- NOBODY -
"DRIVE!" Nabiki shouts as she loads her husband onto the gurney. "We need to get the hell out of here!" Isamu is moaning. His skin is turning grey. Plastic from a binder cover has been taped over the front and back of his wound, to let air out but not in. It's only delaying things. His lung is collapsing, and air whistles out with each halting breath he takes. He's clutching a black notebook labeled /DEATH NOTE/ whose bottom right corner has been burned up, and the rest drenched in water. "You don't have to tell me that, lady!" the ambulance driver shouts back. "I knock over a wall to rescue a guy with a pierced lung, assume I'm taking him to the hospital!"
"NO HOSPITALS!" she barks. "No records of gunshot wounds! No publicly accessible area she can finish the job because SOMEBODY can't arrest her!" She yanks the Death Note out of Isamu's hands and shoves it into the hands of Officer Ogawa, who had been looking at her with googly eyes. "Slap him on the cheek with this and then tell him where a mob doctor is!"
"Lady, I don't know what you think my job is, but unless we have a doctor on board, this thing is just a hospital taxi! We're not permitted to- Ow, stop that, I'm driving! What are JESUS CHRIST WHAT IS THAT?"
Nabiki gets out of the way of the paramedic stabilizing Isamu's vitals. She grabs his hand in both of hers and kneels over. "Honey. You're going to be okay. We're going someplace safe, with someone who is really, really good at treating gunshot wounds. Just hang on, all right? I know it hurts a lot, but you just need to hang in there for me. And the baby. You still have to choose her name, don't you?"
Isamu can only nod weakly.
Then Nabiki turns to Rem with a scowl. The paramedic is doing her best not to notice that god of death looming over her. Nabiki pulls out her wallet, and pulls out the sheet of paper stuffed behind her driver's license. It already has /MISA AMA/ written on it, and beneath, /HEART ATTACK. OCTOBER 9, 2007. HEART FINALLY GIVES OUT AFTER THREE WEEKS OF AGONIZING, UNTREATABLE NERVE PAIN./ "If he dies, Misa's dead. I don't care if I don't get into Heaven. If he dies, I will write this last character with your hand sticking out of a hole in my chest and clutching my beating heart. Do you understand me? Your little pet takes away the man I love and there is NOTHING left for me and there is NO limit to the suffering I am willing to inflict." She drops the wallet back into her purse, paper between her fingers. Rem, a buzzkill, cannot help herself. She cannot stop herself. If she isn't thinking about the rules she might be thinking about how absolutely panicked and helpless she is. "Using the note won't matter. The rules are clear. There is only nothingness for both of you after death."
"Is that so?" Nabiki asks, drooling sarcasm. "I find that very interesting, Rem, because the rules were also clear that using the Note bars you from Heaven and Hell. Why would you have written that rule if nobody goes there anyway? Hmm? Do you think your corpse-gods changed their minds on where people go? Hmm, maybe that's it. That's probably it, isn't it, sweetie? They wrote one thing, and they got to the end of the list, and they just, they decided 'Nah, I don't like what I said before'! That sounds like some bosses I've heard, right?" Her smile was pure hatred. "And they can get away with that, because none of you know anything about where people go after death anyway. Because you're a bunch of PARASITES with DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR! "Do you even know when the printing process that makes a notebook like this was invented?" she asks, unable to maintain her facade of condescending kindness. "I looked it up! 1888! You can't exist without an object invented in the late 19th century! You're not gods of death! You're glorified notebook caddies and you don't know a god damn thing about how the world works and if every single one of you turned to ash TOMORROW everything in the universe would be better off for it! Congratulations! You convinced me that you don't know shit about life after death, and when I kick open the Pearly Gates I'm holding them open so my husband can walk through like he owns the place! So why don't you QUIT ACTING LIKE YOU KNOW ANYTHING!" Rem looks on with disgust.
She closes her eyes and breathes deeply through her teeth. "I'm... I'm sorry, Rem. I'm under a lot of stress right now and it's making me lose my temper. I didn't mean to say all those things. I spoke out of anger." Another inhale and exhale. She opens her eyes. "But I will complete Misa's name the attosecond my husband passes away. This paper and pen don't leave my hand until his condition is stable. So if there's anything you can do to help, then for both of our sakes, do it."
"Is all of this what that '40 seconds, 400 seconds' thing was about?" Ogawa asks. "Is that how you kill people? That's so smart of you."
Nabiki scowls up at Rem. "You told her?"
"She owned at least one piece. She could have used it without recognizing its significance. That would be dangerous. I told her not to kill Isamu with it," says Rem.
"Yeah but the problem is, what if she doesn't believe you?" snaps Nabiki while she searches the rear of the ambulance. "Nnnngggghhhh... Isn't there something caustic back here - Here we go! Officer, give me your socks and your belt." She shakes up a container of caustic disinfectant, something meant to be diluted twenty times over, while the cop hurriedly removes his shoes. She looks down into her husband's eyes. "Honey. Honey! Misa has a piece of the Note and she knows how to use it. She can't get me, but she knows your name and face, okay? We can't change your name. We'll have to change your face." She dabs some of the liquid into a wadded-up sock, and the smell makes her recoil. "I'm going to try and make the burns as superficial as possible, and only the areas a cosmetic surgeon can fix easily. Okay? I'm staying off your nose, your eyes, and your lips. Once this is over, we're going to go to a surgeon, and you are going to get skin grafts, and you are going to look fantastic. Do you hear me, baby? Fan. Tastic. I am going to rock your entire world for every single day you need bandages on. Are you ready, honey?" She puts the belt in his mouth. "Because there are not enough painkillers in the world to make this not hurt like an absolute bitch."
Isamu nods and clamps down on the belt in his mouth. Already in agony, he is eager to be painfully disfigured by the woman he loves, so they can keep pursuing their dream of a perfect life. He begins screaming in pain as Nabiki applies the caustic sock to his forehead and cheeks.
Rem recoils in horror. She doesn't know if this is the apex of humans being disgusting, or an entirely new dimension of their repulsiveness.
- LIGHT -
"This is an NHN exclusive," said the voice of a female newscaster, whose face wasn't being displayed. "An interview with the... controversial? The embattled model and actress Misa Amane. NHN cautions our viewers that this tape contains shocking language and content." The video feed cut to a static glamour shot of Misa. Ryuzaki and I looked at each other. He didn't know why this would be terrible, but it was going to be terrible. Man's voice. "Misa, why are you running from the police! What are we doing here?"
Misa's voice. Cool, even, even though she's clearly being tilted around and trying to keep her balance. "My bodyguard is licensed to carry a weapon, but police sometimes don't understand that." Click. "We cooperate with the arresting officers until they realize there hasn't been a crime." Click.
Man's voice. "That was why you are at the police station, Misa, why are we now fleeing it in my car? What were those gunshots about?"
Click. Misa's voice. "They aren't the police any more. When you decide to kidnap someone for being the prophet of Kira, because of the command of, of not even the real Kira, you stop being a police officer." Click. "At that point you are a cultist." The clicks - she was reloading bullets into a magazine. Slowly, since she was unfamiliar with it. "They shot at us. We're allowed to escape if - Don't look at me! Look out! You are looking for the ambulance right now! You can hear me just fine!"
The playback stopped. The newscaster's voice once again. "Miss Amane refers to an incident, earlier that night, where a voice that is believed to belong to Kira killed a host of Sakura TV, declared Misa a prophet, and commanded its followers to deliver her unharmed to Sakura TV's studio. NHN takes no position on that event."
"Doesn't make sense," Ryuzaki mumbled. "Why declare herself a prophet, and then run?"
"She didn't," I said. "Isamu did. She was telling the truth about him - he has something they both want. Probably related to Kira. Since she's immune, he had to get rid of her."
The man's voice was back. "Misa! What about your prior statements about Kira? Are you saying that you are not Kira's prophet?"
Misa. Click. "I'm not, and that doesn't matter because that wasn't the real Kira. It's a fake. Her name is..." Pause. Click. "...something we can't make public but if we find that ambulance you should hide your face."
She's looking over to Naomi for cues. Good. I can use that. Naomi is the one in charge. Man's voice. "Why would Kira consider you his prophet?" Click. Misa's voice. "I... I don't know why people get obsessed with me. I've had a stalker try to kill me, and more get too close. I had a criminal murder my parents in front of me just because he could. People want, they want some image I project. They want a doll. They want something they imagined that was in my same general shape. Now there's a monster who is obsessed with me. I have no idea why people fall in love with me like that. I don't know if it is love. I'm just a performer. I try my hardest to be beautiful to look at and fun to spend time with. But I'm really just a performer. A manufactured starlet who never really meant any of the things people saw in me." She was quieter now, further away mentally. Man's voice. "So, does this mean that you're changing your public stance on Kira? You've come out as a vocal supporter of Kira in the past, were those statements coerced?"
Misa. Soft. Far off. "This is it, isn't it? If I don't turn myself in to Sakura TV, my entire career is over. I stop being a tragic, pitiable figure, and I become a walking controversy who gets involved in family-unfriendly, scary events, too big a liability to attach to any project. People are going to call to boycott anything I do if I keep fighting. When they aren't coming after me with cans of gasoline." Long pause. Deep breath. Click. "Shoko, I'm going to have to crash on your couch for a while when this is over. I was wrong about Kira. Kira is a selfish parasite who doesn't care how much suffering he inflicts. He wants to make a world for himself, not us. Oh, shit! That's the ambulance!" she said with a sudden shift. "Get down, we're... we're not stopping? I don't... Right. Because there's way too many guys there. Okay. We're going to regroup. Keep going, uh, I'll keep interviewing.
"I have a lot of fans who love Kira," she continued with a click, "and I know they're scared. And there's awful people in the world. And yeah, a lot of people who we'd all be better off if they died. But Kira doesn't love you. You can't love someone without respecting them. Kira would kill any one of you if you were in his way somehow." Click. "Some of you have been with Misa Misa ever since I was a middle schooler, and you got official T-shirts my dad and I printed at the mall. And some of you may have discovered me yesterday. But if I have any of you left who can pass as - No! Okay! Don't pass as me, because, yeah, that would actually be pretty dangerous! But, uh, if I have any fans left after all this, then, do what you can to stop them from finding us! Call in fake sightings to whatever hot line they set up! Anyone asks you if you saw me, if they are a cop or not, you tell them a random direction to walk in! This might be the last time you see or hear from me, but the more time you buy us, the more time we have to stop these monsters. And I promise you, we are going to stop these monsters, because we still care about you!"
I gritted my teeth. These were not encouraging things for Misa to say. She was totally against me now, which meant SOMEONE had to go get the note from the park. And since I mentioned Ryuk while I was coming back from Death, nobody who would talk to Ryuzaki could touch it.
Man's voice. "Misa, what do you say to the allegations you were in rehab for a drug addiction during -"
Misa. "WERE YOU EVEN LISTENING? What kind of stupid question is that? I am about to risk my life - Gimme that! Gimme the tape recorder!" Sounds of a scuffle. "Okay! They're gonna kick me off the movie I'm making, so, I recommend finishing it with my stunt double! She had no idea what we were doing, I just used her to get out of cast meetings and stuff, and she really wants to try a star role. She can just ADR my lines I already recorded! Two! Any money I have coming that you don't want to give me any more should go to a charity for neurological speech disorders! Three - Hey! No! This is an interview! This is exclusive content!" More scuffling, then the recording cut out. "A kinder, gentler Kira," Ryuzaki said as he set the TV to mute. "A Kira who respects and loves you, not like the old one." "She's setting herself up for some great PR," I replied. "Make herself the hero who stopped Kira and used his powers for good. If anyone on the team would be good at manipulating public opinion, it's her." Definitely had to get her memories back. "If she even intends to be Kira, rather than Kira's voice. She was definitely looking to Naomi for cues as to what to say. I think it's still a mistake to assume the one who speaks the most fluently is making the decisions. In either case Naomi has a powerful hold on her - she just gave away millions of yen to an unknown charity for the same kind of disorder Naomi has, to look compassionate for her."
Ryuzaki just looked at me. "You won't have her back, Light."
"Excuse me?"
"Being L," he said. "The position you clearly want. Even if your girlfriend was totally innocent of all charges and coerced into aiding miss Misora. If you're L? You don't get to have a relationship like that. Nobody is that close to you. If you're thinking you will reconcile and win her love back... perhaps temper your expectations."
She wasn't going to be my girlfriend. She was going to be my Shinigami Eyes delivery platform. She'd just think she was my girlfriend. "Look, whatever is happening is insane. We can just figure out how things are going to happen when everything calms down a bit, and worry about it then. If you're concerned my emotions will get in the way, believe me, they won't."
Ryuzaki showly shook his head. "Your old life isn't coming back, Light."
"So?" I snapped at him. "If I have the chance to help the world, make it a better place by hunting down criminals and murderers, why wouldn't I take it? How selfish would I have to be to turn that down so I could go out on dates?" I believed it all, but I was also a bit too harsh on Ryuzaki. He had been through this life. He was speaking from experience. Probably why he was so miserably alone and wanted to be my friend to begin with. "I... Look, we're getting off topic. We know where they started, and we know when she found the ambulance they were chasing - which had Isamu in it. Can we run some kind of analytics based on how fast they were going, find where he was?"
"We can tell when they were turning from the audio," Ryuzaki replied, "but not if they were turning left or right. They could have, in theory, gone in a spiral, or a zigzag pattern. I'll start boosting the ambient audio and removing Misa's speech, but I'll only narrow it down to a band." He slid over to the console and started tapping away.
"Well, let's analyze it logically. Narrow down the possibilities," I said. "There's a shootout at the police station. You're surprised that the women who attacked you are being let go and immediately go after you. You can't use your Kira powers on either one of them, so you have to use the Kira TV show to order the police to get them off of your back. But that takes time. You have to wait on hold and go through call screening. Ambulances are great targets of opportunity as they're often unlocked with the engine running as they load or unload patients, but all of that implies to me the ambulance wasn't the nearest vehicle he could grab - they had time to choose a better ride. He or his wife is injured. Naomi clipped one of them."
"And they can't go to a hospital. Not when the police won't help them," said Ryuzaki.
"So where are they going to want to go? Someone who deals with gunshot wounds and keeps them quiet. A Mob doctor." I told Isamu to put out feelers for his company's yakuza contacts, but this is way faster than he anticipated having to go. I doubt they are on board yet. He's got some tough negotiation ahead. "He was in home appliances himself, but we know the company had dealings with organized crime. He may have some allies... or friends of friends, anyway."
Myself, Ryuzaki, Watari. Wedy and Aiber. Mogi and Aizawa. Unless his chefs and janitors had hidden skills and competencies, the Kira Special Investigative Team was down to five people who could go outside. No. We were seven. Naomi and Misa would still do work for me.
- MISA -
It was like 4:30 AM by the time we finally got a room. We were in Yokohama's shopping district, so it was a love hotel, which was good since they don't ask for ID. It was bad because I was freezing! The heater in here was terrible. I took a long, hot bath, and then I was wrapped up in all the blankets we had, with only my face poking out, like a bug in a cocoon. And I had the hot pack that came with the ice pack for Naomi's knee. And I was still freezing. And Naomi wasn't making it any better!
"How can you eat ice cream while you watch me die of hypothermia?" I asked her. "I can't even ask for a bite!"
She looked me right in the eyes. Right in the windows of my soul. And she opened her jaw as wide as she could. And she chomped down on her ice cream cookie Dreamsicle sandwich in slow motion with the most exaggerated "OOOMMMP" I'd ever heard.
"No fair teasing me!" I pouted, but I smiled. If she was teasing me she wasn't freaking herself out. And that was good! And I was gonna stay around for her to tease me. She was beautiful and smart and saved me from certain death and was out to save the world, she got to tease me all she wanted.
And she did come over and check on me. She didn't say anything but I could tell, she was concerned about my well-being. She wanted me to be safe and healthy and when I did something suicidally dangerous to be useful to her she was sad because she didn't want me to die. "I'm all right," I told her. "I'm chilly, that's all. I'll warm up soon." And that made her happy! I wiggled like a big caterpillar and flipped myself on the side. She sat down on the bed and unzipped the bag. We had about 30,000 yen after this, so we needed to know what to get tomorrow. "Okay. We have your gun. Two loaded clips. Like fifty or so other bullets." That thing was useful. I had no idea how it worked to get the cops to lay off, and didn't think I would ever understand. "And... the blank gun? You brought that? That's actually a good backup. I kind of want that to be my weapon." Ooh, then I had a really good idea. "Hey, I know a few things about practical effects from hanging out with Nori. What if we, like, we used special effects stuff to catch the Egawas? Little explosives and smoke and flash paper and makeup. Like what if we did up a squib vest and faked my death where they saw it?"
She pursed her lips. Looked thoughtful, like way more than when she was trying to find a word. Searching for something, then searching for its word. "Uh. Hmm... Eff-ecks."
"Aww... Is that a movie? That's a movie, isn't it?" She nodded slow. "DAMN it! Someone else has all my good ideas! I'll still show you what I know, but now I won't feel good about it." It was childish to care about that if it really was a good idea. But I was swaddled like a baby, therefore, I got to be childish. "Okay, anyway, keep going," I said. "I know we got a change of clothes... We're going to need more to hide our identities. It's suspicious if we both wear scarves, so, I should probably wear one to cover my face, and get you like a turtleneck. And some hair dye. I can conceal your facial scars, though, with what's in my purse." I did my own makeup back when I was starting out, when Dad was shopping me around to agencies and I wasn't big enough to warrant pro help. I learned a couple things. "And two cell phones. Are we sure Light can't track them?"
Naomi nodded. It was enough for me to just be told, I mean, until I got anxious again. But she also dug out the notepad and wrote for me. /1 TRACK = ALL TRK/
"One track equals all track. Once one person starts... no? It's why L can't do it. Oh. Because, if he makes it so HE can track it, then anybody can just do that thing he does, right?" She nodded, I got it! Talking to her made me feel really smart. We were a team! "Aaand, one box cutter, lightly used," I said as she kept unpacking. Box cutters were the self-defense weapon of choice because out of all the sharp things civilians were allowed to carry, they didn't shred up your pockets but you didn't have to fiddle with them to open them up. "Hey, can you break off the blade a couple notches so it doesn't have that cop's blood on it? We don't know if he had anything." Everyone had to back off if someone was bleeding on set. It was no fun, but, it was for the sake of safety I guess.
Naomi agreed, and she popped off a couple notches worth of the thin, scored blade. But she didn't quite know how easily the tip would snap off, so, she pushed too hard, and she ended up driving the new tip of the blade right into the meaty part of her palm, cutting a gash of a few centimeters. She hissed in pain and looked around for a bandage. A first aid kit! That would be a good thing to have for supplies. But I didn't say that. I just watched the dark red blood flowing out of the cut on her hand. Making two little streams on the way to her wrist, as she dug in my purse. And in my head I was all, MISA STOP IT MISA WHAT ARE YOU DOING, but I opened up the blankets... I was only in my underwear since I got out of the bath... and I sort of, I don't know, I like slithered over to her, and I took her arm in my frozen ice-wraith hands, and I... I licked it. I licked the blood off her hand.
MISA WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOOD IS NOT OKAY TO LICK IT IS ONE THE TOP FIVE SUBSTANCES YOU SHOULD NOT LICK AND YOU DIDN'T EVEN ASK AND And it felt really, really good. I was cold, so cold, I was dying of cold, and it filled me with warmth, not even like a fire but like a hearth, comfortable, it belonged here and I belonged here, like I was dead and it made me alive again. It was salty and metallic and heavy and wonderful and it tasted like the heart of someone who made the world okay.
And she was staring at me oh God she was staring at me.
"I think... you know... that blood is really romantic." MISA STOP DIGGING TELL HER IT WAS HYPOTHERMIA INDUCED CRAZINESS. "Because it's from your heart... it means you're alive... and if you share it with someone, it's sharing your life with them." Oh God why was I doing this why was I doing this why are you telling her you're into blood people's LIVES are on the line including YOURS and HERS and if she gets creeped out and squiggy in a fight she might DIE and then EVERYONE IN THE WORLD DIES!
"If... you know, if you were a vampire," I said, and I held her with my frozen hands and I was looking right into her soulful eyes and she wasn't even staring she was just happy to be seeing me. "If you were a vampire... your blood would be really powerful. Like a love potion. If you fed it to me, I'd be, I'd be, I'd be your thrall. Your slave." AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH ABORT MISA ABORT "You could drink as much blood as you wanted out of me, and, and it would be okay. Even if you took all of it. You could use me up. If you wanted. Like, like, like right now. It's not even my blood! It's, it's yours. I'm just holding it for you." STOP IT MISA STOP IT WHY ARE YOU DIGGING DEEPER WHY DON'T YOU KNOW HOW TO TURN THIS AROUND?
Everything coming out of my mouth was insane, I was a crazy person, but I couldn't STOP it was just pouring out of me and I couldn't put the cap back on! I didn't, I don't know, I thought about this stuff sometimes and it's not like I was repressing it, I just, I had all of these feelings before but I didn't really have them all at the same time, until, until I was holding Naomi's bleeding hand and looking into her eyes and all of this was just, it was, it was everything in the world! "If, if, if you were a vampire..." I said with my a voice cracking, "You could... I would be anyone you wanted me to be. And I would do anything you commanded." I fell face-first into her chest and I sobbed. I couldn't help it. She was looking at me the whole time, I was nearly naked, my makeup was gone, my whole body was ugly-shuddering and she never, she never looked disgusted. "Be-because you would tell me to be Misa Amane..." I blubbered, "And you'd command me to be happy-y-y-y-y!"
I grabbed her for all I was worth with my freezing hands. I never wanted to let her go. I was this terrible crazy person who needed someone to tell her who to be. And that someone stroked my hair. She held my head. She pointed me up to look into her eyes. She was smiling at me. She was happy. She saw who I was, the awful dark thing writhing in my soul, and she was smiling.
I took a step back. She got all our stuff back into the bag, got the bed clear. And she took off her jacket. I could see her arms and her scars. And she pulled off her tank top, and I could see her sports bra, and the scars that ran up her chest. And she was... My breath caught in my throat. She was out of her blue jeans, and I could see her legs, and they were powerful and athletic and all of her was written with lines of beautiful scars that said the world tried to kill her and she was still here and she was stronger than ever.
And she was holding out the box cutter. And her hand. She wanted my hand in hers. I was shivering as I held it up to her, and she held me by the wrist. No words. Didn't need them. She clicked the box cutter. I shivered. She was... I told her what was inside me, what made me tick, and she, and she wanted it. She knew what it meant to me and said yes. She wanted to share it. She nicked me at the base of the wrist. She was delicate, she was as precise as possible, but it still hurt when she pierced into my flesh, It hurt like, like everything hurt. I winced and gritted my teeth and tensed up at the sharp pain that radiated up my arm. A little blood started to trickle out, tickling me slightly as it crept down. Tears welled in my eyes. Because it had stopped hurting, everything had all stopped hurting. It felt so GOOD, it felt like such a relief, like some great awful painful pressure was being let out through my wrist, like I was holding by breath for a decade and finally exhaled. She watched it pool up in the little depression made by my wrist tendons. Swell over and start running down my arm in a forked stream of deep, deep crimson. I was totally, totally transfixed by it. And then she lapped it up. Ran her tongue up my arm like she was licking up ice cream running down the edge of her cone. And she sighed in satisfaction. She tasted the delicious essence that flowed through my heart, and it was good.
I don't think I was breathing. I didn't remember how. Her hands, her mouth, were so warm. I'd be dead without her warmth. I'd be a monster. She could have slurped all of my life away and I wouldn't have cared. But she didn't. Her lips rested on my bleeding wound for a moment so my heart could pump my blood right into her mouth. She looked up at me, and my blood was smeared on her lower lip. She smiled. She put her finger over the wound and held it down to staunch the bleeding.
She had drank her fill.
I closed my eyes. "I promise, Naomi, I will bleed as much as you want me to," I whispered to her, "and not one drop more."
- LIGHT -
With all of L's unlimited Illuminati money, I was kind of hoping for a holographic map display, but I suppose that was a bit childish. I unfurled a giant paper map onto the table in the center of the command room, and got out some markers. "All right, people. This is Isezakicho Shopping District. Closest thing Yokohama has to a red light district ever since they cleaned up Kogane-cho. Shopping for essentials, luxuries, entertainment, gambling, and sex. Here..." I circled a square building near the south west end of the main street. "Is the office it's run from. The Saikaiya Clan of yakuza. Everyone in Isezakicho pays them protection money, they bribe the local police, nobody really thinks a crime is being committed, so they still operate openly. Even Yotsuba pays them off." What they did was criminal, and it was disgusting, and it would buy them death. But their willingness to play nice and follow rules while doing it made them a lower priority than the violently impulsive sort of scum.
