Operation Ex5: Elementary School 26
"Are you okay, Miss Megumi?" Mr. Nakamura stared at his fellow instructor. She gave back a questioning, "yes, why?" "Well, you've been staring at that computer screen for a good minute now, and I haven't seen you blink. Is there something that interesting on it?" Megumi tapped the screen of the flat panel display. "No, just e-mail. Sorry, I think I've been a little out of it lately."
Nakamura turned his head, and after checking his watch, unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. "Really? I was bit tired myself, but even I can't really zone out when Ishida is over there eating curry." He gestured towards the twenty-something woman sitting in the corner of the room, feet up, and attacking a large bowl of curry. Miss Ishida looked up, gave a quiet wave, and went back to her early dinner. "I mean, it's Indian curry. That stuff is an assault on the nostrils." Megumi, for once, blinked. "Hmm…I can't smell it." Nakamura shrugged. "Really? Weird."
Her work for the day done, Megumi packed up her things, made sure her wig was on straight and walked out to the door, closing it behind her. It was then her legs decided to unexpectedly give way under her. The teacher-turned-counselor braced her self against the wall as a hand appeared at her side. She accepted it and was pulled back up to standing. "Are you alright, Hisakawa?" The owner of the hand was a mildly stern-faced man in his late forties, with a head of shortly-trimmed matte black hair. "Mr. Noda…yes."
"And how's your position going? I hope it's not too different for you." Megumi walked next to her new boss. "It's fine. I was a counselor before I ever trained with the Committee." "Well, good luck, then." Noda checked his silvered wristwatch before he continued. "Now, you must excuse me. I have a house call to make."
• • •
Principal Noda stared at the somewhat-small duplex in the middle of Hinode proper. "It doesn't make sense." The home was ordinary by the town's standards, with no external decorations, gaudy or otherwise. The brass name plate by the door quietly read "篠崎". The irritating thing was the house violated all of his pre-conceived notions involving previous "problem students". If anything, it was a little too generic. He swallowed, shrugged, and rang the bell.
He was met with a woman, comfortably in her forties with a long ponytail and tired yet pleasant face, with the first hint of facial creases. "Yes?" "I'm Minoru Noda. I had an appointment with you and your husband?" She quietly nodded. "Please, come in, I'm Kimiko." Noda stepped in and stepped out of his shoes before walking over the inner threshold. "I'm sorry, but Hitoshi's not home yet. It should be any minute, though. Would you mind waiting?" The principal shook his head. "That's fine."
Minoru Noda sat on a small couch across from his hostess. "Now, I understand you and your husband are Junko's parents, correct?" The woman shook her head. "I'm afraid not. We are her current guardians, though. Junko is our niece. Her parents, Hitoshi's older brother and our sister-in-law are…deceased." Noda's half-hardened expression lifted slightly. "I…see. I'm sorry for asking." Jun's aunt smiled. "It's fine." Noda habitually touched the side of his hair before he reached into his blazer and returned with a PDA. Kimiko Shinosaki blinked and turned her head slightly. "Forgive me for prying, but are you a symbiote?" Noda looked up from the miniscule touch screen. "I beg your pardon?" "You're a fused host to a…with a borg, am I correct?" Noda sternly nodded. Kimiko's face took on an expression of carefully masked anxiety. "Then I suggest you be brief when suggesting things with my husband. He has a much lower tolerance for such things than I." It was then that the front door took the opportune moment to open. "Dear, I'm…home." A salaryman with salt-and-pepper hair, glasses, and a concerned look on his face peered into the living room.
