-56: Go with the Flow-
Staying in bed would've been her first choice. I might've lacked the guts to tell her I liked her, but I wasn't oblivious—there was I reason I still did work as an agent even after joining Tactical Response. Truth was, spending the day in cuddled up in bed with her would have been heavenly. Just being around her was hard to describe. It was the millisecond between detonation and feeling the shockwave, kicking off my shoes after a long day, curling up in bed and listening to a blizzard. Something had changed last night, beyond us sharing a bed.
Hasuko kept nudging into me 'accidentally' all the way to her car, in lieu of breaking the social taboo of public affection. I had no idea if the people on the street found us weird; I was getting about the same number of double-takes directed toward me as I did when I was walking . It probably didn't help that I might've been worn the shadow of a grin the whole way.
Once again, I was reminded of the possibility that she had planned this all out when I noticed that the car park she led me to was well within walking distance of the bar and my building. For a moment I again considered asking her if this had been planned from last night, but, I didn't. She was happy, I was happy.
Besides, ask obvious questions, get obvious answers. It didn't matter to me if she had planned this out to the letter or not: despite having no idea what she or even I was doing, Hasuko was enjoying every minute of it. Sitting down in what would've been the driver's seat back home, I almost buckled myself in right away out of habit. Almost—I decided that if the pretty lady next to me was having so much fun, I might as well join in.
"Hey," I leaned over the center console, drawing out her name, "Ha-su-ko."
"Hm?" She paused, halfway through buckling up.
"You," I tried to use my best suave voice "are a very good kisser."
What followed was several seconds of absolutely adorable but fully incoherent stuttering. Unable to help myself, I found myself grinning as her face shifted several shades toward ripe tomato.
"You're adorable when you're flustered." It was sweet payback for her doing the same to me.
"Tha—" Hasuko, bright pink as she was, couldn't hide a toothy smile. "Th-Thank you."
She looked to me again, and I saw that same possessive shadow in her eyes in her smile.
I smiled back. Her happiness made me feel just a little bit lighter as she pulled out of the lot.
"So." I dropped my quinque in the console cupholder. "Where are we headed?"
Adventure or not, I always traveled prepared; that being combination of six years of training and paranoia. Well-founded paranoia. On instinct, I tapped my pockets again. Phone, wallet, passport, map. In the last five minutes, none of the three had evaporated from my pockets. Yet. I really hoped this feeling wasn't that weird and-slash-or unique to me.
"There's a place, southwest of the city proper." That meant a long ride in a car filled with an intoxicating scent. "I'm gonna keep it a surprise though, so you will have to wait."
"That's all right." I was with you, and that made it okay. Even if that was the most vague description I had ever heard.
The drive seemed to pass slowly, even though there wasn't too much traffic on the roads. Even with—or perhaps because of—Hasuko and her scent, I was a little fidgety in my seat, resisting the urge to play with my quinque. The trigger was stiff, but not that stiff—accidental activation in a small car like this would be somewhat destructive, to say the least.
"Remember when I told you about the Eleventh Ward?" Now she had three of my senses occupied. "That's what we're driving through now."
"Oh." I stared out the window. It certainly didn't look like the war zone and deathtrap I had heard it described as. Except—the sidewalks seemed a little emptier, the people seeming to walk a little faster. More tellingly, I saw that scraps of trash had drifted into more than a few quiet corners. A war zone by a different definition, perhaps. Some of that I had seen before—deserted streets, nervous pedestrians—both were common in ghoul-troubled areas back home. Trash in the streets really didn't mean much back home though; we had a bad habit of not cleaning up after ourselves.
Doesn't look like I know enough yet to make an accurate assessment.
"Why did we drive through here, anyway, instead of just taking the highway?"
"Every day we drove together, you were always staring at the city, even though you never missed a beat when we talk." Distracted by a lane change, she paused, the click of the turn signal filling the silence. "It was almost like there were two of you with me."
"Ah. Sorry." I tore my eyes away, looking down.
"Don't be." Her hands twisted nervously on the steering wheel. "That look in your eyes ...was the thing I found beautiful from the first day I met you."
It was like she knew exactly what to say and do to trip up my mind.
The only person who had managed to do that—back home—that had been...what was her name again? I had been away for too long and my brain was far too scrambled.
-Author's note-
Are we ready for some overtime? I did this while building some storyboards for the next few chapters, and I hope it turned out sounding more interesting than the usual orientation talk. Anyway, are there any scenes you're anticipating to seeing in the future?
=-=Bonus Section=-=
BGA abridged transcript #35, taken from an orientation on Ghouls in history:
The idea of using ghouls for military gain is not a new one: Roman records suggest the possibility, as do accounts from the years of Mongol expansion. Similar accounts and legends exist about warriors and war gods, from nearly every continent, with incredible capabilities. On the recognizable end, there are the stories of impenetrable skin, superhuman strength and inhuman devaluation of life on the battlefield. More fanciful are the stories of demonic aspects, servants of dark gods and pacts with unholy beasts in human form, but the sharp-eyed and open minded can find them to be ample indicators of early ghouls.
Such knowledge is hidden from public eyes and jealously guarded. For example, the Vatican archives has a specifically restricted section, the collection of British materials held by MI5 and of course the documentation held by the BGA.
