The sun lanced across the bright blue sky, warming those below with its gentle caress. Birds carved their way through the air, a slight wind feebly pushing them away from their far off destination. People busily made their way on the streets, chatting happily under the soft sunlight.
He ignored them all.
Subaru huddled in the shadows of the buildings, avoiding contact with the passerby. He considered it a skill of his to be able to sneak away at the end of the school day without anybody noticing. Then again, who would care if they noticed him? He stood up, brushing off whatever dirt that had decided to stick to him, and made his way to the street. Despite the fact that it was only early afternoon, there weren't many things he could do. He could always go home...but then he would be at the mercy of his stressed mother when she came back from work. That option was automatically crossed out. He could always go to Vista Point, but what was the point in going there in broad daylight? So the one other place he felt comfortable at would be...
"Ah, Subaru-kun!" The only overly optimistic person Subaru could tolerate ushered him through the door and into the cool air of the research building. The familiar scent of something burning wafted through the hallway. Somebody, most likely one rather eccentric inventor, must have created some new -and probably useless- gadget. Judging by the lack of frenzied panicking among the rest of the scientists in the facility, it had not exploded as most inventions had. Too bad then. Could've used something interesting to watch. Ugh, it smells like burnt rubber.
Amachi Mamoru allowed himself a small grin at his companion's slight look of disgust. "Sorry about the smell. Utagai's experiment nearly ex-...ah, didn't go quite as well as we hoped."
If it failed, why do you still sound so cheerful? Chiding himself for letting his thoughts flit across his face, Subaru carefully slipped his usual mask of indifference back on. In a voice calculated to match his face, he allowed his curiosity to overcome the monotony of the day. "And what was this one supposed to do?"
Getting Subaru to participate in a conversation seemed to be one of Amachi's everyday goals in life. The smile that split his face certainly supported that idea. "He said it was supposed to utilize denpa waves in a new way," he provided happily. "He mentioned something about making it materialize in the visible spectrum so they would be easier to use. After all, nobody besides you really has the ability to see denpa."
With a well-hidden snort, Subaru took the glasses in question off his head. The greenish tint of the aptly named 'Visualizer' flashed a few brief rainbows, reflections of the denpa bouncing through the building. It was a one-of-a-kind invention of his father's, an accomplishment he had been so proud of that it was a wonder why he had forgotten them in his decision to leave home. No matter the case, Subaru had snatched them from his father's desk and become accustomed to wearing them, much to his mother's chagrin. He slowly fingered the smooth surface of the glasses, lost in the memories of 3 years past.
Amachi sighed, realizing he had once again hit a forbidden topic. It seemed that the list of conversational taboos was never ending, judging by how often the boy fell silent. He gently placed his hand on Subaru's shoulder, who flinched at the sudden contact and met the adult's eyes with his own dull brown ones.
"Come on, Subaru-kun." Disappointment at yet another failure flickered across Amachi's expression for a split second as he turned away from the child to shut the door. The smile slid back on, halfheartedly as usual, as the pair adopted their usual pattern of silence and quiet murmurs. Like always, they toured the experiment room as several harried assistants scurried about, scraping the last of the burnt rubber off the walls and tables. In their midst, a lone scientist scrambled on the floor, searching for a lost part that only he seemed to know existed. He managed to ignore the pair approaching until Amachi cleared his throat.
"Utagai!" Said scientist managed to jump to his feet at the sudden exclamation, a remarkable feat for somebody who was previously on all fours.
Utagai rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. "A-Amachi-san! S-sorry, I didn't notice you there," he stuttered, eyes nervously glancing at Subaru. The boy simply turned his gaze toward the wall a few steps away.
Amachi shook his head. "I told you the -san wasn't necessary," he grinned. "After all, we're friends, right?"
"A-ah, yes! Of course!" Utagai was stuttering madly by now, gaze shifting side to side.
Inwardly, Amachi was slightly concerned. Why did everybody near him dislike talking? "So have you figured out what went wrong?" he pressed. Hopefully somebody would start actively talking to him soon because if nobody did, he would start thinking something was wrong with him.
His face immediately brightening, Utagai suddenly became animated. "Of course!" he bubbled. "There was a slight miscalculation in the conversion chamber, which led to a build-up of radioactive residue. Then the vacuum wave's motor overheated, which led to a failure in the power grid, furthering the damage to..the...eh..." He had started staring at Amachi's companion sometime during his rant, and his trail of thought had quickly vanished.