Hitoshi sat with a an ever so slightly annoyed look on his face as he sat down next to his wife, formal introductions having since been made. "So, Mr. Noda, what did you wish to discuss." "The behavior and habits of niece, Junko." Hitoshi's expression stayed fixed. "What about them?" "Well…we have reason to believe that Junko has been in the possession of an illegal weapon while on school grounds." "And do you have any proof of this?" Noda opened his mouth, and quickly closed it. "No. The school does not. Is Junko here? May I speak with her?" Kimiko shook her head. "She's out, currently." "May I ask where?" Hitoshi politely snapped back, "It's none of your business, sir. If you must know, she's out with her friends." Noda was half-flustered and half-angry. "Mr. Shinosaki, I do not wish to insult you. However, your niece's behavior is rather inexcusable. We believe her to have attacked and killed…several aliens while on school grounds." "Did she endanger your students or the school's alien fighters?" "Not to our knowledge." "Then I don't see the problem, sir." Noda spoke up emphatically. "Surely, you don't condone this sort of violence?" Hitoshi sighed, closed his eyes, and prepared his words. "My niece and I don't quite see eye to eye, but we do share a relationship of mutual respect. If she had harmed or killed a human, I would be noticeably disturbed. Yet, you're telling me she's killed aliens, presumably before the school's Alien Party could. The outcome would have been the same. I don't see it as a problem."
Minoru was noticeably flustered. "I was gracious enough to allow her unusual choice of uniform without incident. However, this violent behavior will not be tolerated." "This violent behavior that you have no evidence of? Sir, have you checked the girl's records and history of past schools?" "I have. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I have them…" Noda dug through a manila folder he had brought with him. "…right here." Hitoshi nodded. Kimiko added, "Sir, take a look at the topmost school on the list." Minoru recited, "Elementary School 26, Nagano Prefecture." Hitoshi slid forward on the couch cushion. "Sir, do you have time for an anecdote?"
Hitoshi cleared his throat as his wife got up to procure refreshments. "Junko grew up in Koumi in Nagano…small town. Elementary School 26 was the largest primary school in the rural Minamisaku district. Both she and her older brother, Hisoka attended school there. As I understand it, Hisoka was the only alien fighter at the school when he was in the sixth grade. The school was interesting in that, you're aware that the Drill clan is partnered the schools in the Tokyo area?" Minoru nodded. "I am." "Elementary School 26 was allied with the Yellow Knife clan." "How…how is that possible?" "Not the giant things…they have or had—I'm not sure—a type of small symbiote of their own…can't seem to remember the name to it, though it was something other than "borg". If I remember my late brother correctly, he said Hisoka's symbiote looked rather like a large pair of gloves with cylindrical nodules on it. Anyway…when Junko was in the second grade and her brother in the sixth…"
"…one day, my nephew was out with the common cold, and thus, his Alien Party instructor had to cover for him." Junko reached up to the sink and washed her hands. When she had asked the teacher to use the restroom, it was only a half-truth. While she did have to use it, part of it was that she simply needed a rest from the teasing at lunchtime, most of it at her red-brownish hair. While she sighed and composed herself for an afternoon of mathematics, there was a loud rumbling noise. The lights flashed, once, twice, and then went out altogether.
As Junko's eyes adjusted to the darkness, she noticed the light underneath the door flickering from movement on the other side of it. There was also a distinct, soft chittering sound that she couldn't quite place. As she crept forward to the door, there was a louder sound, that of something metal vibrating. The water pipe under the sink burst, the L-shaped piece of metal knocking her backwards, where she promptly struck her head on the side of the toilet stall and quickly lost consciousness.
When the girl awoke, the first thing she noticed was that she was cold…and wet. Her dress and hair were soaking wet, though as she noticed the water had apparently been shut off and the drains in the room had taken care of the flooding, leaving just a cursory film of slickness across the floor. Junko got up, a bit stiff, and still in darkness, opened the door. Her eyes adjusted to the light, the hallway dimming back into view. There was an eerie silence afoot. Junko could hear the sound of wind gently blowing, when it was a cold enough day that most all of the school's windows were closed. There were also some distant, far-off sounds of human voices, of which she was unsure of, but they certainly sounded like yelling or screaming, with a possibility of wailing mixed in. She walked diagonally across the hallway and opened the door to class 2-E. "Hello?"