Ryuzaki piped up. "Since mid-April, however, they have come to wear masks while carrying out their business, and have made attempts to scrub records of their names from public access, where they exist." He clicked the little display remote, and brought up a picture taken from a second story window of three men in suits talking to a shop owner. All in paper masks and sunglasses.
"Based on Ryuzaki's analysis of the audio from Misa's tape, and what their objectives were at the time and the info they had access to, we believe Isamu's ambulance stopped somewhere in the district," I said. "One of the two of them was hurt badly and needed the assistance of a mob doctor." Mob doctors... I wasn't sure if I would let them live. Doctors do take an oath to first do no harm, and to aid all in need of treatment. But knowingly treating criminals means they are harming others, doesn't it? "The good news is that civilian cars aren't allowed in Isezakicho; they had to make it into their destination on foot, and they can't leave concealed in a vehicle without a great commotion. We do not believe that wherever he is has a secret exit tunnel or anything like that, that's not how the sewers are set up there." "Let me guess," said Aizawa. "The bad news is that cars aren't allowed in Isezakicho, so the streets are filled with pedestrians milling about, making any attempt at recovery or extraction a total disaster. We're investigating Kira AND the yakuza have paid their bribe money, so the police will double refuse to help us. An assault on the building he's in is completely impossible. Oh, and the doc doesn't have a clinic, he has an apartment or a hotel room or a warehouse, so we don't actually know where that building is."
"That's about the shape of it, Aizawa," I responded. "Now since the yakuza are wearing masks, Isamu won't be able to control them. Him and his wife aren't exactly intimidating combatants anyway, and if they started pulling masks off, they'd be bludgeoned to death with bicycle frames before they could effectively use Kira's power. But we believe Misa and Naomi are chasing them for some piece of Kira's power, and it may be the power to see names by seeing faces. If so, every civilian shopper on that street could become a danger." It wasn't an object to steal, but for all I know, Isamu got desperate when his wife got shot and he made the eye trade. "Bringing us to the second point," said Ryuzaki, "Misa and Naomi are also somewhere in Isezakicho. They want something from Isamu. They have, between them, Kira's power and an untraceable gun. Which is why nobody can show their faces in Isezakicho."
"Which is why none of us can get down there and get eyewitness testimony," said Mogi. "Other than 'why are you wearing a mask that's weird'."
"I... I might have a way around that," I said. "Misa gave an interview to a paparazzo. That paparazzo sells it as an exclusive to NHN. That paparazzo saw where Naomi and Misa got out of his car, but the area is not announced, or crawling with cops."
"It's part of the exclusive. They know a huge story is going to happen there, and they want to be the only ones who have it," Aiber said. "Scummy."
"Which means they will have a reporter on the scene, doing something else. A fluff human interest story. Something to justify being there all day for when the battle breaks out," I said. "Wedy should be able to find and wiretap a news van pretty easily." I started marking Xes on the outsides of the map. "Now, these places are all potential sniper nests for Watari. This street and this street are the only places they can get to if they do get a vehicle, so we need to funnel them in one direction to ensure coverage. We may be able to block one with the news van, hopefully... the north one. The south street gives them fewer options." Streets in Japan didn't have names. It really bothered foreigners, and now I was starting to see why.
"I have many applicable skills, mister Yagami," Watari said with a bow. "Please don't think I am merely a marksman."
"Believe me, Watari, I'm aware," I told him. And it was true. "Unfortunately, nobody else can eviscerate the engine block of a speeding car like you." That guy was incredibly useful - I could hardly believe I was going to kill Ryuzaki without killing him. I needed to make sure he was safe. A lowercase /w/ in Gothic font appeared on the view screen, and Wedy's voice chimed in. "Ryuzaki, or Light, or, whoever. We got a bit of a good news bad news situation. Good news is I wired the news van. Since someone was IN it, I couldn't get them to change the proxy server and actually send it to you, but that part's easy for a con man. The bad news is I cannot surveil this place. The people who do have cameras don't have them networked to anything. The ones that are networked, the connection is down. To leave my own wireless cameras I need to be jumping from roof to roof in broad daylight in a motorcycle helmet, which is literally the most suspicious possible thing to do without a dynamite vest. I do infiltration and bugging, I can't remake British CCTV."
Fair enough, really. "All right. Stay on standby. Aiber, you're up."
Aiber slid over to the console, preparing to get in character and get the news van to - where did that pina colada come from?
- NAOMI -
Out of all of the insane, life-threatening things that happened last night, during any one of them I never would have guessed the one that emotionally affected me the most would be 'Misa wants me to have her blood.'
Misa came back from her first errand with little difficulty. "Remember how Hugh Jackman got fifth place in a Hugh Jackman lookalike contest? I just told the guy at the counter I needed hair dye because after last night, pretending to be Misa Amane for my clients was gonna be more trouble than it was worth." She held up a puffy winter jacket, complete with hood. "And I got you your disguise too. It's really chilly out there, so this will work. Some caffeine pills too. Because I fell asleep before you and I did not get nearly enough sleep."
Misa proclaimed all her blood was mine. She was just holding it for me, like a friend's bag of weed. I don't think Raye ever said anything that romantic to me, because that was just on a completely different, uncharted axis of romantic. I never said that much to him. I said I loved him, I loved spending time with him, he made me laugh, he made me feel special. Never ceded ownership of my life's essence. I mean, I said he had my heart, but that was a metaphor. Was it?
So next we dyed our hair in the sink. Misa and I became bluenette, so we looked related, like sisters. It was the first time I tried out bluenette since my chuunibyou days when I put powdered drink mix in the shower head and made the whole bathroom smell like island punch. It came out a lot more even and convincing this time.
What was I going to do, not lick it? It was important to her. Not that, not that I was just humoring her. I think I liked it. It was new and interesting, at least. Tasted like a 10-yen coin. I never exactly went looking for change to suck on, but I didn't spit it out in revulsion if some got in my mouth. It was... like I said, interesting. Tangy metal. Not something often experienced elsewhere.
After that I did my makeup. First time this year, actually. Considering I cry out of frustration or fruitless desire for vengeance an average of four times a day, it's never been really a good investment. I can't really say 'Today, I'm going to draw upon all my will to not cry once!'. I have brain damage, that's not how that works. But none of the investigation has ever seen me with makeup on, and, well, I'm going to skip everything around my eyes... and in a direct line below them. Just give my cheeks some color, conceal the scar here, put some lipstick over the scar there. Blood-red lipstick. Of course. That's just a good name for a color. That's not even the weightiest part. It could have been just a weird thing. If we were lovers, well, that would be a little experiment in the bedroom, and experiments can succeed or fail, and maybe we'd try it again when we weren't worried about decapitation via sniper rifle. No. The part that was heavy was what came next. "I will bleed as much as you want me to, and not one drop more." Which... it only made sense, right? It was my blood after all, it belonged to me. She was promising to be a good, careful custodian of my property. Not throwing it away needlessly. Pumping it really, really well with her heart. Into her cheeks, blushing when I looked at her. She was, she was showing off the goods. There was a wide selection of shops here in Isezakicho, to pick up supplies with, like flashlights, a portable first aid kit, and some scalpels to put in it. Heck, there was even a magic shop - good if you needed things to start fires, for example, or smoke pellets. It just wasn't safe to keep chasing last night, so we didn't know this morning if we were tracing a trail, or laying a siege. We stuck to the sides of the street, keeping out of the easy sight lines for Watari's sniper scope. Crossed only with groups of people. We narrowed down the possible areas he could have been, based on where the ambulance dumped him, and then we got lucky. There were a few levels of apartments above the charming little Hamburger America Hamburger, as there were above most of the one- and two-story businesses... and Rem's bony back-spikes were clipping through the shaded window of one of them. Tiny little apartments, not enough for a god of death to stand comfortably in. Or maybe the shade didn't block enough light, and he ordered Rem to stand in the way of the sun, while he slept off the painkillers. The doc wouldn't want him to move yet.
If her blood was mine, it was her responsibility to keep it safe. Not to throw it away. And if her life was mine, it had value to me, and she knew that. If Light Yagami had asked her to, she probably would have gouged open her neck and bled to death. If he had the means to suck out her soul, she would have told him to throw it away if he wanted. But me? She was willing to give me her blood, exactly as much as I wanted of it, and not to waste a drop. If I had the means to suck out her soul, she would ask me to please keep it safe for her, to take better care of it than she could. Does that mean she loved me more than she had loved him?
Hamburger America Hamburger's building lied on a corner. There was an L-shaped alley, with the fire escape and some vending machines on one side that lead into the main street of Isezakicho, and an entry blocked by a moving truck on the other that led to the side street. Nobody was attending to the truck, and Misa slashing all four tires would result in a significant delay in that truck unblocking the path when someone did get back to it. The cross street (I wish they named streets around here, it has bothered me ever since I moved to America) did not extend over to the next street - it ended at a soapland. The good news is that this meant if Isamu wanted out, he had no other option but to get on Isezakicho's main street. Considering how closely Rem leashed to him, it'd be impossible to hide. It's not like I freaked out last night. It felt natural and beautiful last night that she would share this with me, and I shared my warmth with her. Even though vampires are supposed to be colder than humans and not the other way around, and vampires aren't supposed to love garlic, well, she didn't mind. And it's not like this is the most important thing happening! There's a non-zero chance I get my head blown off by a sniper because of Light Yagami's machinations, and then it's not going to matter if I'm straight, or I'm bisexual, or I'm straight with one exception, or somehow I've actually been a lesbian the whole time and just unbelievably bad at it. And it's not going to matter if I know how to find women sexually attractive or I only had an idea of a general aesthetic. Raye told me he had no idea what an attractive man even looked like, so, I would make a point of it to tell him how good he looked.
One of us had to keep eyes on that intersection at all times. I had more trouble walking without a crutch, so it was me. I took a table outside a little cafe, ordered some tea and an orange scone, and waited. Under an awning, where Watari couldn't see me if he was looking up and down the street. Maybe he was using a thermal scope, but then he'd have no idea it was me. I had a clear view of the apartment entry, the door to Hamburger America Hamburger, and the alley exit as long as I never looked down at my newspaper. I never did. Rem shifted in place occasionally - did gods of death get restless legs? - and at one point turned around, jamming her face through the window to look out on the street. I have no idea if she saw or recognized me. Her face was hard to read from that distance. If she did, well, not much I could do about it.
Misa was pretty. Really pretty. It was her job, and she took pride in how good she was at it. I'm not sure that was all of it, though. She had all kind of stalkers who became obsessed with the idea of her weakness and vulnerability, but, that wasn't it either. I can say when she was at her most beautiful: last night, when she promised her blood to me. And when she joined the investigation, and she proudly proclaimed that Kira needed to be prevented from making mistakes, and she would be a part of that. She wasn't dragged into that. She still believed in the world's most odious killer, at that point. But she was on the road to being better, of her own volition. She joined of her own accord to make the world make sense again. She was pretty for her job. She was a vulnerable person I felt good about protecting. But she was beautiful when she was doing what I respected, what I wished of myself, rather than languishing in despair. Misa never got too far from me on her supply run, and we left our phones connected so she could start jamming the star key to indicate distress. A frontal assault was not a good plan right now. We knew what room Isamu was in, but if we got high enough to shoot through the window, Rem would block the bullets again. He had to be threatened from two angles, or one Rem couldn't see. And there were only two of us, not a full SWAT team. On top of that, there were an unhealthy amount of men in casual suits wearing filter masks and sunglasses going in without coming out. Yakuza, even when they hide their faces they don't hide their nature. Yotsuba undoubtedly paid these guys off - everyone in the district did - and if Isamu used any connections to get here, they'd want to know what was up.
Misa's will and drive and conviction, that part of her could lead to great good or great evil. She was terrified of the evil she could do. And yet she never flopped around her parents' place for weeks wondering if it was really right to do anything. She didn't quit the investigation when it got hard and it made her doubt herself and her abilities. She didn't surrender her essence to me so she could give up. 'Here's my blood. Here's my soul. I trust you more than I trust myself, make sure I'm not evil.' Except for the last part, that was me with Raye, wasn't it? I had to trust him because I couldn't trust myself. That's probably how Light killed me: got me to trust him because I doubted myself. That doesn't make my relationship with Raye wrong, nor does it with Misa.
Misa came back with her haul. She took a seat at my table and ordered a bottled water. Showed me the goods. And she waited while I thought. It's a stakeout, really. I'd been on a stakeout all morning. She was joining me on the stakeout. That was so, so far from the most important thing to happen. The guy in there has the power to kill all but four people on the planet with a name and a face. Naomi. Naomi. Stop worrying about if you want to kiss her for the right reasons. Work that out later. The recriminating ghost of Raye that lived in my skull would even agree to that.
Misa had to have had the same thought I did. We still had the top margin of the death paper. We knew how it worked. We could write in /ISAMU EGAWA AND NABIKI EGAWA. HEART ATTACK. WALK OUTSIDE, SURRENDER, REVEAL EVERYTHING THEY DID AS KIRA, AND THEN KEEL OVER OF HEART ATTACKS./ But maybe that wouldn't work, it's not related enough to the proximate cause of death. /ISAMU EGAWA AND NABIKI EGAWA. FALLING. ACCIDENTALLY FALL OUT OF FOURTH STORY WINDOW, BREAKING THEIR NECKS./ probably would. There were three reasons I wouldn't. They could be immune. Once they knew it was a possibility, they would do everything they could to get immunity. Nabiki couldn't induce clinical death without losing the baby, but for all I know, she got her face cut off and now she looked like Nicholas Cage.
Second, it was wrong. Forcing someone to override their will was an awful violation. Forcing them to confess would be despicable, and I would deserve death no matter how evil they are. Nabiki may be willing to do anything, and that's why she has to be stopped, that's not a license to sink as low as her. She already had at least one and probably three people in there being violated. I won't add to that number. Killing them via heart attack would be fine, we'd shot at each other by now, but even making them jump out a window was over the line to me. And if they died of heart attack, they'd be lying in a building I can't assault, with death paper flopping out of their hands where yakuza can get to it. Third, it was wrong for a different reason. Misa made me promise. I would not let her become the second Kira again. The odds that death paper accepted 'telegraphed speech' were low, and I very well might time out before writing the circumstance. Misa would have to do it for me. If Misa used the death paper to commit murder, she was Kira again. She was terrified of that. It was my responsibility to not let that happen. I swore I would not let her do evil with that.
She knows she was the second Kira but doesn't remember it. When we met she would have been happy to be the second Kira, and believed it just to be circumstance that she wasn't. That was April Misa. And now, she was different. She felt sorry for me, she felt pain after tangibly experiencing the pain and lasting disability Kira inflicted on me. But it wasn't just that. I showed her kindness. I showed her respect. I was someone she could look up to who wasn't Kira. I was someone who wanted the world and her to be better. Who had control over her and didn't use it to terrorize her. Someone who would feed her my vampire blood, just so nobody else could tell her to be someone else. I don't know to say if she's changed so much, or not really at all. Is she the same person? If she is, she still wants that same person to work to better ends. I couldn't trust myself. But Misa trusted me. Misa trusted me with everything. Okay. Stakeout. Analyze the relevant factors. What do we all have here? If Kira's power is written on death paper, there can't just be a version that only requires a face, because you can't write a face (or at least not nearly as easily) and I don't think Misa is that good at photorealistic sketches. There has to be a Kirascope of some kind that just shows you the name you need to write. Isamu was in as desperate a situation as he could be in last night, with his lung collapsing and spewing blood into his torso, surrounded by police officers whose name tags he couldn't see. But he only used his paper to control the one in the same room, whose name placard he could see. He could have gotten out much easier if he controlled the patrol cops, so it's safe to assume that the Kirascope is not accessible to him. The yakuza are masked up and won't give their names, and the Egawas can't fight off anyone on their own. When I checked the entrance to the apartments, they had no names listed, probably for fear of Kiras. The name tags at Hamburger America Hamburger are phony American names. Isamu can look out onto the street, but A: if he does I will shoot him and at the very least leave him shredded by broken glass and B: he has no idea what anyone's names are. So Isamu has access to at least one cop and up to two paramedics, but his only other nearby controllable targets are people on his floor. He has to work with people right now, not command them. He also had a sucking chest wound and a full or partial lung collapse. Any movement or activity is going to be against medical advice and involve him falling to the ground and screaming in pain. If the mob doc doesn't have a wheelchair, he's in a wheeled office chair. He can't jump off the roof unless he has a helicopter and those are real conspicuous. That delivery truck is blocking the other way out of the alley, and it's going to be there for a while. His exits are limited to that elevator in the alley, the fire escape next to it, and the main stairs at the front, next to the restaurant.
He wasn't going to give away his death paper to anyone but his wife. Him and his wife split up before, but that was going to be impossible now. Organized crime was involved, and the moment Nabiki left Isamu's line of sight, she'd become a hostage to ensure his cooperation. Isamu would have to be an idiot not to know that, and if he was an idiot, we'd be able to recognize Nabiki from afar because she's the only pregnant woman flanked by two masked goons. The yakuza's loyalty wasn't, unless something incredibly unusual happened, supernaturally compelled, so they would go after their own interests. So why stake out at all instead of rushing in there? I would love to. There are probably between six and ten yakuza in there, in extremely close quarters, and I would estimate a maximum of two handguns between them. It wouldn't be safe by any means, but I'm confident that none of these guys know how to fight by anything but overwhelming numbers, we had bulletproof vests, and the stakes couldn't be higher, so it'd be worth a shot. Two problems. The first is Light. If I create a commotion, if I take out or incapacitate Isamu and Nabiki, I've made my position. Watari blows my head off and Light recaptures Misa to make her a Kirascope or something. The second is Rem. Rem likes Misa and doesn't give two shits for me. If I get close, Rem is going to try to grab me and incapacitate me for Isamu to slit my throat. I could see her now, so my best odds were somewhere that I had as much freedom of movement as possible. If I shoot, Rem stands in front of the bullets. Isamu had to be attacked from two opposite angles, and a cramped apartment building was a real bad place to do that. And we HAD to take both of them out at once.
What does he want? He wants to recuperate from his bullet injury, which requires him not moving. He wants people with known names and faces near him to do his bidding and die. Every person who walked onto the fourth floor was another resource and potential horrific violation. I needed him to walk into the street where he can be shot by surprise and have his shit taken from him before Light's people know what is going on. I needed to remove his freedom of movement and association as much as possible.
A strip of paper - say, the dimensions of a single lined section of notebook paper that had once been a caterpillar - taped to the back side of the door handles for the apartments and the restaurant would ensure every single person who opened either door and wasn't wearing gloves would touch the death paper and be able to see Rem. The longer he waited, the more people would be able to see the spectre of Death following him, the more of a problem he would have trying to rope anyone in, the more problem he would have moving without a huge commotion inhibiting him, and the less problem anyone else would have when I shot him.
The next step would require some help, but was very doable. After that, it was just a stakeout. Me and Misa. On a stakeout.
- NOBODY - Isamu comes to with a groan of pain, laying on a tiny couch in a side room, his face and chest covered in bandages. In his mouth is a tube to a modified CPAP machine serving as a ventilator. The moment he awakens, his wife is hugging him, joyous at his recovery.
"Don't squeeze..." is all he can choke out, but she realizes her error, and backs off. He grimaces and looks up at her. He can feel he's on painkillers, and they aren't enough. "Are we... Any good news?"
"We made it to the Saikaya," Nabiki says. "You got out of surgery fine, the doctor said your lung only partially collapsed, and you should make a full recovery. Rem didn't see your new face before I bandaged it. The doc also said your face should be fixable. Our daughter is doing fine. We've got the shotgun and seven more shells. The yakuza have been nice enough, and got me some new clothes. I'm in hooker boots, but my feet are warm."
Isamu nods. "Bad news?" He goes back to letting the machine breathe for him. It hurts less.
"Literally everything else," Nabiki says. "We're trapped in this shitty apartment. The gunslinger girls can't assault the building but if we walk out those doors it's going to be the beaches of Normandy. Kira has no way to contact us. The boss doesn't know why we're here and is thinking of kicking us out if he doesn't get an explanation soon. Because the boss is in the kitchen right now with like seven dudes. There's no secret tunnel exits. All of the mobsters wear masks and can beat both of us in a fight. The only pedestrian name we know is Misa Amane. Oh, and the Death Note is ruined." She holds up the scorched and drenched notebook. "You stopped it from burning up and killing us, so I am not criticizing your decision. But the pages are all fused together into a clump of goo. It's way wetter than it should be, somehow, it soaked up every drop of water in the cooler. Probably because of the deal where you can flip through an infinite number of pages. But you can't do that when you can't flip any pages. I asked Rem if there's a way to reset it, and she's not hiding the answer, she genuinely doesn't know. We're down to my emergency page, the half-done Eba forgery, and the six bagged pages we printed off."
"We're going to have to cut the block of paper out with an X-acto knife," he says with a groan. "If tearing pages out doesn't count as destroying it we should be fine. I would guess the spine is what counts. Maybe we can thread the other seven sheets back in to the spine, and they'll be enough to flip through so the notebook starts generating more. Now, help me up..." He practically whinnies in pain as he tries to stand. "OH GOD okay no no no forget that. Get... Get me a wheelchair. We have to see the boss."
She looks down at him and licks her lips. "God I love it when you take charge like that. You're gonna get us out of this, baby."
They don't have a wheelchair. They have an office chair. The main room of this lousy apartment has become the impromptu meeting chamber for the Chairman, wearing a cool-looking kabuki mask, and the two rows of men flanking him and barring the door, in their sunglasses and breather masks.
"Mister Egawa!" says the Chairman. "To what do we owe the pleasure?" Isamu Egawa has a chemical-burned face wrapped in gauze and is being pushed in a chair. He displays no weakness. He looks around the room. "I noticed your men are wearing masks. Your competitors don't have to wear masks. I'm guessing you may have a Kira-related problem, Chairman..."
"Just 'Chairman' will be fine, thank you," says the intimidating man on the couch. "But you have answered my question with another. I asked you, 'to what do we owe the pleasure?'"
The Egawas recall all too well how they had to be bailed out by their shinigami to avoid a humiliating ass-beating from a single woman. Their pet lieutenant is outside, forced away from the action. Should things go south here, the Egawas will be savagely beaten, their teeth will be yanked out from their living or dead bodies to be smashed into dust, and they will be tossed in the back of an old automobile that is set on fire and pushed off a cliff. Isamu has a tube breathe for him as the Chairman speaks. He is steady as a rock, as is his wife.
"I ask because our situations may be linked," Isamu says. "I was shot by someone the police refused to prosecute, because they informed me that her actions were not a crime. I could not go to a hospital, because she would most assuredly pursue me. I needed assistance outside formal channels, and your dealings with my company have always been completely equitable. As you have assisted me, I now seek to assist you. You had a problem that led you to wear the masks, didn't you?"
The Chairman's face is unreadable, he has a mask, but his posture suggests dawning comprehension. "Two problems, as it were. First, in April. A young man acquired a gun and believed himself to be the heart of justice. He opened fire on an innocuous oicho-kabu game and killed two of my men. The police informed us... this was not a crime, and could not be prosecuted. We were forced to dispose of him and his weapon ourselves. It caused us to conclude that the police were leaving us for Kira to clean up. It was only prudent to take preventative measures."
Isamu takes another hit of mechanized breathing. He can talk, but it hurts, not that he would slow down or admit vulnerability. "And then you had a second problem. Much more recent."
"A client at one of our health clinics," says the Chairman. "Was assassinated by a jealous wife, who blamed him for her injury, and played for him a tape of some English phone conversation. Details were sketchy and self-contradictory, as the masseuses did not remain to be debriefed. Though the client was an important government official, again the police informed us that what had happened was not a crime and would not be prosecuted or investigated. It seemed anyone we touched would be abandoned to Kira's tender mercies."
Isamu's smile is visible through his bandages, around his ventilator. "A scarred woman with black hair and grey eyes, walking with a crutch, wielding a pistol left-handed, who is almost entirely unable to speak?" He steeples his fingers in front of his face. "I regret to inform you that she is your problem, and I have led this problem back to your doorstep. I am pleased to inform you that you have not been left for Kira to slay at all. I am Kira's agent. He told me to get in contact with you. Those cryptic messages you got from someone about how the light of the new world must still cast shadows? Unfortunately, I figured I would have more time to pay that off."
Yakuza thugs who stand around someone in a full or partial ring are permitted to laugh, and laugh menacingly, and look threatening, and look impassive. Gasping in shock is not really part of the job description, but when everyone does it it's hard to single anyone out for punishment.
"This is a bold claim," the Chairman says. Nobody can see if his eyes went wide. "Why would Kira wish to contact us? And, if so, why would we believe you to be his agent?"
