A Collision of Heaven and Earth

Episode 01: The Hour of Trial

I can't tell this to anyone anymore, but my name is Natsumi Hinata. I haven't kept a diary since I was in high school, and even though I'm not talking to anyone in particular, I feel like this journal should have some sense of continuity. The threat of me dying an early death is statistically possible, and I want some archaeologist somewhere in the future to find this and be excited they discovered such an incredible source of information. It's the least I can do.

I guess I should go back to high school. I was one of the – I guess the media now refers to us as the "Five Kids" or something. Secret's out. Years before the Keronians showed up on a large scale and decided to attempt peace negotiations with us, a platoon of five of them showed up, but their mother ship abandoned the mission and pulled out before they could get back on board. The five Keronians ended up staying with five high school students, blah blah, this is common knowledge now.

When I was seventeen, the platoon finally managed to get through to Keron that they didn't want to invade Earth anymore, and they wanted to go back and appeal to the government for peace with us humans. I guess they succeeded since the whole Keronian fleet showed up a few years later and scared the shit out of everyone. People really weren't sure how to feel. Fuyuki was publicly all for it, of course, and by then he'd somehow managed to bullshit his way into being some sort of popular cryptozoologist. He made a lot of money off the Google ads on his blog.

By the time everyone settled down enough for actual peace talks to happen, I was already in my mid-twenties, living abroad in California. Life was rough. I felt like I was watching my friends' lives unfold from a distance, like in a TV show. I saw stuff in the news about Fuyuki staging protests against anti-Keronian government officials, about some millionaire upstart named Vincent Slater threatening to put the Nishizawa family out of business, about Koyuki's attempts to start a dojo to teach the martial arts of the Azumaya clan to a new generation of kids. Keroro became a peace ambassador, and I heard about that, too, but his image on the television screen was too distant, too far away.

I guess I should mention Saburo. After the frogs left when we were second-years in high school, he asked me out. At the time, I was overjoyed. I was young and naïve. I did not understand the idea that crushing on someone from a distance can destroy your perception of romance, of relationships, and of that person themselves. Eventually I realized, on a subconscious level, that he had just been a mannequin on which I could paint my fantasies, a sort of skeleton over which I could throw the fabric of my dreams. But that fabric turned out to be thin and transparent, and I saw the limp, lifeless dummy underneath, and foolishly – for several years – I tried to play God and shape it into the form I wanted it to be.

Thinking I could make things work, I moved to California with him, and when we broke up I was too proud and too poor to move back home.

That's about where the story begins – the day I woke up early with a start, from some nightmare I couldn't remember, and sat in my empty living room in the silence with my television turned off. I knew today was supposed to be the day the Keronian peace ambassadors met with the United Nations, but I didn't feel like watching it.

I wondered, briefly, how those dumb frogs had gone from being background noise, a minor annoyance in my life, to being a secret that ruled my existence and prevented me from interacting with the people around me. I couldn't tell any of my office coworkers I used to house Keronian military. At best, they'd think me insane, and at worst, suspect me of being some sort of spy. Maybe that's what drove me back to Saburo, over and over – we shared a past, a part of us, that we couldn't share with anyone else.

Anyway, I'm glad I accidentally woke up that early, because by the time I put my hair in a ponytail, threw on an old t-shirt and some athletic shorts to lounge in, and brushed my teeth there was a knock on the door. I paused, nervously. Maybe a part of me sensed my world about to shift underneath my feet. Even though I hated it, I'd grown weak over the years, a hollow husk instead of the adventurous, intense young woman I was in high school, and as a weary, bitter adult I clung to my routine as a source of comfort. Something in the air threatened that routine.

I opened the door. It was Saburo.

My first instinct was to shut the door in his face. This was not the first time he'd shown up at the door of my apartment looking serious. Usually those visits ended with him wrapped in my blankets and sheets and me sitting on the edge of my bed, feeling stupid and disgusted with myself.

"Wait," he said, holding up an envelope, "This has nothing to do with... us."

I wordlessly held my hand out. Saburo gave me the envelope. I pulled out a letter and two plane tickets. The letter was written on custom stationary with the emblem of the Nishizawa family at the top of the paper. "To Natsumi and Saburo, I have no idea if this is the address you still live at, but it's the only one I have..."

It was from Momoka. She warned us about a connection between her financial rival, Vincent Slater, and the Messengers, a group of anti-Keronian religious zealots who expressed their distaste with the peace negotiations by doing fun things like rioting and shooting people.

"I think Vincent is targeting my business because he suspects I have a history with the Keronians," Momoka wrote. "He knows I sponsor Fuyuki, and I think he has enough intel out there to figure out Fuyuki has a sister. I sent you guys plane tickets to Japan just in case. Paul will meet you at the airport and take you to one of my summer homes."

My stomach dropped. The past was finally catching up to me.

"That's not all," Saburo murmured. "This morning, when the Keronians went to the UN, there was some sort of implosion and the building collapsed. No one saw a blast, but it was televised internationally. The floor shook and everything fell."

I thought of Keroro, standing proud among the other ambassadors. Was he okay? What was even happening? Within minutes, my comfortable bubble popped, and I felt stripped down, exposed to an uncaring universe. The threat of the Messengers was even worse. For the first time, I wasn't truly safe on my home turf. Before, as a teen, I had been targeted by aliens, but it was always me with the humans against the invaders – but now –

"Let me pack first," I managed. Walking to my room felt like wading into murky water.

