Elfen Liner Notes : Building My Nephew's Harem
By Rob Morris
Prologue
Kanagawa Prefecture - 1994
Emiko recalled thinking that her sister was marrying a very striking man. Some years later, she recalled thinking how sturdy he looked as her sister, never the world's healthiest creature, died not long after giving birth to their second child. Just this past summer she recalled feeling his lips pressed against hers. All the children were at a neighbor's house, and the forbidden thoughts of two widowed people were given free rein.
"Yes, that's him."
The attendant placed the severed head back into cold storage.
"Ma'am, this next one is even worse. I would prefer not to raise the sheet entirely."
*Will she ever shut up?* is the thought Emiko had when first meeting her niece. *Sister, you couldn't have taken this one with you?* was a later thought. She felt bad about thinking that even as she did. Now, she only felt numb.
"She deserves to be seen off as she is."
The officials who had informed her of the murders emphatically warned her to not eat or drink anything if possible before coming. She was glad for this. The girl had not yet been undressed, nor had her eyes been closed. Those eyes held—and likely always would hold—a look of stunned terror, a look of something awful happening, something awful and unbelievable. That thing, whatever it had been, had split her cleanly in two and exposed her spinal cord in two spots.
"Where's the boy's body?"
The attendant gladly covered the remains and shook his head.
"They didn't tell you?"
She found herself forced to leave the room. Her nephew was physically intact, but would require massive psychiatric care for some time. He had been found tenderly cradling his little sister's upper torso when the authorities arrived. He did not recognize his Aunt, though the name of her daughter had bled out, along with other names including his sister's, in-between recitations of a mantra.
*You Have To Stop.*
Police reached the conclusion that this was the boy's plea to his family's killer, a regional spree killer they had come to call Kaze No Kaede, for the wind that rustled through the maple trees before evidence of the killer's works was found. The killer left no fingerprints, nor evidence of how they could do things like decapitate a grown man, split a little girl in two, or tear a hole in the roof of a train car. Emiko knew all too well that families had been found torn to pieces all over Kanagawa Prefecture, to say nothing of the supposed bombing at the summer carnival that this boy and her own daughter had attended. The sadistic monster had apparently begun its spree by killing five innocent little orphans.
"Which is why we're talking to you, ma'am. The boy's survival makes us wonder."
"Why? A small miracle among several tragedies? Why should that make you wonder?"
The police detective shook his head.
"Kaze No Kaede does not leave survivors—ever. Well, no survivors that walk on two legs. Your nephew is the first case in which our unknown maniac relented. We even thought he might be our killer, but the ESPer tests were negative."
"How idiotic of you, to suspect a little boy. And what are ESPer tests?"
"We narrow our list of suspects by first suspecting everybody. As for the ESPer tests? They are now standard for determining if a suspect possesses powers and abilities above and beyond the Human norm. Should we ever be lucky enough to take Kaze No Kaede in alive, we suspect his high ESPer rating could be the reason he is able to kill so cleanly-pardon my use of the term."
"That's tabloid nonsense."
"Ma'am, we have a pickpocket who, if able to concentrate, can pull what some would call 'the old Jedi Mind Trick' in order to get released. We have one woman banned from casinos for the minor talent to mentally flip items as small as a coin—or a pair of dice. Yet these folks are like monitor lizards compared to the veritable Gojira that Kaze No Kaede must be, if our theory is correct."
Annoyed that they would even allow such insanity to enter the discussion of her family's murder, Emiko offered no more help and was soon dismissed. She peeked in on her nephew, who had finally been sedated. A voice came from behind her.
"Is he all right?"
Emiko turned and saw a girl nearly her daughter's age, but with the oddest shade of hair, the top of it covered by a wool cap. Why would her mother let her bleach it like that? A disgrace.
"No. He's badly traumatized by what he saw. Do you know my nephew?"
"He is my very dear friend. I would be sad if he ever came to harm."
Something in Emiko she could not define almost screamed at her to not challenge this child in any way, shape, or form, nor to say anything that could remotely be perceived as a challenge. Looking back on that night ten years later, Emiko stopped dismissing the psychic realm as the stuff of tabloids.
