::Author's Note::
Okay, the most important thing, I suppose, is the disclaimer. I don't own "Inu-Yasha" or any of the related characters. I probably never will. It took awhile, but I have moved on.
Now, the real thing I intended to be most important (then I thought of the disclaimer ^_^;;) is the changing of The Code. In the previous chapter,
~text~
meant thought. It has been modified. NOW,
text
stands for thought! Just thought y'all'd like to be let in on that little secret. The rest of The Code still stands.
*text* emphasis
/text/ something in Japanese and should therefore being italicized in a perfect world
\text\ flashback. Should be easy to distinguish from the backslash considering how the text won't be in Japanese. ^_^
On with it!
It's the year 2303 and the human population is in the trillions, scattered among any number of colony worlds. They are ruled by the supreme military power, the Union and held together only by the war. The war has been underway for more than one hundred and fifty years, since the human race first began to colonize other worlds and they met their first other sentient life form. The Youkai, however, are not friendly and they have been trying to destroy the human race since contact. Nyoko Higurashi and her apprentice and daughter, Kagome Higurashi, are the newest scientists to the military community on the military-run planet of Swenson. Their project? Continue the work of the late Kikyou Shimiko; create a being capable of fighting the Youkai for the humans. But is half youkai too much? Or not enough?
The Hanyou Project
Phase Two
"Learning What One Can"
By Jann
"You called?"
Nyoko let her eyes drift from the new desktop to her daughter's glum face. They had replaced it within the hour as promised and the new one was a model slightly older than the one Nyoko had recently purchased for her children. The display platform was bigger, though, and it may have been used, but it was not abused and many of the pre-sets from it's former user were comforting.
Kagome seemed unhappy, but Nyoko assumed that was to be expected. She had just been uprooted from her home of seventeen years and probably talked on the phone with Yuka preceding Nyoko's call to her laptop. It really wasn't fair of Nyoko to expect her daughter to jump right into her work like *she* had for so many years before she had met Kagome's father. Nyoko was older than she seemed, though she hadn't found any need to tell her children that yet. She had become a military scientist only a few years before the start of the war, 150 years before. Since then, she had traveled from planet to planet, working under different generals. Usually they were a bit closer to one another than Swenson and Ko, though.
It was Kagome and Souta's father that had convinced her to stay on Ko, where she had grown up. After his death, it had been Kagome and Souta that kept her there. Then she had gotten the call. This project seemed so much more promising than any she had been offered before! Merely reading the seemingly impossible abstract had excited the scientist in her that she had been sure was dead. Now, with the full report before on the display platform, she couldn't help but want to share the research with her daughter, who had always expressed the same vigor Nyoko remembered in the years of her apprenticeship.
This work will heal her, Nyoko insisted to herself, but she wasn't sure.
"Yes!" Nyoko said, her eyes shining. "Kagome, come here and read this report!"
Kagome nodded and began to amble across the room. But she stopped dead when she saw the experiments that littered the right wall, namely the large tank containing the humanoid form. Her course changed quickly and she forgot about her mother entirely. She glanced at the other animals, ranging from rats to primates, but her gaze immediately returned to the tank containing the man-like entity.
"That's what this is about, Kagome, that . . ." Nyoko trailed off, unsure of what to call the test subject. She realized her apprentice wasn't listening anyway.
The right to gape was entirely hers, anyway. The tall tank held something unheard of, even in the world of military science. How Kikyou Shimiko had gotten the clearance to perform such trials was beyond Nyoko and furthermore, why the project was handed to *Nyoko* was even more perplexing. Hadn't she remained dormant in the community of military science for almost twenty years? Why had they called on her, of all people?
Because they were running out of time.
It was a grasping answer, but it was the only one Nyoko could think of.
"Mom . . ." Kagome murmured, obviously thinking something along the same lines as Nyoko about the ethics involved in the Hanyou Project.
One thing is for certain, Nyoko thought dryly, we will definitely hear from the courts before this is all done, hand-me-down project or none.
