Wow. Two updates in almost as many days. I'm getting all hot and bothered here... (pulls at neck collar) No, really, I am. It's bloody hot where I'm at right now, mostly because my parents believe that the heat in a house should never fall below ninety degrees, assuming, of course, it drops below ninety-five in the first place. (Sweatdrop)
Me, now, I like the cold! Put the thermostat on sixty and I'm pretty much set on dancing! Whoo hoo!
Ah well. You guys aren't here to hear me gripe. So, I'll strip down to my underwear (just kidding! Just kidding! Sheesh...) and then proceed to declare it...
"SHOWTIME!"
Chapter Fourteen
Fearful Dreams
Streets, leading away from Jenny's apartment building, Tokyo, Japan, a.m., Night of the Mark. 4:20 a.m.
We flap our wings as we sail through the night sky of Tokyo, enjoying the feel of the night breeze on our wings (well, not really; we kind of can't feel anything, since, technically speaking, we don't even exist here, in this world) and generally just loafing along as we wait for the next great event of this night to take place. This night has been filled with action ever since its start; even now, as the moon finally begins to go down beneath the hills and the world enters a period of darkness where neither sun nor moon brighten the sky, where only cold, faint points of light we call stars burn in the heavens, even in this twilight darkness, it isn't over yet. As the heroes if this world either go home, their parts in this fight finished (Yugo, stumbling in through his doorway and, averting his eyes from the bloodstain on the floor where Kenji tried to take his own life, going off to find paper towels to clean up the long-dried blood, is one of these), or charge on, their parts just begun (Stun, staring up into a blasted sky where rain, white, swollen rain, like flesh-fed maggots, waits to drop with almost sickening plops onto the concrete surface of Tokyo, where the rain that once blasted outside the Mansion de Leo has dried up and now awaits, flickering, fitfully spinning in the cover of clouds it has made for itself, for the time when it will smash down and blast apart everything it touches, from concrete to flesh, from leaves to skulls, is one of these heroes), we fly over it all and wonder how it will all turn out.
There is a chance, of course, that it will turn out all right; those who believe otherwise are more than fools, they are worse than fools, because they drag others down with them in a course that can only lead to self-hate and discrimination against those who believe otherwise. There is also a chance, of course, that everything will go wrong; but those who honestly believe that it will all go wrong are even more foolish than those who believe that, even if some of it turns out okay, most of it will be bad; those who think it will all go wrong have missed the many times in history that things have not only not gone all wrong, but have turned out all right. The Nazis, for example, were monsters; but they were stopped, in the end, as all evil is. Evil cannot stand by itself; despite everything the popular culture of Japan apparently believes (juding by both its movies and its lore), Good and Evil do not need each other to counterbalance themselves. Good is perfectly capable of standing on its own; it needs nothing to make it more stable, nor does it require any sort of "helping hand" or "culling force" (as Evil has been called, from time to time, by men and women who should have known better and yet for some reason don't) to make it more stable. Evil is dumb and dull; unlike Good, which has both Creation and Destruction inside of itself and is, henceforth, perfectly disposed to take care of its own business, Evil cannot Create, and so must Destroy. Destruction is not a bad thing, not always; but Destruction without Creation is merely Decay, and that is, in the end, what Evil is. Evil cannot stand alone; it must have something to destroy for it to exist, and without a Good to smash against and tear down, Evil eventually turns on itself and self-destructs. Good has, and always will be, stronger than Evil for possessing the power of Creation. And so, in the end, I think that things will turn out all right.
Still... I could be wrong, couldn't I?
Yes indeed, I could be wrong.
But let's fly out into this night and see, shall we? Because no matter what happens here, rather I am right and everything turns out okay in the end or rather I am wrong and everything falls down and shatters, we are here to record it, and that is what we shall do. Watch, record, know, see; that is our duty, and we shall discharge such duty with all the honor we can muster and whatever courage we may find. We were not sent here just because we care about what happens on this world (though we all do, each in their own way; for my part, I want to know what happens to Yugo and Stun more than anyone else here); we were sent because each of us have the power, have the ability, to see what is happening in this world, with the minimal amount of fuss over who is who and what is what. All of us know a little about this world, knew a little before we ever came here, and so we are perfectly suited to view it, because the time we need to adjust to this world (time we really don't have; this one night has brought with it more changes to more people than perhaps any other night in history, with a few exceptions) is small, just as the time available to adjust to this world is small. Now that we are (mostly) adjusted here, it is our solemn duty to watch and see what it happening. It is not asked that we understand, though with watching may come experience, and of experience all things are born; but understanding is not required of us. Not now, or ever.