"Please forgive my asking you questions. I'm just concerned for my nephew."
Emiko noted that the backing away on her part seemed to calm the girl considerably.
"Of course you are. He's of your kind-I mean your family."
Emiko raced through her options, and found one that helped her to get away from this very creepy child.
"Uhhh—the police are asking questions about what happened. But the questions they're asking are foolish. Psychic powers, and all that? They suspect everyone, they say. They even suspected him, for a time."
The girl gained the only definable look she would hold in front of Emiko - that of concern and confusion.
"But he didn't do it!"
"Of course he didn't. But maybe since they're being so foolish, you should leave before they bother you too."
"Thank You. The police don't scare me, but I do want to be away from here. So long as he is alive, there is hope, isn't there?"
"Yes, of course. I hope my daughter sees it that way. Not seeing him for a long while may be more than she can bear."
The coldness returned, this time in greater force.
"Your daughter yells at him, and clings onto him like an octopus."
Emiko actually laughed lightly.
"That's her. Say, do you live around-"
The child was gone, bringing up thoughts of old stories and beings who came and went as they pleased, sometimes taking the unwary living back with them. Emiko was never happier to see such a thing. Other grim tasks awaited her on this very long day.
"But he'll be coming back next summer. He promised!"
"No, honey. He won't. When I saw him, he didn't even recognize me."
Certain concepts were beyond a child.
"So only Uncle and Kanae will come to visit? Oh, she's so hateful!"
"Darling-"
"Well, she is! I wish someone would tie her to a railroad track, just like in those old cartoons!"
Emiko grabbed her wrist. Her daughter did not deserve to be struck.
"Yuka, you may one day see Kouta again. But Uncle and Kanae are never coming back. We must call for the family members, and prepare for their funerals. They were killed aboard the train that was supposed to take them home, and Kouta saw this happen. That's why he's in such bad shape."
"Was there an accident? Did the train crash?"
"I—I cannot tell you what happened. You would get nightmares from it. But there was no accident. Someone came aboard the train and did this to them."
"Why? Mother, why would they do such a thing?"
Emiko held her little girl, who sometimes shook with fury.
"He'll remember me! He has to remember me—He better remember me. You'll see—he'll come back and then he'll make me his wife."
A martial arts regimen over the following months seemed to direct Yuka's physical energy, even if her near-obsession with her crush seemed never to diminish. Emiko for her part had nightmares of kissing her brother-in-law, only to find he was nothing but a cold head. The relatives and neighbors clucked as they always would, and oddly enough, the Kaze No Kaede killings stopped entirely. Emiko would do her best over the coming eight years to help Yuka through the pain of losing someone who wasn't truly dead.
On one positive note, the murders at the orphanage brought about the replacement of the staff personnel, who were cited for allowing the children to act without restraint or guidance, falling into gang-like behavior or even behavior reminiscent of wolf-packs. Eventually, the place where a creepy young girl learned to hate Humanity was closed entirely. Emiko kept this and other articles related to Kaze No Kaede in a scrap-book she gave to Yuka before she left for college.
Glimpsing it during a later clean-up, a young woman who had once been a creepy child still hoped that the kids in the orphanage did better after this, even if they weren't really 'people'.
1
MARCH, 2002
In a dark grim facility on an island no longer officially recorded as being off of Kamakura, Japan, a girl who had never done anyone harm prayed hard that today would not be the day the Glasses Man came to visit.
A scientist who often wondered why he hadn't taken the internship at Umbrella told his topmost superior that the remains of a Human woman could no longer yield viable reproductive material. This scientist was terminated, and then guided out through an underground passageway, where he met girls who had no faces, and learned how his life might have gone if he had taken that other internship.
The second-in-command was never informed that the son of their topmost superior paid a visit and just as suddenly left, having laid the groundwork for an excursion by a young woman who had definitely done many a great deal of harm. The irony is, the second almost spotted his former friend, but his secretary fell over while carrying some designs for a Christmas dress, a present for a young girl who was soon turning seven. She would wear it exactly once.
