The Sum of Our Parts / She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

Akiko couldn't sleep.

She laid on the couch in the garage staring up into the darkness. She usually didn't have this problem. Sure, her thoughts were always a mile a minute, but she generally had no trouble shutting them off and getting to sleep.

The events of the past two days were totally harshing her happy-go-lucky image.

She could hear doors opening. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Artificial light began to stream through the huge mechanical doors on the lower level of the garage.

"...Wakana?" Akiko called out cautiously.

But the figure that stepped through was not Wakana.

Akiko pushed herself to her feet and rubbed at her eyes. Maybe it was just the light streaming through the doorway the figure had entered through, but she found she couldn't make her eyes focus properly.

With quick, self-assured steps, the figure ascended the stairs. It stood atop the grating to stand before Akiko. Now she could see that this person was a woman—or so it appeared from her body shape and her long hair—quite a bit taller than Akiko was. She wore a long, black trenchcoat and a huge black hat, and her face and hands were entirely wrapped in bandages.

"Where is she," the woman demanded in a husky voice.

"Eh? Lady, how did you get in here? What time even is it? You woke me—"

"Where is Wakana?"

Akiko shut her mouth.

The woman balled her fists at her sides. Even though Akiko couldn't see her face, she could feel the rage emanating from the woman in waves. "This is unacceptable! How could something like this have happened?!"

"Are you... are you the client who hired my dad?" Akiko asked hesitantly. What a weirdo.

The woman huffed. She turned and her heels clacked on the grating as she walked back toward the steps.

"Hey, wait!" Akiko rushed after her. "Where are you—"

"To find Wakana."

"Why?"

The woman stopped. "What?" she asked incredulously.

Akiko folded her arms over her chest. "She has a right to go where she wants!" Even if Akiko was worried about her. "Isn't that why you hired my dad to get her out of that place? So she could be free?"

"You understand nothing."

"It would be a lot easier to understand things if people would tell me what's going on here!"

The bandaged woman glowered at Akiko for a long moment. Pure judgment radiated off of her. "Leave this city, Akiko Narumi. You are not worthy of your father's office or of the Double Driver."

Was that what that transformation thing was called? Its full name? That made sense, she figured.

"It's not like I'm using the Driver anymore, but sorry, lady, I'm staying in this office. I'm going to figure out what Museum wants and how to stop them."

"This is too dangerous for you." The woman stepped down the stairs again and toward the doors she had entered through. "Return to Osaka."

"Wait, how did you know—"

The woman stepped through the doorway and pulled out a remote control. It shut behind her, leaving Akiko in darkness—in more ways than one.


From her various lookups over the years Wakana knew that there was such a thing as "the sun" that was supposed to make the sky bright. But both times she'd ventured into the outside world, it had been dark. So, this was "nighttime".

And in addition to being dark, it was also cold. Wakana wrapped her arms around herself and ducked into an alley to get away from the harsh wind.

She needed better clothing. That or a place to stay. For a second she entertained the thought that perhaps she'd been too hasty in leaving the Narumi Detective Agency—but no, this was the right choice. She was her own person now, not the organization's tool and not Akiko Narumi's.

Wakana gritted her teeth. She was going to make her own decisions from now on.

Laughter and footsteps echoed off the walls as a crowd of people, about six or seven in all, walked into the alley. They all appeared to be about the same age as Wakana—perhaps younger. She couldn't say for sure. How old was she, anyway? They were talking and laughing raucously and carrying small metallic cyllinders in their hands. The person in the front of the group shook his can and pointed it at one of the walls. None of them noticed Wakana.

Until she called out, "Give me some of your clothes."

The noisy youths fell silent. The one pointing his... paint cyllinder? at the wall stopped what he was doing and raised an eyebrow at her. "What?"

"I'm cold," she said. "Give me some of your clothes. You have more than enough." All of them were wearing jackets with strange logos on them. It would be difficult to get them to part with their jeans or shoes, though. And she didn't need the dark glasses some of them were wearing. Who wore dark glasses in the middle of the night? Morons.

They all laughed. Wakana was sure that laughter was a sign of amusement, a friendly gesture, but it sounded menacing somehow coming from them.

"Weirdo," called a girl toward the back of the crowd. She had bright pink hair and sharp-looking pointed jewelry stuck through the cartilage of her ears. "Forgot to get dressed so you want us to help?"

"Probably a hobo," someone else said.

"Nah, she's got this stuck-up prissy girl vibe," the pink-haired girl said. "Go ask your mommy and daddy for an advance on your allowance and buy some preppy Windscale shit."

