Are We Really Saving The World?
Chapter 1: Time Doesn't Add Up, Does It?
A/N: I've been working on a story for weeks, trying to make a buffer, before I start releasing anything for it, in case I lose my shit. Again.This isn't that story. Whoops. I'd like to test the waters with my current writing style before I drop the first few chapters for that one.
"C'mon Konata, we're gonna be late!" It was a rainy afternoon unlike any other, or so it appeared to the three friends on their way to another's house. Konata was lagging behind, as per usual, looking carefully at all the sales on the storefronts, keeping an eye out on good deals on anime figures and limited edition box sets. Kagami and Tsukasa, the ever-inseparable twins, were walking at a decent clip, not wanting to be drenched by the time they made it to the neighborhood where the three girl's mutual friend, Miyuki Takara, resided. Konata didn't mind so much, as long as she made sure she didn't miss anything of value...to her, anyways.
"Kagami, you're gonna trip and fall if you walk too fast! The ground's pretty slippery when it's wet, you know." Kagami didn't even need to turn around to look at her diminutive blunette of a best friend to know she was wearing her distinctive catty smile.
She sighed loudly enough for Konata to hear, clicked her fingers twice, and resumed walking at her own pace. Sure enough, within a few seconds, Konata appeared in beside Tsukasa, her head barely reaching the shorter twin's shoulder.
"Kagamin~~, you're so mean sometimes. What if I found a Nendoroid while I was looking around?"
Kagami looked around her sister, to Konata, who was holding a figure, still in its' packaging, aloft in as much of a victory pose you can strike while holding an umbrella and walking simultaneously.
"...How did you manage to go into a store, buy it and still...you know what, never mind." Kagami shook her head and sighed again, as they turned the corner, heading out of the commercial district, and on the road that lead to their friend's neighborhood.
Quite frequently, the things Konata managed to do just never added up, but you were never able to question it. If you did, Kona-chan would smile her little smile, say something sly and vague, and it would fade into obscurity. It was something she meant to call Konata out on someday, but right now, it wasn't terribly important.
They had a time schedule to keep. It was already a quarter to four, and they had promised Miyuki that they would be at her house to hang out prior to four. They might still make it, but only just barely, and only if Konata didn't get distracted.
Kagami decided to do the one thing that would stun Kona-chan into such a stunned silence that she would stay by her side til they made it all the way to Miyuki's house.
"Konata, can you come walk next to me?" Konata, of course, jumped at the chance to do so, dropping out of place next to her sister and coming over to walk with her best friend.
Mentally sighing louder than the previous two times combined, Kagami grabbed Konata's hand and held it tightly. The audible gasp from both her sister and Konata was satisfying for a few different reasons.
"Ka-Ka-Kagamin~~~!"
"Be quiet, you wander off all the time, so I'm making sure you won't go anywhere. Besides, it's keeping you close enough that we can use your umbrella together, and Tsukasa can keep hers' over herself wholly. It just makes sense, okay, ya lil punk?"
An uneasy silence descended on the trio all the way down the block, all the way down the next, and right up to the Takara household's front door.
Kagami released her grip when they made it there, and looked at the yard, and the gate they crossed through to walk up the driveway. She felt something strangely foreboding about it, and she didn't seem to be the only one. Her sister and Konata were both looking at the gate, and around the yard, with equal unease.
Konata spoke first, as Kagami made to ring the doorbell.
"Is it just me, or does Yuki-chan's yard feel like it could have been the setting for like, I don't know, a B-movie horror showdown? I feel like there should be fake blood strewn everywhere, and maybe some zombies climbing over the walls."
The Hiiragi twins' laughter was clearly forced, and stopped nearly as quickly as it began.
"Y-yeah, sure, whatever you say, Kona-chan...Sis, can we go in now? I don't like it out here." Tsukasa finally said something; she was so quiet sometimes, Kagami suspected her twin was selectively mute.
It took more than an entire minute for the door to open after they rang the doorbell, which added to the three's unease in no small amount. They all breathed a not-entirely-silent breath of relief when they heard the deadbolt inside be drawn back, and the door open to the sight of their cheery-as-ever, vibrant pink-haired friend.
She bowed and stood aside to let them inside.
"I'm so sorry that took so long, I was still in the middle of preparing tea when you rang the doorbell. Do come in!" They filed in quickly, folding down their umbrellas and putting them in the hallway to dry, before being led into the living room, where a full tea set was already laid out, ready to be enjoyed by all.
Miyuki's mother waved from the kitchen, where she was chopping vegetables into finely cut pieces and pushing them into a large pot.