A young girl called a woman she had never met "Mama" and waited for her to insert once more how her birth-parents had never wanted her. She was saying this more and more often nowadays, and the girl inside the chamber, the daughter of the second-in-command, wondered if the woman she called Mama really thought she was that stupid. She never doubted that her parents had rejected her (not entirely the truth) but she really hated that "Mama" thought that little of her.
There was also a young girl in a highest-security containment chamber who was very nearly the reason the facility had been built. She was the daughter of the dead woman who had been dissected for her eggs. She was the Messiah of the top-most superior and his son, both of whom would one day make her offers she would find it easy to refuse. She was the arch-nemesis of the second-in-command, and the reason why the young girl who rolled her eyes at "Mama's" repetitive mantra was in the facility to start with. She would also one day kill that same girl. She would kill the woman who fell over. She would try her damndest to kill the girl who was turning seven, and she would make a bloody ruin of her and her new dress. There was only one other in the world really like her, and he ironically lived on the same island and had the same mother as her. Within minutes of meeting this boy, she would kill him as well.
Of course, the scariest fact about her, surpassing her threat to Human supremacy and her place as a pawn in a madman's apocalyptic scheme was the fact that she was a teenage girl in love with a boy who was likely in love with her as well, till one day they suffered a minor misunderstanding, which resulted in the death of the boy's family and a mental breakdown on his part. Teenage romance can be that way—particularly when entangled with the evolutionary destiny of the planet. That never helps. In fact, when the time came when that son of the topmost superior enabled her escape, she would take that risk not for her newly emergent species, but just to see that boy one last time and apologize for making an utter ruin of his life because he tried not to hurt her feelings and failed. Again teenage romance just tends this way.
The night after she and the boy had their-tiff-the regretful (not so much if you asked several thousand people at minimum) girl met a woman, and she was this boy's aunt, whose widowed in-law and lover the girl had decapitated the night prior, giving him just enough time to see the daughter this woman's sister, his late wife, had in essence given her life to have, lying on the floor of the train compartment, looking very much as though the train wheels had ridden over her midsection. This woman's daughter had in some respects caused this grim sequence of events, although evidence for this culpability may rest more with an orgy of abuse and isolation suffered by the girl in the highest-security containment chamber. The woman, the aunt, spoke briefly to the girl, as said a little on the touchy side, and then did not see her again for almost ten years. But she would remember that little girl, and her odd feeling that somehow, the girl was not Human.
Likely, you know that part of it.
2
Away from the grim island but still touched by it in ways she would only understand much later, the woman, the aunt, took a phone call from someone gone just as long as that girl, and who in fact had been gone because of that same girl. The woman, Emiko, felt her eyes go wide. In the voice she heard traces of both her dead lover and her own dead sister, gender aside. Sadly absent were the bold tones of the young explorer who, upon getting off the train from Hokkaido, loudly proclaimed his intent to uncover the greatest secret in all of Kanto. In the present, he had no idea that he had done just that.
"Auntie? Is that you? I'm sorry, this is the number they gave me for Emiko Shi-"
She snapped out of her reverie, the bad and the good of it.
"Yes. Yes, Kouta-San. It's me. It's your Emikoba."
The joy in her voice would prove to be largely one-sided.
"Is that—is that what I used to call you? Sounds like something a little kid would say."
Emiko admonished herself for forgetting how much he had forgotten.
"Well, you were pretty young then. But it was always sweet, so I never minded. How are you?"
She wanted to reach through the line and grab him, hug him, hold him and smother with kisses a face that contained the ones she once loved best of all. But a simple question, the doctors had told her, was all his psyche could take, even so long after it had rebuilt itself around the sanity-healing lies he created.
"Auntie, didn't I used to be smart?"
She knew other things she couldn't talk about as well. At times, her life seemed to be made up of them.
"I'm sure you're just as smart as ever, Kouta-San. Why would you say such a thing?"
Again, his voice lacked not merely the cocksure certainty of a little boy, but also that which a young man tended to have as his birth-right.
"Auntie, I've failed the entry exams for universities up and down the coast. I knew I couldn't really think about anything on the Todai level, but even the mid and low-level schools have proven too much for me. I studied and studied, but nothing came of it. My father would be disappointed, wouldn't he?"