We fly.
-
Rooftops of Tokyo, a.m.
We flap our wings and with one step, are above the cloud cover; in the next, working off the force of our will (gravity only affects us when we want it too; it's kind of a convenient way to remember where the ground is, vital when flying so you don't lose your sense of balance) we fly down below it and approach the rooftops of Tokyo in a banked glide. As we fly down, not flapping our wings and merely watching as the ground passses us by, we see the one we are looking for, running along the rooftops (as he has so many times in the past and so many times this night) and heading towards Yugo's house. It is Stun, and as this hero runs through the night, he ponders over the events of the day. Having no knowledge of the occurrences elsewhere in this world, where Kenji tried to take his own life, where Uranus attempted to electrocute the household of Alan Gado and left a great hole in his roof through which rain will soon pour, puddling up on the marble floor after hard, vicious strikes against it, Stun merely finds the events of the night odd. The first event, his battle with the thugs (battles, we should say; the fight we watched was merely the first he had this night, and though all of them would have been fun in the extreme to have watched, we are not here for our own enjoyment), is merely an everyday happening to him and is dismissed quickly from thought. Another is, in his mind, simply a random occurence (it should be noted here that nothing is random; everything really does have a purpose in the end, though those purposes are usually vague and at best are not usually very clear), and so he dismisses Shenlong from his thoughts as well, other than a quick pause to wonder how the Zoanthrope clone is doing. The third event, the one that has catapulted him through the night air to reach his friend Yugo's house, is the one that he does not dismiss from his mind, because to him it is the only really important occurrence this night.
It would probably be funny to tell Stun that, of the three events this night, it is actually the least important in the long run; in the end, every Zoanthrope has suffered tonight, except Stun, and so the thing that happened to Jenny is merely another normal happening in this long strange night. Of the events, the most important may well be the fight with the thugs, his first fight, the one we witnessed; not important in what happened during it, but in what happened after it. The woman who spoke to Stun, who said "Thank you" and with those two simple words may have sparked a change in Stun more important and more deep than any that his friends could have started (because you expect your friends to love you, you expect your friends to tell you it's okay, and it's alright... but from strangers you expect nothing but truth) may well be the most important person of the many present tonight, because most of what is happening can be linked directly back to what happened (and is happening) on the rooftop of the Mishiyama Corp. and is henceforth merely of a "what happened after" nature in itself (Kenji's suicide being one of these), but the words she spoke to Stun were words spoken of free will, standing on their own, and of such things everything else is born. Stun heard those words and it has sparked a change in him, a change he does not, in a way, really know or understand but, like Shakespeare's famous Scottish general and would-be king, Macbeth, he realizes is happening; even now, when all the words have done is light a small spark in his heart, a little tiny light in the blackness, he realizes that something is happening to him. Macbeth endlessly soliloquized on how he was losing his soul and his mind; in the end, he did nothing to stop the destruction of either. Stun has been silent, so far, and probably will remain so- he's not one to ramble on about his own problems, said problems being immediately obvious when one merely looks at him- but unlike Macbeth, he is doing something about the changes in himself. He is politely ignoring it. Stun is, in a way, almost scared to think of what that woman said, even though it is in the back of his mind even now; he is afraid that, like a match that has had too much oxygen fed to it, it will go out, lose some of its potency, if he thinks of it now. So he leaves it alone. And that happy feeling, not exactly cheeriness and not exactly calmness, stays in the back of his mind, like a light held in the hands of a happy child.
Of course, that feeling is about as far back in his mind as possible. The words have lit a fire inside him; but it is a small fire, and the darkness both inside and outside of Stun is deep, and will take more than a little light to pierce. At the moment, concern for Jenny and thoughts about her condition fill his mind. The small brightness takes a back seat and merely watches the proceeding events with great interest.
As we follow with Stun, not really paying attention to the real world as we delve through Stun's thoughts and our own with all the pleasure that comes from highly intellectual games, we notice that something is happening. The world's getting a little darker... the light's not as bright as it once was... Stun notices this, too, and as we chase after him, he begins to slow down, to look around himself...
The explosion that shatters the building we are on shakes us from our reverie. Stun makes no noise as he falls, as glass shatters all around him, as a blast of incredible power shakes the city, as windows bust out and building tops crack and Stun falls through them, to fall far, far below, into the ick and blackness of the darkness so very far below. Our vision goes dark...