"Mommy and... daddy?" Wakana repeated. The rest of the girl's admonishment went in one ear and out the other. Those two words stuck in her head, though, echoing through her mind like a test subject she remembered from about a year ago. The Bounce Memory had turned a man into a ball-shaped Dopant with an abnormally high deflective efficiency. The Dopant had bounced off the walls for nearly ten minutes before a higher-up officer managed to stop him with a Memory Break.

"Hey, look at her." One of the group laughed. "She's freaking out!"

Wakana twisted her fingers into her hair. She was staring blankly forward, but she wasn't looking at anything real. In her mind's eye she could see two figures. A man and a woman. They were so, so tall and so, so warm. They were speaking to her, but she couldn't hear their words.

The woman's lips formed into the shape of a word that might have been Wakana.

She was in the Library, now, and a search was processing itself without her help. The keywords popped up in front of her in bright green.

Mommy.

Daddy.

Family.

Too many results. The existence of a family was intrinsic to human nature, after all. Everyone had one—every single person had come from the union of two parents. Most people had siblings. Many adults had procreated. This search was useless.

Mine.

My family.

She still wasn't in control of the lookup, but it modified itself according to her thoughts anyway. The shelves pushed themselves aside as one single book flew toward her. She yanked it out of the air and opened it, but there was nothing. The pages had been haphazardly torn out.

Wakana screamed. She flung herself at the crowd of delinquents, who decided that now was a good moment to scram. Someone threw their jacket at her face, sending her stumbling backward and giving them time to make their escape.

She collapsed to the ground, where she curled up into a ball and shivered.

A phrase played itself through her mind over and over: I want to go home.

But what did that mean?


Going to school in December was a drag. At this time of year the sun set only a little after four PM, leaving almost no time for after-school shenanigans on the weekdays.

Elizabeth and Queen were often tempted to skip, but they knew they couldn't. How were they supposed to keep up on the latest gossip from the hallways of Aorifuki High School if they were playing hooky?

They were discussing the antics of some boy or another as they walked along Central Boulevard. They wouldn't remember later—what mattered was what they found when they turned to cut through the alley to Tsujikaze Avenue.

A girl, probably in her late teens, lay curled up on the ground. Dressed in a dirty, tattered nightgown, she clutched a leather jacket tight around herself. The back of the jacket bore the logo of the Derechos, a small-time gang from this neighborhood.

Elizabeth gasped. Queen instantly knelt beside the girl and shook her shoulder. "Hey, hey, lady, are you okay?!"

The girl moaned.

Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief.

Queen looked up at her BFF. "We have to get her somewhere warm."

Elizabeth nodded. She crouched down, and together the two of them helped the girl to her feet, looping her arms over each of their shoulders.

Today was one of those days when playing hooky was acceptable.


Akiko stood outside Kamome Billiards, looking up at the building. To think, just a day ago she'd been planning to shut the detective agency down. But now she knew she couldn't; she had a mystery to solve.

For her father.

For Wakana.

For her own curiosity, damn it.

She locked the side door to the agency and adjusted her messenger bag strap. She didn't know exactly what being a detective consisted of, but it couldn't hurt to get to know the neighborhood.

Within walking distance she found a barber shop, a little ice cream parlor, and a shrine where she briefly stopped to pray. A cat walked by as she walked down the sidewalk and she stopped to stroke it. She found a ramen stand with some really delicious ramen.

This Fuuto place wasn't so bad.

By the time she stepped off a bus in downtown Fuuto, the sun was straight overhead. She walked by a bank and it hit her that she'd have to manage the agency's funds somehow. She wondered where her father had done his banking.

Akiko wandered through a plaza and sat down beside a fountain to retie her shoelaces. When she looked up she saw three girls wandering by across the street, all of them in high school uniforms and carrying shopping bags. The two shorter ones were pretty enough, but the third one, the oldest, was so beautiful it took Akiko's breath away.

She blinked and then looked again.

Wait a second...!


Elizabeth's parents had gone to work, so the two friends had taken the girl to her apartment to get her warmed up. After a shower and a nap, the girl introduced herself as Wakana and asked them for some clothes.

They gave her an extra Aorifuki uniform. The top was a little too tight and the skirt was a little too short, but it would do until they enacted phase two of their plan: Total Makeover. Underneath that rat's nest hair and her pale skin there was something beautiful, and it was up to Queen and Elizabeth to bring that beauty to the surface.

Wakana stared, awed, into Elizabeth's vanity mirror. "Is that me...?" Her skin was flawless, her lips an impossible shade of pink—or at least impossible to someone who had thus far never encountered makeup. To the untrained eye, she may as well have been a different person.

"Uh-huh! You look great!" Elizabeth said, clasping her hands together.

"Now for phase two," said Queen. "Because there's no way we're making it to school on time after this anyway... Shopping trip!"

