In the lone spot of light coming through ruined stained-glass windows, a single rose bush somehow thrived among the faint tones of blue and red cast across its leaves. The bush itself looked healthy, thick and lush with leaves. Upon closer inspection, however, five of the six tiny rosebuds on it had withered and fallen from their stems.
A white-gloved hand reached out and gently caressed the single remaining bud. "One of out of six experiments remains," a man's voice said behind the man who was gently tending to the pruning of the roses. Beneath the bush, a small porcelain doll in a rose-print dress stared out at the world through blue glass eyes. "Our superiors will be very unhappy with the expenses they've granted you if the last bud fails to thrive."
The caretaker just smiled, wisps of white hair touching his lips. "The remaining blossom is the strongest because it doesn't have to share the nutrients with the others, and I know personally of the strength of its stalk. The last flower will not fall."
With that, the two picked up and departed, leaving the rose bush alone in the rainbow of colors coming in through the remains of the window.
Meanwhile, the search for Akabane was on in Infinite Castle, despite the fact that no one actually hoped they would be the one to find him. It was Sakura, however, who got the distressing news. A young man smoking cigarette butts out of an ashtray reported having seen him getting into a black elevator.
"This is very bad," Gen mumbled. The Gondola is Babylon City's transport device. It can move sideways, up, down, whatever way it wants within Infinite Castle. Babylon City must be very interested in him to send something like that to fetch him."
Inside the elevator, Akabane was sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest. The rocking movement of the device had caused his stomach, which had been relatively fine, to become uncomfortably queasy.
The world beyond the bars was black. He tried to stick his fingers out between the bars and found a force-shield preventing him from doing so. So he sat and waited patiently but alertly to find out where he was being taken. The elevator kind of hummed as it rocked back and forth, but the rocking combined with the sound of metal squealing against metal was far from comforting.
The elevator passed through complete darkness, so black that even Akabane's eyes, which were used to the darkness, could not make out any shapes. A cold wind blew against his skin, and he wrapped his arms around himself for warmth. His hair ruffled about his neck, tickling him.
When the elevator passed back into light, he wrapped his arms around himself tighter, as he found himself removed of his usual garments. In their place was a thin white gown of the kind that would be found in hospitals. The cotton garment was short-sleeved and only ran to just above his knees, causing him to shiver in the breeze that was blowing through the bars. That, and the back was open, leading him to use one hand to hold it tightly closed while the other hand tried to warm his goose-bump covered legs. This day was going from bad to worse, and he hadn't killed anyone yet. The next person he saw had better be ready to explain what had happened, lest they lose important bodily organs.
The doors finally slid open to reveal a plain white room resembling the typical Americanized notion of a doctor's office. The furniture was garish and plastic, an orange color that looked as though it were designed so you couldn't tell if it had vomit stains on it. The pictures on the wall were inspirational tripe, like a kitten dangling from a branch with the words "always hang on!" written in cartoonish bubbles across it.
The main feature of the room was an examination table with several long wires and scary looking boxes hanging from the ceiling above it. He held tighter to the closure of the thin outfit he'd been forced into. If they thought he was just going to lie down and let a stranger do what they wanted with him, they would lose a few fingers in the process…
"Welcome," a friendly voice greeted. He spun quickly on his heel, slipping slightly because socks don't grip well on tile. The flamboyant blonde Kagami Kyoji stood behind him.
"Enjoying the view?" Akabane quipped, knives drawn and glowing in one hand. "I did not expect to see you today, Kyoji-kun."
"I'm here because you know me, in the sense that you've served as my pawn before, so they figured you were less likely to poke me full of little holes on sight." He looked at Akabane's hand. "I see they were wrong." The light caught on his earring, giving it almost a mischievous glint. "When you came in, our sensors picked up something very interesting inside your body. We thought we'd like to take a look at it."
Akabane held his ground, but the heel further from Kagami was raised up so that his weight as balanced on the front of his foot, indicating he was ready to move if he needed to. He wasn't just going to lie down and obey like a sweet little puppy. "Why should I let you do such a thing?"
"Look around you. There are cameras and scanners recording your every breath. You'd never escape, no matter how hard you tried. You can choose to cooperate freely or as our prisoner. It's your choice, and what you pick doesn't matter to me one way or the other.