Something...
Teeth!...
We snap awake, our eyes seemingly having been shut even though, in both the technical and the realistic sense of the word, we can't close our eyes- it's impossible, nothing can make us blind. We can't even shut our eyes if we wish to. It's part of what we are. You literally can't make a memory blind. Hell, we don't even really have eyes. We notice (much to our unease), that we are apparently on the floor, lying flat on our backs, too. Which is even more wrong. Assuming that something could knock us out (which doesn't make any sense- we're memories, not living beings!, we should probably have passed through the floor after falling down. Physical things only affect us when we want them to. They don't just affect us "automatically"; we have to will them to. Even now, as some of us test out whether we can still do that or not (and get sucked through the rooftop in the process, flapping their wings gently as they fly up and through the rooftop to land shuddering atop it), we find that yes, our control over our perceptions of the physical realm is still as good as it was. We can still go through the rooftop if we wish, and view the bored clerk inside, reading a magazine full of the latest J-Pop articles. We can even read his mind, which is, admittedly, not something many people would have trouble with (he's quite dull, this one), and some of us do this too, even throwing out a few feelers to see if anyone else is in the area. We all send out our tentacles of thought and sight into the surrounding area, seeing if anything is amiss (and if our powers are still working). The answers are no to the first, yes to the latter. Our powers are fine and back to working... but that brings up the question of whether they ever quit working at all, or why if they did. After all, the rain did touch us, on the rooftop of the Mishiyama Corp., and so maybe, just maybe, whatever sent out that blast had the power to affect us too...
But that brings up the question of what in the hell did just happen, and if it affected anyone. Though we know the truth through the streams of consciousness we've sent all over this city (touching millions of lives in the process, getting glimpses of so very many souls, black and white and calm and crazy and good and bad and mean and kind), we must see the truth with our own eyes. So, dazedly, we begin to get up.
We get up (shakily), and look around. The rooftop's fine. In fact, so is this whole city. The glass windows we saw buckle and break are clean, the signs that we saw knocked askew and blown away by the force of the shock from the blast that echoed out into this city are standing up neatly, brightly lit up in neon, the wires we saw snap and splutter, whipping about like headless snakes, spewing electric death everywhere they touched are fine, whole, and emitting the almost subaudible humming that all power lines resonate with. We glance about, and everyone's fine... except Stun. We rush over to him, invisible as always but, just this once, his comrades and friends, fellow victims of whatever had just happened to us. We rush over, anxious, and bend over him to look.
He groans, and we all breathe a sigh of relief. A quick check reveals his entire body in functioning order- he's just dazed. Considering the great deal of turmoil and stress we all just underwent, he's gotten off pretty lucky. He leans up and holds his head in his hand, groaning. He shakes and shivers, then slowly stands up. We move to help him, but our help is mostly in silent encouragement. A few ghostly hands pass right through him before we give up the attempt and merely move aside, in a strange attempt to give "room" to the man standing up, even though he would, of course, merely pass right through us if he happened to accidentally cross over into one of us. Stun leans up, looks up, and as he stares into the night sky, he hears the rumble of thunder.
" What...?" he mumbles, head not really hurting, just simply reeling from what has happened to him. " What...? Horrid... something... ragged... snaggle-toothed jaws... oh... Oh God... what was that? What... was that...?" Stun gets up slowly, and as he gets up he shakes violently, scared to death for one of the few times in his life. We share his sentiments.
" What... was that...? What...." Stun looks about himself and, in his daze, sees nothing at all... for a moment. Then, his head swiveling towards us, he stops and stares, his yellow eyes growing huge as he stares at the air where we stand. Worried that he is seeing us (his mind is no help as to what he sees; it is totally blank right now, having "supped full of horrors", to quote Macbeth, and too stunned to think anything right now) and sure that, though a few minutes ago, we would dismiss that as impossible, now we are not so sure. The events of this night have convinced us utterly that what we once took for granted can never be the same, and that we are not as omnipotent as we thought we were. And that scares us. As anyone who is powerful can tell you, nothing is more terrifying than that which is more powerful than you. A strong man fears more than a weak man- why? The weak man is used to others being stronger, so he accepts it; a kind of default bravery, if you will. But a strong man knows he is strong, knows that others are weak compared to him- and so he is absolutely terrified when he meets someone who is stronger than he is. It is much the same thing we are feeling now; it's almost as if we have been toppled off our great height of omnipotence and taken down to the level of mere mortals. Of course, in other places and other times, we are mortals, but here, we're just memories, and we shouldn't be affected by anything happening here.
