-112: House Call of Irregulars-

In the vaguest of terms, our plan was six people against god-knows-what in a mansion, and possibly the arrival of the CCG if the universe felt particularly like laughing at us particularly hard. Monica and a good part of me loved the odds for a fight, but I was retaining a little hope for something easy. I found it hilarious that we were taking public transportation there and back, and on the train Tsukiyama revealed that he also saw comedy.

"Imagine what they would think," he said, lowering a dourly-colored fashion magazine and flicking his eyes over a trio of students passing our seats, "if they knew they shared a train car with some of the most dangerous individuals in the city."

I looked like a tourist backpacker, right down to the map in my hands. "Doubt they'd believe it."

"The 'core' of the person is the what makes it work." Tsukiyama waggled a finger with a smirk. "I can put Touka in a dress or you in a suit, but wrapping a wolf in wool is a fruitless exercise. Touka managed to look mostly harmless, but I half expected the restaurant to panic the moment they saw you."

When I snorted at the remark, Tsukiyama only replied with that knowing grin of his. Touka looked away from the window long enough to scowl at the offending party and opened her mouth, only to turn back to the window without saying anything.

The rail line out to the station closest to Kanou's mansion was a new experience for me; sure I had been squeezed into public transit, but this was the first time I had taken an actual train trip. If not for the circumstances, it might've even been fun. I still didn't know what the plan was if we actually found Kanou; that was the one part of the plan I hadn't heard anything about, and the only one I was sure that Kaneki was keeping from everyone else. Well, that or I hadn't been shared that part of the plan, so what he planned on doing was beyond me. Turn him in to Japan's version of the FBI? Kill him? Question him? Taking him back via train probably wasn't going to work.

It was only at the driveway to the estate that we grouped up again; Kaneki and Banjou's group had traveled separately at his suggestion to remain inconspicuous. Madam A's visible hesitation at my appearance was a tiny high point after the boredom of the trip. Banjou's band had been nixed by Touka's demand for them to stay behind and watch Hinami, so we were down three speedbumps. Besides, we were getting close to the point where our band would be conspicuous.

Tsukiyama shared the estate's sordid history as we beat a path through weedy landscaping, unsettling Banjou and adding a few gristly details of questionable truth. Hide had never mentioned what order the ghoul had eaten the former owners in, nor it being 'eyes first'. Fresh off my flight, I would've laughed off the additional detail as being laughably improbable, though now I couldn't help but think there was a grain of truth in it.

"You don't think it's actually haunted, do you?" Banjou eyed the approaching building as if it could grow teeth. "We could've gotten something from a shrine..."

At the rear of the group, a slightly panting Tsukiyama vocally wondered how such a big ghoul could be afraid of ghosts.

I was more worried about who we could actually encounter; pretty much all of the cuts I had gotten from the ghoul restaurant had faded, but the big one on my arm was only mostly healed. I pretty sure that I wasn't about to get attacked by a ghost, but I wasn't eager to have a round two with our one-eyed twins.

The mansion interior set me on edge. In the kitchen, I drew a line on the countertop, a newborn dust bunny sprouting from my fingertip. Unused, just like everything else here: even the microwave was dusty.

"I see Kanou long since dispensed with the housecleaning." Tsukiyama strolled in from a door on the opposite side of the room, Madam A in tow. "She claims her visits never went beyond the front hall, but the dining room is a little less dusty than the rest of the first floor."

Madam A flinched I flicked the bit of dust free from my fingertip. Somehow I was still the scariest person in the room. As Tsykukiyama investigated the fridge, I bit at the barely healed inside of my cheek. How was he this at ease, walking around the place like he lived here? If not for Madam A and his distaste for the landscaping, he was walking around as if this was his house and he had just gotten back from a long vacation. A small pang of envy snagged my attention; I would've loved to be walking around with his amount of chill. With a nod, I left him to his devices and wandered back toward the middle of the core of the first floor, where Banjou waved me over to a doorway.

Seeing unfinished wood and a railing, the hair on my neck prickled as I realized Hide had been right all along. Basement.

