Mystique flooded the rafters of his consciousness. The beginning of this haze had its root in the canals of reality, of which he had begun to dig in his mind to bury his old life's customs. The hidden, oriental-yet-westernized halls of the Vatican Yuen Long Tutorage raised him to be the top of the Black Order's bureaucratic ranks. Just as the mention of this past was noted, the teachers with typical missionary cloths and his fellow future-colleagues of the time all lined up before him. One by one, they grew either distant to a fogged perception of mortality and the continuation of his life. However, he looked not to the shades they became, but to the glimmering light that illuminated every nightmare he had endured in both his sleep and his waking hours: his sister. She was not ready at all for the challenges that faced her in her solidarity as an Exorcist at such a young age, so she nearly lost her mind to insanity non-conformed. It had gotten so desperate of a situation that he was called from halfway across the world to the Headquarters that was built within the heart of Allier.
What he saw in those French lands not only tore his heart by the strings, but also nearly softened his resolve to go on with what he was. His sister was tied to a bed, bound by her wrists and ankles against her will; it took him practically a year to sooth her, as well as to reconstruct her conscience brick-by-brick. However, it was all worth it to see her smile again after thirteen months, fourteen days, six hours and twenty-seven minutes to the dot. That was when she was nine, all the way back in the autumn of eighteen eighty-nine. Now, she is approaching womanhood at the age of sixteen and has gone through endless years of private martial training with two pairs of boots that defy the world's gravity around them. Oh, how she learned! He himself had only witnessed his little sister perform in actual combat twice, and one had been where he would have lost his head had she not intervened.
What would have taken his head off? One of those hellish creatures known only as Akuma, that's what. He could only compare those demons to some kind of industrial machinery from beyond even these modern times, and twice beyond that within itself! These abominations were made from some sort of metal that resisted firearms at the disposal of mankind's armies, even any one of its variously powered artillery divisions. With no other thought than to spread their lust for slaughter of human beings whether young or old, the abominations hailed their creation to one herdsman alone: the Millennium Earl. He represented every single thing that was evil with the world all the while having a lock-jawed, teeth-barring smile complimented by various and humongous top hats. Throughout the years he has ever known this despicable creature, there have been succeeding reasons as to why he should fear him and his blue skin. Oh, all the information about this tyrant of shams and corruption is arriving all at once within his mind! Images of destruction, and the corroded faces of those whom had fallen to the piercing volleys of hellish bullets the Earl's first-tier minions released upon Exorcists of both old leather and new tar; their faces grow closer and closer as if they had the mindset of apparitions within this realm of his slumbering mind, doomed to follow their condemner wherever he went. Closer, closer, and closer-
Komui Lee stirred. The world was a smaller place than whence he had left it a short while ago, with it now being restricted to simply some artist's miniature portrait of that nightmarish caper that stalked his dreams. A small grasping of his blind hand to the portrait's rough behind brought an elderly book from its place upon his face, and turned to see that the world was actually the way he left it: a messy office-space with piles of work that both was done already and simply not sent out, or work that would probably never be done anyways and took up space as a way to give him some strange source of solidified solace. He let the book down slightly, allowing the pages to flutter in the movement to give himself a greater view of their contents. In there were more than just quick doodles of the megalomaniac, but also of the single-caste of demon he had employed solitarily until these last two decades. This book was written in the forties by the hand of a Sir Charles Darwin, an otherwise already infamous naturalist. He, despite having little information of his own to work with when he was procured by the Order for his intelligence, correctly asserted that in the near future the Akuma would have no choice but to go under his assumed modifications of structure called 'evolution' if they were to have any hope against the Exorcists.
Komui let out a small chuckle to that thought; oh, the retelling of that meeting was as classical as any mishap he could recall on his own watch. Back in eighteen seventy-eight before his fatal illness, the good Sir had been given an order by the Catholic Church to give his expert opinion as a renowned person on the issue of the future of this holy-war. He had, of course, been forced to keep the entire story he had been told in secret in an admittedly far-fetched promise of lessening the bounds of the church's persecution of his fellows in naturalism. He was reported to have gotten into a soft-pitched argument with two members of the College of Cardinals over the probability of the Akuma's possibility of transforming to meet the challenges of the Order; it had gotten so out of hand, that one of the Cardinals stood up and declared Darwin a shame-filled heretic before storming out the room. Then, Charles turned his head with mild remorse as well as annoyance and solemnly swore to the remaining persons at the meeting that there would not only be a return-to-power that would match the annihilation brought by the Floods that destroyed the planet once before in the Bible, it would be a far larger retribution of Lucifer than could ever be predicted by even the most poignant of hell-callers. Immediately after the summoning, there were vast amounts of snickering and joking amongst many of the elderly members whom saw the elder fool as merely a blasphemer with little left but to go to his Ultimate Demise.