Anything.
Pondering these things and the sense of newfound fear in our hearts, we hesitantly move to see if Stun will follow us with his eyes. He doesn't. Instead, he continues to stare into the sky, eyes reaching ever greater heights of wideness, and we turn around as well, to see what has so caught his attention. Our eyes widen as well.
For atop the Mishiyama Corp. is an enormous, gaping whirlpool of teeth and jaws, where some thing is reaching through, teeth open wide, jaws snaggle-toothed, hideously flickering tongue tip reaching out to touch lightly upon the top of the building where Xion dances. It seems as if the storm clouds that have threatened the city all this long, long night have gathered there, circling above the black tower that is the Mishiyama Corporation, rising high in to the sky, making a funnel of sorts, where lightning seems to have no place- the clouds are too black for even the momentary brightness that is lightning to flicker across their faces. They are swirling, spinning, as if in turmoil and torment. At their end, in the great hole they have left in the sky, facing out on darkness upon darkness, something is coming through. Only the merest tip of its great tooth-hung jaws have come through- we sense that this thing is huge, so far beyond anything we've ever even thought of that the feelings of half-sensed fear and wonder have suddenly awakened and starting screaming at us, screaming at us to run, because whatever this thing is, it befouls anything it touches and everything it sees... the jaws are orange, a dull, dusk colored orange, the orange of befouled flesh and rotting corpses, bloated on the feed they have taken, jaws covered in slime and slobber that looks like the endless wreckage of some long-crushed city. The red drips off it relentlessly. It's teeth, ragged and tearing things, are the size of city blocks at their bases, but as short and small- and sharp- as razors at their bottom. A single tongue, thick as a building, is now reaching out, to touch the top of the Mishiyama Corporation building like some sort of unholy sign of recognition. The... the....
The demons....
They're here!...
-
Weird, huh? Thought I'd give you guys something to mull over while you go to Christmas. Have a happy Christmas, my friends. Tiger, my old friend, my good friend, and the person who introduced me (if in a rather passive way) to , I wish you a most merry Christmas indeed. Keep writing AKS, my friend, and may your life be as happy as it can be.
To VGuyver, a new friend and reviewer... Though I have not known you as long as our mutual friend, I can wish you merry Christmas as well. For some reason, I'm feeling the holiday spirit, and so I'm out delivering to all. Merry Christmas, all!
To Soundwood- I'll keep responding to your letters when I can. Be good, my young friend. And may you write well and live well in the coming year. I believe that you have the potential to be a writer, simply because your letters are so intelligent. Words may not make a soul, but they can tell who they are on the inside. And from your words, my friend, I believe that you may well be a writer. Do not get discouraged if what you write is not what you want- it takes a while before you gain the skill to refine the diamonds in your mind from the rough and make them into bright and glittering gemstones. Do not worry if, before you attain your skills, you seem a second-rate penny author, using an axe rather than a scalpel to hack off bits and pieces of preciousness and only gaining a few specks of gold in the rock- we all start out that way, and that axe is a blessed thing, because it shows that one has at least decided to try. When you become more accomplished, the cutting knife and paring knife will offer themselves to you in their own sweet time. Until then, cherish your axe, because it is what allows you to write- and to do more, for that axe is what allows you to be free. Keep the blade sharp when you can- axes dull frightfully fast, and knives even more so- but never, ever give up. A diamond is a diamond, whether the blade used to cleave it was sharp or dull, huge or subtle, and will be recognized for what it is in all but the almost criminal manglings that some people go for. So write, my friend. Write.
Indigo Siren: Merry Christmas to you, as well, and blessings on all you do. Happy Holidays, and thank you for the reviews!
And to all and sundry- may your way be light and strong, and, in the words of an old song, I'll leave each of you off with a blessing...
May you sing a song of love at last
May your words be old
May you sing a song in winding grass
May your words be bold
May you hope in dark and love in light
And never fear the cold
May you hold to law and hold to right
And never fear the old
May you dance across all that has
And never touch the ground
May you see the sights that make us men
And never feel your bound
May you dance across an ocean of stars
Til the end of time
May you look to the stars that guide your way
and never lose their shine...
May all the blessings of this song come to you as you sit in your homes on Christmas Eve- and forever thereafter!
Merry Christmas!
-Silverlocke980