Tokyo

March 29, 1913

After an uneventful trip from Honolulu to Tokyo, James had managed to rent a room in a hotel starting on the 25th. While there, he had managed to forge documents that enabled him to carry weapons in public in Japan. He had enjoyed the sights and sounds of Tokyo during the day and the night, not arousing any suspicion due to the ability of most American demons to have Limited Sunlight Resistance, allowing them to walk outside in the day at the cost of their regenerative abilities and the full strength of their Blood Demon Arts. His Japanese was far more improved, and he was able to communicate on the street with only minor difficulty now.

As he walked along a busy pedestrian street in Asakusa, he looked around, admiring the local scenery and the rush of people. Then, just as he began to walk to an empty side street, he turned his head from a side view and to his front just in time to see a young man and a young woman, both running towards him, as the man bumped into him and fell to the ground. James stepped back and dusted himself off, ranting in English, "Agh! Hey, watch where you're fuckin' going, alr-" He then cut himself off as he realized he was speaking the wrong language, and he accordingly switched to Japanese. "I assume you didn't understand any of that."

The man, who bore a green and black haori and had a red scar on his face, kept a tight grip on his sister, who bore black hair with orange tips and a bamboo muzzle, as he replied back, "Who...? What are you?"

"What am I?" James was deeply confused. "You ain't never seen an American before?"

"You look incredibly different from everyone else here," the man replied as he and his sister stood up from the ground. He then bowed and apologized to him with, "Please, excuse me for crashing into you."

James then noticed the man was carrying a sword. "Huh... Nice sword you got there. You seem pretty lost in a place like this. I can tell when someone's spent their whole life in the countryside."

"I'm not used to cities," he replied. "Not at all. I see you're carrying some kind of gun with you." He had noticed the shotgun James carried on his back. "It's not the one I've seen in pictures before."

James remembered a fact that Hideyoshi had told him about the use of matchlock firearms in Japan prior to the arrival of Commodore Perry. "Ah, yes. You're more familiar with the tanegashima, the matchlock gun?"

"Yeah," Tanjiro replied as the three of them began to walk in the same direction together. "I should probably introduce myself. My name is Kamado Tanjiro. This girl is my sister, Nezuko. I carry a sword as a Demon Slayer."

"Demon Slayer, huh?" James realized that by pure luck, he had made his first contact with the more organized demon-hunting efforts of the Japanese. "Funny you should mention that. I hunt them myself in America."

"America?" Tanjiro was unaware of the country. "America? Is that a land somewhere?"

James was confused. Surely he wasn't so isolated he thought only Japan existed, right? Even the most rural Americans knew other countries existed. Then again, Japan had been isolated for a long

time until only almost 60 years prior. "It's another country across the ocean. It's where I'm from."

"Oh, like China!" His reply did bring some relief to James. He at least knew places beyond Japan existed. "It must be far away! I'm surprised demons exist there, sir! What's your name?"

"James Colby," he told him, instinctively extending his hand for a handshake. Tanjiro was confused, but appreciated the gesture. "Uh... Sir, your hand..."

"Right," James replied as he put his hand away. "Shaking hands is a greeting where I'm from. Where your people now, we shake hands."

"Sounds odd," Tanjiro replied as he wiped sweat off of his head. He then extended his hand out. "But since it seems you've made a good effort to learn about my home. I might as well shake hands."

"I suppose," James replied, grabbing a firm hold of Tanjiro's hand. As he somewhat awkwardly shook his hand, they both wondered when the handshake would end. Once it did, James noticed a food stand nearby. "Oh hey, looks like we got a food stand over there."

"Good," Tanjiro replied. "I'm hungry as shit. Being in a city for the first time has been super exhausting!"

"I noticed your sister ain't talkin'," James noted, turning his attention to Nezuko as he began to feel something was off about her. "What's the deal with that muzzle on her face? Her eyes look a little... I dunno, dead?"

Tanjiro and Nezuko both stopped dead in their tracks as the former looked to his sister. "Her? You're calling my sister's eyes dead?!" He then got up in James' face, somewhat starling him. "My sister is not some zombie! She was the most beautiful girl in our village, asshole!"