Isamu need only reel the man in. "Because Kira recognizes the services you provide to society and your place in it. True, the nature of your work will change in many ways. But most of your so-called 'illegal' work harms no one and provides valuable services to a population that harms none but themselves. I vouched personally for your trustworthiness to Kira: When you cut shoplifting in half and offer refunds when an incident does occur? That isn't a criminal protection racket, that's a private security firm doing a better job than the police." That takes a bit out of him, lying so hard. People like this don't get to live in the world his child will occupy. He needs the tube to breathe for him for a second. "I need your help to evade Kira's enemies. Kira and I would be most grateful for the help, and would remember the proof of your honor. As to the proof I am his agent... the only way to do that is to kill someone." He doesn't stop for a dramatic pause. He's got to keep reeling in, act like this is normal. "To have Kira kill someone I need to know their name and be looking at their face. Killing world leaders or public figures is obviously out, as that causes instability. I would prefer to kill someone that we would have immediate feedback on, that the investigator L would be unaware of, as he gains information from each killing."
Isamu doesn't say what he is thinking. He lets the Chairman think. Lets the Chairman come up with it on his own. The apartment is small, and he did not only bring the most well-vetted men with him. Someone whose name is known, whose face Isamu can see. "Koji." the chairman says. A man on the left staggers back. "Koji Nishitani. We know you've been skimming off the top. We know you've been talking to Osaka about a foothold here. Boys, take off his mask."
"What!?" Koji protests. "You can't be serious! I never did anything, and, and this guy, how do you even know he's with Kira?" He struggles in the grip of the two men flanking him, but he can't escape. He tries to avert his gaze and hide his face. He is terrified.
"I don't," says the chairman. "If he is with Kira, you die for betraying the clan. If he's not, then clearly it's some kind of sign, Kira has spared you, and all of your misdeeds are forgiven, if you change your ways. You'll even get to execute our friend here."
Koji is not calmed by this. "All right," Isamu says, writing onto a piece of plain notebook paper, folded over to hide the partial entry that took Misa hostage. "Hello, /KOJI NISHITANI/. And... goodbye, Koji Nishitani." He caps his pen with a flourish. Koji looks around, wincing. "Is... I'm alive?"
"It usually takes about a minute," Isamu says. He has to play up that Kira does this and not the paper. Kira, a mystery, not an object whose properties are known.
For thirty-five seconds there is no discussion. No sound. Every yakuza is looking at Koji. The Egawas confidently look at the chairman.
"I don't... I feel... I think I'm fi-HHHHNNNNNGGGG!" Koji exclaims, and grabs at his chest. He falls to the floor, gasping and twitching, tearing open his shirt and clawing bloody lines into his flesh. His legs pump uselessly. He stares at the masked audience for sympathy, for compassion, and finds nothing. He stares at the Egawas. They feel nothing. His eyes roll back in his head as flecks of foam accumulate at the corners of his mouth. His pulse is inert. He has stopped breathing. And his brain activity has ceased. He is dead.
Over the next few hours, his tissue will accumulate ischemic injury from the lack of oxygenation. After three minutes of no oxygen at room temperature, his brain cells will begin a process that will cause them to damage themselves if oxygenation returns. Drugs can bring that time up to 20 minutes. Longer than that, he could be theoretically revived, with brain damage. Much longer than 30 minutes, his spinal cord risks injury - he could be revived, but brain-damaged and paralyzed. The tissues of his arms and legs won't start dying until at least six hours in, but he could still be a vegetable, mindless and motionless but living. Every cell in his body won't die for probably 12 hours. The colder his body is, the more those time scales extend. Nobody is dead until they are warm and dead.
That's an awful long and uncertain time for the Death Note to peg its effect to, just to ensure someone stays dead. Koji's heart was damaged to send him into cardiac arrest, and it won't beat again, and nobody will provide him aid.
The chairman has a mask to hide the shocked look on his face. "You... appear to be telling the truth." he says. "But you are clearly not all-powerful or all-knowing. What would stop someone from... taking that paper from you and using it as you have demonstrated?"
"None of you made a pact with Kira," Isamu says with confidence. "You can try it if you want, but it won't work." Nabiki wheels him closer to the couch. "I'd recommend you wear gloves, though. Anyone who touches the paper will die if the book it came from is destroyed, which is why my wife and I must be very careful to protect it." Isamu believes this is true, but also believes that Rem would be inconvenient to explain. "Once you see it only works for me, I hope that you will agree to help us escape and hide."
"Hmm." says the chairman as he slips into a pair of fingerprint-concealing gloves and takes the offered piece. "Who should I test it on? If you are so certain only you can use it, then... you wouldn't mind if I wrote down your lovely wife's name, would you?"
They need immediate feedback. The ability is tied to seeing the face rather than remembering the face. The member of his gang he is most willing to kill is already dead. His attention brought to Nabiki. The chairman isn't hooked now, he's flopping around in the boat. "Of course, sir," she says. "Here's my driver's license so you know it's my real name."
- LIGHT -
Wonder of wonders. Ryuzaki's phone started ringing. He instantly sent it through the main display so we could all hear; the visual was a red /M/ in that Gothic font he uses. It took a minute in Photoshop, but when did he spend the minute?
"Ryuzaki!" came Misa's voice on the other end. "Thanks for picking up. Is Light listening?"
"Of course not, Misa," he said while looking right at me.
"What was the point of lying to me?" she snapped. "Your voice is echoing, like your mike is too close to a speaker. You're playing me for a whole room but I'm not on speakerphone. Don't treat me like I'm stupid!" I could envision her pouting on the other end. She could be quick about things in her area of expertise. "Look, we're calling about the Egawas. They have a bunch of gangsters with them right now so it's too dangerous to take them on, right? And if we tell you where it is or we go in there anyway then Light, WHO WE KNOW IS KIRA, is going to just have us killed while we're fighting. So we can't work together but we can't do it alone. So, like, the Internet is out around here? And everyone's credit cards are taking way more time to process? If that wasn't you guys, then you should make sure it doesn't go back up. So he can't look up people on the Internet. Sound good?"
"That was us," Ryuzaki told her. "It is in both of our interests to maintain the outage." I was already texting Wedy to tell her to find where the two were. "Right! That was what Naomi thought. It's a good idea, so you'd have it too. But, about the Egawas..." she said. "The gangsters running around all have masks on, probably because of Kira. So Isamu and Nabiki can't do anything to them. But we think they used Kira power on a cop and some paramedics to get out of the police station. Isamu does the Kira thing by writing it on special sheets of paper. So if you find his stash, then you HAVE to find when he said those people will die, and you have to make sure you can get them back."
Ryuzaki sighed ever so slightly. "Misa. That's dangerous. Reviving someone from clinical death isn't reliable, even if we know what is coming, there is a chance -"
"IT'S BETTER THAN NOTHING!" she barked. "If we leave them alone they die the normal way, and if Naomi and me grab them and lock them in an empty broom closet they just die of heart attacks. You need to use your super doctor guys if you get the information. If we find the paper ourselves I'm gonna call you up and tell you what's on it. Okay? Promise me that if I find out when and how they are supposed to die, you are gonna do something about it. Promise."
"I don't see why it's-"
"Naomi. Is. Not. Going. To. Watch. That. Happen. Again. That means I'm not either. Not without making sure we do something about it." Misa's voice was full of absolute conviction. "If I am Kira then you want this to happen and if I'm not Kira you want this to happen. It's good either way. Promise."
Ryuzaki just stared ahead for a second. "I... promise." He put his hand over the receiver, and indeed, he said "Aiber, get the medics on standby. Tell them to provide means of self-drowning and low-caliber guns, at least."
"Okay, good. So I guess we'll see you when someone decides to make an attack," she said briskly.
"Good. We will."
"Fine!"
"Fine."
"Great!"
"Great."
"Stupendous!"
"Stupendous." Finally, Misa hung up with an exasperated grunt. Not nearly enough time for Wedy to make them. But I had an idea. "Ryuzaki. Does your voice scrambler have any other settings? I want something a bit more menacing," I said as I motioned for the receiver.
"Why?"
"Because if Isamu has a cop under his control," I told him, "then he needs to think he can't rely on any help the police can provide. And to get him to realize that, he has to think it's his idea. And to think it's his idea, I need to say a lot of other threatening things to him so he doesn't know what I'm calling his attention to." Ryuzaki smiled and pitch-shifted me down a bit. Sakura TV's electronic security was terrible, and we had the phone number they were sitting on that called into the Kira show last night.
Not only were they sitting on that number, they were bringing the show back, as "Kira's Kingdom", five nights a week. This might be an appropriate level of reverence, but it was certainly too early. I'm not God yet, people.
I punched in the digits as fast as I could. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring... "Hello!" chirped a sunny voice. "You've reached the phone of Isamu Egawa. This is his wife Nabiki, may I tell him who is calling?" The woman sounded like the perfect yamato nadeshiko if ever there was one.
"Put Isamu on." Wow, this voice sounded way more demonic than I was expecting. "It's urgent."
"My husband is resting," she said with a hint of iron behind her voice. "Anything you can say to Isamu you can say to me, mister spooky scrambled voice."
"Your husband is Kira. This is not a surprise to you because you're still cooperating in his crimes," I said. "I am L. My resources are vast, my reach is infinite, and my people are going to bring you in."
"Oh? Well, that sounds impressive, mister L," she said dismissively. "But I'm standing next to a window right now and you didn't try to impress me by telling me what I was wearing or eating. So I know at least you don't know where we are at the moment. And if you don't know that, you don't know what and who we have, either." A click of a door being locked. "So why should I believe you're going to come and get us, mister L?"
"Because you already met Agent Pandora twice before and you barely escaped with your lives." I looked over to Ryuzaki, who gave a slight nod of approval. Maybe he was wishing he used edgy-sounding code names for reasons other than playing a part. It would be like him. There was a bit of chuunibyou in him. "She is a merciless hunter who isn't going to stop until you're brought in dead or alive. Your husband tried to broker a deal with the NPA to keep them from investigating Kira. Agent Pandora made sure the man on the other end of that deal never saw another sunrise. And then I ensured she walked out of jail before she saw her next one." Ooh, this L character I've created, sounds very proud of the accomplishments of his codenamed agents!
Nabiki paused. I could hear hissing in the background, air rushing in and out of a machine. "My husband didn't broker that deal. I did. And you're the one who got her out of jail. The mute lady. The one who was Misa Amane's bodyguard."
Why wouldn't she think we were on the same side? "She's not mute. She has a condition. It's known as..." God damn it, why was that so hard to remember? "...Expressive aphasia. she does not need to speak to carry out her work. And yes. I have ensured her actions will not face legal consequences. You have no idea how deep my influence with the police goes. The leadership may not actively seek Kira, but you cannot rely on all of the police being cowards. It does not take long for word to reach one of my allies that their aid is required." Oh, that line I threw in as an intimidating aside, it couldn't possibly be the entire point of my call! "You may have some unusual capabilities. But I feel compelled to point out that when you were aided by a completely unknown spectre, and the power of Kira, your husband only managed to get away after having been shot, set on fire, and rendered homeless. How well is she going to do next time she finds you?" It felt weird to be shilling her capabilities like this. There was clearly nothing special about her, the Egawas were simply incompetent.
"It's very rude to call someone merely to gloat," Nabiki said. "If you would like to extol the proficiency of your agents, I can walk away and pick up when you're done."
"I'm calling because I know you aren't the big fish," I snapped. "You received Kira's power late in the game. And it creates a record of every single kill you perform. I don't care about incriminating evidence. But if you were to surrender and hand that record over to Misa Amane, that would be the difference between life and death. Your victims deserve closure, don't they?"
"Oh, a very generous offer. I'm afraid I must decline, though. I simply don't have a gift for you to reciprocate."
"Kira may have told you you were paragons of virtues. You may realize that you're nothing but criminals," I said. If I tried to make my voice intimidating, it would probably end up indecipherable. "I don't care either way. I care about ending the threat. If you preserve the records, then you become my ally in ending this threat. If you don't, then Pandora is going to force you to your knees, order you to beg for your life, and then shoot you in the forehead."
"A lovely story, but I really must attend to my husband," she said dismissively, and hung up.
"Oh no," Ryuzaki deadpanned. "I believe that in his boastfulness, L let slip that attempts to manipulate the police would help him. What a breach of security."
"And if she takes the threat seriously and hands over the paper, well, that's a bonus," I added.
- NOBODY - Nabiki hangs up in disgust. "That was L, if you didn't figure it out," she says. "Boorish, disagreeable fellow. Said he makes it so that woman never goes to jail, and he wants our archived Death Note paper with all our kills."
"If we know he wants it," Isamu says, "we can hold it for ransom. If we get it in serviceable condition." "And it might be a bad idea to call on our friend's police contacts. Apparently he has people let him know," Nabiki says. "Whoever Kira's man on the inside is, he didn't give me any kind of message this time." She looks up at Rem. She has no reason to mention the phrase 'paragons of virtues', nor does Rem ever have reason to mention or remember the name of the warlock Remryuk's guild.
- MISA - "Hey, listen. About last night..." I finally said. We'd been here for hours. Watching the doors, watching people enter and leave. Watching a couple at a time look up and get confused about the spines or the back or the foot clipping through the wall, but figuring it's just an ad or art installation or something else not their business. It was nice to just spend time with her, but the awkwardness was building up.
"I wanted to say I was really sorry. I... I should have attacked Nabiki, and I didn't, and then you could have been hurt," I told her. "I didn't want..." That wasn't true. "I actually, I thought it would be really easy to cut her. But then I was like 'is that what the Second Kira thought too?' and I didn't know. So I hesitated."
She looked at me and she gave me a little reassuring smile. "Ah. Good." That could really mean it was positive, or that it was acceptable. So she thought a bit more and she said "Hmm... Ah, hostage."
"Right. She was a hostage." Man, was I glad nobody was at the tables next to us. It was really cold, so not many people were eating outside. I had on a coat and a bulletproof vest under it and I still wasn't warm. I think the place might be running out of hot for the hot chocolate. "So I didn't think it was good to take a hostage and hurt her. I'm not... I know there's rules for when it's okay and when it's not. And you probably know them really well. But they have, like, complexity and nuance. And you could tell me all of that! But it would take an awful lot of time. So... I'm just gonna trust you that we aren't doing anything evil. Even if it's technically, like, terrorism."
I mean. There is an obvious question there. About someone who can kill someone else and get away with it. And there are a lot of reasons I can come up with why she's better than Kira, and some of them sound really smart. Like the one about how good justice is better than revenge but revenge is way better than corrupt justice and that's all Kira is. But, I would think that wouldn't I? I'd come up with a reason no matter what. SHE came up with reasons too, I bet. So I couldn't trust anything I came up with. I sighed. There was one that I knew mattered. "Because when I'm with you, we care about not making mistakes. If bad things have to happen we still try to avoid them. So if we are evil, then, at least we affected a lot fewer people. Right?"
She smiled at me in the affirmative. And I smiled back.
More people pulled open the door to the hamburger place, and the apartments. They would know what was happening. They'd be able to see something hidden from them, and Isamu wouldn't be able to draw them in and exploit them because they'd be running. I mean they would be scared but it would be an accurate scared. But we hadn't seen any runners yet. The yakuza must have been wearing gloves for fingerprints, and nobody else went in the same apartment, and Isamu never left. "About... you know, the other thing last night," I said. "That really meant a lot to me. Even if I'm still really tired, it gave me a lot of energy. And..." I bit my lip. "When someone gets, like, shot or something. Like that cop I stabbed. That's not romantic. So don't worry about that."
She gawked at me in disbelief. She was trying to stifle a laugh.
"What? I figured it might be a concern!" I said plaintively. "I'm kind of a crazy person! I wanted you to know that, like, I'm not THAT crazy! I mean, I told Light that if he started dating other girls I'd kill them, but, like, that was self-deprecating humor. Like 'Woo, look at what a yandere I am!' I... think?"
I mean... I was pretty sure. But could I be?
Naomi could clearly tell what I was thinking too. She shook her head, but it was fast enough that I don't know if she meant to do that or nod. "Memory. Uh. And, and memory... new?" She kept her voice low. The way she talked was incredibly distinctive. Even when she wasn't talking about anything suspicious, she wanted to make sure someone couldn't hear it and think it was unusual enough to tell someone. I could tell it kind of made her sad, but the more I talked the less sad it was.
"Right. I made new fake memories when I lost my real ones," I told her. "So... I don't know if I was actually making a joke. Or if that was a fake memory, and I meant it. Or, I mean, I guess I might have never said it at all. But then if I asked about it he wouldn't know what I was talking about so that would be like a rookie fake-memory move."
"Nnggggh!" She was frustrated. I didn't freak out, and in the past I would, but I knew I couldn't avoid that. I just stopped talking and waited for her to clarify. She pulled out the card I made for her and held up /HOW: I am asking a question about something's method or origin!/ and said "New?"
"How are the new memories made? I think they got taken away by magic," I said. "But... if it's like amnesia, like all the stuff you had said it was... I would fill in the holes with what was around me?" She was looking at me expectantly. Like I was close, not there. "And... Okay? I would... fit things in, based on what made sense to me? What I thought I would do, right?" She looked like I was getting it. "So... I filled it in based on what I would do... Oh! You mean that, if it's a fake memory, then I must be a person who would say it as a joke. So if the Second Kira would have been serious, I'm not the same person." She nodded slow. That was good to know! Another thing she figured out for me.
Nobody was running from the hamburger place, by the way, or reacting to it, and nobody suspicious had left. I looked at her a lot, but I was still keeping my eyes on our target.
"I mean... in any case he didn't really react. Like it was a joke or not one." I scrunched up my face. "He didn't do much, really. Maybe I forgot about it, but... he didn't do much with me anyway even after I lost my memories, didn't he?" I asked. "Like, you saw me kiss him. I was doing ALL the work. And you know from experience what a lousy kisser I am, but he couldn't even come up to my level!"
Her shoulders were shaking. She was trying not to giggle again.
"I'm a bad kisser! I admit it!" I told her. "I just know stage kisses, which come in two flavors. 'Peck'..." I held up my hands like sock puppets, and touched the fingertips together. "And 'Eat each other's faces'." My hand puppets did just that, kind of chewing where my thumbs met my hands, intersecting at an angle. "And still, Light couldn't match it. Maybe being possessed made him lame. Can you imagine if I told him I thought blood was romantic? He'd probably say something like 'Huh, that's interesting.' I think I only ever said one thing that actually got a reaction from him... and it must have been Second Kira stuff because I can't even recall what it was."
This was not an appropriate subject to talk about! Dishing about an ex-boyfriend who was never really your boyfriend because he was possessed by the ghost of murder and now he's sending people to capture or kill you and you still need to un-possess him to save him BUT not before you figure out where he hid everything, that was just not an appropriate thing to discuss on a stakeout. But she was trying to suppress a smile. And so I kept going. "I mean, like, ALL my memories of him before I talked to him through you, they're all fake, right?" I told her. "They're fake and super generic and don't have any details at all because they're made up. And I never noticed because that is just exactly what he's like all the time. He is a saltine person with no salt. We're, we're gonna un-possess him, and we're going to save him just like the cop and the paramedics. But then we're gonna make fun of him. Like, a lot."
She was giggling and clearly thought she shouldn't be, so it was time to keep going more! "If I, if I asked him to be a vampire for me, he'd like put on a cape and then go study like normal. If I showed up at his house in a French maid outfit, he would tell me the basement needed cleaning!" Tee hee. "And, hey, you know..." I leaned in conspiratorially, "If you, uh, you want to keep on trying out confusing things, after I told you my whole blood vampire make me a ghoul thing..." I held up both hands with my fingers crossed. "Reeeally hoping you're into, like, costumes and roleplaying. I feel like I would be really good at that!"
Air was escaping her pursed lips and her shoulders were shaking. I had to keep looking away from her to check on our target, so she could keep laughing. "Because I get to keep my outfits! If you want, I can be a sexy French maid..." I wasn't being seductive, well, unless she was into it. I was grinning. "Wait! If you like costumes, that probably means you want to be the maid. You can be the sexy maid, and I can be the aloof heiress who thought she was above such petty concerns as love until she first laid eyes on the mysterious new hire. I thought I was in charge, but I was about to learn a lesson... in loooove. Also the maid is a vampire. Maybe you're sneaking in as a maid to do vampire things? You needed the keys to the maid quarters to suck their blood. This is getting complicated. I guess that's why figuring out your sexuality is so hard, the plot gets difficult to follow." I actually wasn't having any problems with that. I guess that's the benefit of being a crazy person. Naomi was beautiful, and I loved her, and therefore, I liked girls. I wasn't sure how to do that very well, or if I was appreciating the right parts of the female form in the right way, but being silly about it was working so far. I figured later on, when there wasn't a blizzard of death paper, I could sit down and get out a chart and figure out what kind of thing I was. Given I was with a beautiful woman I loved, it didn't seem all that important, you know?
But I know for her it was probably hard. She was not a crazy person and already had more of, like, an idea who she was. And maybe it would be easier to deal with like weird identity problems if it didn't seem so important and looming, like if someone poked fun at it in a friendly way. She was still giggling, so I think it was working. "It's simpler if we're both maids. Maybe you sneak in as a vampire maid? And then I'm the head maid, and I go to confront you. Because you, you keep sucking all the maids' blood, and then they call in sick with anemia, and nobody's getting any work done around here!" I grinned. "Naomi, we may have sexy outfits, but we have a job to do too!" What I was saying was funny but not THAT funny, and it was making her laugh all the same. If she felt like me, she... was completely exhausted and was freezing cold and had a splitting headache thrumming under the blanket the painkillers threw over it and that kind of made things funnier. "You could have been a naughty nurse, you know! Then it would be your job. I bet like 3 percent of nurses are vampires anyway, because, like that's just free food, right? And if you were a nurse, I would not have to reveal I only know of two sexy costumes." I smiled with my tongue out. "I'd have to make something up if you were into something else."
She couldn't say anything because of her quiet giggling, and not the usual reason. It took her a second. "Ah... Secretary?"
"Oh, come on, that's easy," I said. "Any vampire needs a secretary to help manage all their night hordes. And you're from like the 14th century so you need someone to show you what phones and E-mail are, and in turn, you show me... about looooooooove." I made an exaggerated kissy face, and then I checked our mark again - still nothing. "Come on, give me a difficult one."
She made a theatrical thinky pose. "Hmm. Uhhh... Ah, and, and, uh..." She couldn't find the word. She put her hand over her mouth and made mechanical breathing noises. "Water?"
Water, breathing thing - "Sexy diver? I can do that." Water... Yeah, isn't there depths of the sea that no light gets to anyway? Where the fish are all super ugly because they know nobody sees them. "Aqua-archaeologist Misa found an ancient Ankaran sarcophagus at the bottom of the sea, where no sunlight penetrates. She should report her findings to the academy, but she keeps going down for wetsuited trysts with its mysterious and beautiful occupant, who is showing her an entirely new discovery... Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuve." Then I grabbed her notepaper, the regular kind that didn't kill people. "I'm writing that down. If that was already made into a movie, I'll eat my frostbitten foot."
She didn't look like she was bringing up the name of a movie. Ha! Eat it, Hollywood! Instead, she mimed turning a wheel back and forth. "Drive?"
"A taxi driver? No? A truck driver. Also no." I said. She made kind of a vroom noise. "Oh, a race car driver? Like with the jumpsuit that has all the endorsements on it. Okay. I can do that, but I need a supplemental costume. Because Race Queen Misa thought her job was to look pretty next to the pit crew, and the part where she kept the sun off the driver's face was just a formality!" Naomi was already cracking up. "Little did she know! How important her branded umbrella would be to the mysterious new driver on the crew! And that no matter how powerful the engine, she can't! Outrun! The speed! Of luuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrve!" I had the giggles now, too. "I should stop this. Now I'm just writing romance novels. And if I write them I don't get to read them and I would read all of these," I said with a smile.
She smiled back. Pointed to herself. "Ah. Same." I could tell that look of consideration on her face, she was probably asking 'when was the last time I read a trashy romance?' Other than the part where I felt awful, I felt great! Better than I had in a while. Naomi had a severe communication disability and she was bantering along with me better than Light ever did. Even for only one person, I was an entertainer! I felt really good about entertaining someone for the first time since-
Since my parents were murdered. since Light killed the man who did it. "Uh... Anyway. I still don't see anyone reacting. They might know they need to hole up," I told her. "Should I go ahead with plan B?"
She thought about it. Checked the time. And gave me the go-ahead. Plan B was technically terrorism, but only technically. Really the only losses were money and L had a giant pile of money to pay everyone back when it was all over. I excused myself into the little girl's room. I locked the door. I turned on the voice scrambler on the phone. And I called up the restaurant: "Disgusting, criminal American culture has no place in Kira's perfect new world. I've planted a bomb in the building, and in one hour, it will be wiped clean from the earth."
Isamu's hiding place was going to be empty.
- NAOMI -
What was taking so long? The customers left the building, and stood in a loose gaggle outside, those who didn't wander off somewhere else. After an initial surge, people trickled out of the apartment building one or two at a time, and only from the main street-side exits. Nobody was flipping their shit and making the problem twenty times worse, which is a huge advantage of operating in Japan over America. Similar crowds formed up and down the street at every other location Misa called. There were hushed whispers about what might be happening and what it meant. But nobody looked like they were going to do anything destructive. Even when a bunch of us saw Rem's entire leg poking out of the wall for a second as she stepped out of someone's way. Except for Rem, the same happened at three other places up and down the street.