Kagome ran her hand, fingernails painted in a deep red-brown polish that was thirty-three years out of date, over the front of the tank. "Mom, what is he?"
" 'It,' Kag," Nyoko corrected softly.
Kagome flashed her mother an angry glance, but her eyes immediately returned to the tank. "He's not an 'it,' Mom, he's a 'he.' I don't care what the book says. I can't believe anyone ever got exoneration for this."
So. Kagome *had* been thinking along the same lines. "/Gomen,/ Kag," Nyoko sighed, because she knew her daughter was right. The thing in the freezing cell *wasn't* an it, but a he. Because no matter what other sort of blood runs -- or rather, ran, considering the suspended animation -- through his veins, some of it is clearly human.
"He's so beautiful," Kagome murmured, letting her hand come to a rest over his nose, the two of them separated only by the strong glass of the freezing compartment.
She was right. He was beautiful. There was no other word for the . . . hanyou, was it? The term made sense, Nyoko knew, from the reports she had begun to read. Kikyou was Japanese, so it seemed fitting that she had would place him with the Japanese equivalent of whatever Corp title he was given. In all truth, the Youkai had been discovered by a Japanese colony and called they had deemed them: demons. Hanyou -- "half demon" -- made perfect sense.
The hanyou, with the shape of a man, seemed almost peaceful within the tank. However, Nyoko had read that Kikyou had quickly learned that he had a temper and refused to be kept behind bars in the holding room. Evidently the doctor had practically lived in her lab anyway, so she had created a sort of shrine for him. Everything had been cleared away after she had died though and all of his possessions had been discarded. Nyoko had read hungrily about the hanyou for an hour before she thought to call her apprentice. He was stubborn and he was temperamental. He picked on the other scientists when they came to "observe" him and he was declared too irritable by many to be of any use in an army.
Yet Kikyou kept him around, she kept studying him until the day whatever it was that caused her death came by, Nyoko reflected. She saw something in him. Or perhaps was it that . . . she was just lonely?
Kagome didn't let her eyes leave the face of the hanyou. His hair was long and silver and topped with two ears that looked remarkably like those of a dog. Of course, Youkai had the forms of many animals a lot like the ones that had come from earth, hundreds of years before. It would make sense for pointed, silver ears to grace the head of a hanyou.
Hanyou. Even in her mind, the word seemed odd and clumsy. Unreal. She continued with her observations. Kikyou had dressed him in a red kimono, but it was still obvious that he was quite fit. He has the body of a soldier, Kagome realized. Her gaze traveled down and she saw that his hands ended in pointed claws. Exactly how far did the Youkai-ness go, anyway? His body looked mostly human; how was his mind?
"Let's open him," Kagome ventured suddenly, her eyes glinting dangerously, removing her fingertips and turning her gaze to her mother.
Nyoko sighed. "Kag, we can't."
"And why not? This is our project, isn't it?"
"Of course we've been given the amnesty to do as we please, Kagome, but goes beyond that." Nyoko took her daughter's hand and led her away from the tanks. "Kikyou was the one to freeze him, *not* the military. They can't open him. Believe me, they've tried."
Nyoko sat down in front of the desktop and Kagome leaned over at her right. Nyoko tapped a bit on the keyboard and brought up the final document on the disk the general had given her. She isolated a paragraph on the display platform and Kagome read it aloud over her mother's shoulder.
" 'One week before she died on September 27, 2270, Dr. Kikyou Shimiko cut off access to her lab. When Admiral Smit looked into the matter after her demise, he found each subject intact in the holding room except one. The human hanyou had been frozen. After several unsuccessful attempts by the technicians to disable Shimiko's locks on the cell, her notes were searched. She made no mention of the freezing of her most important specimen. The rest of the subjects were put into a frozen sleep in wait of a new doctor.' Ai," Kagome finished, leaning back onto the balls of her feet. "I guess she didn't want anyone messing with her baby."