Forcing open the modern trapdoor flanked by wine racks had been simple enough—despite the only reason I knew they were wine racks was because of Monica—but below that was just another basement. Confusing. Banjou and Tsukiyama took cursory looks around, but seemed to be at a loss as of what to do and looked to Kaneki and I. Kaneki examined the space and then rounded to Madam A, interrogating her in the same quietly serrated tone he had admonished me with. I didn't feel as lost as Banjou looked, only like I was missing some piece to a larger puzzle.

Hide was right. That was something I could settle on as correct. So, it followed that there would be a way into it from the house, a route Kanou could use without making stepping outside. The logical answer was that there was a hidden door somewhere or another false wall. Tempting as it was to just start knocking walls out, there were the twin problems of my not having the gear to do it, and the slight risk that taking out an important wall would make something collapse.

Sucking in a deep breath, I caught the slightest hint of something candylike in the air.

"Do you expect me to believe you?" Kaneki's voice crackled with fraying patience. "You have been here. You have met Kanou. There is a camera staring us down, and you still expect me to believe you?"

There was indeed a camera on the wall, tucked up in a corner where the wall and ceiling met. If it was mounted there, then this little area was significant. More importantly, it was most likely mounted like cameras normally were around entrances; set to catch faces as they approached.

"I think I have something." Approaching the suspect wall, I looked up and down for some kind of hidden switch.

Kaneki turned from giving Madam A some fresh fear. "What."

"I think this is a false wall." I gave the short version of my chain of thought.

"Makes sense," Touka nodded. "still looks like a wall."

Instead of stating the obvious about hidden doorways, I opted to sigh again, only to notice the sweet scent was slightly more intense. Kaneki rapped at a brick; it certainly sounded solid enough. Touching a brick myself, I found that pulling back was akin to freeing my hand from a glue trap.

Freeing my hand, I found no residue. "Kaneki, is this wall sticky t-"

Kaneki's kagune made a sledgehammer's introduction to the brickwork, rendering my complaint of not having equipment foolish. Except the wall behaved more like clay being pulled apart rather than pulverized brick. It shuddered after the blow, then the gouge Kaneki left opened into an orifice. It was...meat. Kaneki didn't seem to care about anything more than us now having a way forward, because he marched in without a second thought.

Touka though, had doubts as we followed. "What the fuck is this?"

"The flesh wall, it looks like." Tsukiyama's voice seemed to be eaten by the "The twenty fourth ward, besides its location being a secret, is shielded by this. Supposedly, only the residents know how to open it. Well, open it gently. In practice, it's supposed to be similar to a quinque; 'controllable' by a 'user'."

"But what is it?" Touka carefully stepped over a tendril that had spread onto the concrete.

"An excellent question! Allen, any thoughts?"

"Eh." Glancing to the side, I watched as something below the fleshy surface flexed and twitched. "If you told me this existed yesterday, I would've told you to pull my other leg. Is it supposed to be sticky?"

To my surprise, Tsukiyama casually reached out a hand and brushed it as he stepped through the orifice-slash-door, saying it was smooth and dry. So I gave it another shot, only to have my initial experience repeat itself by nearly stumbling into Banjou while I was in the process of yanking my fingers free. His attention was less on me though, and more on the tunnel ahead.

Tunnel was an insufficient word. Concrete floor and walls, the electric hum of incandescent light, humming and gurgling from pipes and vents; I felt as if I was in one of the nuclear bunkers beneath the BGA and not something built by a rogue doctor. I had even more time to ogle, since my lack of ghoul-level hearing and smelling skill made me the official tail of the group. Everything looked professional; wiring, concrete, ductwork, even the glossy white paint. The only real indicator that this play hadn't been built in the last year was that the clear plastic covering the lights had the faintest yellow tinge.

We had been going downward as well; descending far enough for a few rooms to hold tanks taller than myself. Pipes gurgled, and something hummed withing a few of the tanks. Whatever this place had been built for, it was now definitely being used for whatever purpose Kanou had in mind. Whatever it was, well, Kaneki becoming a ghoul shouldn't have left much room for mystery and yet all of this seemed outsize for that purpose. More troubling was that our path seemed to have been preset with sealed doors and a zig-zag leading us through sections of the main passage at least twice now.