"No, he would not! Listen young man, your father and Kanae didn't want to…to leave you like they did. If you could speak to them, they would admire your strength in living. Now, did you call me just for me to tell you what you already knew?"
There seemed to be a bit of happiness in his voice as he responded.
"No. I called because I'll be coming to your town. I decided to give up trying, and accept going to a safety school. I—sort of-remember Kamakura being a nice place, and Kanae always liked it-before she got sick. Auntie—were you in the hospital room with us when she died?"
That bad night came back. The night when she identified two bodies, one of those a little girl cleaved in two the way nothing short of a katana could do. Kanae was never taken to a hospital, except by way of its basement.
"I don't-don't remember, Kouta-San. That was a sad time."
Kouta's voice gained its hesitancy again.
"I said something to her before she died. I think maybe it was something hateful. She was crying, and scared."
Of that, Emiko had no doubt. The unknown serial killer, called Kaze No Kaede by the press, must have been a giant to pull off the feats he did, even if he somehow had Muramasa's personal blade with him.
"Oh—wait. I recall now. Kouta-San, I was not in the room with you. But your father told me what happened. You two were playfully teasing each other, and she laughed so hard she cried—asked you to stop making her laugh. After that-it—it was just her time."
It was a Santa Claus-level lie, and Emiko didn't care. She wanted to raise up her nephew's shattered spirit. She hoped one day he would stand above Kaze no Kaede with a gun, the monster shaking as death came for it at last.
"Thanks, Auntie. I mean that. I hope I can see you and—and—I have a cousin, right? Is my cousin a boy or a girl?"
His voice seemed on the verge of cracking for some reason. She reasoned it was embarrassment from not remembering.
"Your cousin is a girl, my daughter, Yuka. She'll be very happy to see you again, Kouta-San."
Not a lie, but a massive understatement. Even so, that happy reunion might not go as her child planned.
"Were Yuka-Chan and I friends, when we were children? I think we were, but it's like you said, those were sad times."
Emiko decided she plainly couldn't take much more.
"You were very friendly with each other, Kouta-San. Will you need a place to stay, while going to University?"
"Yeah. But—I haven't figured that part out yet."
Emiko assured him that she would take care of that for him, and excused herself from the phone. She lay down for an hour, fighting back a flood of emotions, hoping to have them in check before Yuka came home.
"Mama? Kouta-San's coming back at last?!"
There was not merely electricity in her voice. No, the little girl head over heels in love at age ten was now a young woman also head over heels. Like she had never left.
"I've decided to let Kouta-San stay at one of the properties your great-grandmother left to me, under a maintenance agreement. With his finances plus the need for study, there's no way he can handle a rental agreement, and some of these local landlords are vampires. God help him if he should end up in a winter rental, lose his organs, and get turned out when summer comes anyway."
Yuka was trembling. All her patient Manga heroines stood behind her, congratulating her on the virtues of patience rewarded. They would have to congratulate her once again, for her time of patience was hardly done with.
"But Mother? What school will he be going to? The only school in the area is a safety school. The Kouta-San I know would never even contemplate that."
Emiko tried to fight back a sigh. There were so many of life's disappointments she was just unprepared for.
"That is where he is going, Yuka-chan. He was disappointed as well, but those are the cards we're dealt."
Emiko turned away, so as not see the pain on Yuka's face.
"But—but now, we won't go to school together! He may as well be living in another town again."
Emiko failed to fight off the sigh this time.
"Well, unless you sign up to his safety school, I don't see how you can change that, child. And with your grades, that's not going to happen. Yuka, you must accept…"
She looked back, and her daughter was gone.
"Yuka?"
Needless to say, Yuka did the unthinkable for someone with her prospects and signed up for the local university.
Emiko knew her nephew would soon once more have a girlfriend, whether he wanted her or not. But back on that same island, two months separated them all from the birth of his harem. For a man named Kurama had just decided to transfer his most dangerous prisoner to an even more secure containment chamber.
For the record, the prisoner called Lucy would enact her own transfer, authorized in red, just not in ink.
3
SEPTEMBER, 2002
For days, Emiko had put up with the frenzied comings and goings of her daughter. But merely an hour before, Yuka had entered quietly, gone to her room quietly, and quietly she remained there. Gone were her hurried pronouncements about absolutely everything Kouta was doing or had done, and how very helpless he was.