Junko was greeted by the body one of her classmates facedown on the floor in front of her. She couldn't make out quite who it was. As she walked towards him, her feet stepped in something. She looked down at the red liquid that looked strangely like cough syrup, although she had a funny feeling it wasn't. The body was facing away from her, so walked around and found she still couldn't identify the boy—he was missing his head entirely. She gasp and stood back. Junko's eyes slowly panned the room…desks were overturned, corpses strewn on the floor, papers and books tossed aside, and the windows broken. "What did this? I know we're close to the mountains, but I thought tengu weren't supposed to be this mean." The girl stood, quietly contemplating the surgical yet disorganized death that stood in what had very briefly before, been her classroom. Then the skittering sound came again, from the hallway. She crouched to the floor, and closed to the door to a crack, patiently watching.
The two beings who sidled by were definitely not bird-like, nor were they mountain oni. They were short to the ground, little more than a foot across, and looked like turtles…mixed with flowers on their edges, with glossy, gem-like eyes on short, compact necks. With their "foliage" on the edges of their curved shells they looked almost like…sunflowers. "So, is that all?" "I think so. The directorate says we have enough possible hosts." "What about that Yellow Knife woman?" "Too much trouble. Her mental resistance was a bit higher than we expected, and she actually resisted." "We could have used her." "Maybe." The two creatures talked in ordinary human tongues, but there was almost a metallic echo, a hardness to their voices. They passed by and Junko cautiously opened the door and made her back into the hall.
She had a feeling that these were like the aliens like her brother took care of. What had he said? That if she was in trouble, to find Mrs. Fukuhara, her brother's teacher? Junko starting briskly walking to the sixth grade hall; since the somewhat rural school had had more than enough room to expand and place all of its classes on a single floor. Within a few minutes, she had found what she knew to be Mrs. Fukuhara, though she was as dead as everyone else she had seen. The woman with black hair cut to a pageboy haircut was slumped against the hallway wall, legs and arms splayed. And as she followed the line of blood, her right arm and leg were actually the corridor, while deep lacerations covered what was left of her torso. "Mrs. Fukuhara!" Next to her was a bloodied pair of long, bumpy, almost flesh-like sandy brown long gauntlets that she recognized as her brother's Yellow Knife. Each of its halves was cut asunder, and each glove's eye was dark and closed. Even the sonic-projecting nodules had been twisted and sliced off of it.
Junko swallowed and held back a whimper. If the one adult who was supposed to protect her school was gone, who could save her? She stared at the three sets of lifeless, sliced remains momentarily before she made her decision. The aliens had missed her. Maybe she could run home on her own. Junko gave a quick prayer to her brother's teacher and ran off towards the school's southeast exit.
Junko was a bit disheartened when she saw the condition of the corner of the school. A giant, greenish object had crashed into the ground at the school's edge, collapsing the edge of the school into the rubble, including the two sets of double doors of the school's exit. She took a deep breath as her pulse quickened. She couldn't quite but a finger on it, but her brain had shifted gears and was currently trying to come up with the map for the half of the school she rarely visited. She then remembered an art room, a half-hallway away, there were doors inside the classroom that led directly outside—they used them for airing out the room or placing works out to dry. She ran up a short flight of four stairs used to adjust for the ground's slight slope.
The door was a little stuck, so the second grader put her shoulder into it and managed to force the door open. The art room, with its numerous high tables and stools, was as silent as the rest of the school, was oddly intact. It had a distinct lack of the dead people and broken windows and chairs that marked the rest of the school. "What should be done about this one? I thought we have enough hosts." "We do. Besides, this one's too young." "Let's get rid of it, then." A cold chill ran down Junko Shinosaki's spine. The voices, although slightly different from the ones she had heard, shared the metallic, business-like tone. She knew they were the same aliens from before. A small reaction had triggered inside her brain…should she run? The doors were across the room, and the room was pretty big. Should she do something else? Her hands found the legs of the all-metal stool that stood closest to her, and with adrenaline fueling her, she effortlessly lifted it and swung it around to her left.