"Yay!" Elizabeth exclaimed.

"Shopping...?"

Shopping was incredible. There were so many things in this world Wakana had never dreamed of, and she could just put them into a basket and take them with her. Queen and Elizabeth steered her away from clothes, jewelry, and makeup they deemed too "ostentatious" or "expensive" (whatever that meant) or that they determined didn't suit her, but she was too busy trying things on and laughing with glee to really care.

She felt like she was walking on air as she followed the two younger girls through Zephyr Plaza, her arms looped through the handles of countless bags. She grinned up at the sky—such a vibrant shade of blue she had never seen before.

"You," a voice sneered, and she stopped. That light feeling gave way to confusion.

Standing in front of the three girls was the leader of the crowd she'd run into last night. He was no longer wearing his jacket. "You," he repeated. "Give me back my jacket, you little freak. I didn't give Kinji permission to throw it at you!"

Queen and Elizabeth swallowed. "What happened, Wakana?" Queen asked.

"What happened?" Elizabeth repeated.

Wakana tilted her head. "Why didn't this Kinji person throw his own jacket...?"

"Hell if I know!" the guy raged. "Just give it back!"

"I don't have it right now," she said simply.

Queen and Elizabeth stared at Wakana in disbelief. She could tell they were intimidated, but she didn't see any reason for it. She just stared the guy down, largely unimpressed.

The guy's face twisted into a snarl. He reached into his pants pocket and retrieved a Gaia Memory. "You gonna give me back my jacket, or you gonna say your prayers?"

Queen and Elizabeth shrieked. Wakana's eyes went wide and she stepped backward as the guy hit the button on his Memory—APE!—and transformed into a hulking, hairy beast. He lunged and the two high-schoolers pulled Wakana out of the way.

Before he could round on the girls, he found someone else standing in front of him.

Akiko Narumi gripped her messenger bag so tightly her knuckles turned white. Her ponytail whipped around in the wind. "W-Wakana, are you okay?!"

Wakana nodded frantically.

The Dopant growled and swung a fist at Akiko, knocking her aside. Wakana tried to rush over to her, but Queen and Elizabeth held her back.

"Ugh..." Akiko had landed on something lumpy in her bag. She rubbed her side as she got back up. Then she blinked and looked down at her bag. "Wait, no way. I still have...?"

"Akiko?!" Wakana called.

"Wakana!" She reached into her bag, dancing around another attack from the Dopant, and pulled out the Double Driver. "I still have this thing, but if you want to run away then—"

Wakana swallowed. Behind her, Queen and Elizabeth were frozen in place, clinging to each of her arms. And all around them people were running and screaming—some of them other shoppers or employees Wakana had seen in the stores they'd been to. They were...

...they were all nice people.

And Akiko was giving her a choice. Even though Wakana was the one who had created that wretched Dopant, even though it was her specifically he was after.

"I don't have Claydoll," she called. "Throw me the blue one!"

Akiko fumbled in her bag for a dark blue Gaia Memory and threw it over to Wakana. When Wakana's half of the Driver appeared around her waist, she activated the Memory and shoved it in. STAR!

DIAMOND!

Wakana's consciousness flowed out of her body. She fell backward into the arms of Queen and Elizabeth, who had no idea what to do. They just crouched there, watching as armor formed around Akiko's body—cyan and white on the left, dark blue and yellow on the right.

STAR! DIAMOND!

Akiko looked down at her—at their hands. "Nice! I like this one!"

"Look out, dumbass!"

They barely managed to dance away from one of Ape's blows. Akiko swung her leg up and landed a diamond-hard kick against Ape's side, sending him stumbling away. When he turned and bellowed in rage, Wakana waved her hand and a bright light filled the plaza. For a second, none of them could see.

"My eyes!" Ape cried. Even once the light died down, he could only stumble around half-blind. He was in no state to resist as Akiko punched him in the face.

"Hey, hey, I wanna try something," Akiko said suddenly. They fell back, and she pulled out a different Memory, a pink one.

"But we have him right where we want him," Wakana protested.

"I want to try this one out, okay?" She pulled Diamond out of the Driver and replaced it. RIBBON!

"I really don't get the point of this."

STAR! RIBBON! Akiko's cyan left half gave way to pink. The trim was a light cream. In her hand, Akiko held a long whip-like ribbon. She would have grinned if a helmet weren't covering her face.

Ape's blindness wore off and he came charging again. Akiko flung the whip wildly, knocking over a pillar before it connected with Ape with a sparkling glow of light. She twirled to one side, spinning the ribbon in the air over their head, and struck again with another glow.

"Oh my god," Queen gasped. "She's like one of those old-school dolls! The ones from like twenty years ago!"

"You nerd," Elizabeth teased her.

