"Papa, can you have a look at this?" She points out a small bump on the back of her neck, on the left-hand side close to the shoulder-blade. "I think it's a twisted muscle or something. Kinda hurts."
He takes a look at it, feeling the shape of it carefully. "Does it hurt when I press it?"
"Ow!"
"I'll take that as a yes." He frowns. "How long has this been here?"
"Mm… I don't know, a couple of weeks?" She shrugs. "I think I musta sprained something in volleyball practice or something. It isn't swollen or anything…"
He grimaces and runs his fingers over it again. "Well, if it doesn't go down in a couple of days, we should take you to a doctor."
"You're both doctors," she pouts, folding her arms.
"A medical doctor," he clarifies. "One who can treat actual human beings."
She rolls her eyes. "It's fine, Pops, it's not like an infection or anything. What's the worst that can happen?"
"I'm just being cautious, sweetheart."
Kakyoin swallows. He knows what the words mean as well as Jotaro does – better. Luckily, it doesn't seem that either Speedwagon or Stroheim have been paying much attention to their Heptapod lessons; there's no gasp of horror or shouts of rage.
(Well, he's not gonna be the one to translate it for them.)
Kakyoin clears his throat. "Buki?" he asks, with a timorous voice. Slowly, he begins to enter the kanji into the computer.
Green interrupts him with a comment.
Weapon is write. Pods give write.
"What do you mean?" asks Kakyoin, deleting his previous question and starting to input a new phrase. "What about the –"
Star darts forward – if Jotaro were to try to assign emotion to any creature whose emotions are on a completely different plane to his own, he'd call the way Star moves 'impatient'. A blue and white-speckled tentacle opens:
Bad thing. Look.
Kakyoin looks around.
"Where is the bad thing? What's going to happen?"
Green die. Pods give write.
"What?" Kakyoin points at Green. "You're not going to – to die? Why? How?"
Weapon is write. Read.
And then:
help head blue future eight who use yes outside not number write hour star walk stop thousand run human green up give read day take ball touch die left box Noriaki we correct two ear tomorrow orange here spaceship hundred under night need bad alive why pod no hand seven Jotaro inside time you start where right red question weapon five and thing Earth answer good weapon yesterday down twelve minute circle fight black how foot past but now look seven seconds –
and more and more and more, hundreds upon thousands of words he doesn't recognise, sentences with completely unrecognisable shapes, as Star and Green jet away into the white abyss (like octopodes, they seem to use inking as a defence mechanism when escaping predators, but that doesn't make sense, there isn't anything that can defeat the pods here on Earth… is there?)
He looks around. There are the others, watching; the bird and the computers and the camcorder live-linked to the ground camp, and –
a box that wasn't there before, with red numbers flashing on a screen, and he remembers the last few words he saw –
00:07.
00:06.
"Run!" He doesn't wait for Kakyoin to reply but grabs his arm, pulling him along towards where he's pretty sure he can see the sea from here, the tiny box of blue-grey seeming further away than ever –
00:05.
00:04.
Kakyoin digs in his heels, and the others – Stroheim, Speedwagon, and Anne - overtake them, not taking any notice of the two of them stopped in the middle of the passage. "Wait! We have to – defuse it, or – we have to help them!"
00:03.
"There's no time, Kakyoin!" He grasps Kakyoin's wrist tightly, pulling him closer –
(he smells nice, some sort of… pine? Or Asian, some sort of green tea –)
"We have to run, Kakyoin, or we'll –"
00:02.
"I…" Kakyoin hesitates for just a millisecond too long.
00:01.
They run. The light at the end of the tunnel is still sideways – they're not gonna –
00:00.
Heat. And light. And noise. And wet. He manages to keep his wits about him long enough to kick off his shoes and not breathe in any water – or at least not too much.
They came in a boat. He's not in the boat, even though by all rights he should be. It's salty. He's cold and wet and somehow, he's flagging, even though he should be at the peak of fitness. He… needs to…keep… kicking…
"Hey, Dad, you still have a white lab coat, right?"
"Hmm? Yeah." He looks up. "Why? Do you need it for something?"
She grins. "You're gonna be Rick for Halloween this year."
"Do I have any choice in the matter?"
She shrugs. "Well, you could come as Bird Person, but Weather's already claimed him, so it would be kind of awkward."
"You can't be serious," he grumbles. "Aren't you a little old for dress-up by now?"
"No." She raises her eyebrows at him. "I notice you haven't mentioned that I'm also too young for Rick and Morty."
"I don't really know enough about it to comment," he mutters. "Why? Is it adult?"
She snorts. "Oh, I'm gonna have so much fun with this. But… are you awake?"
"What?"
Josuke snaps his fingers in front of Jotaro's face again. "Come on, man, are you awake?"
"m 'wake."
Josuke sighs with relief and runs a hand through his over-preened hair. "Good. Okay, now I want you to tell me how many fingers I'm holding up –"
It's hard to focus, though –
He has a concussion, or something; he's not supposed to close his eyes too long. Muzzy. Not supposed to… wait. If he's here, then…
"Where… Kakyoin?"
Josuke nods towards the next bed, where a fuzzy vaguely red shape is moving in and out of focus. He squints. "…kyoin?"
"Mm?"
"Okay?"
"Mm."
Ow. His head hurts. But it's starting to hurt less. "Kakyoin. The pods."
"Mm-hm." There's a slight shift. "I think Green is injured."
"How the – we're alive, though." He rubs his head; it's starting to clear up a little. "We're smaller and more vulnerable to injury."