Nyoko chuckled bitterly. "The funny thing is, she didn't erase any of her files or anything. She just froze him and locked him in such a way that no one could open him except her."
"That's crazy," Kagome mused. "What are we supposed to do, make another?"
Nyoko shook her head vigorously. "Evidently, Kikyou's approval for this project was judged before the medical community before she created this hanyou and she was only granted permission by a slim margin. There's no way we would get clearance to make another."
"Then what's the point of the experiment, Mom?" Kagome asked, letting her eyes drift to the hanyou again. He looked so harmless in his sleep. "I thought the idea was to make beings that could defeat the Youkai in space battle and hand-to-hand combat on planet surfaces."
Nyoko shook her head again. "Well, you're right on the first part, of course," she admitted. "But that about hand-to-hand, that's all propaganda. Even our little friend over there would have no chance against a real Youkai, or at least, not one with any real power. He is still half-human, after all."
"So he's to be a military genius, a strategist, then?" Kagome asked.
"The thing is, Kag, his purpose was never made entirely clear. This Kikyou must have been near insane to want to create him and her co-workers paralyzed with fear to allow her. Kikyou ended this project before you were born, during the --"
"During the Stoic Invasion, I know. No one wanted to fight because the Youkai were just so damn *powerful,* but they all knew they needed to do *something.* This was one of the many stabs at a breakthrough, huh?" Kagome asked.
"Yes. This is just the kind of thing that would have been accepted during the Stoic Invasion," Nyoko agreed.
"You're wondering why they called you to it now," Kagome said.
She had read her mother's thoughts.
"Is urgency up again, Mom? Is there going to be another invasion?" Kagome asked tenetivly, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.
"It's . . . it's difficult to speculate with the military, Kag. I really don't know. I would say it's an extreme possibility, though."
"Gods help us.""Indeed."
::Author's Note::
Sorry, this 'un is short, isn't it ... ^^;; ... the next'll be longer. There wasn't really another point of view to take yet, though and I decided to save Inu-Yasha's opening for later. Help me out here! Review! *Please!*
Okay, the most important thing, I suppose, is the disclaimer. I don't own "Inu-Yasha" or any of the related characters. I probably never will. It took awhile, but I have moved on.
Now, the real thing I intended to be most important (then I thought of the disclaimer ^_^;;) is the changing of The Code. In the previous chapter,
~text~
meant thought. It has been modified. NOW,
text
stands for thought! Just thought y'all'd like to be let in on that little secret. The rest of The Code still stands.
*text* emphasis
/text/ something in Japanese and should therefore being italicized in a perfect world
\text\ flashback. Should be easy to distinguish from the backslash considering how the text won't be in Japanese. ^_^
On with it!
It's the year 2303 and the human population is in the trillions, scattered among any number of colony worlds. They are ruled by the supreme military power, the Union and held together only by the war. The war has been underway for more than one hundred and fifty years, since the human race first began to colonize other worlds and they met their first other sentient life form. The Youkai, however, are not friendly and they have been trying to destroy the human race since contact. Nyoko Higurashi and her apprentice and daughter, Kagome Higurashi, are the newest scientists to the military community on the military-run planet of Swenson. Their project? Continue the work of the late Kikyou Shimiko; create a being capable of fighting the Youkai for the humans. But is half youkai too much? Or not enough?
The Hanyou Project
Phase Two
"Learning What One Can"
By Jann
"You called?"
Nyoko let her eyes drift from the new desktop to her daughter's glum face. They had replaced it within the hour as promised and the new one was a model slightly older than the one Nyoko had recently purchased for her children. The display platform was bigger, though, and it may have been used, but it was not abused and many of the pre-sets from it's former user were comforting.
Kagome seemed unhappy, but Nyoko assumed that was to be expected. She had just been uprooted from her home of seventeen years and probably talked on the phone with Yuka preceding Nyoko's call to her laptop. It really wasn't fair of Nyoko to expect her daughter to jump right into her work like *she* had for so many years before she had met Kagome's father. Nyoko was older than she seemed, though she hadn't found any need to tell her children that yet. She had become a military scientist only a few years before the start of the war, 150 years before. Since then, she had traveled from planet to planet, working under different generals. Usually they were a bit closer to one another than Swenson and Ko, though.