Their snickering and Komui's complacency with their inverse views all came to a halt with the first death of an Exorcist that was not from the normally grotesque disintegration. The poor girl's body was mangled to shreds with blood laying out of her in a similar manner of a beet that was sentenced to the hands of a rickety-handed juicer. At this time, Lenalee was only beginning to recover her constitution as a wonderful young girl of twelve, so he had no choice but to leave her in the care of the Headquarters' chef 'Jerry' while he performed the ceremonial burial for the poor girl from the ethnic Hungarian slices of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Hailee Braum was her name; she was just turning upon the age of nineteen when she was struck down in the streets of Florence, making her just one of the many young to die in this two-decade escalation of this holy-war.
Komui stirred from his drowsed perceptions and looked upon the office once again. There was nothing here but emptiness and void-abide, and it was depressing about how silent it was. He leaned himself up from his chair to take a stroll out into the vastly unlit, gothic hallways of the Headquarters. The decorations and make of the walls varied from each section that were either originally upon the old cathedral or added when this pious building was reclaimed by the Vatican for the Black Order after the Millennium Earl's vicious assault. Even though that memory of decimation was nearing a month old, it was remaining a centerpiece in his chronic nightmares that haunted him on the darkest of nights. There was only one down-side to forgetting and moving on from the attack: he would also lose the memory of the untimely deaths of some of his closest colleagues. The man-power shortage within the entire ranks in the Order itself was devolved into something far worse than before; it came to the point that some parts of the shorter-ends of the organization were chopped off entirely in favour of the Headquarters that supported them all as a sort of principal hive-mind. Even within the new hallways, he could smell the blood of yester-so as if it rested upon his clothes to this day. Haunting him, haunting him…
"Hello, Chief. What're you doing up so late?"
The sudden beckon of an Anglo-Australian accent rescued his mind from the darkness that threatened to drown him completely. With a turn of his body and a side step a way's away, Komui saw his assistant Reever Wenham standing in a lax manner, his blonde hair all ruffled about as if he had just gotten out of bed. However, the small stains of chemicals and oil reported a different story to the Chief Director's intuition. "I just wanted to look about before I go back to bed." He returned Reever's question right back to him.
Reever nodded in miniscule understanding, sipping from his coffee cup an old brew from the main cafeteria. "Oh, just tinkering with the HAT-Project; I forgot to install some necessary gears this afternoon and I didn't want to forget them." The benevolent deputy waved towards the sometimes-massive stains on his white lab-coat, referring to how his modifications went. "We'll have it down eventually."
The Chief Director gave a solemn nod, feeling almost out of place in the world without his signature beret adorned upon his head. With a small stride he was upon a beautifully crafted window of violet, green, and teal decorating-tiles and clear glass looking two-stories down to the forest below. "Do you think it will be ready by the time we need it to be? We can't afford to keep him there for very long; the meeting should have been decided three days ago, and we'll receive instructions any time now."
A remorseful sigh reached Komui's ears from Reever, about two metres away. "It'll be done when it's done, we can't rush this even for a second. The Hyper-Aquatic-Transportation vehicle absolutely cannot fail in the middle of transit. When we brought the Science Department together to draw the schematics for this project, we all agreed that this would be a double-edged sword in case of a catastrophic failure: ample storage compartments and other weighted antiquities were either scaled down or eliminated entirely for the addition of innovative technology." There was a scoff of irony in his voice as the man reflected upon what he just said. "'Innovative technology'; half of these things would be in the public already if we hadn't intervened. They would have provided for faster engines, reserved consumption of fuel, and even camouflage for ships on the battlefield. Instead, they're being holed up in vaults for 'what if?'s and 'why not?'s." Reeveer tilted his head towards his boss, muttering, "It's a waste if you ask me."
Oh, Komui knew full well about how Reever felt about this situation. Even from the first day back in the old Headquarters when the pack ratting of inventions and new technologies was made evident to him, Reever still put his foot down in protest. He disapproved fully of the concept of stunting the progress of society as a whole, especially in the areas of medical-science. The specifics of the retardation grew long and tiresome to recall, but all the Australian could describe it as was gross overcompensation for the Order's members to survive in luxury. The Chief did not try to personalize the issue and instead tried to look forward with a trusting edge upon the Inventive Promise, which gave a solemn word to allow either the living inventor or the ancestor of whom to legally market either the ideas or the inventions that were 'confiscated' by the Vatican. It was either that or complete and utter defrauding of their life's work as cockamamie tripe by undermining them through hired naysayers; such is a typical tactic by what could be described as the ultimate reactionary force of the modern era. Komui gave a sigh of exhaustion and responded, "It is not my job or yours to be so concerned about that. I know you're against it because you've told me a million and one times now." He started to reinitiate their walk by slowly moving himself forward once more; thankfully, Reever went along with it and fell into line.