Amachi followed Utagai's gaze to the child, who was still pointedly staring off in a different direction. Ah, that could be the problem. "W-well you can tell me the technical stuff later," he said over Utagai's mumbles. "Was that part that came off important?"
The anxious look on his partner's face quickly changed to panic. "Ah, I forgot!" Utagai whirled about, eyes frantically scanning the floor. When the piece remained elusive, he groaned and put a hand to his face. "That part was essential for the frequency exchanger," he mumbled. "It took me ages to figure out how to correctly calibrate it while scaling it down in size so it wouldn't block the wave emittor."
"Is it that thing?"
Utagai jumped again at the new voice before bolting to the spot Subaru was pointing at. Within milliseconds Utagai had snatched the tiny golden cube from the ground, cradling it like an infant. "It's completely intact! Thank the heavens, thank the gods, thank...thank..." He spun around sharply. "And th-thank you too!" he stuttered to Subaru, shining eyes radiating gratitude.
When Subaru made no further comment, Amachi coughed lightly. "That's great, Utagai!" he cheered, smile somehow reappearing. "How about we go to your workroom and start fixing this machine up then? Subaru-kun here has already seen everything happening today." Amachi turned to face said boy, eyes just as bright as Utagai's. "You don't mind cutting the tour a little short today, do you?"
It was fairly obvious that Amachi was just as excited as Utagai, if not more. Subaru vaguely shook his head, which Amachi immediately took to be a positive answer.
"Great! I'll see you later then, Subaru-kun!" Surprisingly it was the more timid of the two scientists pulling the other down the hallway. Had Amachi not been holding onto the other, Subaru was certain Utagai would have started skipping through the building in glee.
His experiment nearly blew up, yet he feels the need to drag people in his excitement? What an idiot.Well, at least the visit had taken some time from an otherwise dreary day. He flipped open his Transer as he walked through the hallway. 5:24 PM. It wouldn't be getting dark for another good hour or so, but he could always just wait around Vista Point for a while. With a new destination set in mind he exited the sterile air of the research building, continuing his schedule only slightly earlier than usual.
One of the many things he found he could enjoy at Vista Point was the lack of people. Less people meant less noise, less noise meant less annoyances. Like people. Ah, what a wonderful cycle. The other thing was that the spot was far from the center of the city. Few skyscrapers existed that far out, freeing the sky from their strangling grasp. Almost like a bird finally freed from a cage. I wonder what that feels like.
Subaru stopped at a spot just beyond the reach of a shadow from a tree before flopping to the ground. The sun had just started setting on the hilltops, lighting the sky with luminous shades of red. The clouds high above him were slowing greying out of sight in comparison, blocking the sky in dreary patches. Just awesome. Cloud cover tonight. The reds began dying down as the sun neared the horizon. 5...4...3...2...1. As the sun dipped out of sight, Subaru let out a sigh. Definitely no green flash of light. Who was the idiot that told him the sky flashed green at sundown?
The lights at the edges of the small park flickered on in dull flashes. It was completely abandoned by now, save the one lone child. Deeming the sky dark enough to stargaze, he leaned back on his hands and stared toward the heavens. Faint outlines of clouds greeted him in place of twinkling specks.
In a fit of frustration, Subaru growled and threw himself onto his back, knocking the Visualizers over his eyes in the process. Well the colorful swirls above him weren't even close to stars, but they would have to do.
Over the years, the amount of denpa the city depended on had grown in ridiculous increments. The airspace was chock full of the waves, which ducked and weaved around each other gracefully. Most were a light purple color, often pulsing with bright flashes of yellow. Strange how the green lenses of the Visualizers made everything look purple, rather than green. That was probably just a result of seeing the city at night though.
He tried flicking the glasses back up onto his forehead. Grey clouds replaced the purple. Stupid clouds. The Visualizers were immediately back over his eyes. The swirling waves were comparable to those of the ocean. They gently pulsed with light, often disappearing one moment and reappearing the next. It was impossible to keep track of just one of the waves, for it would vanish into the sea of others within seconds. His father had shown that part of the ocean to him too, long ago during one of those trips to the beach. How many years ago had that been? Six or seven at least. Funny, it felt more like a lifetime or two ago...
