"Oh, I didn't know people in uniform wanted to inspect my spot," said a smaller teenager in a black hood. He grinned, and the journalist was reminded what a fine line there was between invitingness and deceptive lure.
The journalist looked up from where he sat on his discarded orange crate. It was true, he was wearing a suit, but he wasn't a person in uniform by purpose.
"And it looks like you dropped something," the teenager said. Was he trying to push him out of 'his spot', or was he just being nice? What the teenager procured was the journalist's pen, which he had dropped in depression.
"So what's the deal? How'd you end up here? I love a good story," the teenager continued, still doing all the talking. And for some reason, the journalist wanted to answer, even though all the signs said leave.
And for some reason, he answered. "I'm about to get fired from my job." No story, no money, after all.
When he said nothing more, the hooded teenager frowned and his eyebrows lowered in disappointment. At first the journalist thought he'd found someone who sympathized with his plight, or at least empathized, but—
"Is that the end? …In that case, let me tell you a story." The teenager grinned a grin that said, You'll laugh. It's a promise. "Hey, walk with me."
The teenager pulled up the journalist by the upper arm, though not roughly. The journalist took a good look at the other boy's face. He had the eyes of a clever fox. The pair stepped out of a dank alley and under a streetlamp. They walked in the purgatory between that and the rest of the world.
"Once upon a time…I'm only joking." The teenager laughed. "Okay, now for real. When I was a boy, the world was a great big place." He put his hands behind his head, getting comfortable.
"When I was a kid, the world was like a huge shopping mall. Y'know that feeling you get when you see a big place for the first time? Alas, it was not to be for long."
"You see, I was an orphan," the boy continued. "Now, now, stay with me. It's no Oliver Twist. There were two others. One was a…hmm…detached…girl. Taller than me now, but it wasn't that big of a difference back then. The other was another guy, like me, but he was the girly kind." He faked a gag, then elbowed the journalist in the ribs. "Nah, I'm just joking."
"Anyway, we move in with this girl. But what we don't know is that everything is about to change for us." The teenager kept switching from a light voice to a dramatic narrator's, and it was somehow compelling.
"This girl's dad was pretty much everything a good dad should be. And we all loved him for it. Because believe it or not, we all had special powers, called snakes. They come from a close brush with death."
In the back of his mind, the journalist thought, This is too good to be true. The rest of his mind completely overruled him.
"So for a while, everything was fine! Until, of course, the girl we'd moved in with found something terrible. After Mom died, she found out that Mom and Dad had been doing a lot of research into some old folk tales. And get this: Mom actually thought that we had something to do with it all."
"A bit more searching proved Mom right. Our special powers came from the origin of one certain folk tale, and its location was very close to our house."
"See, our powers were called snakes, based off the legend of Medusa. Don't start thinking Greek Medusa, I see you doing that—you sly dog. The only part like the Greek myth was the snakes forming all of Medusa. One of us could turn invisible. One of us could read minds. I can change my appearance to look like anything. That's the best part! I could be someone completely different and you wouldn't even know it." The teenager made a face.
"In this legend, there was one collector of all these snakes—sort of like the head of Medusa. In the real world, she'd died years ago. But we had other problems. There was another snake, sort of like ours but bigger. More sentient. Special, in a way. And he was inside Dad."
In spite of himself, the journalist was surprised.
"Getting into it, are we?" the storyteller said, smiling wide. "Eventually that snake took over Dad, and we found out what it wanted. It was granting Dad's wish to see Mom again. But at what cost?"
"Ayano found out in a journal Dad kept to himself all those years. The serpent's job was to gather wishes and, you know, grant them. And she—"
The storyteller pulled a hand away from his face and stared at it surprisedly. "Oh, what's this?" He laughed. "I'm crying. I'm touched self, I really am. Anyway…" The journalist picked up on the slight quaver, despite the boy's efforts.
"Ayano killed herself trying to stop the snakes from gathering. She knew Dad was going to try to turn her into one of them. She was brave enough to…" Another time the boy pulled his hand away from his face.
He changed tacks. "There were more snakes than just the three of us. Of course, it really messed Kido, Seto and I up. But you know what they say, group therapy."
The journalist didn't know when the storyteller had started using names, but he had unconsciously copied everything down. Might as well keep going.
"Takane and Haruka, two of Dad's students…post-death," the teenager continued. "Shintaro and Momo, brother and sister, one NEET, the other idol. Marry, the queen. Hibiya, the brat and ex-time looper."
Fifteen minutes later, the journalist reached the back of his notepad. My. Brain. Is. Drained. But trust me, this is all going into a book. Even so, he knew he needed to get home tonight or he wouldn't be able to remember any of it. When had the teenager left? He didn't know. In a full sprint to get to the office, he heard a voice. The teenager, again.
"Just remember!" Kano shouted after the now ex-journalist, going on novel writer. "Any relation to actual persons, living or dead, is completely fictional!"