Well, hello again Arc-V fandom. It's good to see you again.
It's been a while, I know, and this is my apology to you. A 56000 word, 74 page love letter to two of my favourite animes.
If you haven't guess by the title, this is a story based on the 2007 anime series Baccano, which is series about prohibition-era alcohol gangs and yet still has a lower death count than Arc-V. Baccano follows three semi-independent story lines featuring featuring a main cast of nearly twenty people. For this reason, I only have enough characters to cover one story line in this fic. However, its unanimously the best of the three, so you won't be missing out on too much. Notably, I also tried to avoid Baccano's more supernatural elements because, like I said, I didn't have enough characters to then explain those supernatural elements. Basically, you can read this fic and still be in for several pleasant surprises.
Another thing about Baccano is that it isn't told linearly, and events may not be shown in the right order. I've included dates, location titles and times at the start of every switch in the narrative to make following this easier.
After three weeks I have most of this story finished, so I'll be publishing it at a rate of about one chapter per day, or two days if I'm busy. Please review as you go along though - when university studies are getting difficult, nothing put a smile on a poor fic writer's face than reviews.
Baccano
noun [masculine] (Italian)
/ba'k:ano/
racket, din, noise, ruckus
Example: Non fate baccano! - Don't make a lot of racket!
Chapter One
"A mysterious cripple walks into the president's office"
Chinatown, New York, New York
Friday 5th February, 1932
10:00
The turn of the twenties into the thirties, where there was one occupation that under threat from a vicious new predator.
Being a salesman.
Well, this was of course true, but not quite relevant for this particular story. What I actually meant to say was:
Being a bootlegger.
Also true. Just one year from now, the prohibition era will end and alcohol will go back to being the daily breakfast, lunch and dinner of the American public. I mean, if everyone's gonna starve to death they may as well do it while so drunk they don't realise just what a mess they're in.
While this is indeed relevant to this story, if not so much for this chapter. In fact, this chapter is about an unbelievable third occupation under threat.
(In reality the thirties just kinda sucked for everyone. Basically you had to be a pastor or a cop to survive, and even then, the latter was no guarantee. I mean, it's one thing for you to starve to death, but riddled with bullets from a tommy gun can't be the best way to go out either, right?)
In this case, we're talking about:
Being a journalist.
Sounds kinda weird? I mean, even starving people wanna know what's going on in the world, right? Well that's where that nasty new predator comes in:
Radio.
It was a nasty little thing that had been around since the 1910's or so. But it has started to get its bread and butter in the twenties. By the time we get to 1932, newspapers were practically sweating bullets at the idea that people would get sick of buying their broadsheets when they could just listen to one dude's voice telling them everything they needed to know in half the time. Just six years from now, the whole newspaper industry would come together to manufacture a hoax about some guy's radio drama causing the whole east coast to think they were being invaded by aliens in an attempt to discredit radio for good.
That dude was Orson Wells, and he used the massive publicity the rags gave him to create a little know feature film called 'Citizen Kane', so clearly they were very successful at it.
Of course, all of us from the 21st century know this is all nonsense and that nearly ninety years later, people will continue to buy newspapers, despite the fact they now not only have radio, but televisions that will give them the whole story, also in half the time, but with pretty moving pictures to boot. Because apparently, newspaper guys in the thirties couldn't comprehend the utter lack of logic their great-grandchildren would possess.
But when a cripple walked in the Daily Days news office at 5-7 Doyers Street, the idea that newspapers were going out of style was a real fear. Most of the minor papers had gone out of business just from the idea; that or been gobbled up by major headliners like the New York Times and the New York Tribune and basically every other paper that started with the words 'New York'. The small paper known as the Daily Days that was distributed from an unobtrusive corner of Manhattan's Chinatown, however, had managed to weather the years on a small but loyal group of readers who appreciated daily, unbiased updates on what the free-thinking journalists, many of them Chinese themselves, thought of the world.
Steering each day of chaos towards another successful issue was chief editor and part-time information broker, Shingo Sawatari, who, at this moment, was debating his life choices.
Being promoted to chief editor, at the time, sounded like a great idea – more pay, more freedom to tell the news as he liked it and more underlings to appreciate how amazing he was. However, it felt more like herding cats.
And not those nice house cats that jumped up on your lap and purred at you. But mangy street cats who were just waiting to take a chunk out of your leg the second you took your eyes off of them.