"Woah, son," James replied to him, backing up off him. "Calm down. I didn't call your sister a zombie, or ugly, or whatever. I just noticed that her eyes look a bit like mine." He pointed at his eyes so Tanjiro could see what he meant. "My eyes are a dull grey, just like her eyes are a dull pink. Eye shape and eyelids are different, of course, but aside from that, we have a lot of the same features. My eyes look dead."

Tanjiro realized what the point he was trying to make, and sighed. "Right, I suppose so..." He then turned to the shop owner, who was standing by the food cart he ran. "Anyway, sorry for the wait. May I have a bowl of udon with grated yam on top, please?"

"Same for me," James replied.

The shop owner replied to them, "Sure thing. A bowl for the girl, too?"

"No, she's good," Tanjiro replied. As he was about to pull out some money, James stopped him. "Huh?"

"I got this," he replied with a wink. "You look like you've traveled a long way, Tanjir-" He stopped himself as he remembered about Japanese honorifics. "I mean, Kamado-san."

...

After the two of them had gotten their bowls and began to eat, Tanjiro asked him, "About my name earlier, is that how your language works?"

"English? Yeah," James replied after he swallowed some of the udon. "My family name is not James. It's Colby. We say personal name first and then family name, and in English, many of us also have a middle name. My middle name is my grandfather's name: Joachim. He and my mother were from Germany, but they came to America to seek a better life. Also, we don't have honorifics, or at least we don't have the same amount of them."

"America really is that better than Germany?" Tanjiro had never heard of the idea of someone emigrating from their homeland to another country.

"At the time they moved," James clarified. "Absolutely. Germany was a disunited mess of city- states constantly at war with each other. It wasn't the unified empire it is now. America was a stable country that at least somewhat respected people's rights, especially compared to where they came from."

"Rights?"

James stopped dead in his tracks, as if Tanjiro had just told him bad news. "Civil rights. Like the idea that you shouldn't go to jail for believing in a religion, or for disagreeing with your government, or since 1865, the idea that slavery shouldn't be a thing." James looked down at his bowl as his mention of slavery brought back memories of his past. "My family was always against the idea that you could just own a human and treat them like your property. America had it for a long time, so long we fought a war over it when half of the country wanted to keep it and the other half had already gotten rid of it in their own states." Realizing Tanjiro did not know what states were, James explained further. "States are what composes America. We have 48 of them as of last year. States can make many of their own decisions as long as the national government hasn't contradicted them. America's full name of the United States of America. At the time of our civil war, most of the states in the southern half of union had slavery, and all but a few of them decided to try to leave our country and form their own just because they wanted to keep slavery. Most of the states in the north had already gotten rid of slavery within their borders. They remained in the union, and fought to put down the rebellion in the south. We kicked their asses, and we got rid of slavery."

"America sounds like such a fascinating pla-," Tanjiro complimented him just before he stopped himself. "Wait..." As he sniffed the air, he suddenly dropped his bowl from his hands, prompting James to catch it with his free hand in the nick of time.

"Holy shit," James remarked. "You almost broke your bo-" As Tanjiro suddenly dashed away from the shop, James took off after him and set both of the bowls down next to Nezuko, who was peacefully sitting beside them. "Hey! Where are ya goin'?!" As he continued to give chase, the two of them reentered onto the city street. "Hold up!"

As James finally caught up, he saw that in the throng of people, Tanjiro had just grabbed a hold of the shoulder of a somewhat pale man with a white fedora walking with presumably his family. As James got a look at the man, the man asked Tanjiro and James, "May I help you two with something?"