Akabane conceded that in the situation it was best to at least pretend to submit. He lowered his eyes in resignation, a gesture which Kagami did not fail to notice. "Kyoji-kun? If I must, I'd prefer that this examination be done in private," he emphasized, leaning against a wall.
"You want me to turn around?" Kagami asked, sounding mock-hurt.
"I meant the cameras recording my every move and my every breath. Do you suppose they could be turned off? I dislike the idea of finding explicit pictures of myself posted on the internet."
Kagami snorted. "You think you have it bad? I can't even take a pee without them knowing the arc of my urine."
Akabane knew that the comment was supposed to relax him and lighten the mood, but it didn't. "Where are my clothes?" he asked, looking out the single window in the room. The skyline of Tokyo was hidden by a big block of twisted metal, making him feel all the more alone and vulnerable before Kagami's eyes.
"Taken care of. Don't worry about them."
The "doctor" Babylon City provided was a lean, anemic looking older man with thinning gray hair. He reminded Akabane vaguely of Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings movie. That's what Akabane decided to think of him as, since he didn't want to think of the man attaching strange wires all over his body as someone in his former profession.
"Gandalf" had a very energetic personality, chattering constantly about the weather and other nonsense as he worked on setting up a series of wires and metal tubes about the wound. He brushed against it once, causing Akabane to involuntarily jerk violently and throw several of the wires off. He avoided it cautiously after that.
"Why are you putting them on my chest?" Akabane asked, eyes narrowing. "They wound is below my navel."
"Well, we'll see…" Gandalf said, flicking on a series of reading monitors. "How does that feel? Comfortable?"
"No. I'm tired," Akabane answered. The machines were cold, and felt like little shocks of static electricity passing over his body. He'd pulled aside what little garments Akabane had been given in order to let the machine work better, leaving him feeling uncomfortably naked beneath Kagami's bright eyes.
"That's understandable, seeing how many new blood vessels your body is busily building…"
Akabane tried to squirm into an upright position so as to better see the image on the screen. "A tumor?" he asked, concern radiating outward from his voice. Kagami pushed his shoulders back down onto the chilly plastic so that he would not dislodge the equipment lying over his prone form.
"No. It seems to be come kind of tissue implant," Kagami answered instead of the doctor, pointing to a vaguely triangular wad facing with the point toward towards his legs. "You can see the network of blood vessels and even nerves growing into and out of it." Kagami turned to the doctor, looking very irritated. "They must have implanted stem cells to manage growing nerves, and that's very advanced technology. But, Babylon City has the technology to create and control adult stem cells as well, does it not?"
The Gandalf-doctor looked down as his shoes, aged face studying the contours of the loafers in either deep thought or shame at the answer he was going to have to give Kagami. "Babylon City has always been concerned with computer technology, not biotechnology," he answered slowly. It was true; otherwise they would have been able to generate bodies for their experimental puppets capable of leaving the boundaries of the castle.
Akabane realized that Kagami wasn't just holding him down to keep him from messing up the equipment; he was rather forcibly pressing Akabane's body into the plastic. One hand was stroking Akabane's hair. Akabane knew the gesture was meant to be calming and comforting, but instead it agitated him. He hadn't given Kagami permission to touch his hair freely, let alone stroke him like a pet. He tried to sit up again, but discovered that Kagami's grip on his arm had become so vise-like that it was painful to try to move.
The doctor pulled out a long, relatively thick needle. Akabane eyed the man very suspiciously, as he didn't trust someone who looked like a character out of a movie to stick a needle that long into him. Seeming to notice that he'd tensed, the doctor-Gandalf calmly explained, "I need to take a tissue sample so we can determine exactly what they put into you. This will probably leave some muscle soreness…"
Akabane hesitated, then nodded. He probably didn't have much a choice, considering that he didn't know where he was in the castle and that Kagami was pinning him against the sheets. Kagami put a hand in front of Akabane's eyes, blocking him so that he couldn't see the needle going in. Perhaps it was all for the better. Funny that a hundred scalpels piercing his flesh would hardly bother him, but one little needle and he felt like his skin were crawling off the muscles and fat of his body.