The seat of the stool caught the cork-like barbs of the first alien, and with the momentum behind it, the steel stool slammed into the first sunflower's carapace and easily crushed it, squeezing out whatever strangely colored liquid passed for blood in the creature. Junko raised the stool to her right to bash the other alien. It was then that its barbed filament lines found her. The corklike weight of a line slid across her face, cutting it open before the barb on it finally lodged in her left eye. She screamed. The sunflower retracted the line back towards its unhinged neck. Junko's eye went with it. There was an enormous strain on the left side of her face momentarily that replaced with a soft burning as the left half of vision disappeared. Her mental focus left her. A second filament line wrapped around her left elbow, tightening for an instant before it quickly sliced the flesh and bone, severing the arm at that point. Junko gasped for breath and gave a slight, breathless whimper. Her severed left forearm, still gripping the stool, lost its function and tumbled to the floor. The girl lost her grip on the stool, and it slid out of her right hand. It fell sideways, with its lattice cracking the shell of the alien and stunning it. Junko, breathing heavily and steeped in her body's best attempts at natural painkillers, lifted her right foot forward and aligned it against the alien's short head before putting her foot down and shifting her weight to it. The sunflower gave a short, insectan screech and stopped moving.
Junko moved her right hand towards her face. There were large cuts on her chin, her ear, and a long, deep cut that run vertically through her left eye. She touched, and found in an odd sort of curiosity, that there wasn't a left eye there, just…a hole for one. As her normal senses started filtering back in, with them came the pain she had apparently been missing. Sensations of burning filled her face and the left side of her body. She winced and walked towards something white that she had noticed moments earlier. Junko walked to the far wall and turned the plastic hinge on the white box…it was a first aid kit.
Doing the best she could manage with one functioning arm, Junko pulled out a packet of a sand-like substance and several large bandages. Both had the word "hemostatic" on them, whatever that meant, though she remembered it had something to do with chemicals that stopped bleeding. She managed to tear open the packages on with her teeth and right hand, and sprinkled some of the powder on her arm and eye cavity. It burned slightly. Then she relaxed her facial muscles (to the extent she could) and pressed one of the large, square bandages over her eye socket. Adhesive on the borders kept it on. She did the same for the stump of a left elbow, and bent the flat bandage around it as best she could. They still really hurt, and they still were bleeding…just not nearly as badly. Junko took a deep breath, and pushed open the door at the end of the art room. The cold winter air greeted her, although she was more worried about getting home than she was worried about finding her coat. Her head, despite its throbbing, knew the way home by heart.
• • •
Hitoshi paused to take a drink of water. "She eventually collapsed about a kilometer away from her parent's home, after walking six klicks by herself." Mr. Noda nodded. "Still, if an entire school was attacked and destroyed, I figured I would have heard about it on the news." Hitoshi's face gave an awkward smile. "Elementary schools Two and Six here in Tokyo were razed to the ground with great loss of life, including many of your colleagues. The news barely mentioned it. Interesting, isn't it? I also find it interesting that those…Sunflower aliens; their clan apparently has control of a good fifth of the countryside in this nation. Funny that neither the government nor the GSDF have done little against what I certainly would call a 'foreign' invader." Noda's eyebrows cinched into a slight scowl. "Are you implying that their inaction is on purpose? The result of some sort of conspiracy?" Hitoshi shook his head, the grin widening. "No, no, sir. I'm merely presenting the information. I'm not drawing any conclusions. However, if I must say that if that's all you came to inform us about, we our having dinner soon and I'm sure to you have things to do."
"Wait, Mr. Shinosaki. With that anecdote of yours, I don't think we've finished discussing your niece." Hitoshi turned his head. "Really? What's left to discuss? Do you even know why she wears that strange combination of a uniform that she requested?" Minoru went to speak, and quickly realized that he didn't know. "I…I do not." "It's because my niece's appearance is startling to most people. She's as much carbon fiber and titanium as she is flesh and blood." "That…that's absurd. Every clinic and hospital these days has cell gel." Hitoshi shook his head. "You forget, sir. Bioregenerative medicine has only been around for the past few years. It wasn't an option in her case."
