Chapter Nine: Temptation
Kyon had a headache. Trying to juggle schoolwork and keeping Haruhi entertained was really starting to wear him thin, especially now that Yuki kept giving him updates on some of the things that had been flitting in and out of their universe because Haruhi had decided that she wanted to meet creatures from other universes.
Yuki had given him The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft shortly after their meeting with the creature and he had wondered why she would want to meet anything from another universe when there was the possibility that it could very well be anything like what had come out of that man's mind. Especially since from what Yuki had been saying to a large degree the guys using their universe as a transfer station were worse.
Kyon made damn sure though that he kept that book well away from Haruhi. It did no good to give her any new sorts of crazy ideas, especially ones that could potentially end with gibbering madness and people being eaten. The cave cricket had been bad enough.
His mind was so weary that it took him a moment to realize that he was doodling on his paper. Glancing down, he found that he was trying to work out how exactly to construct the name that the creature had given him. He immediately scribbled it out, not trying to dare the universe to make things worse for him. Still, the damn sounds that thing had made picked at his brain, like an open wound on the inside on your mouth that would go away if you just stopped tonguing it, but trying to ignore it only brought more attention to how much it bothered you.
Tzintchi. What an odd name, although he supposed if you squinted at it you might be able to call it a mangled version of Shinji or something like that. Definitely a difficult word to get right. What characters would be needed to properly construct those sounds? It would…
Kyon paused as he looked down at what he had written, before angrily scratching it out. He had been warned that the names and symbols could get into your head. These things were corruptors, insidious and powerful and…
Kyon felt a peculiar and unfortunately familiar gaze boring into the back of his head. Turning about, Kyon found Haruhi looking at him funny, the sort of annoyed inquisitive stare that said, "What on Earth are you doing Kyon and why haven't you included me yet?" while simultaneously insulting his intelligence.
"Kyon, what are you doing?" Haruhi asked him in an annoyed tone.
"Doodling," Kyon replied honestly while trying not to sound nervous because that would indicate that he had something to hide so therefore something Haruhi would want to see because it was her business to butt into every aspect of Kyon's life whenever possible just because she could get away with it.
"Let me see," Haruhi demanded.
"I…" Kyon did not have time to try and deflect her attention before she reached past him and snatched away the piece of paper he had been doodling upon.
Glancing over it, Haruhi then shrugged and said, "You're not very good at this are you?"
Angrily snatching the paper back from her, Kyon shook his head said, "I wasn't trying to make it good, which is why I kept scribbling stuff out."
Sniffing disdainfully, Haruhi said, "And that word was just weird. Tzintchi? I've never heard of that before."
Kyon's blood ran cold. If he said that name three times it was supposed to summon forth some form of representative to talk to. If Haruhi said it… the possibilities for destruction were endless.
Glancing side to side and noticing that the walls of reality still looked solid, Kyon said, "That's not how you're supposed to pronounce it."
Shaking her head, Haruhi said, "No, it looked like you were very deliberately going for Tzintchi."
That was two. Come on, think Kyon! Deflect her attention.
Shrugging, Kyon replied, "I was just combining random stuff. Say, did you hear about…"
"Come on; tell me why you were trying to write 'Tzinchti'? What does it mean?" Haruhi asked.
Three. She had said it three times. Kyon winced and braced for the tentacles to start, but when after a second of nothing happening he finally said, "Alright, it's the name of an evil character in a book I read, but it's originally from another language so I was trying to figure out how to spell it. It's no big deal."
Haruhi didn't seem convinced, but she was satisfied with that and left the matter alone. Seeing as how the universe failed to implode, Kyon was just as happy otherwise.
He had almost forgotten the entire incident until he got home later that day and his sister said, "Kyon, you have mail!"
What his sister handed him was a post card of the biggest, richest hotel in the area with an invitation in lurid, flowing writing on the back for Kyon to come meet his 'Internet friend' Tzintchi for lunch on the weekend, which was conveniently the next day.
Oh. Crap.
Kyon arrived at the hotel lobby and immediately felt rather shabby, what with the rich décor and expertly dressed staff. Surprisingly though, as soon as he walked through the door holding the post card and looking annoyed and confused one of the staff in a crisply starched uniform approached him and asked, "Are you Kyon-sama?"