"C'mon, quit playing around." Wakana pulled the Ribbon Memory out of Akiko's side of the Driver and jammed it into a port in the whip's handle. RIBBON! MAXIMUM DRIVE!

Their body spun again and this time it didn't stop. They spun faster and faster, the ribbon twirling around their body as they lifted into the air. Queen and Elizabeth clung to Wakana's body, shrieking as the ensuing wind whipped away some of their shopping bags.

"Hyaa!" Akiko and Wakana cried simultaneously. They whipped the ribbon at Ape, straight through his body. He sparked profusely until a bright glowing light enveloped him and he exploded.

They landed on the ground. They dusted their knees off and approached the former Dopant, now just a young punk lying next to a shattered Gaia Memory.

"Nice job," Akiko beamed.

Wakana hesitated. Finally, she replied, "You too."


The former Ape Dopant, Tsujiro Shiroyuki, was taken away by the police in handcuffs.

"He's a drug dealer," explained the cop overseeing the scene, a middle-aged man with a plastic back-scratcher slung over his shoulder. "That's probably why he was so eager to get his jacket back. He must have left some of his product inside."

"A drug dealer?" Wakana's hand stroked Akiko's chin curiously. "What does—"

Akiko interrupted her right half with a nervous laugh. "Glad we could be of service to you, officer!" She saluted him eagerly.

"Who are you, anyway?" He pointed his back-scratcher at them menacingly.

"Us? We're, um..." Akiko slammed her fist into her palm with a sudden burst of inspiration. "You can call us Double!"

"Are you serious? That's so—"

"Okay, Double. I'm gonna need you to come down to the station and fill out some—"

"Oops, sorry! We gotta go!" Akiko exclaimed. "A superhero's work is never done. Up, up, and away!"

But they couldn't fly, so they settled for turning and running.

Once they'd rounded a corner to the back side of a store, Akiko undid the transformation and shoved the Driver back into her bag. Queen and Elizabeth were waiting there with Wakana, who began to stir.

"That—"

"Was—"

"Incredible!" both high-schoolers concluded together.

"How did you do that?" Queen asked.

"Yes, how?"

Akiko laughed nervously and rubbed the back of her neck. "It's kind of a long story..."

Wakana got to her feet and began to gather up her shopping bags. "Let's go," she said to Akiko. "You two, help me carry these."

"Go?" Akiko repeated.

"Back to the Narumi Detective Agency. I don't have anywhere else to keep this stuff," Wakana replied haughtily.

"Eh? You mean—"

Wakana nodded. "I... I have nowhere else to go, Akiko. And it's true that you're the first person who's ever..." She didn't finish her sentence, but she didn't have to. "Besides..." She glanced sidelong at Queen and Elizabeth. She'd thought she didn't care what happened to the people of this city, but they had gone out of their way to help her. And to what end? They could have been killed. "This is partially my responsibility."

Queen and Elizabeth tilted their heads toward each other. "Eh?"

Akiko smiled affirmatively. "All right. I'm looking forward to working with you, Wakana." She stuck her hand out, but Wakana just stared at it in confusion. "Oh, for crying out— Let's just head back."

The four girls started off in the direction of the nearest bus stop.


"Eh?! Dad's bike is gone!" Akiko was sure it had been parked in front of the agency when she'd left.

She rushed inside to make sure nothing else had been harmed. Wakana, Queen, and Elizabeth followed, dumping their shopping bags on the floor in the office. The office proper seemed just fine, but Akiko immediately opened the side door and descended into the garage.

The SkullGarry had been remodeled. Instead of a giant skull, its front more closely resembled Double's face—beige on the right, cyan on the left, with two silver antennae extending upward.

Wakana ascended the grating and retrieved an object that was lying on the desk against one wall—a cell phone of some sort. She flipped it open and pressed some buttons on it, and the former SkullGarry—the DoubleGarry?—began to open up.

Queen and Elizabeth stepped backward in shock. Akiko stepped forward.

"So the base functionality remains the same..." Wakana mused.

Inside the remodeled tank was a bike that resembled Sokichi's in form, but the coloration differed. The front half was cyan and white, the back beige and maroon.

"Where did this come from?!" Akiko shrieked.

Wakana closed her eyes. A soft green glow emanated from her body, but after only a second she stumbled backward. She scowled. "Don't ask me."


Hearing the commotion in the hangar, the bandaged woman turned away from the double doors and made her way through the tunnels that led away from the Narumi Detective Agency.

If this was what Wakana wanted... Shroud supposed she could indulge her for now. She would be no better than Museum if she forced her will on the girl, after all. But if the Double Driver was to be used in this fashion, it would have to be divorced from Skull's image.

Akiko Narumi was nothing like her father.