It was Kagome and Souta's father that had convinced her to stay on Ko, where she had grown up. After his death, it had been Kagome and Souta that kept her there. Then she had gotten the call. This project seemed so much more promising than any she had been offered before! Merely reading the seemingly impossible abstract had excited the scientist in her that she had been sure was dead. Now, with the full report before on the display platform, she couldn't help but want to share the research with her daughter, who had always expressed the same vigor Nyoko remembered in the years of her apprenticeship.
This work will heal her, Nyoko insisted to herself, but she wasn't sure.
"Yes!" Nyoko said, her eyes shining. "Kagome, come here and read this report!"
Kagome nodded and began to amble across the room. But she stopped dead when she saw the experiments that littered the right wall, namely the large tank containing the humanoid form. Her course changed quickly and she forgot about her mother entirely. She glanced at the other animals, ranging from rats to primates, but her gaze immediately returned to the tank containing the man-like entity.
"That's what this is about, Kagome, that . . ." Nyoko trailed off, unsure of what to call the test subject. She realized her apprentice wasn't listening anyway.
The right to gape was entirely hers, anyway. The tall tank held something unheard of, even in the world of military science. How Kikyou Shimiko had gotten the clearance to perform such trials was beyond Nyoko and furthermore, why the project was handed to *Nyoko* was even more perplexing. Hadn't she remained dormant in the community of military science for almost twenty years? Why had they called on her, of all people?
Because they were running out of time.
It was a grasping answer, but it was the only one Nyoko could think of.
"Mom . . ." Kagome murmured, obviously thinking something along the same lines as Nyoko about the ethics involved in the Hanyou Project.
One thing is for certain, Nyoko thought dryly, we will definitely hear from the courts before this is all done, hand-me-down project or none.
Kagome ran her hand, fingernails painted in a deep red-brown polish that was thirty-three years out of date, over the front of the tank. "Mom, what is he?"
" 'It,' Kag," Nyoko corrected softly.
Kagome flashed her mother an angry glance, but her eyes immediately returned to the tank. "He's not an 'it,' Mom, he's a 'he.' I don't care what the book says. I can't believe anyone ever got exoneration for this."
So. Kagome *had* been thinking along the same lines. "/Gomen,/ Kag," Nyoko sighed, because she knew her daughter was right. The thing in the freezing cell *wasn't* an it, but a he. Because no matter what other sort of blood runs -- or rather, ran, considering the suspended animation -- through his veins, some of it is clearly human.
"He's so beautiful," Kagome murmured, letting her hand come to a rest over his nose, the two of them separated only by the strong glass of the freezing compartment.
She was right. He was beautiful. There was no other word for the . . . hanyou, was it? The term made sense, Nyoko knew, from the reports she had begun to read. Kikyou was Japanese, so it seemed fitting that she had would place him with the Japanese equivalent of whatever Corp title he was given. In all truth, the Youkai had been discovered by a Japanese colony and called they had deemed them: demons. Hanyou -- "half demon" -- made perfect sense.
The hanyou, with the shape of a man, seemed almost peaceful within the tank. However, Nyoko had read that Kikyou had quickly learned that he had a temper and refused to be kept behind bars in the holding room. Evidently the doctor had practically lived in her lab anyway, so she had created a sort of shrine for him. Everything had been cleared away after she had died though and all of his possessions had been discarded. Nyoko had read hungrily about the hanyou for an hour before she thought to call her apprentice. He was stubborn and he was temperamental. He picked on the other scientists when they came to "observe" him and he was declared too irritable by many to be of any use in an army.
Yet Kikyou kept him around, she kept studying him until the day whatever it was that caused her death came by, Nyoko reflected. She saw something in him. Or perhaps was it that . . . she was just lonely?