Kyon blinked a few times before he said, "Uh… yes, my name is Kyon."
"Your friend Shinji-sama said to expect you. He is waiting for you in the restaurant, and he also anticipated that you might not be able to meet our exacting dress code standards, so he had an outfit prepared for you. If you would come this way," the man said, leading a bemused and befuddle Kyon to a private washroom where a richly cut and tailored suit of western fashion was waiting for him with an attendant there to help him. While Kyon waived off the attendant, he did discover that the suit fit him perfectly and showed all of the signs of having been hand tailored specifically for him in the past day.
Once appropriately attired, Kyon was lead to the restaurant section of the hotel where he did a double take when he thought he saw Yuki sitting there only to realize that it was in fact another pale, blue haired girl with a closed off, bookish expression, although she looked considerably more expressive than Yuki when Kyon had first met her. She was wearing a modest blue dress.
The other guests at the table included a thirty-something woman in a dark-purple, almost black, strapless dress that matched her hair with a simple silver cross hanging down and almost plunging into her ample cleavage; a girl with long, vibrant red hair and an expression of supreme smugness in a shimmering scarlet dress; and lastly a quiet, reserved looking young man wearing a suit of identical cut to the one given to Kyon, only coloured dark blue with a slight indigo trim in places to the conservative black and white given to Kyon.
Despite the finery and richness and the elegant, public setting, Kyon could not help but feel his skin crawl in reaction to being around these people, if that was even the appropriate word for them. The hotel staff all seemed oblivious, but Kyon could feel the aura of menace radiating off of them.
He was now in the presence of predators.
"Hello Kyon-san, how are you today?" The young man asked.
"Tzintchi I presume?" Kyon asked while he sat down, a chair pushed forward for him.
"If you wish you can call me Shinji, or possibly Ikari-san if you really feel like being formal, seeing as how I am using this old form. Or technical as how I am borrowing this old form, as are my lovely associates," Shinji said.
Feeling distinctly uncomfortable, Kyon said, "And your friends?"
"Katsuragi Misato," the older woman said in a way that simultaneously gave Kyon a serious case of the willies while also made him feel warm all over.
"Ayanami Rei," the pale, blue haired girl said in a quiet, flat tone.
"Asuka Langley Soryu," the red head told him with an arrogant grin.
"We are… how to put it so that you will understand properly? We are… avatars I suppose you could call us, projections of the gods into this reality. We are simultaneously more and less than the servant sent to deliver our message to you. You can thank your friend Haruhi for our ability to be here by the way," Shinji explained.
"I… see… Ikari-san," Kyon replied, intentionally trying to distance himself as much as possible from these people.
Shinji grinned slightly while folding his hands together in front of his chest, the smile somehow not reaching his eyes. He then said, "You think us evil and wanting to do harm to you and the ones you care about."
His expression hardening, Kyon replied, "I know that you sent a warship through here to some other universe just so that you could bully the inhabitants."
"Bully is an inappropriate term. 'Massacre the pathetic fools' is far more appropriate," Asuka interjected.
"Now, now dear, we're here to reassure our friend here, not scare him," Shinji said.
"It is the truth," Rei pointed out calmly.
Shrugging, Shinji replied, "Yes, but it is not the whole truth. Yes, we deployed our ship with the intent of picking a fight, but not to start a fight." Shinji then turned back to Kyon and said, "Do you know what the population of my home world is, not counting immortal creatures such as daemons?"
Kyon stared at Shinji before he said, "No."
"Two billion. In the past eighteen years with some encouragement in the form of very generous social programs we have managed to more than double that number from a low point of about 950 million a few years after a group of psychotic old men tried to kill everyone and only by hijacking the process for the purposes of our own apotheosis did we prevent the extinction of the human race," Shinji explained slowly.
"Fifteen years before that the same group of old men wiped out half the world's population to set up for the final killing stroke," Misato said with cold anger.
"Where we come from, none but the very young have not known hardship and horrors in their lives. It is exceedingly rare for anyone over the age of twenty to have a complete family, and uncommon for even teenagers. We are vicious and predatory, make no mistake, but we are human. We will obliterate with extreme prejudice anything and anyone who stands between us and our friends and families. Mother bears have nothing on us," Asuka stated.
"And we understand that the same goes for you," Shinji said. "This is why we leave you alone."