Today was even worse then usual. A Friday would usually be a fairly relaxed day – nothing exciting ever happened on a Friday after all – and Shingo could usually get a moment of sleep at his desk in his shiny office on the second floor (you know, the one Shinji had kicked the door of down when he found someone had misspelt his name as Shinji Weeber and took personal offense to it. The same office that was currently graffitied with bad Italian slogans and the words 'Professional Worrier' painted above the desk chair, which in turn had been glued to the floor and slathered with honey – Shingo loved his work colleagues, he really did). However, this week happened to contain the weekend the Chinese New Year fell on, and it appeared everyone of even vaguely Chinese descent had decided not to come into work today (including that one blonde dude with the red tattoos on his face who swore he was from Peiping. If he was Chinese, Shingo was the hitman for the Haitian mob). This left poor, poor Shingo with a bunch of grouchy white dudes and a couple of fresh-faced interns trying to hammer out something to keep the paper's so-far spotless record of publishing something every day.
So when the cripple walked into the front office of the Daily Days, Shingo was not indeed napping in his office. Instead he was passed out on the front desk, having nightmares about angry bosses and semi-violent copy editors and passive-aggressive freelancers and the fact someone had managed to misspelt the word 'moist' three different times in the same article.
The cripple in question stared at Shingo like he was some sort of circus attraction. Then, he raised his hand and brought his palm down on the bell fitted to the counter.
Shingo woke with a start at the sudden ringing noise in his ear, startling so badly he managed to roll right of the desk and bring the final draft for three different articles with him. Before the cripple could so much as ask if he was okay though, Shingo was back on his feet and greeting the visitor with a cheery grin that may have been just a little forced.
"Hello there! Welcome to the Daily Days, bringing the daily news to the masses. I'm Chief Editor Shingo Sawatari, how can I help you?"
The cripple blinked a pair of green eyes up at him and shifted his weight on his crutch a bit. "I got a letter telling me to come here."
With those words, the small man produced a letter, folded twice and thrice over, from his coat pocket and handed it to Shingo.
Shingo opened it and recognised the handwriting immediately. This was definitely Shinji's, instructing this young man to come to the office this Friday morning on 'urgent matters'.
Urgent matters with a cripple? What was he up to?
"Just, wait here for a minute, ok?" Shingo told the cripple, still looking at the letter more than its owner, and turned up the stairs to the first floor where Shinji's office was.
Shingo, before his office was untimely invaded, had prided himself on keeping a clean and tidy work environment. Which, in hindsight, probably explained the invasion. Nobody had bothered to wreck Shinji's office, however, as no one could possibly hope to create as much a mess as Shinji himself had already done so.
The copy editor's office may as well be the office archive. Papers, drafts and completed works, were stacked from floor to ceiling, almost baring any view one might have of the man at the equally crowded desk. Shinji refused to let anyone clean it for him, insisting it formed some kind of system he could follow. Shingo could only guess it followed the same idea as fossils – you could date them by the amount of strata they were buried under.
"Did you ask some cripple to come in today?" Shingo had learnt over time that it was safer to just get to the point with Shinji – opening a conversation in a roundabout way tended to deliver you a politically-charged rant on anything from bees to the rise of socialism.
Shinji frowned, peeking his head out from behind the looming towers for yesteryear. "He here for a story?"
"I don't know" Shingo shrugged, holding up the letter "He has a letter from you, says he had to turn up today on 'urgent matters'."
Shinji frowned and touched his glasses in thought. "He's crippled, you said?"
"He's on crutches" Shingo confirmed.
"Short guy? Ponytail?"
"Yeah."
"With a broken leg?"
"I guess. It had a splint on it."
Shinji suddenly jumped up from his desk, three of his towers crashing onto one of the few patches of unblemished floor left in the office. "Oh my god! He actually turned up!"
"What?" Shingo couldn't understand what all the fuss was about "He a celebrity or something?"
"The president wanted to see him!" Shinji told him, flying past Shingo whilst trying to ditch his reading glasses, coat and what appeared to be a stray magnifying glass "He had me send letters to all these weird places all over the country, but he didn't think the guy would show! But he's here!"
"The president wants to meet him?" Shingo's eyebrows practically climbed into the rafters.
The president never met with anybody. Shingo was his chief editor and he could count the number of times he'd met the man on one hand.
"Hello there sir!" Shinji greeted the stranger with open arms and a wide smile "Thank you so much for stopping by! I hope the journey wasn't too far for you! The president is just upstairs!"
