Chapter Twenty-Three – Five Ounce Bird/One Pound Coconut

"Wow, Katsuko. You're actually cute, like a real girl – oof!" Yuki turned to glare at Sasuke who had elbowed him. "What?! She is."

"I agree with the sentiment, though not the wording," Sasuke said. He was regarding me, well, scientifically, so maybe his operating system was checking my appearance against the 'real girl' matrix.

I waved both statements away. "Mai and Yoshimoto ambushed me." Ok… how should I bring this up? If Sasuke truly was a time traveler, did Yuki know? What if I was wrong? Maybe he'd just found the glasses somewhere. Was there a way to ask him without coming across as insane? "While I was with them, something occurred to me, something I guess I never noticed before… oh, I mean, I did notice, but the implication didn't hit me until now because of the full-frontal distraction, but…"

Yikes. Speaking of operating systems, difficult was failing to load.

Sasuke sighed. "Word vomit again." He looked along the puddle dotted walkway, then out toward the courtyard, the torrential downpour drowned the benches. There was even standing water in the zen garden, where a mini-flood had overwhelmed the sand underneath. No zen on this newly formed pond unless the ripples from the raindrops counted. "I hope I don't need to sit down for this?"

"Well, probably not. It's a question, actually, but-" I glanced at Yukimura. "It might be related to some sensitive information … maybe I should ask in private." Yuki had trouble with the concept of 'girl.' I couldn't imagine how he would deal with the concept of 'girl born 450 years from now is standing in front of you, and oh by the way, your best friend also won't be born for another 450 years either.'

"Hey!" Yukimura scowled at me. "Sasuke and I share our sensitive stuff all the time."

With a wince, Sasuke patted Yuki's shoulder. "Again. Agree with the sentiment, but not the wording. Whatever it is, I don't mind Yuki hearing."

Uhhhh.

The blunt question, 'are you a time traveler' stuck in my throat. I couldn't risk an over-the-top response from Yukimura. Better to ask indirectly. If Sasuke was what I thought he was, he would understand, and if not, he would shrug it off as a weird question. But it was a question that any modern nerd would know the answer to, and I realized that Sasuke had a strong layer of nerd under that ninja mask. "Sasuke… what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

"African or Euro-" was his automatic response, before his eyes got wide behind those plastic frames. "When?"

I wanted to hug him in relief. "Which when? Do you mean, when did I leave, or when did I arrive?"

Yuki's head ping-ponged between the two of us. "What am I missing?"

Sasuke ignored him. "Both."

I reeled off the date that Toshiie and I had gone up to the Togakushi Shrine to argue about my freerunning risk taking. "When we arrived here it was late 1575. The twelfth month... December," I amended, knowing that Sasuke would be familiar with the Gregorian calendar.

He seemed to be doing math in his head. Wait, of course he was doing math in his head. "Ok, so you left …" he glanced at Yuki "your village about the time I started researching temporal anomalies, but I hadn't pinpointed any yet-"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Yuki interrupted. "Temple abnormalities? Is this about the Ikkō-ikki?"

Sasuke pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's a long story that I will try to explain later– Yuki, please get Mai and tell her to meet us in my room."

"Don't start the story without me!" Yuki looked annoyed at being ordered off in the middle of a conversation, but he did as Sasuke requested.

"I need paper." Sasuke seemed to be talking to himself. He turned and headed toward his quarters without checking to see if I was following him. "I studied weather patterns, researching back nearly ten years and there weren't any strange storms at Honno-ji that year."

"What's Honno-ji got to do with it?" I hurried to keep up with him – thank God he hadn't decided to short cut through the ceiling this time. "Oh, the storm." I remembered the storm in Kyoto the night that Nobunaga was almost assassinated. Is that when Sasuke came… no, that didn't fit. I had met Sasuke three years before that happened. "Toshiie and I were brought here by a storm, but we weren't anywhere near Kyoto. We were in Nagano, at the Togakushi Shrine."

Sasuke halted, and I nearly plowed right into him. "There's another wormhole? Holy crap on a cracker… or does the one at Honno-ji move around?"

I figured that was rhetorical, since this was the first time I'd heard anyone mention a wormhole.

When we reached his room, he dove for a scroll of paper, scribbling math like a mad scientist… which I guess he was, when he wasn't a ninja… and… holy crap on a cracker indeed, how did that come about? "What is it that you did in the future?"

He muttered something along the lines of Theoretical Physics, but he was deeply plugged into his data already, so I took a moment to look around his room – I didn't see anything that looked like a time machine, but how had he gotten his hands on a telescope?