If Isamu came out with the rest, that was great. Everyone freaks out and runs from him, he can't hide in a crowd, he's got a bitch of a time quietly doing anything. If Watari wants to drop him, he can do so; if not, I can shoot him, I can grab him, I can take him somewhere out of the line of fire. He didn't. Okay. That's fine. Now our plan splits into two. Denoted by a time line on the notes splitting into a "V". The cops show up, tell everyone to remain calm, and wait for the bomb squad. If the bomb squad hits here first, they're on Kira's team, they know where the real action is, we ambush them in the stairwell, now we can walk up to Isamu's door while he expects a friend. If they don't, if they go the place Misa called first, then eventually a team of three-plus men with masks WILL come here to sweep the building, Misa tags as many as she can with the bracelet from the crowd, and then Isamu gets a problem he has absolutely no way of dealing with. And Misa tries to shoot off a lock in somewhere she threatened, so the multiple felonies she committed were related to the gun. It took an hour and a half to convey this contingency plan to Misa before we started talking about costumes, using multiple crude diagrams that I had to burn with a lighter, but she got it. Here's the problem: Where was the bomb squad? Nobody had gone in. It was more than thirty minutes. Everyone was still waiting patiently. This isn't normal - one of these buildings should be being swept by now. And nothing. That wasn't the worst, though. The worst was this:
The power to the entire southern half of Isezakicho, including Hamburger America Hamburger, went out two minutes ago. Rem was nowhere to be seen. We had to go in, he was up to something. I looked at Misa. I pulled out my fake badge, and the briefing photos of the Egawas we still had. She nodded. "All right. Let's do this. I have any problems, I'll just try and guess what you would do." She swept her hand down over her face and I did the same. In character. "Let's go."
Cross the street nonchalantly. Don't draw a sniper's attention. Look like we're interested in this big crowd here. Don't shout. Don't get attention on ourselves from anyone outside this little crowd of people. Misa and I flashed our fake badges to the small group, and unzipped our coats partially - people who wear bulletproof vests and eat at cafes for hours must be cops. "Excuse us," she said in a slightly gruffer voice, a lower register. "Aiko Marukabiianu, JOCD. Has anyone in this building seen these two people?" I held up the profile pics for the crowd. Not too high. Not high enough Watari could see. I didn't know how trigger happy he might be. "Isamu and Nabiki Egawa. Nabiki is pregnant, Isamu was seriously injured. We think they might have holed up in here, and all this stuff happening is mighty suspicious."
A short man with a flat face squinted at me. I just looked businesslike. Someone who chose not to speak, not someone who was incapable. "I... I saw the woman," he said. "Yeah. Not before today, but I saw her on the fourth floor. Said something about, not enough time to burn everything, or, burning something for time? I'm not sure. It wasn't very long ago."
Misa and I looked at each other. Shit. Shiiiiit. She was destroying the evidence, which included the record of when we had to kill those people she violated in a way that could get them back. If anything was left, then there was no time to waste. No time to screw around. She approached the patrolman standing by the door and flashed her badge, but hopefully still not in a way that made a scene. "Officer?" she said. "There's no bomb in that building. There's just Isamu and Nabiki Egawa, destroying evidence of their crimes. We're going in. If you want to wait for a warrant that's fine by us."
Misa Amane was a national celebrity. Everyone knew her face, even if they recognized it with different hair. And everyone was thinking of her because she was a huge news item. People who had just evacuated their homes for a bomb threat were talking about the insane thing that just happened with Misa Amane. Her entire career was built on people recognizing her in different contexts. And maybe it was total confidence. Maybe it was her absolute trust in me. Maybe she was just a berserker. But there wasn't a single hint of doubt or fear or desire to hide in her demeanor. She wasn't trying to look less like Misa. She was someone who obviously resembled that actress, but just as obviously wasn't, and you'd be foolish to think she was. Hugh Jackman placed fifth in the Hugh Jackman lookalike contest. The Kuleshov effect was an actress's best friend. "Uh. Go ahead, ma'am," said the patrol officer who clearly wasn't ready for a jurisdictional pissing match. Of course she shook his hand, as a show of professional courtesy. We were in. We walked one step inside from the door. We dropped our coats, and we pulled out our guns. Misa's fired blanks, but nobody else knew that. Misa stuck behind me, just like I told her. Her job was to watch my back. Our back. Keep all my blood safe inside her by sticking with me, giving me information, and providing fake cover fire if necessary, forcing hostiles to hide.
The first floor was tiny, with only the passenger elevators and the mailboxes to accompany the stairwell. With the power out, the elevators wouldn't move. This stairwell was the only way up or down. We went as fast as we could to still be called "careful". Nobody on the floor 2 landing. Wrap a tie on the handle to get in and out of the floor to keep it that way, in case they were hiding and planned to sneak past us. Nobody on the floor 3 landing. Wrap a cable tie to keep that way. Nobody on the floor 4 landing...
Wait. This is labeled as the fifth floor. Four is death, after all. Like an American skyscraper skipping from floor 12 to floor 14. But our informant said the fourth floor... which meant our informant didn't live in this building. I motioned Misa to stop. Carefully, I hugged the wall, I reached out to the door handle that gave access to the 'fifth' floor. I jiggled it a bit... The door exploded outward, kicked by an off-white pair of slacks, belonging to a man who charged forward expecting to grab a woman he'd just stunned. He was surprised for a very short time when I kicked him in the back of the knee to send him kneeling. Then I smashed his face into the banister and broke his nose without even looking at him. I was looking at the friend standing behind him. The one who dropped the tire iron and held up his hands. The one who had my laser sight dancing on his chest.
"Oh, hey, ha ha!" he laughed. "You... dealt with that pretty easy, huh? And you have a gun! We must look awfully foolish right now, huh?" "Uh. Uh..." God damn it, the simple command you barked at someone who you had a gun to the head of! The, the, everyone knows it, "Talk." Beneath me, Misa zip-tied the first ambusher's wrists to the banister. At least he knew better than to try anything.
"Talk? Sure I'll talk, darling!" he said with what I can only call panicked charm. "I'll come over there and get tied up, too. Please don't break my face. My face has an unbroken record going." I wordlessly scowled as he advanced. "Okay! Okay! She told us that two armed women were coming up to the fourth floor. We were supposed to stop you. She said we weren't supposed to kill the shorter one, but we could break up to two limbs." That meant Rem could hear her, and these guys could not see Rem. "I don't know what else they had planned. Uh, keep you out of room 508, there's some information there? I didn't see it. It was just us two, and they left before us and told us to get ready when the power cut." He put his arms out hopefully onto the banister. I motioned for him to put them behind his back, and Misa bound him. Very cooperative when he saw his buddy get his shit ruined in half a second and he had a gun on him. Must have been a new guy.
"Don't scream. Don't alert anyone," Misa cautioned. "If there is anyone else in there we're going to hurt you very, very badly."
He clearly tried to mime zipping his lips shut, but his arms were bound. The guy on the floor didn't want any more either. And I hadn't alerted any remaining people with a gunshot. Misa and I stopped just outside of sight range in the fourth-floor hallway, waiting a moment to see if our friend would alert anyone down the hall. Not a peep. We crept down the hallway, guns drawn. The lights flickered back on, here and on the rest of the street. 508 was about where Rem's spare body parts poked out, and the two yakuza had locked it on their way out. Hinges on the wrong side this time, but flimsy. I raised my leg as high as it would go, holding Misa for balance, and axe-kicked the handle right off the cheap particle board door. I pulled us out of the line of fire, but there was none coming. The apartment was empty.
Then I had an awful realization. Why cut the power? There was nothing I did that required electricity, and nothing I saw that needed it to be off. They cut the power to pull me in. They cut the power... Nobody could get in or out of the elevator while the power was off. THAT'S where they hid. It ensured I would skip them over. My eyes went wide. I looked down the hallway, to the window. The fire escape. Misa saw me. She looked back into the room. The death paper might be in there. She couldn't let those people stay dead. "Go!" she shouted, brandishing her gun. "I'll defend myself if anyone shows up, and I'll find the evidence!"
It was time to trust her.
As I ran down the hallway, I smacked myself on the knee repeatedly, trying to nail the little metal filament in the ice pack I'd preemptively wrapped around myself. My bad knee was about to become a problem. I still didn't have a hearing aid, but this one I could at least do something about. The fire alarm exploded into shrieks when I kicked the door to the fire escape open. Sure enough, they had used the cargo elevator in the alley. There they were. Staggering Isamu, propped up by his wife. I couldn't see his face, it was wrapped in bandages, but he had Rem and a ventilator for his bullet-collapsed lung. There was their slave the cop. Another new friend in a casual suit. A briefcase, a bag. And Rem, looming behind them all. I don't know how the hell Isamu thought they were going to blend in but it wasn't going to work. He was already getting gasps before even emerging from the alley. Then came the gasps from me setting off the fire alarm. I drew on him as fast as I could, but Rem was standing in the way again. The yakuza looked around in confusion, and I think Nabiki slapped him with... a notebook, that didn't have any pages in it.
BLAM!
The yakuza dove for cover to my right, if I hit him all I did was wing him. Nabiki shouted at him that he was supposed to hide behind the monster, as if he could have guessed that. The officer drew his revolver. I couldn't shoot him. And I'm left-handed, so I couldn't shoot him from around the corner anyway. I ducked back into the doorway as he fired... and kept firing. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! His police revolver held five rounds, he was keeping me from poking my head out. Suppression. Misa looked to me, but I waved her back. We needed that information, and I had a feeling that they would leave some behind - if the trap failed, then we might spend enough time looking at it to let them escape. And my suspicions were confirmed about the cop. Just like I thought, he instructed all of his men to capture people alive for resisting Kira. He fired at me with no chance of killing me. The paper was making him act this way, the paper needed a name and face to kill, and therefore the paper could not cause the death of someone else who hadn't been written in.
But his suppressive fire had bought him some time. "Fuck it! Throw me the gun if you're going to hide! I'll take her apart myself!" They still had the hunting shotgun. Rem had said she'd kill me, she'd find a way. She wasn't acting on the orders of death paper. The fire escape was made of metal, that gun was loaded with birdshot that failed to pierce Misa's vest at much closer range. I took a chance. I jumped out onto the landing, in the back, with my head shielded by the dangling stair to the next floor. Sure enough,
BLAM!
God DAMN it that smarts! I was going to have welts tomorrow, and it stung like a mother, but I was fine. I didn't have a lot of time to be in pain right now. I had no time to climb down all the flights of metal stairs, but monkey-barring down the back side was quicker and put a lot of metalwork in between me and her. BLAM! She fired again, but I didn't even feel it. Totally obscured by the fire escape. I dropped to the ground from the second floor and went flat against a vending machine. The wall was on my left when I was facing her. God, everything here would be perfect if I was right-handed. My knee was already aching.
"God damn it! Fuck! give, me, give me the shells!" Nabiki ordered, snapping her fingers.
"Drop the weapon! Now!" the patrol officers commanded. The commotion around the corner had turned into screaming and panic. One of them had a much shakier voice than the other two, and he said "You, you... You need to stand down, whatever you are!" Rem wasn't doing that. She was staring at me, crouching to provide cover for the Egawas. "No, you don't understand!" the lieutenant said. "This woman is in witness protection! She NEEDS to be taken to a safe place, NOW!" But I didn't hear the snap of a break-action being broken open. Nobody was handing her ammo.
I threw a can out of my hiding place, no reaction. Quickly jammed my hand out, no reaction. Neither of our armed humans had reloaded, and the three cops with guns drawn on them were a bigger problem. I had to charge up a word, get it to be the one sound held in my working verbal memory. I had to be a capable law enforcer, not someone obviously disabled. Had to win the crowd, whoever hadn't yet fled. I muttered to myself that word, the word when if someone moves you will kill them, that you say fluently and with confidence. "Uh, hmm... Ah, and... freeze? Freeze."
"FREEZE!" I shouted as I rounded the corner, both hands on my weapon. I was on the side of the cops. They had to know that. "Don't!" the officer said back. I still didn't know that poor man's name. "This woman is a wanted criminal! She's an assassin and she's here to murder an innocent, pregnant woman!"
"THERE IS A SKELETON GHOST NEXT TO YOU!" shouted the patrolman to complete the trifecta. That skeleton ghost was looking right at me. "You should run," she intoned. "You can't beat him." If I wasn't a brain-damaged cripple maybe I could figure out exactly what she was talking about. We could negotiate a solution. But subtle and quick negotiation was beyond me. And she was standing in between me and two murderous rapists on the lam. I had made a couple observations from my tussle with Rem, before I could see her. Rem was a supernatural creature of otherworldly strength and totally invincible constitution. She also had never ever fought anyone before she fought me. I advanced. Gun held straight. How do I reinforce that I am a law enforcement officer and get the observers on my side? How do I look like I don't have brain damage? Words all flee from my brain and syntax is impossible. But phrases that aphasics memorized completely by rote, with no variation, count as a single word in your brain's filing system. And the archetypal example of such a phrase was important for my job. A phrase I said into a mirror sometimes, to remind myself to know what it was like to put words one after the other.
"You're under arrest!" I barked in English. "You have the right to remain silent! If you choose to waive this right, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law! You have the right to an attorney!" even though in Japan they did not, "If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you!" If I paused at any point, I would have fallen apart into stammers. But I didn't. All one word.
Even if they couldn't speak English they recognized the cadence. Of course, he must be an international criminal! I wasn't looking at the Egawas, I couldn't see them. I was looking at the captive lieutenant. Still didn't know his name. And the patrolmen, one with his gun on Rem, the others not sure what was going on. I kept slowly walking forward. My name is Naomi God Damn Misora, the Misora Massacre, the greatest law enforcement agent the FBI had seen since J. Edgar Hoover first put on women's garters, and everyone else needs to help or get out of my way. "Sir..." said the patrolman in a shaky voice. "Sir, I think you need to stand down. Both of you. I don't know if she's a cop or an assassin. I know she's not the one with the SKELETON GHOST." The officer put his gun down carefully. If he kept fighting he'd put his masters in danger, make a shootout. Nabiki dropped her weapon with a clatter. Now my only problem was that if I blew Isamu's head off, I'd be shot before anyone could check that I had a serial number that meant I got to do whatever. I needed a scene first. I clicked on my safety. And I started bouncing from one leg to the other. Always keep moving.
"I don't want to do this," Rem said. "But I can't let you interfere. I can't let you put her in danger."
Rem had a real funny god damn idea of what would keep Misa safe. Anyone else could have got it out from her. I just needed to get an unobstructed line of sight that didn't have her in it. My arms went up at my side with each bounce left and right. "I can't kill you. But they will." she said. She couldn't kill me, she didn't know how to fight, and I could see her. It was time to go. The second I got into her armspan, Rem swung a spine-arm at me while most of the crowd watched in horror and the rest watched in confusion. I easily lunged underneath it, diving into range. I swept my heel into her 'ankles' to bring her off her feet. Her impossible body wasn't exactly stable, her right leg crumpled immediately, and her left leg - my leg slid through it with what I can only describe as a visual 'bzzt' and an awful grave-chill sensation. She went intangible to avoid tripping - and was no longer blocking fire. One fluid motion, flick off the safety, take the momentum to roll into a crouching position, and shoot right into her. Right through her ghostly body. I only had a vague guess as to where the Egawas were, so I kept it low.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! The third bullet impacted Rem's bony chest, about the time Nabiki started screaming "YOU SHOT ME YOU CRAZY BITCH I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU SHOT ME! REM! Why can't you deal with her! Where is the CAR! Why are NONE OF YOU HELPING!" They weren't helping because I was fighting a monster and you were commanding it. Rem was solid again, She tried to grab me, or maybe just my gun, but when I could see her coming she was painfully slow and uncoordinated. She got a handful of asphalt as I rolled to the side. I grabbed her arm and I yanked myself to my feet - had to make sure the people who didn't see the monster were seeing something that was clearly physically impossible. My feet shot up to Rem's snake-eyed face and planted on it, then I kicked off in a backwards somersault. Showy. But everyone would know what was going on. And maybe I got road mud in her eye. There was more screaming from up the street. All three patrolmen were holding out their guns, ordering the Egawas to keep their hands up, even as Nabiki was shrieking about her leg. The officer was edging closer. No sign of their yakuza escort. I landed out of the backflip and pain shot up my right leg. Christ. I was really counting on some more performance from that joint, but any ice pack that let me bend my knee wasn't a very powerful ice pack. I staggered to the side, I winced, and Rem grabbed me by the shoulder. I twisted underneath, I bent her arm back, but I needed leverage - I wasn't going to win a direct struggle. But I had time. I had an audience seeing me levitate and both Egawas were injured. Rem started to lift me up so I couldn't kick off of anything. Held me out too far to land a foot on her face. I struggled. And I got a clear view of what the screaming up the street was about. I was such an idiot. Such a God damn idiot. I thought I was denying him assets, denying him people he could kill and control. By making sure everyone who walked in without gloves could see Rem, and they'd run. I forgot. I forgot he already had six names and faces, five of which were attached to people who he knew the routines and general locations of. The mob didn't cut the power. Someone killed themselves by electrocution and knocked out the power.
Roaring down the street were two cars. One red RX-7 and one blue Land Cruiser. Both of them skidded to a stop right in front of the building. And the SUV's driver's door opened up and out came a round-faced woman. Mayo Juba. Materials R&D. Foaming at the mouth, skin turning blue, eyes awfully bloodshot, she could barely get clear of the vehicle before she started vomiting very chunky blood. Behind her vehicle Hiraga Shohei, International Shipping, was doing the same thing. Horrifically poisoned to make sure there wasn't any revival. The Egawas were going to clear out the Yotsuba Prosperity Council before any of them could provide evidence. They doubled up on cars... because they wanted to make sure at least one of their escape vehicles made its timetable and the target didn't just have an impossibility heart attack. They killed one of those people for a safety margin.
"All right! Fine!" Nabiki shouted. "Here's how it's going to be! Any of you try and stop us from escaping, and our pet demon is going to be forced to rip this lady cop in half!" She took an assisted step toward her still-running escape vehicle, gasping in pain, and Rem was dragged toward him and I was dragged with her. "I don't want that to happen! None of you want that to happen, do you?"
She was counting on me being unable to vocalize how Rem couldn't kill me. So, it was time to see how much of the crowd I'd won with my performance. "Ah. Ah." I took a deep breath. I must not speak Japanese very well. No time to think about how that works. I have to find the word to talk to the Japanese crowd. "SHOOT!"
One. Two. Three patrolmen brought their weapons back up. At the Egawas. "Ma'am, I have no idea what in God's name you're doing", said the far one - one who just saw me hovering. "But any of the three of you take another step and I will be forced to fire." He thumbed back the hammer on his revolver. "Lie down on the ground with your hands behind your heads, all of you." The Japanese-American monster hunting cop won out over the native warlocks. Finally.
Rem had to drop me. She had to. She chucked me into the horrified crowd like a concert T-shirt and I bowled an elderly couple over, we hit the ground in a heap. Nabiki screamed, "Get in! Get in!", and chucked her purse and the notebook cover into the car, heedless of the blood oozing down her thigh. And Rem needed both of her hands - three cops with guns, two of them couldn't see her moving to yank the revolvers from their hands and rip out the cylinders. The third started to shoot her, but it was no use. The captive officer, whose name I still didn't know, threw Isamu into the backseat, then Nabiki, both of them howling in pain. I struggled to my feet, unable to draw a line of fire on them through the crowd. I heard something crash, Isamu chucking something at the RX-7 to render it unusable. Officer jumped into the driver's seat, over the poisoned human corpse. And he stomped the accelerator.
I was not going to let him get away. I could really use Misa to cover angles but that would take minutes I did not have. The moment I found my feet, I stormed forward. Not to the sports car with the brick through the windshield. To the police motorcycle that brought our patrolman here. I snapped and then held out my hand, and they understood that language perfectly well. With no objection, one of them threw me a set of keys. Thank God, finally the police had done something useful. The bike started right away, and I was ready to give chase. Two other patrolmen were getting their car, and calling everyone else stationed up and down the street. I hoped this would wrap by the time they figured out which side of the Kira Equation we were on.
They had a head start, but not as much speed. Running through a full crowd of people was a bad idea in addition to being mass murder because the car would be damaged, but our lieutenant was slowing down, hammering the horn, letting everyone flee is path. Rem might have been batting people out of the way. Neither of them can kill another human being.
Maybe being controlled by the paper renders him literally incapable of causing death. Maybe they told him that he couldn't allow himself to, because that would break the rules of the paper and give him a default heart attack. They really didn't care about human life at all. He was just an object grabbed because he was in arm's reach. And he only made it about 500m, not even to the exit of Isezakicho, when there was a cloud-splitting BOOOM!
and a news helicopter hovering steady in the distance was suddenly jerked backwards. The SUV immediately lost control, probably because a half-inch slug just drilled a hole through a bunch of vital engine components. Watari was on the scene. The SUV skidded and collided with a light pole, and I gunned the engine to close the gap and get in an alley before he righted that whirlybird in time to line up a shot on my head. L's people were here. This entire scene was about to become a catastrophe.
The SUV came to a stop in front of an arcade, empty of people and full of noisy, blaring machines. Rem put out her arm for Isamu to grab as he crawled out of the car, but she wasn't actually helping him move, and he collapsed to the ground, back against the car, the moment he had to support his own weight. Rem looked up to the sky, and then to me. She stepped toward me, hunching her head.
I bopped from my left to my right. I was ready for Round Two. I didn't have to impress anyone this time. BLAM!
I shot out the passenger window above him, showering broken glass on him. Rem looked back in shock and came at me. But not too far. Not past her maximum range, the range she got dragged to when he moved away. I grabbed the miniature pole used to make a fabric barrier around the DDR machine, and I swung it at Rem's head. She caught it, of course, and I twirled my momentum away from it and took a couple pot shots at Isamu's slumped form. He was NOT walking away from this. BLAM! BLAM!
I danced back out of Rem's reach. She threw the pole at me, I easily rolled out of the way. What else could I use to force her to go intangible?
I heard gasping. Isamu. Crawling on all fours. Getting closer to me so Rem could grab me. Pulling a sheet from his pocket. Shouting. "Rem! Rem! I wanna take the deal! There, there has to be someone around here-"
I heard screaming. Nabiki. Distant, being dragged away. "No! Let me go! That's my HUSBAND! He NEEDS ME! You're, god damn it, you're supposed to do what I SAY! I don't CARE If I got shot! DO WHAT I SAY AND GO BACK AND SAVE HIM!" Shrieking. Sobbing. Rem closed her eyes and shuddered. She turned her back to me, to face him. I got ready to bait her left and roll right and hopefully take off Isamu's head. And then BOOOM!
The car and the front of the store was drenched in blood and chunks of gore. Rem looked around in terror for a second, and then she was YANKED through a hole in nothing the size of my wrist, pulled rapidly and violently away, back in the direction we came from. I could see Isamu's body now, his head completely erased. Watari had decapitated him when he crawled just a bit closer. I needed to hide. I needed to get Misa and hide and we needed to get the Hell out of here. Where did Rem go? Is she still here? Is she invisible again? How much concrete can a .50 BMG round penetrate? I looked around frantically for some exit that wouldn't leave me exposed. I lost focus. I panicked. Just for long enough.
For long enough for our missing friend in the casual suit to swing a broken chunk of handrail at my bad knee and stab me in the side as I fell.
- RULES -
55b. In the occasion where the cause of death is possible but the situation is not, only the cause of death will take effect for that victim. If both the cause and the situation are impossible, that victim will die of heart attack.
ADDENDUM: The heart attack occurs 6 minutes and 40 seconds from the time of writing the name, regardless of the time written, if both cause and situation are impossible.
X-7a. If for some reason a human whose name was written in the Death Note reaches the time of death without dying at all - such as if they were revived before 117 seconds elapse, or if rare and completely unforeseeable circumstances result in accidentally avoiding death at the exact moment of demise - the Death Note attempts to repeat the cause of death 139 seconds later. It will do this up to three times.
x-7b. If the circumstances of death are made impossible due to secondary events that occur as a result of that same Death Note entry - a person who is made to act irregular for a prolonged period and then kill themselves will be restrained for their safety, for example - then as much of the circumstances as possible will occur. At the appointed time, the victim will die of a heart attack. X-7c. The power of the Death Note is limited by the speed of light. If a human's death is written in a valid entry, but the time of that human's death has passed by the time light can travel from the user to the victim, then the victim's death will not occur. This will happen if no details are written about a human who is 41 light-seconds away.
X-7d. For this reason, gods of death should not travel further from Earth than the L2 Earth-Moon LaGrange point.