"Still, regardless of what's happened to her, she cannot go around killing aliens like some foolish five year old, whether it's on my campus or not. I will ensure that the authorities know about her!" Hitoshi concentrated his stare on the man across from him, and after a few seconds, added "Defending your own kind, aren't you?" "I beg your pardon?" "You're fused with a borg, Mr. Noda. I can feel it; it's something that runs in my family. Tell me, sir. Tell me why even a white collar business such as mine gives incentives to its employees to fuse with borgs. Tell me why the medical profession is seeing unusually high levels of Parkinson's syndrome, young Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and other rarer neurological diseases, that before were too rare to be studied to any great extent, including some that can normally only be inherited. Tell me why the country falters under a rather weak mélange of foreign invaders. Well, I can tell you one thing. I am some distance apart from my niece, and I don't directly support her actions. However, she does what I cannot. Still, if you're up for it, feel free to try and get her kicked out of school. We'll home school her. Or, based on your tone earlier, try calling the police box and getting her arrested. I do not personally know the chief of Hinode's department, but I am quite aware that he lost his wife at the First Contact and his only son due to aliens. I think he might be a little sympathetic to a girl solving the problem on her own." "Are you mad? You're threatening me, after I came here to ask for your help? You're transferring your fears…I have done nothing to you!" "No, Mr. Noda. You did not come to discuss. You came to accuse. You have violated my family's privacy, my trust, and my time; you have much overstayed your welcome. Now, I suggest you and that animated toupee on your head leave my family's home on your own accord. I am not a violent man by nature. But if you do not, I swear on my brother's grave that you might have to leave here in a casket."
• • •
Jun had already disengaged the safety on her pistol and she had just now manually cocked the hammer, to ensure a lighter and more accurate trigger pull. "Please, please. I don't know what you're talking about." The teenager, wearing subdued colors stared at the man she had cornered in the back of a small alley, who was pushing into his late twenties. It was comfortably after dusk. "Oh, I think you do." The man shook his head. "Please, ma'am, I'm begging you! I just released from the hospital after a two year coma. I don't want to die after just after getting a second chance on life." Jun chuckled. "Oh, no, this isn't your second chance on life. You simply stole the first one." The man sidled, glancing intermittently. "Please, miss, I have no idea what you're talking about. I just want to go home to my wife…" "She isn't your wife. You aren't even Shiki Hakugi. He was beyond a human vegetable, with permanent damage to the cerebral cortex. You just stole him, Mercury." The man's meek face hardened, as did his tone of voice. "So, you know about us, huh? Aren't you 'The Destroyer' everyone's talking about? I'm going to love taking you down!" The man held his right hand out straight and charged. A silver liquid spread from underneath his fingernails and flowed into a dagger-like shape. Jun juggled the gun to her left hand and held up her bare right arm, devoid of gloves or long-sleeves, parrying the organic blade with the dark grey metal-like finish of her second prosthetic arm. Without saying a word, she fired into the man's chest.
A tingle of brass hit the concrete. "Ugh…" Shiki Hakugi fell backwards, his eyes wandering as red seeped from his chest. "Get out of my…" Shiki looked up with brightened eyes. "It's gone…I've managed to push that thing out of my mind. Miss, you need to get me to a hospital…I'm back!" Jun looked down at the man's hand, which still had a biological blade formed around it. She gave a tinge of a frown and shook her head. She then shot the man in the forehead. What was once Shiki Hakugi fell limp on top of a couple of trash bags. The head wound bled red, mixed with metallic silver. "I know from experience. There's not a cure for a Mercury. You can't come back." Jun clicked the safety on his pistol and slid it into her bag before she walked out of the alley and back towards home. She rolled her lips into a thinking frown. She was probably late for dinner.