"Mother's making soup, everyone will be able to have as much as they like." Konata has her smile, but Miyuki's is a thousand times more stunning and warm. Kagami quite liked both, but Miyuki's sure made you feel at home...especially after feeling so uneasy on the outside of said home.
"So, Yuki-chan, you said your mother was going to have a job opportunity for us, of sorts?" Tsukasa talks a lot more around Miyuki...I wonder if there's any connection there.
Miyuki bobbed her head happily.
"Oh yes, Tsukasa-san, she'll tell us about that after we eat, okay? It's much easier to discuss things on full stomachs, I think." Oh yeah, there was that. None of us knew what Miyuki-chan's mother does for work, but a few days ago, she mentioned that her mother would like to get us to help her with something. We would be paid for our efforts, so it didn't hurt to at least hear her out on what she'd need help with; how much help three high school girls can really give, however, was probably very slim.
How had she already forgotten? It had seemed so important when it was initially mentioned, and her memory was usually excellent. That made for another thing that just didn't add up.
Kagami cast a sidelong glance at Konata, who had already been looking in her direction. They locked eyes for a second, raised an eyebrow in recognition, and shared a moment of understanding, before looking to Miyuki and Tsukasa, who had effortlessly transitioned into chatting about a video they'd seen of an exceptionally large rodent in a bathtub and having baby ducklings stand on its' head and being a 'gentle giant', of sorts.
They looked back to each other, shrugged more or less at the same time, and kept drinking their tea.
Whenever they tried some of Miyuki's lunch, it was always delicious, and this tea was no exception. Miyuki's mother was an amazing cook, and her daughter had inherited that talent, or, more likely to be the case, learned under her mother's tutelage and honed her cooking ability in several trial-by-fire scenarios.
The both of them were surprisingly intense in a few niche subjects, and for her mother, cooking was an art that you needed to be able to perform even in a life or death situation.
She was a mysterious woman, Miyuki-chan's mother. But the thought of eating her home-made soup had no other effect than to give Kagami incredibly acute hunger pangs.
She was going to enjoy the food tonight, no doubt.
Time seemed to pass in the blink of an eye, and before Kagami could even register that any time had passed at all, they were all seated at the dinner table, a large bowl of steaming hot soup in front of them, along with rolls and rice. At that point, you could've sworn you could hear three stomachs groaning in anticipation at the same time.
"Alright everyone, dig in!" Miyuki's mother clapped her hands together in excitement, and on cue, everyone took their first spoonful of hearty chicken noodle soup. Not the most popular choice in Japan, but Takara-san had experience in cooking a wide variety of dishes, and Western-style chicken noodle soup was now at the top of Kagami's list of soups. It was amazing. She ate slowly, making sure to savor each spoonful as much as any other. Tsukasa, on the other hand, was, in a rare show of gluttony, already done with her first bowl and asking for seconds, while Konata was staring into her soup and probably having fantastical adventures in the annals of her mind.
The general consensus was, after everyone had eaten their fill, was that Takara-san's culinary skills were on a plane that no mortal could ever hope to attain. Even Miyuki commented on how great it was, and if she grew up with having food prepared by her mother all the time, than that meant that this truly was amazing if even she commented on it!
After everyone helped out with cleaning up after their heavenly dinner, everyone moved back into the living room, where Takara-san grabbed the TV remote and dimmed the lights, which made the room feel just...incredibly comfortable. Kagami was on the verge of getting sleepy, from just how comfortable it was.
"Now, girls, I'd like to address that job that I'd like to have all of you help me with." This got everyone's attention, even, as Kagami quietly noted, Miyuki's. It seemed she didn't know any more about this than they did, which might count as unsual, but Kagami didn't really know where it was or not. Maybe they didn't talk much, or maybe this was something that it was better to learn about at the same time as the rest of them?
Takara-san flicked on the TV, to what appeared to be a very complex mathematical equation.
"In the world we live in today, there are many things that govern our society. Some of these things are quite apparent, like the amount of money a country makes from imports and exports, the birth rate versus the death rate, and things of that nature. However, some things that govern the world even moreso than any of these things, is the existence, and the careful maintenance, of Entropy. As most thermodynamic courses will teach you, if there is the maximum amount of entropy possible in the universe, that is the effective heat death of the universe, which of course, is the end of all life, ever."
Okay, yeah, but how does that apply to us? This doesn't make any sense... She thumbed to the next slide.