"DRIVE!" Nabiki shouts as she loads her husband onto the gurney. "We need to get the hell out of here!" Isamu is moaning. His skin is turning grey. Plastic from a binder cover has been taped over the front and back of his wound, to let air out but not in. It's only delaying things. His lung is collapsing, and air whistles out with each halting breath he takes. He's clutching a black notebook labeled /DEATH NOTE/ whose bottom right corner has been burned up, and the rest drenched in water. "You don't have to tell me that, lady!" the ambulance driver shouts back. "I knock over a wall to rescue a guy with a pierced lung, assume I'm taking him to the hospital!"
"NO HOSPITALS!" she barks. "No records of gunshot wounds! No publicly accessible area she can finish the job because SOMEBODY can't arrest her!" She yanks the Death Note out of Isamu's hands and shoves it into the hands of Officer Ogawa, who had been looking at her with googly eyes. "Slap him on the cheek with this and then tell him where a mob doctor is!"
"Lady, I don't know what you think my job is, but unless we have a doctor on board, this thing is just a hospital taxi! We're not permitted to- Ow, stop that, I'm driving! What are JESUS CHRIST WHAT IS THAT?"
Nabiki gets out of the way of the paramedic stabilizing Isamu's vitals. She grabs his hand in both of hers and kneels over. "Honey. You're going to be okay. We're going someplace safe, with someone who is really, really good at treating gunshot wounds. Just hang on, all right? I know it hurts a lot, but you just need to hang in there for me. And the baby. You still have to choose her name, don't you?"
Isamu can only nod weakly.
Then Nabiki turns to Rem with a scowl. The paramedic is doing her best not to notice that god of death looming over her. Nabiki pulls out her wallet, and pulls out the sheet of paper stuffed behind her driver's license. It already has /MISA AMA/ written on it, and beneath, /HEART ATTACK. OCTOBER 9, 2007. HEART FINALLY GIVES OUT AFTER THREE WEEKS OF AGONIZING, UNTREATABLE NERVE PAIN./ "If he dies, Misa's dead. I don't care if I don't get into Heaven. If he dies, I will write this last character with your hand sticking out of a hole in my chest and clutching my beating heart. Do you understand me? Your little pet takes away the man I love and there is NOTHING left for me and there is NO limit to the suffering I am willing to inflict." She drops the wallet back into her purse, paper between her fingers. Rem, a buzzkill, cannot help herself. She cannot stop herself. If she isn't thinking about the rules she might be thinking about how absolutely panicked and helpless she is. "Using the note won't matter. The rules are clear. There is only nothingness for both of you after death."
"Is that so?" Nabiki asks, drooling sarcasm. "I find that very interesting, Rem, because the rules were also clear that using the Note bars you from Heaven and Hell. Why would you have written that rule if nobody goes there anyway? Hmm? Do you think your corpse-gods changed their minds on where people go? Hmm, maybe that's it. That's probably it, isn't it, sweetie? They wrote one thing, and they got to the end of the list, and they just, they decided 'Nah, I don't like what I said before'! That sounds like some bosses I've heard, right?" Her smile was pure hatred. "And they can get away with that, because none of you know anything about where people go after death anyway. Because you're a bunch of PARASITES with DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR! "Do you even know when the printing process that makes a notebook like this was invented?" she asks, unable to maintain her facade of condescending kindness. "I looked it up! 1888! You can't exist without an object invented in the late 19th century! You're not gods of death! You're glorified notebook caddies and you don't know a god damn thing about how the world works and if every single one of you turned to ash TOMORROW everything in the universe would be better off for it! Congratulations! You convinced me that you don't know shit about life after death, and when I kick open the Pearly Gates I'm holding them open so my husband can walk through like he owns the place! So why don't you QUIT ACTING LIKE YOU KNOW ANYTHING!" Rem looks on with disgust.
She closes her eyes and breathes deeply through her teeth. "I'm... I'm sorry, Rem. I'm under a lot of stress right now and it's making me lose my temper. I didn't mean to say all those things. I spoke out of anger." Another inhale and exhale. She opens her eyes. "But I will complete Misa's name the attosecond my husband passes away. This paper and pen don't leave my hand until his condition is stable. So if there's anything you can do to help, then for both of our sakes, do it."
"Is all of this what that '40 seconds, 400 seconds' thing was about?" Ogawa asks. "Is that how you kill people? That's so smart of you."
Nabiki scowls up at Rem. "You told her?"
"She owned at least one piece. She could have used it without recognizing its significance. That would be dangerous. I told her not to kill Isamu with it," says Rem.
"Yeah but the problem is, what if she doesn't believe you?" snaps Nabiki while she searches the rear of the ambulance. "Nnnngggghhhh... Isn't there something caustic back here - Here we go! Officer, give me your socks and your belt." She shakes up a container of caustic disinfectant, something meant to be diluted twenty times over, while the cop hurriedly removes his shoes. She looks down into her husband's eyes. "Honey. Honey! Misa has a piece of the Note and she knows how to use it. She can't get me, but she knows your name and face, okay? We can't change your name. We'll have to change your face." She dabs some of the liquid into a wadded-up sock, and the smell makes her recoil. "I'm going to try and make the burns as superficial as possible, and only the areas a cosmetic surgeon can fix easily. Okay? I'm staying off your nose, your eyes, and your lips. Once this is over, we're going to go to a surgeon, and you are going to get skin grafts, and you are going to look fantastic. Do you hear me, baby? Fan. Tastic. I am going to rock your entire world for every single day you need bandages on. Are you ready, honey?" She puts the belt in his mouth. "Because there are not enough painkillers in the world to make this not hurt like an absolute bitch."
Isamu nods and clamps down on the belt in his mouth. Already in agony, he is eager to be painfully disfigured by the woman he loves, so they can keep pursuing their dream of a perfect life. He begins screaming in pain as Nabiki applies the caustic sock to his forehead and cheeks.
Rem recoils in horror. She doesn't know if this is the apex of humans being disgusting, or an entirely new dimension of their repulsiveness.
- LIGHT -
"This is an NHN exclusive," said the voice of a female newscaster, whose face wasn't being displayed. "An interview with the... controversial? The embattled model and actress Misa Amane. NHN cautions our viewers that this tape contains shocking language and content." The video feed cut to a static glamour shot of Misa. Ryuzaki and I looked at each other. He didn't know why this would be terrible, but it was going to be terrible. Man's voice. "Misa, why are you running from the police! What are we doing here?"
Misa's voice. Cool, even, even though she's clearly being tilted around and trying to keep her balance. "My bodyguard is licensed to carry a weapon, but police sometimes don't understand that." Click. "We cooperate with the arresting officers until they realize there hasn't been a crime." Click.
Man's voice. "That was why you are at the police station, Misa, why are we now fleeing it in my car? What were those gunshots about?"
Click. Misa's voice. "They aren't the police any more. When you decide to kidnap someone for being the prophet of Kira, because of the command of, of not even the real Kira, you stop being a police officer." Click. "At that point you are a cultist." The clicks - she was reloading bullets into a magazine. Slowly, since she was unfamiliar with it. "They shot at us. We're allowed to escape if - Don't look at me! Look out! You are looking for the ambulance right now! You can hear me just fine!"
The playback stopped. The newscaster's voice once again. "Miss Amane refers to an incident, earlier that night, where a voice that is believed to belong to Kira killed a host of Sakura TV, declared Misa a prophet, and commanded its followers to deliver her unharmed to Sakura TV's studio. NHN takes no position on that event."
"Doesn't make sense," Ryuzaki mumbled. "Why declare herself a prophet, and then run?"
"She didn't," I said. "Isamu did. She was telling the truth about him - he has something they both want. Probably related to Kira. Since she's immune, he had to get rid of her."
The man's voice was back. "Misa! What about your prior statements about Kira? Are you saying that you are not Kira's prophet?"
Misa. Click. "I'm not, and that doesn't matter because that wasn't the real Kira. It's a fake. Her name is..." Pause. Click. "...something we can't make public but if we find that ambulance you should hide your face."
She's looking over to Naomi for cues. Good. I can use that. Naomi is the one in charge. Man's voice. "Why would Kira consider you his prophet?" Click. Misa's voice. "I... I don't know why people get obsessed with me. I've had a stalker try to kill me, and more get too close. I had a criminal murder my parents in front of me just because he could. People want, they want some image I project. They want a doll. They want something they imagined that was in my same general shape. Now there's a monster who is obsessed with me. I have no idea why people fall in love with me like that. I don't know if it is love. I'm just a performer. I try my hardest to be beautiful to look at and fun to spend time with. But I'm really just a performer. A manufactured starlet who never really meant any of the things people saw in me." She was quieter now, further away mentally. Man's voice. "So, does this mean that you're changing your public stance on Kira? You've come out as a vocal supporter of Kira in the past, were those statements coerced?"
Misa. Soft. Far off. "This is it, isn't it? If I don't turn myself in to Sakura TV, my entire career is over. I stop being a tragic, pitiable figure, and I become a walking controversy who gets involved in family-unfriendly, scary events, too big a liability to attach to any project. People are going to call to boycott anything I do if I keep fighting. When they aren't coming after me with cans of gasoline." Long pause. Deep breath. Click. "Shoko, I'm going to have to crash on your couch for a while when this is over. I was wrong about Kira. Kira is a selfish parasite who doesn't care how much suffering he inflicts. He wants to make a world for himself, not us. Oh, shit! That's the ambulance!" she said with a sudden shift. "Get down, we're... we're not stopping? I don't... Right. Because there's way too many guys there. Okay. We're going to regroup. Keep going, uh, I'll keep interviewing.
"I have a lot of fans who love Kira," she continued with a click, "and I know they're scared. And there's awful people in the world. And yeah, a lot of people who we'd all be better off if they died. But Kira doesn't love you. You can't love someone without respecting them. Kira would kill any one of you if you were in his way somehow." Click. "Some of you have been with Misa Misa ever since I was a middle schooler, and you got official T-shirts my dad and I printed at the mall. And some of you may have discovered me yesterday. But if I have any of you left who can pass as - No! Okay! Don't pass as me, because, yeah, that would actually be pretty dangerous! But, uh, if I have any fans left after all this, then, do what you can to stop them from finding us! Call in fake sightings to whatever hot line they set up! Anyone asks you if you saw me, if they are a cop or not, you tell them a random direction to walk in! This might be the last time you see or hear from me, but the more time you buy us, the more time we have to stop these monsters. And I promise you, we are going to stop these monsters, because we still care about you!"
I gritted my teeth. These were not encouraging things for Misa to say. She was totally against me now, which meant SOMEONE had to go get the note from the park. And since I mentioned Ryuk while I was coming back from Death, nobody who would talk to Ryuzaki could touch it.
Man's voice. "Misa, what do you say to the allegations you were in rehab for a drug addiction during -"
Misa. "WERE YOU EVEN LISTENING? What kind of stupid question is that? I am about to risk my life - Gimme that! Gimme the tape recorder!" Sounds of a scuffle. "Okay! They're gonna kick me off the movie I'm making, so, I recommend finishing it with my stunt double! She had no idea what we were doing, I just used her to get out of cast meetings and stuff, and she really wants to try a star role. She can just ADR my lines I already recorded! Two! Any money I have coming that you don't want to give me any more should go to a charity for neurological speech disorders! Three - Hey! No! This is an interview! This is exclusive content!" More scuffling, then the recording cut out. "A kinder, gentler Kira," Ryuzaki said as he set the TV to mute. "A Kira who respects and loves you, not like the old one." "She's setting herself up for some great PR," I replied. "Make herself the hero who stopped Kira and used his powers for good. If anyone on the team would be good at manipulating public opinion, it's her." Definitely had to get her memories back. "If she even intends to be Kira, rather than Kira's voice. She was definitely looking to Naomi for cues as to what to say. I think it's still a mistake to assume the one who speaks the most fluently is making the decisions. In either case Naomi has a powerful hold on her - she just gave away millions of yen to an unknown charity for the same kind of disorder Naomi has, to look compassionate for her."
Ryuzaki just looked at me. "You won't have her back, Light."
"Excuse me?"
"Being L," he said. "The position you clearly want. Even if your girlfriend was totally innocent of all charges and coerced into aiding miss Misora. If you're L? You don't get to have a relationship like that. Nobody is that close to you. If you're thinking you will reconcile and win her love back... perhaps temper your expectations."
She wasn't going to be my girlfriend. She was going to be my Shinigami Eyes delivery platform. She'd just think she was my girlfriend. "Look, whatever is happening is insane. We can just figure out how things are going to happen when everything calms down a bit, and worry about it then. If you're concerned my emotions will get in the way, believe me, they won't."
Ryuzaki showly shook his head. "Your old life isn't coming back, Light."
"So?" I snapped at him. "If I have the chance to help the world, make it a better place by hunting down criminals and murderers, why wouldn't I take it? How selfish would I have to be to turn that down so I could go out on dates?" I believed it all, but I was also a bit too harsh on Ryuzaki. He had been through this life. He was speaking from experience. Probably why he was so miserably alone and wanted to be my friend to begin with. "I... Look, we're getting off topic. We know where they started, and we know when she found the ambulance they were chasing - which had Isamu in it. Can we run some kind of analytics based on how fast they were going, find where he was?"
"We can tell when they were turning from the audio," Ryuzaki replied, "but not if they were turning left or right. They could have, in theory, gone in a spiral, or a zigzag pattern. I'll start boosting the ambient audio and removing Misa's speech, but I'll only narrow it down to a band." He slid over to the console and started tapping away.
"Well, let's analyze it logically. Narrow down the possibilities," I said. "There's a shootout at the police station. You're surprised that the women who attacked you are being let go and immediately go after you. You can't use your Kira powers on either one of them, so you have to use the Kira TV show to order the police to get them off of your back. But that takes time. You have to wait on hold and go through call screening. Ambulances are great targets of opportunity as they're often unlocked with the engine running as they load or unload patients, but all of that implies to me the ambulance wasn't the nearest vehicle he could grab - they had time to choose a better ride. He or his wife is injured. Naomi clipped one of them."
"And they can't go to a hospital. Not when the police won't help them," said Ryuzaki.
"So where are they going to want to go? Someone who deals with gunshot wounds and keeps them quiet. A Mob doctor." I told Isamu to put out feelers for his company's yakuza contacts, but this is way faster than he anticipated having to go. I doubt they are on board yet. He's got some tough negotiation ahead. "He was in home appliances himself, but we know the company had dealings with organized crime. He may have some allies... or friends of friends, anyway."
Myself, Ryuzaki, Watari. Wedy and Aiber. Mogi and Aizawa. Unless his chefs and janitors had hidden skills and competencies, the Kira Special Investigative Team was down to five people who could go outside. No. We were seven. Naomi and Misa would still do work for me.
- MISA -
It was like 4:30 AM by the time we finally got a room. We were in Yokohama's shopping district, so it was a love hotel, which was good since they don't ask for ID. It was bad because I was freezing! The heater in here was terrible. I took a long, hot bath, and then I was wrapped up in all the blankets we had, with only my face poking out, like a bug in a cocoon. And I had the hot pack that came with the ice pack for Naomi's knee. And I was still freezing. And Naomi wasn't making it any better!
"How can you eat ice cream while you watch me die of hypothermia?" I asked her. "I can't even ask for a bite!"
She looked me right in the eyes. Right in the windows of my soul. And she opened her jaw as wide as she could. And she chomped down on her ice cream cookie Dreamsicle sandwich in slow motion with the most exaggerated "OOOMMMP" I'd ever heard.
"No fair teasing me!" I pouted, but I smiled. If she was teasing me she wasn't freaking herself out. And that was good! And I was gonna stay around for her to tease me. She was beautiful and smart and saved me from certain death and was out to save the world, she got to tease me all she wanted.
And she did come over and check on me. She didn't say anything but I could tell, she was concerned about my well-being. She wanted me to be safe and healthy and when I did something suicidally dangerous to be useful to her she was sad because she didn't want me to die. "I'm all right," I told her. "I'm chilly, that's all. I'll warm up soon." And that made her happy! I wiggled like a big caterpillar and flipped myself on the side. She sat down on the bed and unzipped the bag. We had about 30,000 yen after this, so we needed to know what to get tomorrow. "Okay. We have your gun. Two loaded clips. Like fifty or so other bullets." That thing was useful. I had no idea how it worked to get the cops to lay off, and didn't think I would ever understand. "And... the blank gun? You brought that? That's actually a good backup. I kind of want that to be my weapon." Ooh, then I had a really good idea. "Hey, I know a few things about practical effects from hanging out with Nori. What if we, like, we used special effects stuff to catch the Egawas? Little explosives and smoke and flash paper and makeup. Like what if we did up a squib vest and faked my death where they saw it?"
She pursed her lips. Looked thoughtful, like way more than when she was trying to find a word. Searching for something, then searching for its word. "Uh. Hmm... Eff-ecks."
"Aww... Is that a movie? That's a movie, isn't it?" She nodded slow. "DAMN it! Someone else has all my good ideas! I'll still show you what I know, but now I won't feel good about it." It was childish to care about that if it really was a good idea. But I was swaddled like a baby, therefore, I got to be childish. "Okay, anyway, keep going," I said. "I know we got a change of clothes... We're going to need more to hide our identities. It's suspicious if we both wear scarves, so, I should probably wear one to cover my face, and get you like a turtleneck. And some hair dye. I can conceal your facial scars, though, with what's in my purse." I did my own makeup back when I was starting out, when Dad was shopping me around to agencies and I wasn't big enough to warrant pro help. I learned a couple things. "And two cell phones. Are we sure Light can't track them?"
Naomi nodded. It was enough for me to just be told, I mean, until I got anxious again. But she also dug out the notepad and wrote for me. /1 TRACK = ALL TRK/
"One track equals all track. Once one person starts... no? It's why L can't do it. Oh. Because, if he makes it so HE can track it, then anybody can just do that thing he does, right?" She nodded, I got it! Talking to her made me feel really smart. We were a team! "Aaand, one box cutter, lightly used," I said as she kept unpacking. Box cutters were the self-defense weapon of choice because out of all the sharp things civilians were allowed to carry, they didn't shred up your pockets but you didn't have to fiddle with them to open them up. "Hey, can you break off the blade a couple notches so it doesn't have that cop's blood on it? We don't know if he had anything." Everyone had to back off if someone was bleeding on set. It was no fun, but, it was for the sake of safety I guess.
Naomi agreed, and she popped off a couple notches worth of the thin, scored blade. But she didn't quite know how easily the tip would snap off, so, she pushed too hard, and she ended up driving the new tip of the blade right into the meaty part of her palm, cutting a gash of a few centimeters. She hissed in pain and looked around for a bandage. A first aid kit! That would be a good thing to have for supplies. But I didn't say that. I just watched the dark red blood flowing out of the cut on her hand. Making two little streams on the way to her wrist, as she dug in my purse. And in my head I was all, MISA STOP IT MISA WHAT ARE YOU DOING, but I opened up the blankets... I was only in my underwear since I got out of the bath... and I sort of, I don't know, I like slithered over to her, and I took her arm in my frozen ice-wraith hands, and I... I licked it. I licked the blood off her hand.
MISA WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOOD IS NOT OKAY TO LICK IT IS ONE THE TOP FIVE SUBSTANCES YOU SHOULD NOT LICK AND YOU DIDN'T EVEN ASK AND And it felt really, really good. I was cold, so cold, I was dying of cold, and it filled me with warmth, not even like a fire but like a hearth, comfortable, it belonged here and I belonged here, like I was dead and it made me alive again. It was salty and metallic and heavy and wonderful and it tasted like the heart of someone who made the world okay.
And she was staring at me oh God she was staring at me.
"I think... you know... that blood is really romantic." MISA STOP DIGGING TELL HER IT WAS HYPOTHERMIA INDUCED CRAZINESS. "Because it's from your heart... it means you're alive... and if you share it with someone, it's sharing your life with them." Oh God why was I doing this why was I doing this why are you telling her you're into blood people's LIVES are on the line including YOURS and HERS and if she gets creeped out and squiggy in a fight she might DIE and then EVERYONE IN THE WORLD DIES!
"If... you know, if you were a vampire," I said, and I held her with my frozen hands and I was looking right into her soulful eyes and she wasn't even staring she was just happy to be seeing me. "If you were a vampire... your blood would be really powerful. Like a love potion. If you fed it to me, I'd be, I'd be, I'd be your thrall. Your slave." AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH ABORT MISA ABORT "You could drink as much blood as you wanted out of me, and, and it would be okay. Even if you took all of it. You could use me up. If you wanted. Like, like, like right now. It's not even my blood! It's, it's yours. I'm just holding it for you." STOP IT MISA STOP IT WHY ARE YOU DIGGING DEEPER WHY DON'T YOU KNOW HOW TO TURN THIS AROUND?
Everything coming out of my mouth was insane, I was a crazy person, but I couldn't STOP it was just pouring out of me and I couldn't put the cap back on! I didn't, I don't know, I thought about this stuff sometimes and it's not like I was repressing it, I just, I had all of these feelings before but I didn't really have them all at the same time, until, until I was holding Naomi's bleeding hand and looking into her eyes and all of this was just, it was, it was everything in the world! "If, if, if you were a vampire..." I said with my a voice cracking, "You could... I would be anyone you wanted me to be. And I would do anything you commanded." I fell face-first into her chest and I sobbed. I couldn't help it. She was looking at me the whole time, I was nearly naked, my makeup was gone, my whole body was ugly-shuddering and she never, she never looked disgusted. "Be-because you would tell me to be Misa Amane..." I blubbered, "And you'd command me to be happy-y-y-y-y!"
I grabbed her for all I was worth with my freezing hands. I never wanted to let her go. I was this terrible crazy person who needed someone to tell her who to be. And that someone stroked my hair. She held my head. She pointed me up to look into her eyes. She was smiling at me. She was happy. She saw who I was, the awful dark thing writhing in my soul, and she was smiling.
I took a step back. She got all our stuff back into the bag, got the bed clear. And she took off her jacket. I could see her arms and her scars. And she pulled off her tank top, and I could see her sports bra, and the scars that ran up her chest. And she was... My breath caught in my throat. She was out of her blue jeans, and I could see her legs, and they were powerful and athletic and all of her was written with lines of beautiful scars that said the world tried to kill her and she was still here and she was stronger than ever.
And she was holding out the box cutter. And her hand. She wanted my hand in hers. I was shivering as I held it up to her, and she held me by the wrist. No words. Didn't need them. She clicked the box cutter. I shivered. She was... I told her what was inside me, what made me tick, and she, and she wanted it. She knew what it meant to me and said yes. She wanted to share it. She nicked me at the base of the wrist. She was delicate, she was as precise as possible, but it still hurt when she pierced into my flesh, It hurt like, like everything hurt. I winced and gritted my teeth and tensed up at the sharp pain that radiated up my arm. A little blood started to trickle out, tickling me slightly as it crept down. Tears welled in my eyes. Because it had stopped hurting, everything had all stopped hurting. It felt so GOOD, it felt like such a relief, like some great awful painful pressure was being let out through my wrist, like I was holding by breath for a decade and finally exhaled. She watched it pool up in the little depression made by my wrist tendons. Swell over and start running down my arm in a forked stream of deep, deep crimson. I was totally, totally transfixed by it. And then she lapped it up. Ran her tongue up my arm like she was licking up ice cream running down the edge of her cone. And she sighed in satisfaction. She tasted the delicious essence that flowed through my heart, and it was good.
I don't think I was breathing. I didn't remember how. Her hands, her mouth, were so warm. I'd be dead without her warmth. I'd be a monster. She could have slurped all of my life away and I wouldn't have cared. But she didn't. Her lips rested on my bleeding wound for a moment so my heart could pump my blood right into her mouth. She looked up at me, and my blood was smeared on her lower lip. She smiled. She put her finger over the wound and held it down to staunch the bleeding.
She had drank her fill.
I closed my eyes. "I promise, Naomi, I will bleed as much as you want me to," I whispered to her, "and not one drop more."
- LIGHT -
With all of L's unlimited Illuminati money, I was kind of hoping for a holographic map display, but I suppose that was a bit childish. I unfurled a giant paper map onto the table in the center of the command room, and got out some markers. "All right, people. This is Isezakicho Shopping District. Closest thing Yokohama has to a red light district ever since they cleaned up Kogane-cho. Shopping for essentials, luxuries, entertainment, gambling, and sex. Here..." I circled a square building near the south west end of the main street. "Is the office it's run from. The Saikaiya Clan of yakuza. Everyone in Isezakicho pays them protection money, they bribe the local police, nobody really thinks a crime is being committed, so they still operate openly. Even Yotsuba pays them off." What they did was criminal, and it was disgusting, and it would buy them death. But their willingness to play nice and follow rules while doing it made them a lower priority than the violently impulsive sort of scum.
