Mayuka is this little bundle of joy who rides around with her father Vidaux in their smart car, Graham. She misses her mother deeply and what makes her story all the more tragic is the fact that not only does she not have her mother anymore, she also loses her father as he stays behind to hold off the DZ from killing Derrida before he gets too close to the answer with Mage.

Nathan was a prominent scientist and Derrida’s best friend working on what he loved. When the two spot a bug in the system and go to report it, this puts everyone’s lives in danger including his daughter, Mage. In fact, he fails to keep her alive and has to ask Derrida to save her after he himself is gunned down trying to escape the corrupt elite. True, his death was a necessary one for the sake of the plot, still it was not something that anyone wanted.

Yuri is Mage’s best friend and around the same age as Mage. The two actually are introduced a very long time ago in the past of the story on the first snowy night, but Yuri is the one who stays ever present in the story. She is the one to help Derrida after he arrives in the future and sticks close by his side. She has feelings for Derrida at the end of the series and has to kill them off in order to make sure that he accomplishes his mission of finding Mage. The worst part, too, is that at the end, she realizes that she knew the truth about Mage all along and has to watch Derrida suffer at the hands of fate.

Derrida is our main character of the story. As the best friend to Nathan, the two were inseparable and did everything together including work. When a bug threatens the company and national security, Derrida loses his friend, his friend’s daughter, and now has to go looking for her after being asleep for years. Bewildered and confused, he has to somehow find Mage. The sad truth is that while he makes friends and moves forward in the mystery around her, he loses his friends one by one before learning the ultimate, soul-crushing truth about Mage.

Our final entry on this list of characters with sad backstories is Mage. Mage is the entire subject of the anime and whom Derrida is driven to find. When he does find her all grown up, she’s nothing more than an information database and hasn’t really been alive for a very long time. She exists online, but not in the capacity of what one would normally expect when searching for someone presumably alive. As Derrida is crushed, we learn the sad truth about what happened to Mage on that night and what her role is in the entire future and the DZs. Semi-anticlimactic, but still sad and tragic nonetheless.