Touka staggered back a step and cursed about a foul scent with enough force that something nauseating roiled in my stomach. First at her side, Kanki coughed hard himself after pulling her back. One hand fanning fresh air at her nose and mouth, Touka pointed at a doorway just even with where she had stopped. My time to shine; I thought my mostly-human nose would keep me safe, but learned otherwise once I stood about where Touka had been. No wonder there was an exhaust fan directly overhead.

It wasn't shit, I knew that much having lived in places where a cheap porta-potty would've been a improvement. Occasionally, when we killed a ghoul back home, we'd get picked to respond to a panicked landlord a while later. This was decomposition, of the 'partially gnawed limbs left in a bathtub' variety. The room itself went further down in the direction we had been headed with a gangway suspended over a mostly full pit of...something. There was another pair of tanks on the far side in addition to a pair of hatch-like doors.

Stepping back and sucking in clean air, I turned to the group and gave a report.

"Need to go through it." Kaneki noted grimly. "Banjou checked the other doors."

I led, thankful that the smell didn't get much worse when approaching the crossing. Whoever had designed it must've had a sick sense of humor, because it was less of a floor, and more of a grate: solid enough to stand on, but seeing the slick black liquid below was not a perspective to be enjoyed. For the sake of paranoia, we went across one by one. Second to last, Banjou started retching when he was halfway across, drawing all our attention before he bent over and emptied his guts into the fluid below. While I was glad to not join him, I couldn't blame him. Just as he straightened up, the black liquid roiled as a head rose from it. Something in my training clicked over making me two steps onto the gangway by the time a hand had reached and securely latched on to Banjou's leg.

Suddenly very aware that the gangway had no handrail to keep us from falling in, I held Banjou upright as his caught leg slipped, redirecting a stumble to the other side of the walkway into staggering us both toward solid ground. In the process, I got an accidental look at the bloated and pale thing below and quickly redirected my eyes upward at our destination.

Partial chaos reigned in my ears; Banjou's panic, the gurgling of the thing below and the echo of Tsukiyama's shocked swear. It was Touka who beat Kaneki to the draw and came to our rescue with a precise line of shards stitching through the thing and getting it to let go of Banjou. I doubt Banjou had ever been so relieved to land on hard floor before. Climbing to my feet as quickly as I could, I looked to the pit for some kind of response. The thing was just there, bobbing at the surface and I got a much better look at it. Blue and bloated like a drowned corpse with the lips and most of the nose gone, it definitely had been dead for more than a few days. When the thing finally twitched and rolled onto its face, a stubby and anemone-like kagune emerged and began to tear chunks from its back.

It was unnatural, unheard of, completely unsettling, and I couldn't tear my eyes away from the spectacle. 'Hunger is hell,' I had been told, but nothing had given me an indication that someone could be hungry enough to do this. But where would a ghoul get into this bunker of a basement? Glancing over at the rest, Kaneki was seemingly drinking in every detail.

A ghoul wouldn't have to get in here. All Kanou would need is some poor sap off the street and a kagune. Kaneki and I didn't need any examples of how we had beaten the odds staring us in the face; we, or at least, I, knew that well without the nightmare inducing visuals.

It was Tsukiyama, nose wrinkled from the stench who got us moving again, with me taking the second space in line when he led the way out. At the end of the line, Kaneki made a second interrogation of Madam A to ensure that we were at least somewhat on the right track and getting her to admit that she and her bodyguards had been introduced. When Tsukyama pushed open an ajar door, he stepped through with a sudden bounce in his step and a curt bit of laughter echoing into a cavernous room.

"Speak of the devil." I heard Banjou grumble over my shoulder.

"Good afternoon, ladies." With a slight bow, Tsukiyama's greeting echoed back to us. "Shall we reprise our most recent dance?"


I must beg forgiveness for the delay on this update, but it's been a wild few months.

Went outside after the last thaw/freeze cycle and a lot of stuff happened. Broke my ankle, had surgery on said ankle to have a few screws put in, typed a lot, started phyisical therapy. I can now officially say that the only screws I have loose are metaphorical, ha!

I'm fine now apart from needing crutches for a while still, and have a few new ways to describe painful experiences. In addition, I also discovered that my writing while on painkillers was about as coherant as the scribblings of a mouse with a pen taped to its tail, so I had to do a ton of editing and rewriting.

Long story short, I'm back and getting back in the swing of things.