Shaking his head vigorously to rid himself of unwanted memories, Subaru focused back on the present as his head stopped spinning. No. No. That was the past, a past which didn't matter anymore. Now there was only the present, which simply served as a placeholder until life stopped being pointless. If the universe disagreed with him, it never showed it, allowing the denpa to quietly twist by as it always had. Nope, nothing out of the ordinary in the slightest. Except...that didn't seem very normal.
His eyes shot up to the heavens, watching a speck almost directly above him. Unlike the regular denpa in the airspace, the speck was growing steadily. Then it was a dot, and then it was a vague blur. Stranger still, it seemed to be approaching the ground, rather than flying off to some random electronic destination. Wait. It's not coming directly down here, is it?
Just before Subaru decided to stop being stupid and get out of the way, the blur paused briefly. A second passed, and then another. Without warning, the blur exploded into several multicolored bursts of light. Each light streaked off in a different direction, leaving blazing paths of neon in their wake.
Wh-what the HECK was that?That...was definitely out of the ordinary. No gentle pulses of light from those...things, all of which seemed to burn with a violent brightness. No soft, rainbowy colors, but rather shades capable of blinding unlucky bystanders. That bystander being the lone child at the park.
Seeing a decidedly large number of aftermirages from the explosion, Subaru sqeezed his eyes shut as he lay back on the grass again. Well the stupid lights hadn't hit him, so whatever they were, they had nothing to do with him. Maybe they're runaway aliens, escaping to a planet with little to no knowledge about them.He entertained the thought for a while. They had fallen from the sky, after all. And then there was that odd movement, sharp and strong in comparison to the flowing movement of the usual denpa. But they were still just lights and waves, so it was probably just some signal from a new satellite or something. Oh well, the thought was interesting while it had lasted.
He slowly opened his eyes again, half-expecting to see some sort of light monster standing over him. But no, the purple airspace was the only thing to meet his eyes. Shoving the green lenses off his eyes for a moment, he was pleased to see that a marginal amount of the clouds had disappeared, leaving a bit of space for the stars to shine through. A small cluster there...was that part of Cygnus' wing? Or perhaps it was part of Cancer. He had never been great with constellations anyways, the inner workings and functions of stars being much more meaningful to him than the shapes they could make.
Another few stars peeked out, and then a couple more. Much better. He could identify a few of them now, noting their brightness and distance from each other.
There were just a few things that were puzzling him now, the incident with the lights from before having passed from his mind. The biggest ones at the moment, though, were the three stars that had decided to shine for the first time that night. One unrecognizable star was one thing, but three right next to each other? They seemed abnormally bright, outshining the stars closest to them and radiating light like the moon. Intuition chose to kick Subaru in the shin at that moment, and he flicked the Visualizers back on. If at all possible, the stars were brighter even with the nearby denpa blocking them. In fact...
He blinked. The denpa around him had seemingly frozen, vibrating in place rather than curving slowly. No, scratch that. The waves were slowly gathering into a clump, which stretched towards the three odd stars. He started to look up again and cursed when the light from the stars succeeding in blinding him yet again. The glasses came off in a split second so his hands had free access to his eyes, which he rubbed until the light patterns stopped appearing.
There. Without the Visualizers, he could look skyward without damaging his eyesight any further. The denpa was now invisible to him, but the three lights were as bright as when he had first seen them. They were bouncing slightly, circling each other...and similarly streaking down to Earth. Had the evening been a little less eventful, Subaru would have just thought there had been a huge meteor shower that night. The shooting stars were spiralling downwards, once again in his direction. Wow. Lucky me. He got to his feet, still watching carefully. They were plunging towards the ground now at an extreme rate, each steadily growing to become much larger than the earlier lights. Closer...closer...
BAM. The three stars smashed into the ground a good hundred feet away from Subaru, raising a shock wave that threw the boy back to the ground and creating yet another multicolored explosion. If my eyesight isn't gone by the end of today, then I'll consider the possibility of miracles. He raised himself to a sitting position, coughing out a cloud of dust in the process.
His eyes were still reeling with mirages when a deep voice interrupted his concentration. "Well, well, well," it rumbled. "What could we possibly have here?"