"Fuck," James thought to himself as he remembered the artist depiction of the Japanese Progenitor. "Holy fuck... This guy... He's the Progenitor! He's the fuckin' Progenitor of Japan! Tanjiro's insane if he thinks he can take him down! I don't even know his name, but if he's

anything like Thaddeus and George Jackson, he's incredibly powerful!" James pulled an anxious and angry Tanjiro aside in an attempt to defuse the situation. "Well, um, sorry about that, sir. We mistook you for a different person." When Tanjiro tried to pipe up a protest, James grabbed a hold of him and covered his mouth, infuriating him. "Don't mind my friend here. He's looking for some guy who screwed him out of some money. We're gonna give him a piece of our damn mind. He's just a bit angry, that's all!" James prayed in his head that his excuse worked.

"I see," the man replied, giving off a smile. "I'm sorry to hear that about your friend. I hope he finds the man that stole his money. I would be angry, too." As he turned back to his family, he walked away, seemingly taking the bait and falling for James' lie.

Once the man was far enough away, James uncovered Tanjiro's mouth while keeping a firm hold of him. As he took a deep breath, he screamed at him, "What the fuck was that for?! I couldn't breathe! You just stopped me from confronting Muzan Kibutsuji! He killed my family and turned my sister into a demon!"

James immediately dragged him into an alleyway, despite his protests, and held him up against a wall, the shock of their encounter still fresh on his mind. "First off, thanks for telling me his name, because I'm lookin' for him, too. Second, do you have any fuckin' clue how powerful a Progenitor is?! You certainly can't take one on, son! Even if you could, why the fuck would you do it in the middle of a crowd?! If you and Muzan whatever-his-name-is fought, not only would he absolutely destroy you, but your little fight would kill tons of people needlessly in the crossfire!" He was very forceful in his words, but after that remark, he began to calm himself down. "Now... What was that about your sister?"

"She's a demon," Tanjiro explained to him as he broke free of his grasp and stood before him. "Muzan murdered my parents and all of our younger siblings. My sister only survived because she was turned into one of them by him. She has the bamboo muzzle to keep her from attacking others or consuming blood. She's essentially an infant mentally right now."

James sighed as he began to walk back to the udon shop, with Tanjiro following close behind. "I see... I suppose I shouldn't hide my own true self anymore, since you seem to have a strong sense of smell."

"True self?"

James then pulled a knife from his pocket and cut open his arm, much to Tanjiro's shock. He winced from the pain as blood began to spill from the wound before he put his knife away and began to walk in a way that allowed the blood to drop on the ground to form a shape. Once his shape was done, he had completed a triangle just before his wound healed itself. "Alright, tell me, Tanjiro, what kind of person do you know that can have wounds heal themselves?"

Tanjiro's eyes widened as the realization began to hit him. "You... You're a-!"

James stuck his knife into the ground and proclaimed, "By the Grace of the Spirits, I cancel the Scent Mask Spell enchanted upon me by me!" A small flash of red light then emerged from the triangle of blood before it disappeared, revealing a clean ground with no traces of the crimson liquid. "Take a good sniff and see what scent comes up now."

Once Tanjiro did as he was told, he drew his sword from its sheath, as if he was ready to attack. "You're a demon! You hid your own scent!"

"Jesus Christ," James replied as he tried to calm him down. "Put the fuckin' sword away before you hurt someone with it! I didn't lie to you when I said that I'm here to hunt demons! I've been

huntin' them since before you were even a thought in your parents' heads one night!"

"How long would that be?" Tanjiro began to lessen his aggressive stance. "And I'd rather not think about my parents having sex to make me, thank you."

"Fifty years this year," James remarked. "Look, if you're so concerned about me, I'll leave."

As he began to turn around and walk away from him, Tanjiro had a change of mind and told him, "Wait! Hold on a second! You don't have to leave!" As James turned around again to face him, he continued with, "I'm... I'm sorry I drew my sword. It's just that I've been taught to see all demons as bad. The Demon Slayers don't have the character for "destroy" on their uniforms for nothing, after all. Nezuko-chan is different, though."

Then, both of them were interrupted by a new voice, that of a woman, emerging from the darkness of the alleyway behind them both. "Perhaps we can assist you two." As they both turned to face the person the voice belonged to, they found a man and a woman staring back at them. "My name is Tamayo, and this is my assistant and confidant Yushiro. Come with us."