Added to something else in her blather that seemed off, it was enough for Emiko to finally decide to sit her down and get some answers. But as she entered her daughter's room, she was already sat down, and the soundtrack from her favorite movie musical played on the small turntable she treasured, a last Christmas gift from the father she barely remembered.
"Guess Mine Is Not The First Heart Broken; My Eyes Are Not The First To Cry; I'm Not The First To Know; There's Just No Getting Over You; I'm Hopelessly Devoted To You…"
On the desk in front of Yuka were numerous carving games, some highly intricate. Though Yuka had gotten quite good at these, these ones were broken and cut through. Emiko knew full well why she had become so good at them, and she had a fair idea as to why she would deliberately break them.
"Yuka-Chan…"
Emiko frowned as the rising music overrode her words.
"…there's nowhere to hide, since you pushed my love aside, I'm out of my head; Hopelessly Devoted To You; Hopelessly Devoted To Y…"
Emiko hoped her own teenaged self would forgive scratching Olivia Newton-John, but there was no choice, so she abruptly lifted the needle. Yuka's response was far too muted.
"I was listening to that."
Her speaking voice was so far drained, Emiko was reminded of Yuka's Kohai, the polite but painfully shy Nozomi-chan. This also was not a good sign, so Emiko, always the more blunt of the two sisters and aunts, said it straight.
"Maybe it's time to let him go, Yuka-chan. He's not Danny Zuko, and for that matter, neither is John Travolta."
*No*, thought Emiko dreamily. *John Travolta is forever and always Tony Manero and no other.* before the dance floor vanished, and the present reasserted itself again over the late 1970's.
A rise of temper gave Yuka's mother some hope as the girl came back to life.
"How can you say that? What do you know about letting anything go?"
Emiko would one day teach this same boy, when he was her son-in-law, the best methods of dealing with the temper Yuka had inherited from her father. Most involved upping their calm to match the rage, which she used then and there.
"Oh—let's see. I've buried my parents, my grandparents, your father, his parents, his grandparents, my sister, her husband, their daughter, and arranged to have their son the young man you're killing yourself over committed to long-term mental health rehab. I've also managed the financial affairs of all those people. So, my darling girl? Please ask me again what I know about letting go."
Yuka wiped her eyes, and looked ashamed.
"Mama, I'm sorry. I meant no disrespect."
Emiko held her close, then pushed back and looked her in the eye.
"Respect you have, Yuka. Perspective, you lack very badly."
Still sniffling, Yuka sat back down.
"So give me perspective then."
Pulling up an extra chair meant for study partners, Emiko stroked her girl's hair.
"I told you about his memory problems."
"NO! It's just him being dense and a little cruel, ya know-just like he used to be."
It would take a horrid disconnect on Kouta's part to make a believer of Yuka, but that would come soon. For then and there, Emiko kept on her larger point.
"You've spent most of the last eight years preparing for a return you had no guarantee of. You've squandered entry into at least a few very good schools. You turned away at least three really nice boys I know of saving yourself for a young man who, and let's be honest here, for all intents and purposes, died that sad night along with Kanae and your Uncle."
Yuka did not resent, yet could also not bear to look at her mother.
"You're wrong. I'll prove you're wrong about Kouta-San. He's just being a jerk, and once he stops, I'll forgive him for it. Because there is no way he could ever forget me."
Emiko rose from the blunt to the harsh, remembering that sometimes, cruelty is kindness.
"He has forgotten you, Yuka-chan. To keep what's left of his mind from being consumed by grief, he has drawn a black mark around you and all that you two were together. Look at him now. Still a nice guy, but willing to settle for a safety school? Would the Kouta you knew have ever allowed anything to stop him from at least trying for Todai?"
For the moment, Yuka offered no spoken rebuttal, though her mother knew this was likely not a surrender to reality, just a retreat to a safe if silently held position. So Emiko kept on, but at a more stealthy remove.
"Just what happened to put you in this state?"
Yuka had many positive traits. Definitely not among them, though, was her proclivity to jump far ahead of the person she was talking to.