Ryuzaki piped up. "Since mid-April, however, they have come to wear masks while carrying out their business, and have made attempts to scrub records of their names from public access, where they exist." He clicked the little display remote, and brought up a picture taken from a second story window of three men in suits talking to a shop owner. All in paper masks and sunglasses.
"Based on Ryuzaki's analysis of the audio from Misa's tape, and what their objectives were at the time and the info they had access to, we believe Isamu's ambulance stopped somewhere in the district," I said. "One of the two of them was hurt badly and needed the assistance of a mob doctor." Mob doctors... I wasn't sure if I would let them live. Doctors do take an oath to first do no harm, and to aid all in need of treatment. But knowingly treating criminals means they are harming others, doesn't it? "The good news is that civilian cars aren't allowed in Isezakicho; they had to make it into their destination on foot, and they can't leave concealed in a vehicle without a great commotion. We do not believe that wherever he is has a secret exit tunnel or anything like that, that's not how the sewers are set up there." "Let me guess," said Aizawa. "The bad news is that cars aren't allowed in Isezakicho, so the streets are filled with pedestrians milling about, making any attempt at recovery or extraction a total disaster. We're investigating Kira AND the yakuza have paid their bribe money, so the police will double refuse to help us. An assault on the building he's in is completely impossible. Oh, and the doc doesn't have a clinic, he has an apartment or a hotel room or a warehouse, so we don't actually know where that building is."
"That's about the shape of it, Aizawa," I responded. "Now since the yakuza are wearing masks, Isamu won't be able to control them. Him and his wife aren't exactly intimidating combatants anyway, and if they started pulling masks off, they'd be bludgeoned to death with bicycle frames before they could effectively use Kira's power. But we believe Misa and Naomi are chasing them for some piece of Kira's power, and it may be the power to see names by seeing faces. If so, every civilian shopper on that street could become a danger." It wasn't an object to steal, but for all I know, Isamu got desperate when his wife got shot and he made the eye trade. "Bringing us to the second point," said Ryuzaki, "Misa and Naomi are also somewhere in Isezakicho. They want something from Isamu. They have, between them, Kira's power and an untraceable gun. Which is why nobody can show their faces in Isezakicho."
"Which is why none of us can get down there and get eyewitness testimony," said Mogi. "Other than 'why are you wearing a mask that's weird'."
"I... I might have a way around that," I said. "Misa gave an interview to a paparazzo. That paparazzo sells it as an exclusive to NHN. That paparazzo saw where Naomi and Misa got out of his car, but the area is not announced, or crawling with cops."
"It's part of the exclusive. They know a huge story is going to happen there, and they want to be the only ones who have it," Aiber said. "Scummy."
"Which means they will have a reporter on the scene, doing something else. A fluff human interest story. Something to justify being there all day for when the battle breaks out," I said. "Wedy should be able to find and wiretap a news van pretty easily." I started marking Xes on the outsides of the map. "Now, these places are all potential sniper nests for Watari. This street and this street are the only places they can get to if they do get a vehicle, so we need to funnel them in one direction to ensure coverage. We may be able to block one with the news van, hopefully... the north one. The south street gives them fewer options." Streets in Japan didn't have names. It really bothered foreigners, and now I was starting to see why.
"I have many applicable skills, mister Yagami," Watari said with a bow. "Please don't think I am merely a marksman."
"Believe me, Watari, I'm aware," I told him. And it was true. "Unfortunately, nobody else can eviscerate the engine block of a speeding car like you." That guy was incredibly useful - I could hardly believe I was going to kill Ryuzaki without killing him. I needed to make sure he was safe. A lowercase /w/ in Gothic font appeared on the view screen, and Wedy's voice chimed in. "Ryuzaki, or Light, or, whoever. We got a bit of a good news bad news situation. Good news is I wired the news van. Since someone was IN it, I couldn't get them to change the proxy server and actually send it to you, but that part's easy for a con man. The bad news is I cannot surveil this place. The people who do have cameras don't have them networked to anything. The ones that are networked, the connection is down. To leave my own wireless cameras I need to be jumping from roof to roof in broad daylight in a motorcycle helmet, which is literally the most suspicious possible thing to do without a dynamite vest. I do infiltration and bugging, I can't remake British CCTV."
Fair enough, really. "All right. Stay on standby. Aiber, you're up."
Aiber slid over to the console, preparing to get in character and get the news van to - where did that pina colada come from?
- NAOMI -
Out of all of the insane, life-threatening things that happened last night, during any one of them I never would have guessed the one that emotionally affected me the most would be 'Misa wants me to have her blood.'
Misa came back from her first errand with little difficulty. "Remember how Hugh Jackman got fifth place in a Hugh Jackman lookalike contest? I just told the guy at the counter I needed hair dye because after last night, pretending to be Misa Amane for my clients was gonna be more trouble than it was worth." She held up a puffy winter jacket, complete with hood. "And I got you your disguise too. It's really chilly out there, so this will work. Some caffeine pills too. Because I fell asleep before you and I did not get nearly enough sleep."
Misa proclaimed all her blood was mine. She was just holding it for me, like a friend's bag of weed. I don't think Raye ever said anything that romantic to me, because that was just on a completely different, uncharted axis of romantic. I never said that much to him. I said I loved him, I loved spending time with him, he made me laugh, he made me feel special. Never ceded ownership of my life's essence. I mean, I said he had my heart, but that was a metaphor. Was it?
So next we dyed our hair in the sink. Misa and I became bluenette, so we looked related, like sisters. It was the first time I tried out bluenette since my chuunibyou days when I put powdered drink mix in the shower head and made the whole bathroom smell like island punch. It came out a lot more even and convincing this time.
What was I going to do, not lick it? It was important to her. Not that, not that I was just humoring her. I think I liked it. It was new and interesting, at least. Tasted like a 10-yen coin. I never exactly went looking for change to suck on, but I didn't spit it out in revulsion if some got in my mouth. It was... like I said, interesting. Tangy metal. Not something often experienced elsewhere.
After that I did my makeup. First time this year, actually. Considering I cry out of frustration or fruitless desire for vengeance an average of four times a day, it's never been really a good investment. I can't really say 'Today, I'm going to draw upon all my will to not cry once!'. I have brain damage, that's not how that works. But none of the investigation has ever seen me with makeup on, and, well, I'm going to skip everything around my eyes... and in a direct line below them. Just give my cheeks some color, conceal the scar here, put some lipstick over the scar there. Blood-red lipstick. Of course. That's just a good name for a color. That's not even the weightiest part. It could have been just a weird thing. If we were lovers, well, that would be a little experiment in the bedroom, and experiments can succeed or fail, and maybe we'd try it again when we weren't worried about decapitation via sniper rifle. No. The part that was heavy was what came next. "I will bleed as much as you want me to, and not one drop more." Which... it only made sense, right? It was my blood after all, it belonged to me. She was promising to be a good, careful custodian of my property. Not throwing it away needlessly. Pumping it really, really well with her heart. Into her cheeks, blushing when I looked at her. She was, she was showing off the goods. There was a wide selection of shops here in Isezakicho, to pick up supplies with, like flashlights, a portable first aid kit, and some scalpels to put in it. Heck, there was even a magic shop - good if you needed things to start fires, for example, or smoke pellets. It just wasn't safe to keep chasing last night, so we didn't know this morning if we were tracing a trail, or laying a siege. We stuck to the sides of the street, keeping out of the easy sight lines for Watari's sniper scope. Crossed only with groups of people. We narrowed down the possible areas he could have been, based on where the ambulance dumped him, and then we got lucky. There were a few levels of apartments above the charming little Hamburger America Hamburger, as there were above most of the one- and two-story businesses... and Rem's bony back-spikes were clipping through the shaded window of one of them. Tiny little apartments, not enough for a god of death to stand comfortably in. Or maybe the shade didn't block enough light, and he ordered Rem to stand in the way of the sun, while he slept off the painkillers. The doc wouldn't want him to move yet.
If her blood was mine, it was her responsibility to keep it safe. Not to throw it away. And if her life was mine, it had value to me, and she knew that. If Light Yagami had asked her to, she probably would have gouged open her neck and bled to death. If he had the means to suck out her soul, she would have told him to throw it away if he wanted. But me? She was willing to give me her blood, exactly as much as I wanted of it, and not to waste a drop. If I had the means to suck out her soul, she would ask me to please keep it safe for her, to take better care of it than she could. Does that mean she loved me more than she had loved him?
Hamburger America Hamburger's building lied on a corner. There was an L-shaped alley, with the fire escape and some vending machines on one side that lead into the main street of Isezakicho, and an entry blocked by a moving truck on the other that led to the side street. Nobody was attending to the truck, and Misa slashing all four tires would result in a significant delay in that truck unblocking the path when someone did get back to it. The cross street (I wish they named streets around here, it has bothered me ever since I moved to America) did not extend over to the next street - it ended at a soapland. The good news is that this meant if Isamu wanted out, he had no other option but to get on Isezakicho's main street. Considering how closely Rem leashed to him, it'd be impossible to hide. It's not like I freaked out last night. It felt natural and beautiful last night that she would share this with me, and I shared my warmth with her. Even though vampires are supposed to be colder than humans and not the other way around, and vampires aren't supposed to love garlic, well, she didn't mind. And it's not like this is the most important thing happening! There's a non-zero chance I get my head blown off by a sniper because of Light Yagami's machinations, and then it's not going to matter if I'm straight, or I'm bisexual, or I'm straight with one exception, or somehow I've actually been a lesbian the whole time and just unbelievably bad at it. And it's not going to matter if I know how to find women sexually attractive or I only had an idea of a general aesthetic. Raye told me he had no idea what an attractive man even looked like, so, I would make a point of it to tell him how good he looked.
One of us had to keep eyes on that intersection at all times. I had more trouble walking without a crutch, so it was me. I took a table outside a little cafe, ordered some tea and an orange scone, and waited. Under an awning, where Watari couldn't see me if he was looking up and down the street. Maybe he was using a thermal scope, but then he'd have no idea it was me. I had a clear view of the apartment entry, the door to Hamburger America Hamburger, and the alley exit as long as I never looked down at my newspaper. I never did. Rem shifted in place occasionally - did gods of death get restless legs? - and at one point turned around, jamming her face through the window to look out on the street. I have no idea if she saw or recognized me. Her face was hard to read from that distance. If she did, well, not much I could do about it.
Misa was pretty. Really pretty. It was her job, and she took pride in how good she was at it. I'm not sure that was all of it, though. She had all kind of stalkers who became obsessed with the idea of her weakness and vulnerability, but, that wasn't it either. I can say when she was at her most beautiful: last night, when she promised her blood to me. And when she joined the investigation, and she proudly proclaimed that Kira needed to be prevented from making mistakes, and she would be a part of that. She wasn't dragged into that. She still believed in the world's most odious killer, at that point. But she was on the road to being better, of her own volition. She joined of her own accord to make the world make sense again. She was pretty for her job. She was a vulnerable person I felt good about protecting. But she was beautiful when she was doing what I respected, what I wished of myself, rather than languishing in despair. Misa never got too far from me on her supply run, and we left our phones connected so she could start jamming the star key to indicate distress. A frontal assault was not a good plan right now. We knew what room Isamu was in, but if we got high enough to shoot through the window, Rem would block the bullets again. He had to be threatened from two angles, or one Rem couldn't see. And there were only two of us, not a full SWAT team. On top of that, there were an unhealthy amount of men in casual suits wearing filter masks and sunglasses going in without coming out. Yakuza, even when they hide their faces they don't hide their nature. Yotsuba undoubtedly paid these guys off - everyone in the district did - and if Isamu used any connections to get here, they'd want to know what was up.
Misa's will and drive and conviction, that part of her could lead to great good or great evil. She was terrified of the evil she could do. And yet she never flopped around her parents' place for weeks wondering if it was really right to do anything. She didn't quit the investigation when it got hard and it made her doubt herself and her abilities. She didn't surrender her essence to me so she could give up. 'Here's my blood. Here's my soul. I trust you more than I trust myself, make sure I'm not evil.' Except for the last part, that was me with Raye, wasn't it? I had to trust him because I couldn't trust myself. That's probably how Light killed me: got me to trust him because I doubted myself. That doesn't make my relationship with Raye wrong, nor does it with Misa.
Misa came back with her haul. She took a seat at my table and ordered a bottled water. Showed me the goods. And she waited while I thought. It's a stakeout, really. I'd been on a stakeout all morning. She was joining me on the stakeout. That was so, so far from the most important thing to happen. The guy in there has the power to kill all but four people on the planet with a name and a face. Naomi. Naomi. Stop worrying about if you want to kiss her for the right reasons. Work that out later. The recriminating ghost of Raye that lived in my skull would even agree to that.
Misa had to have had the same thought I did. We still had the top margin of the death paper. We knew how it worked. We could write in /ISAMU EGAWA AND NABIKI EGAWA. HEART ATTACK. WALK OUTSIDE, SURRENDER, REVEAL EVERYTHING THEY DID AS KIRA, AND THEN KEEL OVER OF HEART ATTACKS./ But maybe that wouldn't work, it's not related enough to the proximate cause of death. /ISAMU EGAWA AND NABIKI EGAWA. FALLING. ACCIDENTALLY FALL OUT OF FOURTH STORY WINDOW, BREAKING THEIR NECKS./ probably would. There were three reasons I wouldn't. They could be immune. Once they knew it was a possibility, they would do everything they could to get immunity. Nabiki couldn't induce clinical death without losing the baby, but for all I know, she got her face cut off and now she looked like Nicholas Cage.
Second, it was wrong. Forcing someone to override their will was an awful violation. Forcing them to confess would be despicable, and I would deserve death no matter how evil they are. Nabiki may be willing to do anything, and that's why she has to be stopped, that's not a license to sink as low as her. She already had at least one and probably three people in there being violated. I won't add to that number. Killing them via heart attack would be fine, we'd shot at each other by now, but even making them jump out a window was over the line to me. And if they died of heart attack, they'd be lying in a building I can't assault, with death paper flopping out of their hands where yakuza can get to it. Third, it was wrong for a different reason. Misa made me promise. I would not let her become the second Kira again. The odds that death paper accepted 'telegraphed speech' were low, and I very well might time out before writing the circumstance. Misa would have to do it for me. If Misa used the death paper to commit murder, she was Kira again. She was terrified of that. It was my responsibility to not let that happen. I swore I would not let her do evil with that.
She knows she was the second Kira but doesn't remember it. When we met she would have been happy to be the second Kira, and believed it just to be circumstance that she wasn't. That was April Misa. And now, she was different. She felt sorry for me, she felt pain after tangibly experiencing the pain and lasting disability Kira inflicted on me. But it wasn't just that. I showed her kindness. I showed her respect. I was someone she could look up to who wasn't Kira. I was someone who wanted the world and her to be better. Who had control over her and didn't use it to terrorize her. Someone who would feed her my vampire blood, just so nobody else could tell her to be someone else. I don't know to say if she's changed so much, or not really at all. Is she the same person? If she is, she still wants that same person to work to better ends. I couldn't trust myself. But Misa trusted me. Misa trusted me with everything. Okay. Stakeout. Analyze the relevant factors. What do we all have here? If Kira's power is written on death paper, there can't just be a version that only requires a face, because you can't write a face (or at least not nearly as easily) and I don't think Misa is that good at photorealistic sketches. There has to be a Kirascope of some kind that just shows you the name you need to write. Isamu was in as desperate a situation as he could be in last night, with his lung collapsing and spewing blood into his torso, surrounded by police officers whose name tags he couldn't see. But he only used his paper to control the one in the same room, whose name placard he could see. He could have gotten out much easier if he controlled the patrol cops, so it's safe to assume that the Kirascope is not accessible to him. The yakuza are masked up and won't give their names, and the Egawas can't fight off anyone on their own. When I checked the entrance to the apartments, they had no names listed, probably for fear of Kiras. The name tags at Hamburger America Hamburger are phony American names. Isamu can look out onto the street, but A: if he does I will shoot him and at the very least leave him shredded by broken glass and B: he has no idea what anyone's names are. So Isamu has access to at least one cop and up to two paramedics, but his only other nearby controllable targets are people on his floor. He has to work with people right now, not command them. He also had a sucking chest wound and a full or partial lung collapse. Any movement or activity is going to be against medical advice and involve him falling to the ground and screaming in pain. If the mob doc doesn't have a wheelchair, he's in a wheeled office chair. He can't jump off the roof unless he has a helicopter and those are real conspicuous. That delivery truck is blocking the other way out of the alley, and it's going to be there for a while. His exits are limited to that elevator in the alley, the fire escape next to it, and the main stairs at the front, next to the restaurant.
He wasn't going to give away his death paper to anyone but his wife. Him and his wife split up before, but that was going to be impossible now. Organized crime was involved, and the moment Nabiki left Isamu's line of sight, she'd become a hostage to ensure his cooperation. Isamu would have to be an idiot not to know that, and if he was an idiot, we'd be able to recognize Nabiki from afar because she's the only pregnant woman flanked by two masked goons. The yakuza's loyalty wasn't, unless something incredibly unusual happened, supernaturally compelled, so they would go after their own interests. So why stake out at all instead of rushing in there? I would love to. There are probably between six and ten yakuza in there, in extremely close quarters, and I would estimate a maximum of two handguns between them. It wouldn't be safe by any means, but I'm confident that none of these guys know how to fight by anything but overwhelming numbers, we had bulletproof vests, and the stakes couldn't be higher, so it'd be worth a shot. Two problems. The first is Light. If I create a commotion, if I take out or incapacitate Isamu and Nabiki, I've made my position. Watari blows my head off and Light recaptures Misa to make her a Kirascope or something. The second is Rem. Rem likes Misa and doesn't give two shits for me. If I get close, Rem is going to try to grab me and incapacitate me for Isamu to slit my throat. I could see her now, so my best odds were somewhere that I had as much freedom of movement as possible. If I shoot, Rem stands in front of the bullets. Isamu had to be attacked from two opposite angles, and a cramped apartment building was a real bad place to do that. And we HAD to take both of them out at once.
What does he want? He wants to recuperate from his bullet injury, which requires him not moving. He wants people with known names and faces near him to do his bidding and die. Every person who walked onto the fourth floor was another resource and potential horrific violation. I needed him to walk into the street where he can be shot by surprise and have his shit taken from him before Light's people know what is going on. I needed to remove his freedom of movement and association as much as possible.
A strip of paper - say, the dimensions of a single lined section of notebook paper that had once been a caterpillar - taped to the back side of the door handles for the apartments and the restaurant would ensure every single person who opened either door and wasn't wearing gloves would touch the death paper and be able to see Rem. The longer he waited, the more people would be able to see the spectre of Death following him, the more of a problem he would have trying to rope anyone in, the more problem he would have moving without a huge commotion inhibiting him, and the less problem anyone else would have when I shot him.
The next step would require some help, but was very doable. After that, it was just a stakeout. Me and Misa. On a stakeout.
- NOBODY - Isamu comes to with a groan of pain, laying on a tiny couch in a side room, his face and chest covered in bandages. In his mouth is a tube to a modified CPAP machine serving as a ventilator. The moment he awakens, his wife is hugging him, joyous at his recovery.
"Don't squeeze..." is all he can choke out, but she realizes her error, and backs off. He grimaces and looks up at her. He can feel he's on painkillers, and they aren't enough. "Are we... Any good news?"
"We made it to the Saikaya," Nabiki says. "You got out of surgery fine, the doctor said your lung only partially collapsed, and you should make a full recovery. Rem didn't see your new face before I bandaged it. The doc also said your face should be fixable. Our daughter is doing fine. We've got the shotgun and seven more shells. The yakuza have been nice enough, and got me some new clothes. I'm in hooker boots, but my feet are warm."
Isamu nods. "Bad news?" He goes back to letting the machine breathe for him. It hurts less.
"Literally everything else," Nabiki says. "We're trapped in this shitty apartment. The gunslinger girls can't assault the building but if we walk out those doors it's going to be the beaches of Normandy. Kira has no way to contact us. The boss doesn't know why we're here and is thinking of kicking us out if he doesn't get an explanation soon. Because the boss is in the kitchen right now with like seven dudes. There's no secret tunnel exits. All of the mobsters wear masks and can beat both of us in a fight. The only pedestrian name we know is Misa Amane. Oh, and the Death Note is ruined." She holds up the scorched and drenched notebook. "You stopped it from burning up and killing us, so I am not criticizing your decision. But the pages are all fused together into a clump of goo. It's way wetter than it should be, somehow, it soaked up every drop of water in the cooler. Probably because of the deal where you can flip through an infinite number of pages. But you can't do that when you can't flip any pages. I asked Rem if there's a way to reset it, and she's not hiding the answer, she genuinely doesn't know. We're down to my emergency page, the half-done Eba forgery, and the six bagged pages we printed off."
"We're going to have to cut the block of paper out with an X-acto knife," he says with a groan. "If tearing pages out doesn't count as destroying it we should be fine. I would guess the spine is what counts. Maybe we can thread the other seven sheets back in to the spine, and they'll be enough to flip through so the notebook starts generating more. Now, help me up..." He practically whinnies in pain as he tries to stand. "OH GOD okay no no no forget that. Get... Get me a wheelchair. We have to see the boss."
She looks down at him and licks her lips. "God I love it when you take charge like that. You're gonna get us out of this, baby."
They don't have a wheelchair. They have an office chair. The main room of this lousy apartment has become the impromptu meeting chamber for the Chairman, wearing a cool-looking kabuki mask, and the two rows of men flanking him and barring the door, in their sunglasses and breather masks.
"Mister Egawa!" says the Chairman. "To what do we owe the pleasure?" Isamu Egawa has a chemical-burned face wrapped in gauze and is being pushed in a chair. He displays no weakness. He looks around the room. "I noticed your men are wearing masks. Your competitors don't have to wear masks. I'm guessing you may have a Kira-related problem, Chairman..."
"Just 'Chairman' will be fine, thank you," says the intimidating man on the couch. "But you have answered my question with another. I asked you, 'to what do we owe the pleasure?'"
The Egawas recall all too well how they had to be bailed out by their shinigami to avoid a humiliating ass-beating from a single woman. Their pet lieutenant is outside, forced away from the action. Should things go south here, the Egawas will be savagely beaten, their teeth will be yanked out from their living or dead bodies to be smashed into dust, and they will be tossed in the back of an old automobile that is set on fire and pushed off a cliff. Isamu has a tube breathe for him as the Chairman speaks. He is steady as a rock, as is his wife.
"I ask because our situations may be linked," Isamu says. "I was shot by someone the police refused to prosecute, because they informed me that her actions were not a crime. I could not go to a hospital, because she would most assuredly pursue me. I needed assistance outside formal channels, and your dealings with my company have always been completely equitable. As you have assisted me, I now seek to assist you. You had a problem that led you to wear the masks, didn't you?"
The Chairman's face is unreadable, he has a mask, but his posture suggests dawning comprehension. "Two problems, as it were. First, in April. A young man acquired a gun and believed himself to be the heart of justice. He opened fire on an innocuous oicho-kabu game and killed two of my men. The police informed us... this was not a crime, and could not be prosecuted. We were forced to dispose of him and his weapon ourselves. It caused us to conclude that the police were leaving us for Kira to clean up. It was only prudent to take preventative measures."
Isamu takes another hit of mechanized breathing. He can talk, but it hurts, not that he would slow down or admit vulnerability. "And then you had a second problem. Much more recent."
"A client at one of our health clinics," says the Chairman. "Was assassinated by a jealous wife, who blamed him for her injury, and played for him a tape of some English phone conversation. Details were sketchy and self-contradictory, as the masseuses did not remain to be debriefed. Though the client was an important government official, again the police informed us that what had happened was not a crime and would not be prosecuted or investigated. It seemed anyone we touched would be abandoned to Kira's tender mercies."
Isamu's smile is visible through his bandages, around his ventilator. "A scarred woman with black hair and grey eyes, walking with a crutch, wielding a pistol left-handed, who is almost entirely unable to speak?" He steeples his fingers in front of his face. "I regret to inform you that she is your problem, and I have led this problem back to your doorstep. I am pleased to inform you that you have not been left for Kira to slay at all. I am Kira's agent. He told me to get in contact with you. Those cryptic messages you got from someone about how the light of the new world must still cast shadows? Unfortunately, I figured I would have more time to pay that off."
Yakuza thugs who stand around someone in a full or partial ring are permitted to laugh, and laugh menacingly, and look threatening, and look impassive. Gasping in shock is not really part of the job description, but when everyone does it it's hard to single anyone out for punishment.
"This is a bold claim," the Chairman says. Nobody can see if his eyes went wide. "Why would Kira wish to contact us? And, if so, why would we believe you to be his agent?"
