Alchemy in the Subyear
Her father had warned her about talking to strange men. Every other man had warned her about talking to strange men when growing up, she thought, even her dog, CC had done so. This was something men did, she had come to realise, some weird contest they had with one another in which they tried to impress on others that of all the men in all the world, it was only they that were truly trustworthy. Well, in her time, Arashiyama Misa had certainly met strange men, she felt, perhaps none more than her father, the director of fringe paramilitary group, the Solar Squadron.
She crossed her legs one way, then crossed her legs the other, uncomfortable in her seat, aware of the presence of CC by her chair, his dark eyes watching the door as it opened, and three men entered the room, one of them leaning heavily on a crutch, another with his jacket pinned at the elbow, neither seemingly considerate of modern prosthetics, both of them clearly having seen battle in their time.
Hastily, she stood up also, inclining her head.
Well, Misa, this is what you were expecting wasn't it, she asked herself. This is why you're here, this is why they called you to come in for an interview. Still, she thought, this was perhaps the only interview that she'd been asked to bring her dog along to. Not that there had been all that many job opportunities recently. It had been three years since the summit at which the Solar Squadron had been codified, and two years since Black Magma had finally been defeated, and for the most part, she had been working as a temp in the secretary pool for a record company, taking the train into Shinjuku every day, bustling along with fellow commuters, talking to strange men.
It wasn't that she didn't like working where she did, it wasn't like she wasn't interested in music, but there was only so many times she could listen to that the syrupy sweet sound of that same ALiCE SWeeTS song, or the Spanish guitar in that Barbēlō song, both of which had been playing on the radio non-stop that summer.
"No need to get up on our behalf," the man leaning on the crutch said, easing himself into his chair. "Trust me, I won't be getting up again."
Panic seized her, she didn't know whether this was a joke, whether she should be laughing or not. At her heels, she felt CC become equally tense, his ears flattening.
One of the other men dropped a heavy folder to the desk and removed his sunglasses.
"Please don't worry about Kenji," he said with a smile, "he can be a bit abrupt, but he's a good guy."
Again, Misa nodded.
"Y-Yes," she managed to murmur.
The man seemed bemused, and gestured at her seat.
"Please, sit down."
"Y-Yes," she said again, and though she did as instructed, she did it with reluctance.
At her heels, CC remained tense, half-sitting, half-standing, hunched in a crouch.
"So," the man said, "as established, this unhappy fellow is Iida Kenji. The man next to him is Yuuki Jouji, who you may know from some of his scientific achievements, and his role on the board of Industrial Electronics."
She glanced over, inclining her head in a slight bow to the man at the far end of the table. The name of Professor Yuuki would have been well known even without the coda with which he was introduced. At the record company, people spoke of Yuuki in hushed whispers, said his cassette arm technology had pushed forward the market of Japan's music industry with the domestic application of such machinery in a way that no other country, not even the United States, could presently compete with.
Yet if the cassette arms were what had made Yuuki Jouji famous, why did he make the absence of his right arm so apparent?
"And my name is Taki Kazuya, current commander-in-chief of operations here at JMDF," the other man said, apparently oblivious to her thought process.
She turned sharply to look at him, and instead found his gaze directed towards her dog.
"This little fellow must be CC, am I right?"
"Right," she said quickly, and then added, "sir."
Taki Kazuya smiled, keeping his eyes on the dog.
"It's all right, you're amongst friends, you can talk here."
She glanced down at CC, seeing him warily regarding the three men.
"I don't know about that," the dog said reluctantly.
"We're very pleased to meet you," Taki continued, "we've heard a lot about your work supporting Commander Arashiyama's staff."
Behind the desk, the man named Iida shook his head in annoyance.
"A talking dog, just what we need to liven up the office."
Misa felt her cheeks warm with sudden embarrassment.
"Listen, you asked me to bring CC here," she said defensively, reaching down and scooping the dog up in a protective hug, getting fur all over the white jacket she had spent the morning going over with a lint roller.
"That we did," Taki said quickly, "and we're pleased to meet you both."
From the far end of the table, Professor Yuuki looked down at his notes.
"Miss Arashiyama, it says here you have some secretarial expense."
Misa sighed, feeling somewhat deflated. Here we go, she thought. It was her own fault, she shouldn't have imagined that JMDF might have been any different from the Guardians of World Peace, or the Solar Squadron. She was a woman after all, and no one seemed to care about how well she could fight, how she handled a sword, or how much she had put on the line for her father's vision of just what the Solar Squadron could be, all they seemed to care about was how many words a minute she could type.
In the man's eyes, there was a glimmer of mischief, a smile playing upon his lips.
"Tell me, what do you think you could teach our new recruits when it comes to fencing?"