They reached a solemnly located balcony upon the fifth floor of the cathedral's towering monolith. It definitely was an endearing night to simply stare off into the distance: the seemingly unending stretches of forests inclined a naturally forming slope that provided a sort of watch-out for miles. Reever seemed to be worn out by their midnight travel so far up the building. He gave out a small yawn to indicate his wishes to take his leave of their mutual overlooking if the landscape, and looked with sagging lids to his boss. Komui noticed at first-yawn and second-eyes, so he subsequently let him go with a dismissing but still sincere 'good-night'. So, now he was set with the stars in the ocean of unknowing above, surrounding in seemingly huddled masses around their matriarch within the Moon. Oh, how he envied those celestial bodies: they were not cursed with the mission of sending their sister to clandestine holy-wars against an unfathomable creature, nor were they besieged by the existential questions of intelligent men with all the time to use in the world but none of the permission to do so. Instead, the stars merely had to look down towards the fray in an almost mocking fashion and to disappear when their dark spectacle was through, with the moon sometimes staying behind to greet the sun in its own slow revolution around this confusing ball of dirt, blood and mucky water.
The arrival of a smaller being than he was not lost to Komui; he did not even have to turn to know whom it was, for their presence was already so evident as it had been before. "Good evening, Bookman."
A few small steps of lightly soled shoes clicked as the smaller man came forth. He was wrinkled all over his one-meter and a half tall Egyptian-birthed body, yet managed to let out a sort of sphere of inner strength that only seemed wizened and bolstered by his age. It was with his eyes that this power was emitted as a piercing gaze from within two dark cylindrical disks of make-up; even now, in the darkness, those dark circles of black powder surrounding his two eyes were only expanding the amount of intrigue they had. "And good evening to you, Director; Lavi and I have just returned from our mission within the Isle of Mann. We did not find anything of note, and managed to return after landing just yesterday." He gave a sort of nod to a point two stories down from their stand on the balcony.
In the window below, Bookman's protégé Lavi was slumbering in exhausted peace. The moonlight just barely lit him up, showing his arms flayed out upon the light blue bedspread as he slumbered in his sort-of-light fitting under-clothes. Even in his sleep, the student continued to wear that eye-patch that wrapped around his red-haired head and covered his right eye. While Bookman presumably was able to see it with clarity despite his age, Komui struggled while squinting to even catch a glimpse. Despite this, he still replied, "So I see." He turned from that wall of the cathedral and instead looked up to the moon above. A small sigh, "Before you left, you told me that you needed to discuss something of grave importance. What was it?"
The wind whisked against them as their hair lifted into the breeze. This seemed to provide a small pause for Bookman to compile the necessary thoughts, which he slowly let loose with his gravely voice. "It would be advisable for you to not rely upon our services beyond the year of nineteen-hundred, if your war is to carry upon to that point. I cannot say if we are to completely abandon your cause, but I think it is my duty to warn you of this before anyone else." He blinked once to swallow the gravity of the situation to give himself bearings to continue forward with what seemed to be a large professional confession. "There is war of possibly larger physical implications brewing upon the horizon; my increasing absences are related to them, but it has become clear that I can no longer hide the reality of the situation from you."
Definitely not what I had thought at first; the sudden bluntness of the admittance shocked him to say the least. "Where will it take place?"
"It is not where, but more as 'where not'. At the rate as to it is evolving through an intricate web of alliances and malcontent, it threatens to become a war that is so great that it could consume the world with chaos, fear, and distraught." He turned to his Chinese counter-part, staring into him with intent. "I apologize for comparing the two, but I believe that this war will be even greater than the one we are fighting at the moment. Thus, I must suggest that you should be prepared for our eventual leave."
In a sort of nervous chuckle and an equipped smile, Komui gave a small observation to alleviate the mood. "Ah, you say it is the war that 'we' are fighting? You told us when you first arrived those many years ago that the Bookmen and the Black Order would never combine their goals. What is with this 'we' business?"
He was victorious, for Bookman gave his own smirk in admission. "That is true; I am glad you caught that for me, my young friend." The older man lowered his head in humility and muttered in jest. "Perhaps we should just stand here for a little longer and let the moment come? It will not be until four years or so until Lavi and I must leave, so we shall simply be as we were until then." He became silent and, in his own way, remorseful.
Komui readjusted his small-framed glasses and nodded in return. "Agreed." And so, the night illuminated the two compatriots as they allowed themselves to be absorbed by those spectators in the stars. Their two worlds would be separating in the future, but hopefully the bonds of the battles they fought with each other would tie them forever. Hopefully.