Now, before the advances in medical science due to the industrial revolution reduced the mortality rate and increased human lifespan, ghouls could and did grow fat off of natural deaths and scavenging. As these two factors changed, ghouls switched to other methods of feeding themselves and their families. Some took the growing risk of living among humans, taking jobs at graveyards and morgues; staying true to their ancestral history of acting as necrophages. Others adopted the predatory behavior that is the dominant feeding behavior we seen today. Some ghouls however, chose to enter military life, usually concealing their heritage in the process, though others did little to conceal their nature.
It is very important that it is noted that the use of ghouls as bodyguards, both from assassins and other ghouls is a fully distinct subject from this and will be touched upon in Advanced Ghoul History, offered to those of you pursuing a position in intelligence.
The roles said ghouls took were as diverse as their human counterparts; infantry, artillery, doctors and all the way down to camp followers and prostitutes—you may all stop snickering. No matter the role they took, there was really only one goal; the aftermath of the battlefield—a literal all-you-can-eat buffet. While most nations took a dim view of this, they generally remained either unable or partly unwilling to put a stop to battlefield feedings. In a statement attributed to Napolean at a general's meeting, the thoughts of many in the military are cleanly summed up: "Better to lose the dead than the living, and better to clean a battlefield than to risk pestilence". As covered in your orientation, battlefield scavenging became such a problem during the American civil war that it led to the formation of the our own BGA, which dealt with the issue by allowing ghouls to freely scavenge on the condition that they leave bodies in identifiable condition; an pact later called 'the torso agreement'.
So far as we can tell from our neighbors across the Atlantic, actually admitting ghouls into military service was banned across much of Europe from the early 1700s onward via a mix of royal decrees, treaties between nation-states, and rising anti-ghoul and pro-human sentiments. In practice, naturally, the reality was much different. Many nations operated under a policy of 'we won't ask, you don't tell', with the presence of ghouls only known to their immediate superiors and those in their immediate proximity on the battlefield.
What there is no disputing was that until the second world war, no nation considered the thought of maintaining an all-ghoul unit, regardless of at battalion, squad or even individual size. The primary reason behind this was the ethical and logistical nightmare of keeping such a group adequately fed, despite military debates suggesting everything from taking bodies from local morgues to simply turning a blind eye to the unit's feeding habits. Secondary to this was the potential domestic and international backlash when such a unit was discovered. Domestic populations saw ghouls as an acute existential threat and were likely to withdraw their support for a government which appeared to support such a group. To neighboring nations, such an act would also cause a breakdown in relations and the mere idea of such a thing was responsible for several small wars in Eastern Europe in the 1890s.
Then, the assassination of a Serbian noble sparked something you all probably learned to death in school. With death on an industrial scale, you may think ghouls were welcomed into the ranks, but this was not the case: it was not until the optimistic early years had passed that the use of ghouls was considered, due to reasons nearly as varied as the nations involved in the war.
German and Prussian ghouls were quietly promised amnesty for some past crimes and French and British ghouls were rallied with nationalist slogans, to name the methods used by the major European powers. Those ghouls that enlisted were treated in much the same they were in the decades before the war, in the 'don't ask, don't tell' method; interspersed through companies, though always attached to frontline units. Ghouls only ended up concentrated via consolidation of decimated companies and when that occurred, the officers of said groups on both sides would claim them to be 'lazy and apathetic until faced with a fresh battlefield'.
During the war, only two nations that we are aware of fielded majority-ghoul companies: Russia and the United States. The Russian company, known as the 'Blackest Hearts' only became public knowledge near the end of Russia's involvement in the war, and their reveal to the public may have been one of the factors in leading up to the overthrow of the czar. In their short time in the field, they were known to be ferociously effective trench raiders and innovated the tactic of interspersing in no-man's land and ambushing German charges. While many official records were either poorly kept or destroyed during the Bolshevik revolution, the generally accepted strength of the group was between 200-400 individuals, with an estimated 1500 individuals having passed through the roster by the time they were disbanded. A six month gap in reports is commonly attributed to the near complete destruction and then rebuilding of the company. After the war, the company roster was cleared, another indicator that the political and ethical costs of maintaining such a unit was seen as untenable in many eyes.
It is worth noting that there is a small plaque commemorating the unit in St. Petersburg, a small proof that these ghouls received some recognition for their work.
Now, in the cases of unknown large-scale usages of ghouls, Germany was believed to have kept nearly a thousand ghouls on the fronts, though it is likely that any records relating to their existence were summarily destroyed for plausible deniability—despite the fact that the Germans were among the first to produce the precursors to quinque steel and a rudimentary version of the Q-bullet, all in the run-up to the second world war.
In the case of the United States, the Fourth Expeditionary Force, known as the 'Blue Stripes' due to the armbands worn by the group, were among the first American fighting forces to arrive in Europe. They were not directly part of the First Army, due to their arriving nearly a month prior to the first wave of human troops. The force was part of a plan by the current president Woodrow Wilson to gain as strong position as possible at the postwar bargaining table, via having an outsize impact on the end of the war, but history has since proven the effort moot.
Thanks to this unit, the BGA was able to learn a great deal on ghoul psychology, including the effectiveness of certain chemical agents and overpressure from explosives in incapacitating a ghoul. Those of you moving into the armory and Tactical Response will cover these in greater detail.
I certainly hope you four in the back have been taking notes, because there is a quiz after this orientation. I kid on the quiz of course, but your training instructor will likely have some punishment planned for your lack of attention.
Yes, you in the back, I can see you. No need to wave your arm like a flag; what is your question. Ah a good one! Not many think to ask what happened to the Blue Stripes after the war. Originally, the plan set forth by the BGA was a simple one, but for the problem of...
-Transcript ends-