Isamu need only reel the man in. "Because Kira recognizes the services you provide to society and your place in it. True, the nature of your work will change in many ways. But most of your so-called 'illegal' work harms no one and provides valuable services to a population that harms none but themselves. I vouched personally for your trustworthiness to Kira: When you cut shoplifting in half and offer refunds when an incident does occur? That isn't a criminal protection racket, that's a private security firm doing a better job than the police." That takes a bit out of him, lying so hard. People like this don't get to live in the world his child will occupy. He needs the tube to breathe for him for a second. "I need your help to evade Kira's enemies. Kira and I would be most grateful for the help, and would remember the proof of your honor. As to the proof I am his agent... the only way to do that is to kill someone." He doesn't stop for a dramatic pause. He's got to keep reeling in, act like this is normal. "To have Kira kill someone I need to know their name and be looking at their face. Killing world leaders or public figures is obviously out, as that causes instability. I would prefer to kill someone that we would have immediate feedback on, that the investigator L would be unaware of, as he gains information from each killing."
Isamu doesn't say what he is thinking. He lets the Chairman think. Lets the Chairman come up with it on his own. The apartment is small, and he did not only bring the most well-vetted men with him. Someone whose name is known, whose face Isamu can see. "Koji." the chairman says. A man on the left staggers back. "Koji Nishitani. We know you've been skimming off the top. We know you've been talking to Osaka about a foothold here. Boys, take off his mask."
"What!?" Koji protests. "You can't be serious! I never did anything, and, and this guy, how do you even know he's with Kira?" He struggles in the grip of the two men flanking him, but he can't escape. He tries to avert his gaze and hide his face. He is terrified.
"I don't," says the chairman. "If he is with Kira, you die for betraying the clan. If he's not, then clearly it's some kind of sign, Kira has spared you, and all of your misdeeds are forgiven, if you change your ways. You'll even get to execute our friend here."
Koji is not calmed by this. "All right," Isamu says, writing onto a piece of plain notebook paper, folded over to hide the partial entry that took Misa hostage. "Hello, /KOJI NISHITANI/. And... goodbye, Koji Nishitani." He caps his pen with a flourish. Koji looks around, wincing. "Is... I'm alive?"
"It usually takes about a minute," Isamu says. He has to play up that Kira does this and not the paper. Kira, a mystery, not an object whose properties are known.
For thirty-five seconds there is no discussion. No sound. Every yakuza is looking at Koji. The Egawas confidently look at the chairman.
"I don't... I feel... I think I'm fi-HHHHNNNNNGGGG!" Koji exclaims, and grabs at his chest. He falls to the floor, gasping and twitching, tearing open his shirt and clawing bloody lines into his flesh. His legs pump uselessly. He stares at the masked audience for sympathy, for compassion, and finds nothing. He stares at the Egawas. They feel nothing. His eyes roll back in his head as flecks of foam accumulate at the corners of his mouth. His pulse is inert. He has stopped breathing. And his brain activity has ceased. He is dead.
Over the next few hours, his tissue will accumulate ischemic injury from the lack of oxygenation. After three minutes of no oxygen at room temperature, his brain cells will begin a process that will cause them to damage themselves if oxygenation returns. Drugs can bring that time up to 20 minutes. Longer than that, he could be theoretically revived, with brain damage. Much longer than 30 minutes, his spinal cord risks injury - he could be revived, but brain-damaged and paralyzed. The tissues of his arms and legs won't start dying until at least six hours in, but he could still be a vegetable, mindless and motionless but living. Every cell in his body won't die for probably 12 hours. The colder his body is, the more those time scales extend. Nobody is dead until they are warm and dead.
That's an awful long and uncertain time for the Death Note to peg its effect to, just to ensure someone stays dead. Koji's heart was damaged to send him into cardiac arrest, and it won't beat again, and nobody will provide him aid.
The chairman has a mask to hide the shocked look on his face. "You... appear to be telling the truth." he says. "But you are clearly not all-powerful or all-knowing. What would stop someone from... taking that paper from you and using it as you have demonstrated?"
"None of you made a pact with Kira," Isamu says with confidence. "You can try it if you want, but it won't work." Nabiki wheels him closer to the couch. "I'd recommend you wear gloves, though. Anyone who touches the paper will die if the book it came from is destroyed, which is why my wife and I must be very careful to protect it." Isamu believes this is true, but also believes that Rem would be inconvenient to explain. "Once you see it only works for me, I hope that you will agree to help us escape and hide."
"Hmm." says the chairman as he slips into a pair of fingerprint-concealing gloves and takes the offered piece. "Who should I test it on? If you are so certain only you can use it, then... you wouldn't mind if I wrote down your lovely wife's name, would you?"
They need immediate feedback. The ability is tied to seeing the face rather than remembering the face. The member of his gang he is most willing to kill is already dead. His attention brought to Nabiki. The chairman isn't hooked now, he's flopping around in the boat. "Of course, sir," she says. "Here's my driver's license so you know it's my real name."
- LIGHT -
Wonder of wonders. Ryuzaki's phone started ringing. He instantly sent it through the main display so we could all hear; the visual was a red /M/ in that Gothic font he uses. It took a minute in Photoshop, but when did he spend the minute?
"Ryuzaki!" came Misa's voice on the other end. "Thanks for picking up. Is Light listening?"
"Of course not, Misa," he said while looking right at me.
"What was the point of lying to me?" she snapped. "Your voice is echoing, like your mike is too close to a speaker. You're playing me for a whole room but I'm not on speakerphone. Don't treat me like I'm stupid!" I could envision her pouting on the other end. She could be quick about things in her area of expertise. "Look, we're calling about the Egawas. They have a bunch of gangsters with them right now so it's too dangerous to take them on, right? And if we tell you where it is or we go in there anyway then Light, WHO WE KNOW IS KIRA, is going to just have us killed while we're fighting. So we can't work together but we can't do it alone. So, like, the Internet is out around here? And everyone's credit cards are taking way more time to process? If that wasn't you guys, then you should make sure it doesn't go back up. So he can't look up people on the Internet. Sound good?"
"That was us," Ryuzaki told her. "It is in both of our interests to maintain the outage." I was already texting Wedy to tell her to find where the two were. "Right! That was what Naomi thought. It's a good idea, so you'd have it too. But, about the Egawas..." she said. "The gangsters running around all have masks on, probably because of Kira. So Isamu and Nabiki can't do anything to them. But we think they used Kira power on a cop and some paramedics to get out of the police station. Isamu does the Kira thing by writing it on special sheets of paper. So if you find his stash, then you HAVE to find when he said those people will die, and you have to make sure you can get them back."
Ryuzaki sighed ever so slightly. "Misa. That's dangerous. Reviving someone from clinical death isn't reliable, even if we know what is coming, there is a chance -"
"IT'S BETTER THAN NOTHING!" she barked. "If we leave them alone they die the normal way, and if Naomi and me grab them and lock them in an empty broom closet they just die of heart attacks. You need to use your super doctor guys if you get the information. If we find the paper ourselves I'm gonna call you up and tell you what's on it. Okay? Promise me that if I find out when and how they are supposed to die, you are gonna do something about it. Promise."
"I don't see why it's-"
"Naomi. Is. Not. Going. To. Watch. That. Happen. Again. That means I'm not either. Not without making sure we do something about it." Misa's voice was full of absolute conviction. "If I am Kira then you want this to happen and if I'm not Kira you want this to happen. It's good either way. Promise."
Ryuzaki just stared ahead for a second. "I... promise." He put his hand over the receiver, and indeed, he said "Aiber, get the medics on standby. Tell them to provide means of self-drowning and low-caliber guns, at least."
"Okay, good. So I guess we'll see you when someone decides to make an attack," she said briskly.
"Good. We will."
"Fine!"
"Fine."
"Great!"
"Great."
"Stupendous!"
"Stupendous." Finally, Misa hung up with an exasperated grunt. Not nearly enough time for Wedy to make them. But I had an idea. "Ryuzaki. Does your voice scrambler have any other settings? I want something a bit more menacing," I said as I motioned for the receiver.
"Why?"
"Because if Isamu has a cop under his control," I told him, "then he needs to think he can't rely on any help the police can provide. And to get him to realize that, he has to think it's his idea. And to think it's his idea, I need to say a lot of other threatening things to him so he doesn't know what I'm calling his attention to." Ryuzaki smiled and pitch-shifted me down a bit. Sakura TV's electronic security was terrible, and we had the phone number they were sitting on that called into the Kira show last night.
Not only were they sitting on that number, they were bringing the show back, as "Kira's Kingdom", five nights a week. This might be an appropriate level of reverence, but it was certainly too early. I'm not God yet, people.
I punched in the digits as fast as I could. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring... "Hello!" chirped a sunny voice. "You've reached the phone of Isamu Egawa. This is his wife Nabiki, may I tell him who is calling?" The woman sounded like the perfect yamato nadeshiko if ever there was one.
"Put Isamu on." Wow, this voice sounded way more demonic than I was expecting. "It's urgent."
"My husband is resting," she said with a hint of iron behind her voice. "Anything you can say to Isamu you can say to me, mister spooky scrambled voice."
"Your husband is Kira. This is not a surprise to you because you're still cooperating in his crimes," I said. "I am L. My resources are vast, my reach is infinite, and my people are going to bring you in."
"Oh? Well, that sounds impressive, mister L," she said dismissively. "But I'm standing next to a window right now and you didn't try to impress me by telling me what I was wearing or eating. So I know at least you don't know where we are at the moment. And if you don't know that, you don't know what and who we have, either." A click of a door being locked. "So why should I believe you're going to come and get us, mister L?"
"Because you already met Agent Pandora twice before and you barely escaped with your lives." I looked over to Ryuzaki, who gave a slight nod of approval. Maybe he was wishing he used edgy-sounding code names for reasons other than playing a part. It would be like him. There was a bit of chuunibyou in him. "She is a merciless hunter who isn't going to stop until you're brought in dead or alive. Your husband tried to broker a deal with the NPA to keep them from investigating Kira. Agent Pandora made sure the man on the other end of that deal never saw another sunrise. And then I ensured she walked out of jail before she saw her next one." Ooh, this L character I've created, sounds very proud of the accomplishments of his codenamed agents!
Nabiki paused. I could hear hissing in the background, air rushing in and out of a machine. "My husband didn't broker that deal. I did. And you're the one who got her out of jail. The mute lady. The one who was Misa Amane's bodyguard."
Why wouldn't she think we were on the same side? "She's not mute. She has a condition. It's known as..." God damn it, why was that so hard to remember? "...Expressive aphasia. she does not need to speak to carry out her work. And yes. I have ensured her actions will not face legal consequences. You have no idea how deep my influence with the police goes. The leadership may not actively seek Kira, but you cannot rely on all of the police being cowards. It does not take long for word to reach one of my allies that their aid is required." Oh, that line I threw in as an intimidating aside, it couldn't possibly be the entire point of my call! "You may have some unusual capabilities. But I feel compelled to point out that when you were aided by a completely unknown spectre, and the power of Kira, your husband only managed to get away after having been shot, set on fire, and rendered homeless. How well is she going to do next time she finds you?" It felt weird to be shilling her capabilities like this. There was clearly nothing special about her, the Egawas were simply incompetent.
"It's very rude to call someone merely to gloat," Nabiki said. "If you would like to extol the proficiency of your agents, I can walk away and pick up when you're done."
"I'm calling because I know you aren't the big fish," I snapped. "You received Kira's power late in the game. And it creates a record of every single kill you perform. I don't care about incriminating evidence. But if you were to surrender and hand that record over to Misa Amane, that would be the difference between life and death. Your victims deserve closure, don't they?"
"Oh, a very generous offer. I'm afraid I must decline, though. I simply don't have a gift for you to reciprocate."
"Kira may have told you you were paragons of virtues. You may realize that you're nothing but criminals," I said. If I tried to make my voice intimidating, it would probably end up indecipherable. "I don't care either way. I care about ending the threat. If you preserve the records, then you become my ally in ending this threat. If you don't, then Pandora is going to force you to your knees, order you to beg for your life, and then shoot you in the forehead."
"A lovely story, but I really must attend to my husband," she said dismissively, and hung up.
"Oh no," Ryuzaki deadpanned. "I believe that in his boastfulness, L let slip that attempts to manipulate the police would help him. What a breach of security."
"And if she takes the threat seriously and hands over the paper, well, that's a bonus," I added.
- NOBODY - Nabiki hangs up in disgust. "That was L, if you didn't figure it out," she says. "Boorish, disagreeable fellow. Said he makes it so that woman never goes to jail, and he wants our archived Death Note paper with all our kills."
"If we know he wants it," Isamu says, "we can hold it for ransom. If we get it in serviceable condition." "And it might be a bad idea to call on our friend's police contacts. Apparently he has people let him know," Nabiki says. "Whoever Kira's man on the inside is, he didn't give me any kind of message this time." She looks up at Rem. She has no reason to mention the phrase 'paragons of virtues', nor does Rem ever have reason to mention or remember the name of the warlock Remryuk's guild.
- MISA - "Hey, listen. About last night..." I finally said. We'd been here for hours. Watching the doors, watching people enter and leave. Watching a couple at a time look up and get confused about the spines or the back or the foot clipping through the wall, but figuring it's just an ad or art installation or something else not their business. It was nice to just spend time with her, but the awkwardness was building up.
"I wanted to say I was really sorry. I... I should have attacked Nabiki, and I didn't, and then you could have been hurt," I told her. "I didn't want..." That wasn't true. "I actually, I thought it would be really easy to cut her. But then I was like 'is that what the Second Kira thought too?' and I didn't know. So I hesitated."
She looked at me and she gave me a little reassuring smile. "Ah. Good." That could really mean it was positive, or that it was acceptable. So she thought a bit more and she said "Hmm... Ah, hostage."
"Right. She was a hostage." Man, was I glad nobody was at the tables next to us. It was really cold, so not many people were eating outside. I had on a coat and a bulletproof vest under it and I still wasn't warm. I think the place might be running out of hot for the hot chocolate. "So I didn't think it was good to take a hostage and hurt her. I'm not... I know there's rules for when it's okay and when it's not. And you probably know them really well. But they have, like, complexity and nuance. And you could tell me all of that! But it would take an awful lot of time. So... I'm just gonna trust you that we aren't doing anything evil. Even if it's technically, like, terrorism."
I mean. There is an obvious question there. About someone who can kill someone else and get away with it. And there are a lot of reasons I can come up with why she's better than Kira, and some of them sound really smart. Like the one about how good justice is better than revenge but revenge is way better than corrupt justice and that's all Kira is. But, I would think that wouldn't I? I'd come up with a reason no matter what. SHE came up with reasons too, I bet. So I couldn't trust anything I came up with. I sighed. There was one that I knew mattered. "Because when I'm with you, we care about not making mistakes. If bad things have to happen we still try to avoid them. So if we are evil, then, at least we affected a lot fewer people. Right?"
She smiled at me in the affirmative. And I smiled back.
More people pulled open the door to the hamburger place, and the apartments. They would know what was happening. They'd be able to see something hidden from them, and Isamu wouldn't be able to draw them in and exploit them because they'd be running. I mean they would be scared but it would be an accurate scared. But we hadn't seen any runners yet. The yakuza must have been wearing gloves for fingerprints, and nobody else went in the same apartment, and Isamu never left. "About... you know, the other thing last night," I said. "That really meant a lot to me. Even if I'm still really tired, it gave me a lot of energy. And..." I bit my lip. "When someone gets, like, shot or something. Like that cop I stabbed. That's not romantic. So don't worry about that."
She gawked at me in disbelief. She was trying to stifle a laugh.
"What? I figured it might be a concern!" I said plaintively. "I'm kind of a crazy person! I wanted you to know that, like, I'm not THAT crazy! I mean, I told Light that if he started dating other girls I'd kill them, but, like, that was self-deprecating humor. Like 'Woo, look at what a yandere I am!' I... think?"
I mean... I was pretty sure. But could I be?
Naomi could clearly tell what I was thinking too. She shook her head, but it was fast enough that I don't know if she meant to do that or nod. "Memory. Uh. And, and memory... new?" She kept her voice low. The way she talked was incredibly distinctive. Even when she wasn't talking about anything suspicious, she wanted to make sure someone couldn't hear it and think it was unusual enough to tell someone. I could tell it kind of made her sad, but the more I talked the less sad it was.
"Right. I made new fake memories when I lost my real ones," I told her. "So... I don't know if I was actually making a joke. Or if that was a fake memory, and I meant it. Or, I mean, I guess I might have never said it at all. But then if I asked about it he wouldn't know what I was talking about so that would be like a rookie fake-memory move."
"Nnggggh!" She was frustrated. I didn't freak out, and in the past I would, but I knew I couldn't avoid that. I just stopped talking and waited for her to clarify. She pulled out the card I made for her and held up /HOW: I am asking a question about something's method or origin!/ and said "New?"
"How are the new memories made? I think they got taken away by magic," I said. "But... if it's like amnesia, like all the stuff you had said it was... I would fill in the holes with what was around me?" She was looking at me expectantly. Like I was close, not there. "And... Okay? I would... fit things in, based on what made sense to me? What I thought I would do, right?" She looked like I was getting it. "So... I filled it in based on what I would do... Oh! You mean that, if it's a fake memory, then I must be a person who would say it as a joke. So if the Second Kira would have been serious, I'm not the same person." She nodded slow. That was good to know! Another thing she figured out for me.
Nobody was running from the hamburger place, by the way, or reacting to it, and nobody suspicious had left. I looked at her a lot, but I was still keeping my eyes on our target.
"I mean... in any case he didn't really react. Like it was a joke or not one." I scrunched up my face. "He didn't do much, really. Maybe I forgot about it, but... he didn't do much with me anyway even after I lost my memories, didn't he?" I asked. "Like, you saw me kiss him. I was doing ALL the work. And you know from experience what a lousy kisser I am, but he couldn't even come up to my level!"
Her shoulders were shaking. She was trying not to giggle again.
"I'm a bad kisser! I admit it!" I told her. "I just know stage kisses, which come in two flavors. 'Peck'..." I held up my hands like sock puppets, and touched the fingertips together. "And 'Eat each other's faces'." My hand puppets did just that, kind of chewing where my thumbs met my hands, intersecting at an angle. "And still, Light couldn't match it. Maybe being possessed made him lame. Can you imagine if I told him I thought blood was romantic? He'd probably say something like 'Huh, that's interesting.' I think I only ever said one thing that actually got a reaction from him... and it must have been Second Kira stuff because I can't even recall what it was."
This was not an appropriate subject to talk about! Dishing about an ex-boyfriend who was never really your boyfriend because he was possessed by the ghost of murder and now he's sending people to capture or kill you and you still need to un-possess him to save him BUT not before you figure out where he hid everything, that was just not an appropriate thing to discuss on a stakeout. But she was trying to suppress a smile. And so I kept going. "I mean, like, ALL my memories of him before I talked to him through you, they're all fake, right?" I told her. "They're fake and super generic and don't have any details at all because they're made up. And I never noticed because that is just exactly what he's like all the time. He is a saltine person with no salt. We're, we're gonna un-possess him, and we're going to save him just like the cop and the paramedics. But then we're gonna make fun of him. Like, a lot."
She was giggling and clearly thought she shouldn't be, so it was time to keep going more! "If I, if I asked him to be a vampire for me, he'd like put on a cape and then go study like normal. If I showed up at his house in a French maid outfit, he would tell me the basement needed cleaning!" Tee hee. "And, hey, you know..." I leaned in conspiratorially, "If you, uh, you want to keep on trying out confusing things, after I told you my whole blood vampire make me a ghoul thing..." I held up both hands with my fingers crossed. "Reeeally hoping you're into, like, costumes and roleplaying. I feel like I would be really good at that!"
Air was escaping her pursed lips and her shoulders were shaking. I had to keep looking away from her to check on our target, so she could keep laughing. "Because I get to keep my outfits! If you want, I can be a sexy French maid..." I wasn't being seductive, well, unless she was into it. I was grinning. "Wait! If you like costumes, that probably means you want to be the maid. You can be the sexy maid, and I can be the aloof heiress who thought she was above such petty concerns as love until she first laid eyes on the mysterious new hire. I thought I was in charge, but I was about to learn a lesson... in loooove. Also the maid is a vampire. Maybe you're sneaking in as a maid to do vampire things? You needed the keys to the maid quarters to suck their blood. This is getting complicated. I guess that's why figuring out your sexuality is so hard, the plot gets difficult to follow." I actually wasn't having any problems with that. I guess that's the benefit of being a crazy person. Naomi was beautiful, and I loved her, and therefore, I liked girls. I wasn't sure how to do that very well, or if I was appreciating the right parts of the female form in the right way, but being silly about it was working so far. I figured later on, when there wasn't a blizzard of death paper, I could sit down and get out a chart and figure out what kind of thing I was. Given I was with a beautiful woman I loved, it didn't seem all that important, you know?
But I know for her it was probably hard. She was not a crazy person and already had more of, like, an idea who she was. And maybe it would be easier to deal with like weird identity problems if it didn't seem so important and looming, like if someone poked fun at it in a friendly way. She was still giggling, so I think it was working. "It's simpler if we're both maids. Maybe you sneak in as a vampire maid? And then I'm the head maid, and I go to confront you. Because you, you keep sucking all the maids' blood, and then they call in sick with anemia, and nobody's getting any work done around here!" I grinned. "Naomi, we may have sexy outfits, but we have a job to do too!" What I was saying was funny but not THAT funny, and it was making her laugh all the same. If she felt like me, she... was completely exhausted and was freezing cold and had a splitting headache thrumming under the blanket the painkillers threw over it and that kind of made things funnier. "You could have been a naughty nurse, you know! Then it would be your job. I bet like 3 percent of nurses are vampires anyway, because, like that's just free food, right? And if you were a nurse, I would not have to reveal I only know of two sexy costumes." I smiled with my tongue out. "I'd have to make something up if you were into something else."
She couldn't say anything because of her quiet giggling, and not the usual reason. It took her a second. "Ah... Secretary?"
"Oh, come on, that's easy," I said. "Any vampire needs a secretary to help manage all their night hordes. And you're from like the 14th century so you need someone to show you what phones and E-mail are, and in turn, you show me... about looooooooove." I made an exaggerated kissy face, and then I checked our mark again - still nothing. "Come on, give me a difficult one."
She made a theatrical thinky pose. "Hmm. Uhhh... Ah, and, and, uh..." She couldn't find the word. She put her hand over her mouth and made mechanical breathing noises. "Water?"
Water, breathing thing - "Sexy diver? I can do that." Water... Yeah, isn't there depths of the sea that no light gets to anyway? Where the fish are all super ugly because they know nobody sees them. "Aqua-archaeologist Misa found an ancient Ankaran sarcophagus at the bottom of the sea, where no sunlight penetrates. She should report her findings to the academy, but she keeps going down for wetsuited trysts with its mysterious and beautiful occupant, who is showing her an entirely new discovery... Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuve." Then I grabbed her notepaper, the regular kind that didn't kill people. "I'm writing that down. If that was already made into a movie, I'll eat my frostbitten foot."
She didn't look like she was bringing up the name of a movie. Ha! Eat it, Hollywood! Instead, she mimed turning a wheel back and forth. "Drive?"
"A taxi driver? No? A truck driver. Also no." I said. She made kind of a vroom noise. "Oh, a race car driver? Like with the jumpsuit that has all the endorsements on it. Okay. I can do that, but I need a supplemental costume. Because Race Queen Misa thought her job was to look pretty next to the pit crew, and the part where she kept the sun off the driver's face was just a formality!" Naomi was already cracking up. "Little did she know! How important her branded umbrella would be to the mysterious new driver on the crew! And that no matter how powerful the engine, she can't! Outrun! The speed! Of luuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrve!" I had the giggles now, too. "I should stop this. Now I'm just writing romance novels. And if I write them I don't get to read them and I would read all of these," I said with a smile.
She smiled back. Pointed to herself. "Ah. Same." I could tell that look of consideration on her face, she was probably asking 'when was the last time I read a trashy romance?' Other than the part where I felt awful, I felt great! Better than I had in a while. Naomi had a severe communication disability and she was bantering along with me better than Light ever did. Even for only one person, I was an entertainer! I felt really good about entertaining someone for the first time since-
Since my parents were murdered. since Light killed the man who did it. "Uh... Anyway. I still don't see anyone reacting. They might know they need to hole up," I told her. "Should I go ahead with plan B?"
She thought about it. Checked the time. And gave me the go-ahead. Plan B was technically terrorism, but only technically. Really the only losses were money and L had a giant pile of money to pay everyone back when it was all over. I excused myself into the little girl's room. I locked the door. I turned on the voice scrambler on the phone. And I called up the restaurant: "Disgusting, criminal American culture has no place in Kira's perfect new world. I've planted a bomb in the building, and in one hour, it will be wiped clean from the earth."
Isamu's hiding place was going to be empty.
- NAOMI -
What was taking so long? The customers left the building, and stood in a loose gaggle outside, those who didn't wander off somewhere else. After an initial surge, people trickled out of the apartment building one or two at a time, and only from the main street-side exits. Nobody was flipping their shit and making the problem twenty times worse, which is a huge advantage of operating in Japan over America. Similar crowds formed up and down the street at every other location Misa called. There were hushed whispers about what might be happening and what it meant. But nobody looked like they were going to do anything destructive. Even when a bunch of us saw Rem's entire leg poking out of the wall for a second as she stepped out of someone's way. Except for Rem, the same happened at three other places up and down the street.