The rattle of paper indicated that Sasuke was still in computation mode, so I kept discretely poking around his room - I envied that he had a hearth in it like most of the upper echelon of warlords. It was clear sign of Kenshin's affection and respect. He may have started out as a scientist, but he was now an important part of Kasugayama.

From outside the room I heard Mai's exasperated voice. "Yuki, slow down! My legs are not as long as yours?!" By the time Yuki pulled into the room, she was half out of breath. She took in the sight of Sasuke in the middle of a labyrinth of scrolls on the floor. "What's the big emergency?"

"Stand back. He's trying science." (I've always wanted to say that).

Sasuke freed one hand to give me a fist bump. Then he glanced up at Mai. "Mai, Katsuko is from… where we are."

Mai too? Duh. Of course, she is. Sasuke had always said they were from the "same village." It was stupid of me to have forgotten that.

"Oh my God? Really?" Mai squealed and hugged me. "How long have you been here? Were you at Honno-ji too? Were you scared? Wait… your brother… him too? When did it-"

I was trying to keep track of her questions in order, but before I got too caught up, Yuki interrupted us.

"I don't understand," Yuki said. "If all three of you come from the same village, how come you didn't know each other already?"

I looked from Mai to Sasuke, deciding to let them handle that one.

"Kenshin already knows, so I don't care if you tell Yuki." Mai gave Yuki the kind of look generally reserved for annoying younger brothers. "If you think he'll understand."

"Shut it boar woman." Yuki returned the look. "I'm not the dummy who nearly ran off a cliff."

"That was my first night here… things were confusing." Mai directed her comments at me. "There was a storm and a fire and an assassination attempt."

"Oh my." God, I've missed being able to cap quotes.

"Yuki," Sasuke explained. "We're not exactly from the same place. We're from the same time… about five hundred years in the future. A wormhole – a tunnel in space and time- brought us here."

"Huh." He scratched his head and glanced at where Sasuke's telescope was pointed out the window. "Alright, I know you guys wouldn't lie to me-" he paused and gave me the side eye.

Mai kicked him. "Rude."

He rubbed his shin and glared at her. "Stop that!"

"It's ok Mai. He's right. I would lie… but I don't have the kind of imagination to make something like this up, and when I do make stuff up, I avoid coming up with things that would make the listener doubt my sanity." Because even in my own time, if someone came to me claiming to be a time traveler, I would probably not believe them.

"I still have the things I had with me when I came through," Mai said. "That helped convince people."

"Toshiie and I got attacked by bandits, like minutes after we… landed? Appeared? All I had left was my clothing. But after almost seven years, those have since disintegrated. Although I think somewhere I still have my IC card." It had been in my pocket, so it hadn't been lost with everything else. Of course, it was still in my quarters at Aki's so it wasn't like I'd be able to produce it on demand.

"Seven years?" Mai sounded shocked. "I've only been here a couple months. But I decided to stay, so I suppose at some point, I will have been here seven years."

"Decided? There's a way to go back?" I'd stopped thinking about that possibility long ago, having figured that whatever quirk of fate that brought me here had been a one in a million event.

Sasuke was frantically scribbling math – physics? – calculations. "The wormhole opens occasionally at Honno-ji. If Togakushi is another node then that alters things considerably." He muttered to himself. "I can't go much further without a clear sky." He indicated his telescope. "The short answer is that it's possible to go back, but I need more data to give you an exact time. Honno-ji will open sometime next month. No idea about Togakushi."

"Do you want to go back?" Mai asked. "When I first got here, it was all I could think about, but now I can't imagine living anywhere else."

"Moot point. I can't abandon Toshiie." I plopped down on Sasuke's futon – looked like we were going to be here a while. Sasuke grabbed another scroll so violently that it unrolled across the room.

Yuki picked up the scroll and tossed back to Sasuke. "Wait. Sasuke… does that mean you're going to go back? And Katsu, when you find your brother, you'll leave too?" He sounded a bit sad about the possibility of both of us leaving … which was flattering, especially considering recent events.

"I never thought it was possible, so I put it out of my mind." I was used to it here, and I felt like I was living a more purposeful life than I had been in the future. "I don't even know what I would return to – I've been careful not to do anything that would alter the future, but I killed that sniper a few weeks back, and well, even before that – Yuki shut your ears – well, you probably noticed there are people who supposedly died before now, but… didn't."

Sasuke raised his hand. "Saved Kenshin."

Mai raised hers too. "Saved Nobunaga."

Geez, no wonder the timeline was haywire. "You two are the butterflies?"

