Kadota had jarred Izaya off course. Adjustments were in order. Already Izaya knew he had committed the great sin of overreaction. He who brushed off incoming vending machines as if they were a mere bother had lost his cool over a kiss and a confession. The irony hit him wits its full force - Izaya dropped the cube, it splashed loudly and floated merrily like a cubic ship of many colors.
"Waterproof, yay!"
Very much like a little boy playing with a rubber ducky Izaya pocked the cube. This moment too reflected his personality, an overly clever child that could not escape the many barriers he had reinforced to escape from the fearful world outside the ever branching complexities of his spectacular mind.
**
634.0 metres (2,080 feet). Three legs.
Skytree. Izaya had read much about it and had been literally counting down the days until its inauguration. Japan's tallest building made for the perfect vantage point from which to overview Tokyo. And Tokyo might as well be the world. He considered this as he queued up.
A mega city had a lot of advantages to one as Izaya and the greatest of all might be its being a veritable microcosm. Humanity to be freely sampled at his will. Izaya glowed with the secret satisfaction of knowing what no one else could know, of seeing the lucid connections that were mere random phenomena to others.
The tower itself had him tingling with excitement. Here it stood, a wonder of steel columns crisscrossing diagonally, reaching into the very heights in defiance of gravity. Izaya had pored over the specs, to him the effect of explicit regularity was all the more impressive for its being grounded on different angles and varied shapes.
Izaya almost hummed as one of the sleek elevators (that there were 13 elevators total amused him greatly) worked its borderline magic of ascent from the streets to the clouds. He had bypassed emotional crisis but at cost: Izaya had so fully invested himself into his many mental mannerisms to the point he grew too detached from his surroundings. Those who saw him did not think of him as a smooth young man but as a young man whose mind was miles away.
Normally Izaya reinforced his flawless facade from the correspondence between his quirks and outside reality, now his inner atmosphere did not overlap as much as overwhelm everything else. Izaya was entrenched in himself.
And for that very reason he felt more at ease than he had since Kadota had so disturbed his emotional balance. Izaya nearly skipped around the observation deck.
"Hi there, Izaya."
Izaya was about to land on one foot and it was with some difficulty that he did not jump away. He made a very fast calculation and settled on a course of action: emulate business as usual.
"If it isn't Dotachin. Did you follow me here?"
Kadota shook his head. This was hardly a good start. At least childishness peevishness could be argued with and violence called for a strong reaction. Downplaying things as Izaya was bent on doing limited Kadota's options.
"Didn't have to. I thought you'd be here."
"Oh? How come?"
"Because you love Tokyo. This is a great place to see the city from. No way you'd miss the inauguration."
Izaya blinked.
"Indeed."
They both shifted without actually moving. Kadota decided that he had to talk things through one way or another and with Izaya there were many ways of getting to the core of issues for Izaya's interests were far and wide, offering all sorts of possible approaches.
"Besides, I am interested in this tower too. It's so much like a super modern world tree."
Izaya gazed off at the endless city, a map of everything under the sun. He smiled.
"Even down to the name. The world tree is a recurring concept in a lot of mythologies, it connects the world where it is planted, to the heavens where its branches spread and even the underworld through the roots. In other words, it's a symbolic representation of a unified ontological vision."
"Like Yggdrasil?"
"That's the most famous. I'm particularly fond of the squirrel."