There was a momentary breeze of cold air against his hip as the doctor pulled aside what little bit of the hospital gown he still had on, not taking as much care for Akabane's modesty as Akabane himself would have preferred. The doctor began to cautiously push the needle inward. Without warning, after he had reached maybe two inches in, his head suddenly snapped back. He dropped away from the needle, writhing on the floor while clutching his wrist and crying out in a bestial manner. Kagami ran to the doctor's side, leaving Akabane free to jerk upright. The wires dislodged from his body as a shock of pain ran through the muscle the needle was still hanging out of. Akabane looked down, and upon spotting the needle, immediately realized that his nausea had returned. Thus, he threw up all over the floor of the faux hospital room.
Kagami, meanwhile, has managed to pry the doctor's hand off of the wound. A massive red welt spread over the hand, looking like a burn that had been struck repeatedly with a meat tenderizer. Kagami whistled when he saw the damage, assisting the whimpering man in staggering to the sink to wash the wound with cold water. As they washed the wound over, a shape began to appear. Left pale white and untouched in the center of the wound, the same logo that Ban had drawn proudly taunted the three men. "It's a copyright," Kagami commented dryly. He let the doctor crawl off to tend to the wound on his own, as he'd been programmed with the knowledge to do so.
"Someone… someone trademarked me?" Akabane asked, still dry heaving, for once letting true anger creep into his voice. His left hand was curled tightly around the edge of the examination table, so tightly that his knuckles were white and bloodless. His other hand held where the needle went into his skin, fingertips covered in blood.
Kagami stood up, watching as a nondescript blue-eyed woman with blonde pigtails entered the room and went about the duty of removing the needle from Akabane's body. Kagami's normally light, humor-filled eyes had taken on the dark seriousness that he gained when he was fighting an enemy without limit. "Have you ever heard of Rune Biotechnology?"
"No. Should I have?" Akabane asked coldly, wincing as she pulled the needle out and applied gauze and pressure to the hole it had left.
"Not unless you took a particular interest in the field. They work through a thousand puppet companies, masking their identity, much as the colonies of organizations that keep this castle supplied do. Those, you might have heard of. As you might have overheard us saying, while Infinite Castle is the undisputed leader in technology, they lead in illegal biology. There's even been talk that they've managed to create cloned organs through the use of specially bred pigs."
Akabane's hand covered his wound. "If they are responsible, then I will have to have a word with their heads." By which he meant, a word followed by the removal of some heads.
Kagami didn't respond to Akabane's comment, instead choosing to look with great concern upon the image of the implant, still frozen on the screen. His mouth was drawn tightly into a thin line of either concern or concentration.
A second girl, identical to the first down to the mole on her cheek, entered the room. Akabane realized that they were what, in gaming terms, would be called an "NPC." They were endless clones of the same character controlled by a hive-like memory collective, used to serve as gophers and servants. They had no real purpose in existing except that they were necessary for the important characters to go about their business.
"Kagami-sama, something happened when we tried to repair the doctors programming. It could be a virus. You should have a look at it," the second girl said, her voice concerned but her face expressionless.
Kagami nodded, heading for the door. Akabane stood up, pushing aside the girl who had been poking at the needle hole with an antiseptic wipe. "I want to go with you."
"No," Kagami snapped. "You sit back down."
"If this concerns this… thing inside me, then I have a right to know."
"It doesn't. It concerns the doctor."
"Gan- the doctor was wounded by the thing," Akabane argued, "the thing inside MY body."
"I said no, and believe me when I say that I'd let you come if the matter concerned you." He turned his attention sharply to the girl, who was standing aside in a sort of stupor. "Take care of him. Keep him comfortable and warm. Oh, and get him a pair of pants. I think he feels… vulnerable," Kagami smiled before disappearing out the single door set in the room.
Akabane angrily chased Kagami to the door. When he yanked it open, however, he was met with what appeared to be a solid brick wall on the other side of the door. After a few attempts to cut through the door only to have the wall reassemble before his eyes, his shoulders sagged and he sank down onto the couch.
The girl brought him a rough, loosely knit white blanket and a pillow that smelled of disinfectant, both of which he pushed on the floor. She stubbornly tried again to lay the blanket over him as he crouched on his side on the couch. When he threw them off again the girl looked as though she might cry. "Kagami-sama told me to keep you warm," she whimpered, trying once again to give him the blanket.
