she pulled the cover off. And why she didn't warn her partner about the cognitive hazard before doing so.

I mean, she has consistently proved to have an ego of "oh I know about this it will be fine" and then things go wrong because she goes in head first

 

[recklessribbon]

Just finished reading the novels the other day and now caught up on the manga. Immediately shot up to one of my favorite series. I'm in love with the characters and the worldbuilding. Can't believe I've slept on this for so long.

Thanks for the translation!