"I caught Kouta stripping Nyu."
Emiko asked what she thought any sane person might.
"What is a Nyu?"
Yuka sat bolt upright.
"Oh, that's right."
She smiled a stupidly infuriating smile that one day every single member of her extended family would tell her to stop using, for it was just that annoying.
"Sorry, Mama. This past week has been so crazy. There's so much I haven't told you."
About an hour later, Emiko had a new appreciation for the wisdom that states ignorance is bliss.
"You-you found a naked girl on the beach. With a head wound. Instead of alerting authorities immediately, you took her to the Kaede-Sou, where she proved either so infantile or so drunk, she peed on the floor. She ran off after Kouta lost his temper, you two went to recover her-I hope she had clothes by this point-you were ATTACKED by unknowns who the police want you to ignore-and, rather than contacting me or asking around about her family, you left a young man who's lived much of his life in isolation with custody of a young girl. Wait-a little girl? No figure yet, incessantly calls Kouta Onii-Chan? Please tell me she's like that."
Yuka seemed almost cross.
"Mother, when you say it all like that, it sounds like some story with a lot of plotholes and stupid assumptions made by gullible characters."
"Remember, kid-you said it-I didn't."
Yuka drew back, but only a bit.
"Nyu-is-a-little hottie. She has a very nice body, looks to be between fifteen and sixteen-and has hair that-tends reddish. Her name is about the only word she can form. She is very devoted to Kouta-San."
Emiko fought back endless snarky comments, the worst of which was :
*Well, dear, I know you haven't been able to give Kouta any birthday or Christmas gifts all these years, but this may be taking it a bit too far. Tell me, did you get Nyu a cheerleader's outfit for the occasion as well?*
Instead, she kept her comments to the practical.
"Is there anything else about her you're not telling me?"
Yuka valued honesty. Yuka valued truth.
"nothing of any real importance."
Yuka lied through her teeth, leaving a hole where the lie passed. Then, she did something that her mother found less infuriating than utterly confusing.
"Oh, how silly of me."
Yuka began gathering some of her things. Emiko shook her head.
"Where are you going?"
Yuka smiled a smile a great deal surer than any look she had worn for awhile.
"You're absolutely right, Mama. I have been silly. Nyu-chan is too much of a handful-hmmph! two nice soft handfuls-for Kouta-san to handle. So I'm moving in with them, to keep an eye on them both."
Emiko had always thought that the day her baby left home would be somewhat more dramatic.
"What brought this on? I thought you were mainly concerned about Kouta."
Yuka packed light, but was being thorough in this.
"Well, he is a pervert. But I now realize, Nyu's clothes were soaking wet from the rain, and his eyes were closed as he pulled her pants off. He was making an effort, stupid though it was. It's unfair of me to leave him right in the lap of temptation without the hands of correction to steer him clear."
Emiko cornered her child on one subject.
"So-if you're living there, will you split the maintenance chores with your cousin?"
Emiko noted that Yuka never met her eyes as she responded.
"We'll work all that out, Mother. Well, I better get over there before they end up making a Nyu Junior. Oh, I will so kill him if that happens!"
The cab came, and though she would be back for her things, Emiko knew her nest was now empty. She realized she could even start dating again in a real way. But for then and there, she picked up a picture of her late sister with her husband, and simply shook her head.
"Should've listened to you, Imouto. We should have run off and joined a nunnery."
Where, she had to admit, they would not have lasted very long. About three hours into a headache-born nap, she received a phone call.
"Yuka-chan? Oh-well will he be all right? Thank goodness. Oh? Well, obviously that's not how he died. I tried to warn you-even so, I didn't know he rearranged past history in his head, but I guess that makes sense. Well, until he gets over it, you'll be solely responsible for maintenance-no, we're not breaking up-Yuka, we're on a landline. Don't you dare try and dump all that work on poor-"
Emiko heard an odd noise in the background on the phone, from Yuka's end. She chose to ignore it.
"Well, listen. If she is going to be staying and living on my property, then I want to meet this Nyu. No, that is not up for discussion. You were keeping something from me about her, and in any event, I want to..."
Emiko heard the odd noise again.
"Yuka, did you two buy a cat?"