Kagome didn't let her eyes leave the face of the hanyou. His hair was long and silver and topped with two ears that looked remarkably like those of a dog. Of course, Youkai had the forms of many animals a lot like the ones that had come from earth, hundreds of years before. It would make sense for pointed, silver ears to grace the head of a hanyou.
Hanyou. Even in her mind, the word seemed odd and clumsy. Unreal. She continued with her observations. Kikyou had dressed him in a red kimono, but it was still obvious that he was quite fit. He has the body of a soldier, Kagome realized. Her gaze traveled down and she saw that his hands ended in pointed claws. Exactly how far did the Youkai-ness go, anyway? His body looked mostly human; how was his mind?
"Let's open him," Kagome ventured suddenly, her eyes glinting dangerously, removing her fingertips and turning her gaze to her mother.
Nyoko sighed. "Kag, we can't."
"And why not? This is our project, isn't it?"
"Of course we've been given the amnesty to do as we please, Kagome, but goes beyond that." Nyoko took her daughter's hand and led her away from the tanks. "Kikyou was the one to freeze him, *not* the military. They can't open him. Believe me, they've tried."
Nyoko sat down in front of the desktop and Kagome leaned over at her right. Nyoko tapped a bit on the keyboard and brought up the final document on the disk the general had given her. She isolated a paragraph on the display platform and Kagome read it aloud over her mother's shoulder.
" 'One week before she died on September 27, 2270, Dr. Kikyou Shimiko cut off access to her lab. When Admiral Smit looked into the matter after her demise, he found each subject intact in the holding room except one. The human hanyou had been frozen. After several unsuccessful attempts by the technicians to disable Shimiko's locks on the cell, her notes were searched. She made no mention of the freezing of her most important specimen. The rest of the subjects were put into a frozen sleep in wait of a new doctor.' Ai," Kagome finished, leaning back onto the balls of her feet. "I guess she didn't want anyone messing with her baby."
Nyoko chuckled bitterly. "The funny thing is, she didn't erase any of her files or anything. She just froze him and locked him in such a way that no one could open him except her."
"That's crazy," Kagome mused. "What are we supposed to do, make another?"
Nyoko shook her head vigorously. "Evidently, Kikyou's approval for this project was judged before the medical community before she created this hanyou and she was only granted permission by a slim margin. There's no way we would get clearance to make another."
"Then what's the point of the experiment, Mom?" Kagome asked, letting her eyes drift to the hanyou again. He looked so harmless in his sleep. "I thought the idea was to make beings that could defeat the Youkai in space battle and hand-to-hand combat on planet surfaces."
Nyoko shook her head again. "Well, you're right on the first part, of course," she admitted. "But that about hand-to-hand, that's all propaganda. Even our little friend over there would have no chance against a real Youkai, or at least, not one with any real power. He is still half-human, after all."
"So he's to be a military genius, a strategist, then?" Kagome asked.
"The thing is, Kag, his purpose was never made entirely clear. This Kikyou must have been near insane to want to create him and her co-workers paralyzed with fear to allow her. Kikyou ended this project before you were born, during the --"
"During the Stoic Invasion, I know. No one wanted to fight because the Youkai were just so damn *powerful,* but they all knew they needed to do *something.* This was one of the many stabs at a breakthrough, huh?" Kagome asked.
"Yes. This is just the kind of thing that would have been accepted during the Stoic Invasion," Nyoko agreed.
"You're wondering why they called you to it now," Kagome said.
She had read her mother's thoughts.
"Is urgency up again, Mom? Is there going to be another invasion?" Kagome asked tenetivly, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.
"It's . . . it's difficult to speculate with the military, Kag. I really don't know. I would say it's an extreme possibility, though."
"Gods help us.""Indeed."
::Author's Note::
Sorry, this 'un is short, isn't it ... ^^;; ... the next'll be longer. There wasn't really another point of view to take yet, though and I decided to save Inu-Yasha's opening for later. Help me out here! Review! *Please!*