"Ugh, don't mention butterflies," Sasuke said. "Katsuko, don't worry. The timeline you came from is unaltered. We're in a different one, but if you go back, you'll return to your own timeline, not the future of this one."

I think I understood that. "So, we're in a multiverse?"

"Theoretically," Sasuke added.

"My brother had the scientific brain in my family. If he sent me a message – like in a time capsule – in the hopes that I made it home and was looking for him in history, would that time capsule be in the future of this timeline, or the future of the one we came from?" I hoped I had phrased that right.

"This timeline, not your original one." Sasuke paused in his calculations. "Theoretically."

I'm starting to hate that word.

Yuki groaned, lay on the floor and flung his hand over his eyes. "This is too weird for me. Wake me up when you start talking about stuff that's important in the present."

"Actually." Sasuke continued, a feverish light gleaming in his eyes, "It could be in an infinite number of future timelines."

Oh… I was beginning to feel sympathy for Yuki – it was starting to feel overwhelming. It sounded like the best way to find my brother was to continue as I had been.

"There's much that's still unknown," Sasuke said. "Mai and I were transported from the same moment, but we arrived four years apart. I never have figured out why." He returned to his frantic mathing. It's not all that exciting to watch someone do math, so I listened to Mai talk about her life as a fashion designer, and what happened to her the day she'd been sent back in time.

Somewhere in the middle of that, Yuki fell asleep, snoring so loudly that walls vibrated. Or well, I suppose that could have still been the rain.

"Hm," Sasuke said a while later. He'd filled several papers with scribblings. He'd also repurposed one of his Ninja wires and had constructed a mobile of some kind which was either a model of the world… or he'd gotten off track and played a short game of cat's cradle. "I'm left with two competing hypotheses. One is that the wormhole anchors at both Honno-ji and Togakushi – and possibly other places- and any of us could use either location to travel back and forth to the future, whenever it opens."

A loud snore from Yukimura alerted us to the fact that he was still out for the count.

Sasuke pushed his glasses further up on the bridge of his nose and continued. "That's the one I'm leaning toward, pending further data. However, there's a non-zero chance that the Togakushi node anchors this timeline to a different one. Meaning that if I… or Mai… went through at Togakushi – we could potentially run into that timeline's version of ourselves, or if Katsuko went through at Honno-ji, the same thing could happen. Or the timeline would try to self-correct, and send us through to a completely different future, one in which we either never existed, or were no longer alive. Theoretically."

I knew I was beginning to hate that word.

"Or it could even-" He broke off and tilted his head toward the corridor.

The bell at the guard station was clanging … and there was the sound of running feet in the corridor…

Voices… lots of them… yelling.

The door to Sasuke's room slid open. Shingen stood at the threshold. He looked us all over, although his gaze iced over and slid past me. "Yukimura! Sasuke!"

At his voice, Yukimura woke up with a start, and was instantly alert.

"Emergency council. Come on." He strode away. Vassals and guardsmen were rushing past the door.

Mai clutched my arm. "What? Are we under attack? Is Kenshin going to war?"

"It can't be a war… there's not been any hint of it," Sasuke muttered as he transformed from Scientist to Ninja. Ok, seriously, that's some superhero shit right there.

"He's right – no one would attack without us getting a warning." And Shingen would have gotten that warning. Nothing happened in this part of the country that he wasn't aware of. "There's no one around here who could attack us without warning." You can't move an army across Japan without somebody noticing, and Shingen had an entire network of people whose job it was to notice that kind of thing.

Sasuke and Yukimura were already out the door. Without needing to consult each other, Mai and I followed. Even if it wasn't a pending battle, it was clearly urgent. Though Mai and I hadn't been specifically invited, I doubted Kenshin would send her away if she showed up, and I planned to stick close to her.

The meeting hall was semi-organized chaos, and hard to hear anything specific over shouted instructions and the rain pounding on the roof. Kenshin was directing the Uesegi, Takeda and Imagawa forces into three groups. "Shingen will go upriver and try to divert—"

Yuki stood toe to toe with Shingen, yelling at him. "Not in this weather, you'd be the worst kind of fool to risk-"

Shingen said something back to Yukimura, but Kenshin's shouts took precedence again. "—lead the people to higher ground if the fortifications fail."

"Are you sure we're not under attack?" Mai gazed at Kenshin's battle face. She was still holding onto my arm, and her nails dug into my skin.

Upriver…

Divert…

Higher ground…

"No." I looked toward the window, where sheets of water were still pouring from the sky – had been pouring from the sky for the past two days. "It's the river. It's flooding… and there are dozens of little villages in its path."