"Haruhi might wield absolute, omnipotent power, but you are the real deity in the equation seeing as you are unaffected by her power. You are the one constant in the universe that which was carved into the slate of the blackboard that Haruhi writes upon. But one word from you to Haruhi and the whole universe would be rewritten. And yet you care about your friends and family too much to let them be erased like that, so you fight to preserve what is. We applaud your nobility," Misato said, and then the four of them all gave light applause to Kyon.
"We applaud your nobility because we have none ourselves. We might have our own twisted morals and rules of conduct, but ultimately we are greedy, vicious monsters. We are all that is wrong with humanity given form… and yet enough intelligence to realize that ultimate indulgence in our own baser desires would be counter-productive in the long run. We straddle the fine line between benevolent dictators and competent evil overlords. But we respect you Kyon, we respect what you sacrifice to put up with Haruhi," Shinji explained.
"But since we are corruptors, we must ask you; how much longer can you keep this up, how much more can you take, what are the limits of your nobility?" Rei asked.
"Even before we arrived here, we have always been with you. We are emotion. How often have you grown furious with Haruhi? How often have you wanted to just give up and let her destroy everything? How often have you wanted to selfishly harness her powers for your own will? And how often have you wondered if Haruhi's demands might take a more… twisted turn?" Misato said.
"Would you like to hear a tale Kyon-san?" Shinji asked.
"What is it about?" Kyon asked nervously as he tried to keep some mental distance from these creatures. Even when they told him awful things, things that should repulse him, he could hear the terrible logic in their words.
"It's about a race of creatures we call the Eldar. Their civilization lasted for millions of years, bringing them to the pinnacle of art and technology. Their people lived nearly immortal lives with not a care in the world, protected from the outside universe by their vast powers. Do you know what happened to them?" Shinji asked.
Kyon kept quiet.
"They grew bored. For generations they had no great trials of war or disease or famine to test them. So they turned inward and they created great works of art and civilization. And for a time this satisfied them. But when you live for thousands of years and your history stretches back for millions, with your civilization extending across tens of thousands of worlds, then you will have possibly hundreds of Da Vincis, Leonardos, and Picassos all living at the same time, with hundreds of thousands more in the past. Soon everything will have been done and there will be no way to compete. So they grew bored again. They needed new entertainments, new excitements, and new arts to pass the time. Soon for the immortal Eldar the only thing that could soothe the dullness of eternal life was death. They began to experiment in pain and death, creating horrid works of art of unimaginable cruelty. For thousands of years the filled the void of their lives with the worst excesses of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, until finally all that negative emotion came around to bite them in the ass. They literally birthed a god of hentai, a god that they proceeded to destroy the creatures that gave it existence," Misato finished off.
"How much longer do you think you can keep Haruhi from growing bored?" Shinji asked maliciously. "More so, how much longer before she starts to think of men as something more than women with penises and flat chests? What happens when she starts to want things that you don't want to give her? You have already seen how badly she treats Asahina-san, and how willing all the other members of the SOS Brigade are to acquiesce to her demands. How much longer before her harassment turns from thoughtlessness to play?"
Kyon wanted to say that was impossible, that they had been doing great so far, but could he say the same thing a year from now? Two years? Ten? Would they have to spend their whole lives keeping Haruhi from growing bored with existence? Could they keep providing her with new, interesting distractions that were healthy?
"We are the temptations of life: avarice, wrath, apathy, and lust. To fight us is to be human. To embrace us is to be human. We are also the virtues of life: hope, valour, joy, and passion. To desire us is to be human. To fail to live up to us is to be human. We are the dreams and nightmares of an entire species made flesh. We know what you live through, we know more than what you have lived through or ever will live through," Shinji said.
"And we can teach you to fuck three girls up the ass at the same time and blow their minds," Misato said crudely.
That snapped Kyon out of it, causing him to angrily slam his hands down on the table while rising. Without another word he turned and left. He had very nearly fallen for their words, had very nearly wanted to know more, wanted to see if they could offer him any way out of the pains, and joys, that living with Haruhi offered. They were monsters trying to seduce him, and he had listened to enough of their poison.
Before he got out of earshot, Shinji said, "We will be here. Even if you throw us out of your universe, lock the door and throw away the key, you will never be rid of what we represent."