>>968
Other thoughts? Yeah. Not sure the kaibutsu can entirely be referred to in the past tense. I mentioned last night that I figured that Sabi enters flow to help her concentrate on things that she's concerned with at present. Oreko is up to something people seem to think, but I also propose that Sabi is also up to something, either of her own agenda or working as part of a think tank of some sort, requiring her to spend all her time at her computer, doing whatever it is she does, while she processes her thoughts and contemplations in the form of a metaphorical world.
Example, there's a portion where she needs to approach the kaibutsu, become invisible, then sneak back in order to get through a path that wasn't open until the kaibutsu come at her. This is quite frightening, and in a dreamscape would be a typical nightmare. But this is flow, so it may also mean that Sabi is contemplating on how to avoid or sneak past kaibutsu in the real world (whatever the hell they are). This info would then possibly be passed on to anyone else at another computer working in the think tank, if Sabi has anyone else she's working with.
And going back to the idea that Sabi lives in a post-apocalyptic world---well if everything can be taken at present tense, then the condition of the world could be running from a nightmarish wasteland of war to a more small scale, secluded area where things are going wrong and Sabi is concerned with figuring things out, going into the trance-like flow while she's working at her computer.
On the other hand, I'm still not opposed to the idea that she's just another shut-in that lives in an ordinary world, REALLY takes bad care of her room, and kind of zonks out when she works at the computer and thinks about really random, morbid shit.