If Isamu came out with the rest, that was great. Everyone freaks out and runs from him, he can't hide in a crowd, he's got a bitch of a time quietly doing anything. If Watari wants to drop him, he can do so; if not, I can shoot him, I can grab him, I can take him somewhere out of the line of fire. He didn't. Okay. That's fine. Now our plan splits into two. Denoted by a time line on the notes splitting into a "V". The cops show up, tell everyone to remain calm, and wait for the bomb squad. If the bomb squad hits here first, they're on Kira's team, they know where the real action is, we ambush them in the stairwell, now we can walk up to Isamu's door while he expects a friend. If they don't, if they go the place Misa called first, then eventually a team of three-plus men with masks WILL come here to sweep the building, Misa tags as many as she can with the bracelet from the crowd, and then Isamu gets a problem he has absolutely no way of dealing with. And Misa tries to shoot off a lock in somewhere she threatened, so the multiple felonies she committed were related to the gun. It took an hour and a half to convey this contingency plan to Misa before we started talking about costumes, using multiple crude diagrams that I had to burn with a lighter, but she got it. Here's the problem: Where was the bomb squad? Nobody had gone in. It was more than thirty minutes. Everyone was still waiting patiently. This isn't normal - one of these buildings should be being swept by now. And nothing. That wasn't the worst, though. The worst was this:
The power to the entire southern half of Isezakicho, including Hamburger America Hamburger, went out two minutes ago. Rem was nowhere to be seen. We had to go in, he was up to something. I looked at Misa. I pulled out my fake badge, and the briefing photos of the Egawas we still had. She nodded. "All right. Let's do this. I have any problems, I'll just try and guess what you would do." She swept her hand down over her face and I did the same. In character. "Let's go."
Cross the street nonchalantly. Don't draw a sniper's attention. Look like we're interested in this big crowd here. Don't shout. Don't get attention on ourselves from anyone outside this little crowd of people. Misa and I flashed our fake badges to the small group, and unzipped our coats partially - people who wear bulletproof vests and eat at cafes for hours must be cops. "Excuse us," she said in a slightly gruffer voice, a lower register. "Aiko Marukabiianu, JOCD. Has anyone in this building seen these two people?" I held up the profile pics for the crowd. Not too high. Not high enough Watari could see. I didn't know how trigger happy he might be. "Isamu and Nabiki Egawa. Nabiki is pregnant, Isamu was seriously injured. We think they might have holed up in here, and all this stuff happening is mighty suspicious."
A short man with a flat face squinted at me. I just looked businesslike. Someone who chose not to speak, not someone who was incapable. "I... I saw the woman," he said. "Yeah. Not before today, but I saw her on the fourth floor. Said something about, not enough time to burn everything, or, burning something for time? I'm not sure. It wasn't very long ago."
Misa and I looked at each other. Shit. Shiiiiit. She was destroying the evidence, which included the record of when we had to kill those people she violated in a way that could get them back. If anything was left, then there was no time to waste. No time to screw around. She approached the patrolman standing by the door and flashed her badge, but hopefully still not in a way that made a scene. "Officer?" she said. "There's no bomb in that building. There's just Isamu and Nabiki Egawa, destroying evidence of their crimes. We're going in. If you want to wait for a warrant that's fine by us."
Misa Amane was a national celebrity. Everyone knew her face, even if they recognized it with different hair. And everyone was thinking of her because she was a huge news item. People who had just evacuated their homes for a bomb threat were talking about the insane thing that just happened with Misa Amane. Her entire career was built on people recognizing her in different contexts. And maybe it was total confidence. Maybe it was her absolute trust in me. Maybe she was just a berserker. But there wasn't a single hint of doubt or fear or desire to hide in her demeanor. She wasn't trying to look less like Misa. She was someone who obviously resembled that actress, but just as obviously wasn't, and you'd be foolish to think she was. Hugh Jackman placed fifth in the Hugh Jackman lookalike contest. The Kuleshov effect was an actress's best friend. "Uh. Go ahead, ma'am," said the patrol officer who clearly wasn't ready for a jurisdictional pissing match. Of course she shook his hand, as a show of professional courtesy. We were in. We walked one step inside from the door. We dropped our coats, and we pulled out our guns. Misa's fired blanks, but nobody else knew that. Misa stuck behind me, just like I told her. Her job was to watch my back. Our back. Keep all my blood safe inside her by sticking with me, giving me information, and providing fake cover fire if necessary, forcing hostiles to hide.
The first floor was tiny, with only the passenger elevators and the mailboxes to accompany the stairwell. With the power out, the elevators wouldn't move. This stairwell was the only way up or down. We went as fast as we could to still be called "careful". Nobody on the floor 2 landing. Wrap a tie on the handle to get in and out of the floor to keep it that way, in case they were hiding and planned to sneak past us. Nobody on the floor 3 landing. Wrap a cable tie to keep that way. Nobody on the floor 4 landing...
Wait. This is labeled as the fifth floor. Four is death, after all. Like an American skyscraper skipping from floor 12 to floor 14. But our informant said the fourth floor... which meant our informant didn't live in this building. I motioned Misa to stop. Carefully, I hugged the wall, I reached out to the door handle that gave access to the 'fifth' floor. I jiggled it a bit... The door exploded outward, kicked by an off-white pair of slacks, belonging to a man who charged forward expecting to grab a woman he'd just stunned. He was surprised for a very short time when I kicked him in the back of the knee to send him kneeling. Then I smashed his face into the banister and broke his nose without even looking at him. I was looking at the friend standing behind him. The one who dropped the tire iron and held up his hands. The one who had my laser sight dancing on his chest.
"Oh, hey, ha ha!" he laughed. "You... dealt with that pretty easy, huh? And you have a gun! We must look awfully foolish right now, huh?" "Uh. Uh..." God damn it, the simple command you barked at someone who you had a gun to the head of! The, the, everyone knows it, "Talk." Beneath me, Misa zip-tied the first ambusher's wrists to the banister. At least he knew better than to try anything.
"Talk? Sure I'll talk, darling!" he said with what I can only call panicked charm. "I'll come over there and get tied up, too. Please don't break my face. My face has an unbroken record going." I wordlessly scowled as he advanced. "Okay! Okay! She told us that two armed women were coming up to the fourth floor. We were supposed to stop you. She said we weren't supposed to kill the shorter one, but we could break up to two limbs." That meant Rem could hear her, and these guys could not see Rem. "I don't know what else they had planned. Uh, keep you out of room 508, there's some information there? I didn't see it. It was just us two, and they left before us and told us to get ready when the power cut." He put his arms out hopefully onto the banister. I motioned for him to put them behind his back, and Misa bound him. Very cooperative when he saw his buddy get his shit ruined in half a second and he had a gun on him. Must have been a new guy.
"Don't scream. Don't alert anyone," Misa cautioned. "If there is anyone else in there we're going to hurt you very, very badly."
He clearly tried to mime zipping his lips shut, but his arms were bound. The guy on the floor didn't want any more either. And I hadn't alerted any remaining people with a gunshot. Misa and I stopped just outside of sight range in the fourth-floor hallway, waiting a moment to see if our friend would alert anyone down the hall. Not a peep. We crept down the hallway, guns drawn. The lights flickered back on, here and on the rest of the street. 508 was about where Rem's spare body parts poked out, and the two yakuza had locked it on their way out. Hinges on the wrong side this time, but flimsy. I raised my leg as high as it would go, holding Misa for balance, and axe-kicked the handle right off the cheap particle board door. I pulled us out of the line of fire, but there was none coming. The apartment was empty.
Then I had an awful realization. Why cut the power? There was nothing I did that required electricity, and nothing I saw that needed it to be off. They cut the power to pull me in. They cut the power... Nobody could get in or out of the elevator while the power was off. THAT'S where they hid. It ensured I would skip them over. My eyes went wide. I looked down the hallway, to the window. The fire escape. Misa saw me. She looked back into the room. The death paper might be in there. She couldn't let those people stay dead. "Go!" she shouted, brandishing her gun. "I'll defend myself if anyone shows up, and I'll find the evidence!"
It was time to trust her.
As I ran down the hallway, I smacked myself on the knee repeatedly, trying to nail the little metal filament in the ice pack I'd preemptively wrapped around myself. My bad knee was about to become a problem. I still didn't have a hearing aid, but this one I could at least do something about. The fire alarm exploded into shrieks when I kicked the door to the fire escape open. Sure enough, they had used the cargo elevator in the alley. There they were. Staggering Isamu, propped up by his wife. I couldn't see his face, it was wrapped in bandages, but he had Rem and a ventilator for his bullet-collapsed lung. There was their slave the cop. Another new friend in a casual suit. A briefcase, a bag. And Rem, looming behind them all. I don't know how the hell Isamu thought they were going to blend in but it wasn't going to work. He was already getting gasps before even emerging from the alley. Then came the gasps from me setting off the fire alarm. I drew on him as fast as I could, but Rem was standing in the way again. The yakuza looked around in confusion, and I think Nabiki slapped him with... a notebook, that didn't have any pages in it.
BLAM!
The yakuza dove for cover to my right, if I hit him all I did was wing him. Nabiki shouted at him that he was supposed to hide behind the monster, as if he could have guessed that. The officer drew his revolver. I couldn't shoot him. And I'm left-handed, so I couldn't shoot him from around the corner anyway. I ducked back into the doorway as he fired... and kept firing. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! His police revolver held five rounds, he was keeping me from poking my head out. Suppression. Misa looked to me, but I waved her back. We needed that information, and I had a feeling that they would leave some behind - if the trap failed, then we might spend enough time looking at it to let them escape. And my suspicions were confirmed about the cop. Just like I thought, he instructed all of his men to capture people alive for resisting Kira. He fired at me with no chance of killing me. The paper was making him act this way, the paper needed a name and face to kill, and therefore the paper could not cause the death of someone else who hadn't been written in.
But his suppressive fire had bought him some time. "Fuck it! Throw me the gun if you're going to hide! I'll take her apart myself!" They still had the hunting shotgun. Rem had said she'd kill me, she'd find a way. She wasn't acting on the orders of death paper. The fire escape was made of metal, that gun was loaded with birdshot that failed to pierce Misa's vest at much closer range. I took a chance. I jumped out onto the landing, in the back, with my head shielded by the dangling stair to the next floor. Sure enough,
BLAM!
God DAMN it that smarts! I was going to have welts tomorrow, and it stung like a mother, but I was fine. I didn't have a lot of time to be in pain right now. I had no time to climb down all the flights of metal stairs, but monkey-barring down the back side was quicker and put a lot of metalwork in between me and her. BLAM! She fired again, but I didn't even feel it. Totally obscured by the fire escape. I dropped to the ground from the second floor and went flat against a vending machine. The wall was on my left when I was facing her. God, everything here would be perfect if I was right-handed. My knee was already aching.
"God damn it! Fuck! give, me, give me the shells!" Nabiki ordered, snapping her fingers.
"Drop the weapon! Now!" the patrol officers commanded. The commotion around the corner had turned into screaming and panic. One of them had a much shakier voice than the other two, and he said "You, you... You need to stand down, whatever you are!" Rem wasn't doing that. She was staring at me, crouching to provide cover for the Egawas. "No, you don't understand!" the lieutenant said. "This woman is in witness protection! She NEEDS to be taken to a safe place, NOW!" But I didn't hear the snap of a break-action being broken open. Nobody was handing her ammo.
I threw a can out of my hiding place, no reaction. Quickly jammed my hand out, no reaction. Neither of our armed humans had reloaded, and the three cops with guns drawn on them were a bigger problem. I had to charge up a word, get it to be the one sound held in my working verbal memory. I had to be a capable law enforcer, not someone obviously disabled. Had to win the crowd, whoever hadn't yet fled. I muttered to myself that word, the word when if someone moves you will kill them, that you say fluently and with confidence. "Uh, hmm... Ah, and... freeze? Freeze."
"FREEZE!" I shouted as I rounded the corner, both hands on my weapon. I was on the side of the cops. They had to know that. "Don't!" the officer said back. I still didn't know that poor man's name. "This woman is a wanted criminal! She's an assassin and she's here to murder an innocent, pregnant woman!"
"THERE IS A SKELETON GHOST NEXT TO YOU!" shouted the patrolman to complete the trifecta. That skeleton ghost was looking right at me. "You should run," she intoned. "You can't beat him." If I wasn't a brain-damaged cripple maybe I could figure out exactly what she was talking about. We could negotiate a solution. But subtle and quick negotiation was beyond me. And she was standing in between me and two murderous rapists on the lam. I had made a couple observations from my tussle with Rem, before I could see her. Rem was a supernatural creature of otherworldly strength and totally invincible constitution. She also had never ever fought anyone before she fought me. I advanced. Gun held straight. How do I reinforce that I am a law enforcement officer and get the observers on my side? How do I look like I don't have brain damage? Words all flee from my brain and syntax is impossible. But phrases that aphasics memorized completely by rote, with no variation, count as a single word in your brain's filing system. And the archetypal example of such a phrase was important for my job. A phrase I said into a mirror sometimes, to remind myself to know what it was like to put words one after the other.
"You're under arrest!" I barked in English. "You have the right to remain silent! If you choose to waive this right, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law! You have the right to an attorney!" even though in Japan they did not, "If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you!" If I paused at any point, I would have fallen apart into stammers. But I didn't. All one word.
Even if they couldn't speak English they recognized the cadence. Of course, he must be an international criminal! I wasn't looking at the Egawas, I couldn't see them. I was looking at the captive lieutenant. Still didn't know his name. And the patrolmen, one with his gun on Rem, the others not sure what was going on. I kept slowly walking forward. My name is Naomi God Damn Misora, the Misora Massacre, the greatest law enforcement agent the FBI had seen since J. Edgar Hoover first put on women's garters, and everyone else needs to help or get out of my way. "Sir..." said the patrolman in a shaky voice. "Sir, I think you need to stand down. Both of you. I don't know if she's a cop or an assassin. I know she's not the one with the SKELETON GHOST." The officer put his gun down carefully. If he kept fighting he'd put his masters in danger, make a shootout. Nabiki dropped her weapon with a clatter. Now my only problem was that if I blew Isamu's head off, I'd be shot before anyone could check that I had a serial number that meant I got to do whatever. I needed a scene first. I clicked on my safety. And I started bouncing from one leg to the other. Always keep moving.
"I don't want to do this," Rem said. "But I can't let you interfere. I can't let you put her in danger."
Rem had a real funny god damn idea of what would keep Misa safe. Anyone else could have got it out from her. I just needed to get an unobstructed line of sight that didn't have her in it. My arms went up at my side with each bounce left and right. "I can't kill you. But they will." she said. She couldn't kill me, she didn't know how to fight, and I could see her. It was time to go. The second I got into her armspan, Rem swung a spine-arm at me while most of the crowd watched in horror and the rest watched in confusion. I easily lunged underneath it, diving into range. I swept my heel into her 'ankles' to bring her off her feet. Her impossible body wasn't exactly stable, her right leg crumpled immediately, and her left leg - my leg slid through it with what I can only describe as a visual 'bzzt' and an awful grave-chill sensation. She went intangible to avoid tripping - and was no longer blocking fire. One fluid motion, flick off the safety, take the momentum to roll into a crouching position, and shoot right into her. Right through her ghostly body. I only had a vague guess as to where the Egawas were, so I kept it low.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! The third bullet impacted Rem's bony chest, about the time Nabiki started screaming "YOU SHOT ME YOU CRAZY BITCH I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU SHOT ME! REM! Why can't you deal with her! Where is the CAR! Why are NONE OF YOU HELPING!" They weren't helping because I was fighting a monster and you were commanding it. Rem was solid again, She tried to grab me, or maybe just my gun, but when I could see her coming she was painfully slow and uncoordinated. She got a handful of asphalt as I rolled to the side. I grabbed her arm and I yanked myself to my feet - had to make sure the people who didn't see the monster were seeing something that was clearly physically impossible. My feet shot up to Rem's snake-eyed face and planted on it, then I kicked off in a backwards somersault. Showy. But everyone would know what was going on. And maybe I got road mud in her eye. There was more screaming from up the street. All three patrolmen were holding out their guns, ordering the Egawas to keep their hands up, even as Nabiki was shrieking about her leg. The officer was edging closer. No sign of their yakuza escort. I landed out of the backflip and pain shot up my right leg. Christ. I was really counting on some more performance from that joint, but any ice pack that let me bend my knee wasn't a very powerful ice pack. I staggered to the side, I winced, and Rem grabbed me by the shoulder. I twisted underneath, I bent her arm back, but I needed leverage - I wasn't going to win a direct struggle. But I had time. I had an audience seeing me levitate and both Egawas were injured. Rem started to lift me up so I couldn't kick off of anything. Held me out too far to land a foot on her face. I struggled. And I got a clear view of what the screaming up the street was about. I was such an idiot. Such a God damn idiot. I thought I was denying him assets, denying him people he could kill and control. By making sure everyone who walked in without gloves could see Rem, and they'd run. I forgot. I forgot he already had six names and faces, five of which were attached to people who he knew the routines and general locations of. The mob didn't cut the power. Someone killed themselves by electrocution and knocked out the power.
Roaring down the street were two cars. One red RX-7 and one blue Land Cruiser. Both of them skidded to a stop right in front of the building. And the SUV's driver's door opened up and out came a round-faced woman. Mayo Juba. Materials R&D. Foaming at the mouth, skin turning blue, eyes awfully bloodshot, she could barely get clear of the vehicle before she started vomiting very chunky blood. Behind her vehicle Hiraga Shohei, International Shipping, was doing the same thing. Horrifically poisoned to make sure there wasn't any revival. The Egawas were going to clear out the Yotsuba Prosperity Council before any of them could provide evidence. They doubled up on cars... because they wanted to make sure at least one of their escape vehicles made its timetable and the target didn't just have an impossibility heart attack. They killed one of those people for a safety margin.
"All right! Fine!" Nabiki shouted. "Here's how it's going to be! Any of you try and stop us from escaping, and our pet demon is going to be forced to rip this lady cop in half!" She took an assisted step toward her still-running escape vehicle, gasping in pain, and Rem was dragged toward him and I was dragged with her. "I don't want that to happen! None of you want that to happen, do you?"
She was counting on me being unable to vocalize how Rem couldn't kill me. So, it was time to see how much of the crowd I'd won with my performance. "Ah. Ah." I took a deep breath. I must not speak Japanese very well. No time to think about how that works. I have to find the word to talk to the Japanese crowd. "SHOOT!"
One. Two. Three patrolmen brought their weapons back up. At the Egawas. "Ma'am, I have no idea what in God's name you're doing", said the far one - one who just saw me hovering. "But any of the three of you take another step and I will be forced to fire." He thumbed back the hammer on his revolver. "Lie down on the ground with your hands behind your heads, all of you." The Japanese-American monster hunting cop won out over the native warlocks. Finally.
Rem had to drop me. She had to. She chucked me into the horrified crowd like a concert T-shirt and I bowled an elderly couple over, we hit the ground in a heap. Nabiki screamed, "Get in! Get in!", and chucked her purse and the notebook cover into the car, heedless of the blood oozing down her thigh. And Rem needed both of her hands - three cops with guns, two of them couldn't see her moving to yank the revolvers from their hands and rip out the cylinders. The third started to shoot her, but it was no use. The captive officer, whose name I still didn't know, threw Isamu into the backseat, then Nabiki, both of them howling in pain. I struggled to my feet, unable to draw a line of fire on them through the crowd. I heard something crash, Isamu chucking something at the RX-7 to render it unusable. Officer jumped into the driver's seat, over the poisoned human corpse. And he stomped the accelerator.
I was not going to let him get away. I could really use Misa to cover angles but that would take minutes I did not have. The moment I found my feet, I stormed forward. Not to the sports car with the brick through the windshield. To the police motorcycle that brought our patrolman here. I snapped and then held out my hand, and they understood that language perfectly well. With no objection, one of them threw me a set of keys. Thank God, finally the police had done something useful. The bike started right away, and I was ready to give chase. Two other patrolmen were getting their car, and calling everyone else stationed up and down the street. I hoped this would wrap by the time they figured out which side of the Kira Equation we were on.
They had a head start, but not as much speed. Running through a full crowd of people was a bad idea in addition to being mass murder because the car would be damaged, but our lieutenant was slowing down, hammering the horn, letting everyone flee is path. Rem might have been batting people out of the way. Neither of them can kill another human being.
Maybe being controlled by the paper renders him literally incapable of causing death. Maybe they told him that he couldn't allow himself to, because that would break the rules of the paper and give him a default heart attack. They really didn't care about human life at all. He was just an object grabbed because he was in arm's reach. And he only made it about 500m, not even to the exit of Isezakicho, when there was a cloud-splitting BOOOM!
and a news helicopter hovering steady in the distance was suddenly jerked backwards. The SUV immediately lost control, probably because a half-inch slug just drilled a hole through a bunch of vital engine components. Watari was on the scene. The SUV skidded and collided with a light pole, and I gunned the engine to close the gap and get in an alley before he righted that whirlybird in time to line up a shot on my head. L's people were here. This entire scene was about to become a catastrophe.
The SUV came to a stop in front of an arcade, empty of people and full of noisy, blaring machines. Rem put out her arm for Isamu to grab as he crawled out of the car, but she wasn't actually helping him move, and he collapsed to the ground, back against the car, the moment he had to support his own weight. Rem looked up to the sky, and then to me. She stepped toward me, hunching her head.
I bopped from my left to my right. I was ready for Round Two. I didn't have to impress anyone this time. BLAM!
I shot out the passenger window above him, showering broken glass on him. Rem looked back in shock and came at me. But not too far. Not past her maximum range, the range she got dragged to when he moved away. I grabbed the miniature pole used to make a fabric barrier around the DDR machine, and I swung it at Rem's head. She caught it, of course, and I twirled my momentum away from it and took a couple pot shots at Isamu's slumped form. He was NOT walking away from this. BLAM! BLAM!
I danced back out of Rem's reach. She threw the pole at me, I easily rolled out of the way. What else could I use to force her to go intangible?
I heard gasping. Isamu. Crawling on all fours. Getting closer to me so Rem could grab me. Pulling a sheet from his pocket. Shouting. "Rem! Rem! I wanna take the deal! There, there has to be someone around here-"
I heard screaming. Nabiki. Distant, being dragged away. "No! Let me go! That's my HUSBAND! He NEEDS ME! You're, god damn it, you're supposed to do what I SAY! I don't CARE If I got shot! DO WHAT I SAY AND GO BACK AND SAVE HIM!" Shrieking. Sobbing. Rem closed her eyes and shuddered. She turned her back to me, to face him. I got ready to bait her left and roll right and hopefully take off Isamu's head. And then BOOOM!
The car and the front of the store was drenched in blood and chunks of gore. Rem looked around in terror for a second, and then she was YANKED through a hole in nothing the size of my wrist, pulled rapidly and violently away, back in the direction we came from. I could see Isamu's body now, his head completely erased. Watari had decapitated him when he crawled just a bit closer. I needed to hide. I needed to get Misa and hide and we needed to get the Hell out of here. Where did Rem go? Is she still here? Is she invisible again? How much concrete can a .50 BMG round penetrate? I looked around frantically for some exit that wouldn't leave me exposed. I lost focus. I panicked. Just for long enough.
For long enough for our missing friend in the casual suit to swing a broken chunk of handrail at my bad knee and stab me in the side as I fell.
- RULES -
55b. In the occasion where the cause of death is possible but the situation is not, only the cause of death will take effect for that victim. If both the cause and the situation are impossible, that victim will die of heart attack.
ADDENDUM: The heart attack occurs 6 minutes and 40 seconds from the time of writing the name, regardless of the time written, if both cause and situation are impossible.
X-7a. If for some reason a human whose name was written in the Death Note reaches the time of death without dying at all - such as if they were revived before 117 seconds elapse, or if rare and completely unforeseeable circumstances result in accidentally avoiding death at the exact moment of demise - the Death Note attempts to repeat the cause of death 139 seconds later. It will do this up to three times.
x-7b. If the circumstances of death are made impossible due to secondary events that occur as a result of that same Death Note entry - a person who is made to act irregular for a prolonged period and then kill themselves will be restrained for their safety, for example - then as much of the circumstances as possible will occur. At the appointed time, the victim will die of a heart attack. X-7c. The power of the Death Note is limited by the speed of light. If a human's death is written in a valid entry, but the time of that human's death has passed by the time light can travel from the user to the victim, then the victim's death will not occur. This will happen if no details are written about a human who is 41 light-seconds away.
X-7d. For this reason, gods of death should not travel further from Earth than the L2 Earth-Moon LaGrange point.