A sigh. Kakyoin shrugs, and Jotaro is pleased to note that he can see the shrug rather than just a vague movement. That means it's probably going to be okay. "They were closer, maybe? And the ship is an enclosed space, after all. Maybe there was a lot of debris that we were shielded from by the walls."
"Mm." He looks back at Josuke. "By the way… what happened? We… were in the water…"
Josuke nods. "Ah, well, y'see Captain Lisa-Lisa, she noticed that you'd gone, an' then Corporal Kira from munitions came back all smug with Oku and his brother – that Keicho guy, you know – and Oku came up to her all worried an' said Keicho an' Kira made him come along to help with a bomb, an' that he'd seen you goin' the other direction. So the Captain went off ta try an' help you, an' she got there just as it was all blowin' up, so to speak, an' it turns out your boat had drfted away cause the driver hadn't anchored it properly."
Jotaro digests this flood of information. "So Lisa-Lisa was the one that fished us out."
"Yup!" Josuke grins. "She got you here, and I fixed you up! Oku didn't want ta do it, cause he was all cut up about getting' you in trouble like that, but he's a nice guy, I swear, an' I trust him, yannow?"
"…right." Kakyoin rubs his forehead – he's not wearing his glasses, and there's a small bandage encircling his hairline – and frowns. "Then what about –"
Stroheim storms in, looking furious. "You two are up finally, are you? Good. Well, thank god no one else was injured and all that, but – what the hell did those pods say to you, huh?"
"Oh. Ah. Yes." Kakyoin fiddles with his collar. "Right. Well, the good news is that it's probably a mistranslation, based on our limited vocabulary."
"And the bad news?"
Kakyoin bites his lip. "They said 'use weapon'."
"Fuck's sake." Stroheim closes his eyes and rubs his forehead. "No wonder everyone else in the world has gone crazy."
"What do you mean, General?" asks Jotaro. "What's happened?"
Stroheim glances at Josuke. "It okay if they get up and walk around?" he asks.
"Well…" Josuke shrugs. "As long as ya don't let 'em fall asleep."
"Trust me," grunts Stroheim. "When they see this, they're not gonna sleep ever again."
She gets up. "Fine. I'll go ask."
"Okay." He goes back to grading papers. Then – "Oh, wait, I know what it's called."
She looks back sceptically. "You do?"
"Yeah," he nods. "It's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Is that what you were looking for?"
She looks back at her homework and nods. "Yeah. I guess it is." She sits back down again at the table and picks up her pencil. "Thanks, Dad."
"No problem."
Chine: offline. Egypt: offline, and the last image is of the physicist Vanilla cutting off the power with the thermodynamics professor Avdol being held off from stopping him in the background. Europe: offline. Japan: offline. Brazil: offline. And on and on it goes. All eleven of the other sites, switched off.
"China's gonna blow 'em up," growls Stroheim. "Everyone's scared witless. And it's all 'cause of what they read from the pods. Tell me one good reason why I shouldn't give Corporal Kira a medal."
"Well, for one thing," starts Kakyoin, "how the fuck did he know they were going to say that? It could just be a random act of aggression."
"Or maybe the Chinese got the same message just before we did, and communicated it to the world, and we were too busy admiring your fucking –" Stroheim waves towards the computer – "your fucking sentence machine thingy."
Kakyoin massages his forehead. "God's sake. We don't even know for sure whether they know the difference between 'weapon' and, for instance, 'tool'."
"Well, do they?" grunts Stroheim.
"No!" Kakyoin starts pacing, back, forth. "If only I could figure out what they sent out just before the bomb went off, I might be able to figure it out… the weapon…"
"We've got the recording," mutters Stroheim. "But it's just a mess of words."
"I know, but…"
Stroheim scowls. "Maybe you should go ask them. I'm going to make my preparations for an all-out nuclear war, if that's all right with you." With that, he stomps away.
"Ask them…" Kakyoin strokes his chin thoughtfully. "I suppose I could, but… how would I get there?"
Jotaro clears his throat. "I can, um, drive a boat."
Kakyoin looks up, startled, and then relaxes. "Oh, Jotaro, of course. First Japanese, now boats. You really are a very convenient person to have around, you know that?"
"M-hm. But we should hurry," he suggests. "There isn't much time."
Jolyne Kujo
Beloved daughter, dearest friend
'I will return in every song and each sunset
Our memory is always within reach.'
Age 19.
He doesn't put flowers by her grave. She had always thought it was a stupid idea, and that the dear departed wouldn't care either way. Instead, he lights incense as he once did for an old friend of his, as his mother taught him to do for those who had gone before.
"She was so young," murmurs the other person. "I didn't think…"
A sigh, half caught up by a stifled sob.
"I know," he replies. "I know."
He steers the boat toward the anchoring point, with Kakyoin by his side. It won't be open, he knows – they've scuppered their chances of that, even without the consideration that it's outside of visiting hours. But he keeps going, focuses on positioning them under the Obelisk and making sure they're properly anchored in its shadow.
For a moment, nothing happens: the underside of the Obelisk stays unopened. He's not sure why he was hoping for anything more. But then –
a black tube shoots out from the top of the Obelisk and flats down to the deck of the boat: what must be a door slides open to reveal a compartment big enough for two people.
"Well," says Kakyoin, shaking slightly with some unnameable emotion, "shall we?"
He shrugs. "I guess we have to."
The door of the tube closes behind them like an elevator.
Terminal.
Inoperable.
Malignant.
Returning.
"As you can see, multiple tumours have spread unnoticed to various organs – including, unfortunately, the brain. We only have a short window before – well, let's just say that if we hadn't found the one on her shoulder, we wouldn't have a chance of –"
It's not going to be enough. He can see it in their eyes. It's not going to be enough, but they want to give her some hope, before –