Akabane looked up at her with one eye, then through her to the window. Of course. He slowly sat up. "I would be very warm and comfortable if you opened the wind to let the breeze in, and if you gave me my coat and hat so that the wind wouldn't chill me."
The girl smiled, delighted at being able to do what Kagami-sama had told her to, and obediently did as Akabane had asked. "Next," Akabane said. "Could you go to the little vending stand on the first level that has the panda sign over the top and get me a weak green tea with lemon and honey? I only want the tea from the place with the panda."
She disappeared out the door seemingly right through the brick wall with a smile, eager to fetch the exact drink he'd wanted. "Idiot," he declared out loud upon her departure. He hadn't asked for all of his clothes as that might have made her suspicious of his intent to escape via the window, not because he actually liked the cruddy blue scrub pants Kagami had given him.
Fortunately, the ledge outside the window was just large enough for Akabane to crawl along on all fours. The wind tore violently at his body. The speed and smell of the breeze told him that he was pretty far up, but he dared not look down for fear that he might loose his nerve.
He followed Kagami's dusty, blood-lust and curiosity tinted scent to a room a floor up and two rooms down, which required some degree of monkey-like clamoring over the crumbling ledges to get to. Peering inside, he spotted the doctor strapped to a table, his arm no more than a spinning vortex of data and symbols. So that was what the girl had meant by "it might be a virus." The man had been no more than another computer simulation.
The window was open just a touch, but that was all Akabane needed to hear the conversation. "If they armed it with a virus, they must have been expecting us to get involved," Kagami's voice was saying.
"He still doesn't know the nature of what he carries inside himself, does he?" an unfamiliar male voice probed. "The seed of destruction…"
"We can thank whoever wiped his memories in order to have room to implant that seal for that," Kagami answered. Akabane wished he could see who Kagami was talking to, but he didn't dare look through the window lest he be caught before he found out any useful information. "It's still very iffy what will happen at this point, though. They've got at least twenty days out on us because we could detect the heartbeat."
The… heartbeat? The thing inside of him was… alive?! No, no, no reason to jump to that stupid conclusion. They could have been speaking of the virus inside the doctor, or talking about something in a strange medical sense. No reason to worry, at least no reason to worry yet.
"What will you do about it?" The strange voice asked.
"We'd intended to kill it by poisoning it with the biopsy needle, but now it doesn't look like we can get through its defenses."
"I'm glad you failed. Even if they created it, their amazing discovery is now in our hands," the other man answered, his tone of voice indicating that he was gloating.
"The infamous doctor Jackal is not a man who is easily controlled. You'd have to cage him or cut off his fingers in order to keep him."
Disgust flushed through Akabane. So that was why he hadn't been invited into this conversation. Well, they were right about one thing. He had absolutely no intent of being their prisoner because they wanted to play rival companies with whoever had violated his body.
The sound of the door being thrown open suddenly and with great force reverberated through the room. "Kagami-sama! Kagami-sama! He's gone! He's gone!"
"Who's gone?" the strange voice asked, angrily barking at the panting girl.
"The man with the womb implant and the baby! I left to get him tea and when I returned-"
The rest of the words ran into a blur as shock coursed through Akabane's body, numbing him all over. He felt as though he'd just drank anesthesia for the fun of it. That couldn't… there was no way… well, yes, the implant had sort of looked like a deformed womb… but… he… last time he took a pee, he was still very much a man, thank you VERY much!"
He tried to move backwards on the ledge but in his shock, he put his knee down wrong on a decorative slant. His knee slid sideways, throwing his whole body off balance. Still numb, he tried to catch the railing but moved too slowly. Off the ledge his body rolled, plummeting head-first down from the tall building.
The wind ruffled his long black hair past his eyes. All the sound in the world seemed to stop for a moment save for the sound his coat made as it slapped against his legs. He'd fallen from one of the upper levels of the Beltline, and he was going to die. There was nothing near enough to reach out to and slow his drop, nothing but air moving past his face and the hard ground growing ever closer below.
Then, out of the silence, he heard a woman's- no, a girl's- voice screaming, and before his eyes, a massive block of solid color spread out. Is this what death is like, he wondered as he fell downward into the field of color.