The cripple shot Shinji a calculating look, like he was sizing him up and finding him wanting. None the less, he hobbled over to the stairs and began the slow climb up them.
Shingo considered asking if he needed any help, but felt this would be perceived negatively, and so decided to keep his mouth shut and just follow the pair upstairs.
The president, despite the level of importance the name carried, actually had his office on the same floor as Shingo and Shinji's. In fact, from the few times he'd been inside said office, Shingo was almost certain it was actually smaller than his. It wasn't as if it had a great window view either – just a filthy back alley. But what the president liked wasn't any of Shingo's business, even if he really wished it was. If it was, he could get rid of that awful red carpet and replace it with something that made the room seem just a little bit bigger and airier. Maybe a nice cream or beige?
Shinji didn't even bother to knock, just threw open the doors with the enthusiasm of a train heading for a complete wreck.
"Sir! Your mysterious visitor has arrived! Just like you wanted!"
The president turned in his chair and ignored Shinji completely, eyes focused purely on the young man leaning on his crutch in the doorway of the office. The cripple, in turn, didn't so much as bat an eyelid at the president. To Shingo, this meant one of two things – either they had met before, or the young man had seen so much in his life that seeing the president, who he was a just how surprising it was to see him there, just didn't affect him at all.
Shingo hoped sincerely it wasn't the latter. He had to deal with enough crazy, broken people on a day-to-day basis.
"Hello there" the president said "I don't supposed we've had to the chance to meet before."
"Probably not" the cripple admitted, a vaguely southern accent in his words that Shingo hadn't noticed before.
"I'm sorry to drag you out here out of the blue."
Shingo nearly fainted, since when does the president apologise to anyone?
"It's alright" the cripple shrugged, shifting his weight on his crutch as he did so "I was in the city anyway."
"Please, take a seat" the president gestured to the large sofa on the opposite side of the room.
To Shingo's surprise, because apparently he was getting enough surprises to last a year this morning, the cripple hobbled across the room and sat down, leaning his crutch against the wall, splinted leg propped up on the coffee table.
"Do close the door, Sawatari, this is a private meeting" the president finally acknowledged Shingo was even there.
Shingo jumped to it and slammed the door behind him. He wondered if 'private meeting' meant he and Shinji were supposed to leave, but Shinji didn't seem to be in a hurry to go, so he decided to stick around until he was told to get out.
Shinji, meanwhile, had produced a box of lemon drops and held them out to their guest. "Lemon drop?"
The cripple stared at the open box for a few seconds, before reaching forward and taking the whole box out of Shinji's hand, wolfing down a handful of them so quickly Shingo could barely keep up.
Shinji frowned, clearly not impressed with the man's behaviour, but it wouldn't do well to badmouth the president's guest, and so kept his mouth shut and moved back to sit himself down in an armchair near the sofa instead.
"So, you here for the same reason as everyone else?" the cripple asked, mouth still full of the sugary treats.
Shingo and Shinji both winced at the appalling manners and wondered who their beloved president was associating himself with now.
"I'm not here to throw money at you, no" the president corrected him "Nor am I here for sensationalism. Just the truth. Simple, honest truth."
The cripple glanced up at him, the look on his face making it clear he didn't believe a word of it. "Yeah, truth truth truth. Just like the others. Why are you so focused on it? It happened, like, weeks ago. The big rags have to all printed by now."
"They have their stories printed, yes" the president admitted "But I'm not just some newspaper president. I broker information, both publicly and for…more pertinent sources."
"You're a broker?" That finally caught the stranger off guard "Wouldn't have seen that coming."
"Yes, Mommy and Daddy were very disappointed" the president admitted with a rare sincere smile "But this story isn't for the papers, or for others. This is strictly personal."
"Personal?" the guest finally seemed to be listening "Like, what, kind of personal?"
"The kind of personal that wants to know what happened to their family, wants to try and understand, protect them from harm the best they can, even if it's too late" the president told him "I supposed you could sympathise with that."
The cripple paused, then placed the box of lemon drops down on the coffee table next to his injured leg.
"So, if I do this for you, you can do a little something for me?" he asked "Is that what you're saying?"
"Of course" the president nodded "And I have a feeling I know what you'd like in exchange."
The stranger leant back in his seat, puffing his cheeks out in thought. "Alright. Where do you want me to start?"
The president in turn learnt forward in his chair, chin propped up on his hands. "December 30th, 1931. The transcontinental express from Chicago to New York, The Flying Lancer, leaves Chicago's Union Station at 9am sharp."