"The common misconception about entropy is that there's no way to reduce the amount, and that it's always increasing, no matter what. As it so happens, it's been discovered that it actually is tied moreso to a figure that we in 'the business' refer to as "The Equalizer". What this means is that we, as a race, can actually keep the amount of entropy present around us in check. My official job description doesn't really exist, because to most, my job doesn't exist, but through a few scientific breakthroughs, a few key things have become possible.
The first, and the most difficult to wrap your heads around, is time travel...sort of. We're able to go to send small groups of people to points in time when the entropy has been sent off balance, and once they restore balance in that time, they are automatically pushed back to the time period that they initially came from." The next slide showed this happening, from head mounted camera of someone going 'through time'.
I couldn't stop watching. My eyes must have been as large as saucers.
"There's two sections of people who do this sort of work. There's those who strictly go to high concentrations of Entropy and reduce it, as well as the section I work in, which is those who go to low concentrations of Entropy and increase it.
Now, what happens if there's the wrong amount of Entropy in a certain time period? Well, everything and everyone is going to die, plain and simple. Someone or something will quite literally end the world and possibly the entirety of existence if we don't do this.
Just last week, my newest members, that's you girls, by the way. You accept to this and we go back in time and have already completed this first operation, there's literally no way out of this. Time is funny, that way. Anyways, we went to a football stadium in Brazil and took out support struts and brought an entire section of the seating down on itself. The death toll was around three hundred people, but by doing that, we saved the lives of millions in Brazil; if we hadn't, a nuclear reactor would've gone critical and annihilated the entire city of Rio de Janeiro. So, 300 died on that night, and saved the lives of 7,000,000.
How do we know what will happen if we don't do these things? Well, when you girls experience it first hand, we'll wait around first and see what happens, then go back and make things right."
Everything I know about the world around us is crashing down around my ears. Time travel? Killing people to save more? TIME TRAVEL?!
Yet, she's right...I can't see myself saying no. If we've already done it...I hate time travel already, then there's nothing we can say to get out of it.
"Anyways, we're going to be heading out for this assignment in about...checking my watch here...ten minutes. Go use the washroom, girls, we'll be moving to the staging zone as soon as you're done."
What. WHAT. WHAT? WHAT. Now? Right now? Like, ten minutes is six hundred seconds. Two seconds for every person that's about to die?
"Oh, look, Hiiragi-san's fainted...and there goes the other one...Izumi-san, can you...oh, you've fainted too. Yuki-chan, dear, would you mind helping me...oh. You've fainted too."
Yukari sighed, turning off the TV and bringing up the lights. Sometimes, first timers would faint. But four, all at the same time? She'd need help with this one.
She unlocked her phone, called a certain someone, and let it ring.
Before anyone picked up, the whole room seemed to distort in ways reality shouldn't, and three individuals popped up in the middle of the room.
Honoka Iwasaki moved swiftly to her friend's side, helping Yukari lift the newest recruits back into sitting positions from where they'd fallen to the floor.
The other two young women were initially shocked to see their friends lying still on the floor, but quickly recovered.
"So they're being brought into the fold, huh? We won't let on until they know enough about what we do...Yukari-sama, don't let this end up like it did the last time I got a crippling brain injury, huh?" Yukari's eye twitched. Misao's tendency to say 'huh' at the end of every sentence really tested her patience.
"Don't worry Misao-san, everything will be fine. Safety in numbers, right? C'mon, let's take their information down and leave before they regain consciousness." Ayano, on the other hand, was far less obnoxious, and extremely helpful in her capacity as a roving secretary of sorts.
Yukari made sure the new recruits didn't wake up while those two did their thing, before sending them on their way with another unique number.
Honoka sat down next to the unconscious girls, spreading her hands across them in such a way that she was touching all of them. Yukari dialled a final number, and brushed against Honoka while hitting the call button. In an instant, they were gone from the Takara household, and brought into a massive warehouse filled to the brim with..."supplies" they would need for their coming mission.
Kagami groggily roused herself, remember the awful dream she'd fallen asleep to.
Time travel and killing people, what had she eaten last night to cause that?
Waking up to the sight of Miyuki's mother demonstrating how to disassemble a rifle to Konata caused her to fall right back into the sweet relief of unconsciousness.
It can't be real.
None of it.
A/N: I've always had Kagami be the smooth badass in any story I write, so why not make her the weakest link for once?
Eh, other than the other stuff I have waiting in the wings, I haven't written anything in awhile, so let me know how much I suck!
There's a few references in here to much earlier crap I've written. There's a nod to that awful Killing Floor bit I did awhile back, and another one to how poor Misao gets the short end of the stick in some of the other things I've written. At least this time she won't get minced by a helicopter blade~