The drive to the airport and even the flight itself was, fortunately, uneventful. Saburo attempted to be lively, to carry on conversations with me. I kind of felt sorry for him, looking over at his sleeping face during the flight; he was not a bad person, nor was he a terrible boyfriend. I had just never loved him. The problem with loving the idea of someone more than you actually love them is you don't even realize there's a problem for years and years. There is just an emptiness to the relationship that haunts you. And when you finally get around to breaking things off, there's no clean, easy way out of the relationship – it's not like you can say, "I'm tired of the fighting," or "You cheated and I can't trust you anymore." You've just kind of... woken up from a dream.

Landing filled me with sudden anxiety. I shook Saburo awake, and he seemed to feel it, too – the tension buzzing in the air like electricity. We pulled on wide sunglasses, hats, and scarves, hiding our faces at the airport as if we were celebrities on the run from paparazzi photographers. Positioning ourselves in the middle of a crowd of people, we exited the plane. Paul stood in the distance, unchanged. Lord knows that man might be immortal. He nodded at us in acknowledgment.

Paul bowed and took our luggage. "I thought it would be a good morale booster for the both of you to know you have a few old friends at the house," he told us.

"Keroro?" I asked hopefully, my hand going straight to my chest in a gesture of relief.

"Yes," Paul nodded. "Along with the others."

He hesitated before saying "the others," glancing awkwardly at Saburo, whom I saw visibly stiffen out of the corner of my eye. The exchange confused me, but I was more concerned with the well-being of the dumb old sergeant and about escaping the prying eyes of the public. Anxiety ran high as we exited the airport, making our way outside to the limousine.

The sound of a gunshot ripped through the air like a shockwave. A ringing flared up in my ears. The people around us threw themselves to the ground, screaming, but their cries sounded muffled and distant to me. Between the high-pitched "eeeeee" noise in my head and the chaos around me, I made out Saburo shouting my name and touching my lower back in an attempt to steer me. Paul escorted both of us into the limo. He pulled a handgun from the inside of his suit jacket to cover our backs.

When we piled into the backseat, I suddenly felt something warm and wet running down my face. I reached up to touch my cheek and, when I pulled away, my fingers were stained red with blood. I became so overwhelmed with fear and confusion I just sat there in shock, barely registering that Saburo and Paul were touching and looking at my head and neck to see if I had been shot.

"The bullet skimmed her," Paul concluded with a heavy sigh. "She is fine."

"I can barely hear you," I said.

"That's normal. That bullet passed incredibly close to your ear. You're probably also in shock."

The driver tore out of the parking lot as fast as he could, dodging other cars amidst a chorus of honking and squealing tires. He turned to glance back at us. "I'm hoping I lost them, but there was a car of Messengers. We might be followed."

"Take the longest and most convoluted route you can," Paul ordered.

Paul was right. Eventually the ringing dimmed to a distant background noise, and I could clearly hear the purr of the engine and the thumping of the tires over unsteady roads. The driver took us over a network of empty one-way streets and forgotten, pothole-ridden alleys. Then, when we could no longer see anyone around us for miles, we turned and the road opened into a wide countryside highway, framed by farmland on both sides.

"Makes me think of Grandma's house," I said without thinking. Forested mountains towered in the distance, and the vast plains were lined with thin, unpaved side roads and traditional country homes. I thought about vacationing in the countryside and finding the frogs stowed away in the backseat of Mom's car. The memory was painful in its own sweet-and-sour way, like bare feet on summer-hot pavement scrawled with sidewalk chalk drawings. I guess that's what people call "nostalgia."

After awhile I closed my eyes. I guess Paul and Saburo thought I was asleep and started talking about me, but I was too disoriented and exhausted to let them know I was awake. I wasn't even sure, myself, if I was completely awake anyway. They didn't say anything bad – Paul observed the weird distance between us and Saburo explained that we weren't together anymore.

The last thing they talked about was kind of strange.

"So, everyone thinks we're still together," Saburo ventured, talking slowly and quietly.

There was a pause. Paul snorted, as if he knew what Saburo was really asking. "Yes."

"How did... You know..."

"He seemed fine," Paul responded, answering a question I didn't understand. "But you never know with him. He seems the type to shelve thoughts and feelings unless he has a use for them."

I think at some point I fell asleep for real, because right after that Saburo touched my arm and gently called my name. I blinked open my heavy eyelids and realized the limo had stopped and was parked in the circle driveway of some elaborate country mansion. Paul held the car door open for me, offering his hand as I sleepily stumbled out into open air.

"Natsumi!"

I looked up to the sound of my brother's voice. He stood at the top of a low flight of stairs leading to the front double doors, waving at me. Fuyuki had grown to be a handsome young man, with the outgoing, round features of our mother, but with a more pronounced jawline, broader shoulders, and a lean, lanky figure. At some point after I moved he'd grown taller than me.

However, beside my brother stood someone else, who I can only describe as a familiar stranger. He was roughly Fuyuki's height, and of ambiguous ethnicity, with light brown skin and large, dark eyes. A mop of bright green hair sat unruly on top of his head, and his upturned nose was brushed with a cloud of freckles. The man's arm was in a sling.

"Natsumi," he greeted cheerfully, "It's nice to see you again."

My eyes widened and my jaw dropped. "Wait – Keroro?"

Author's Note: Why, hello there. I'm new around these parts. This is my first fanfiction in several years, and I guess I started writing fanfic again as a sort of stress relief during finals week (don't do that; I'm a terrible example). Anyway, I've had this idea burrowing in my brain since this past winter, and I finally had to write it down. I plan on updating this once a week since summer break is coming up. Anyway, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it.