"Ashita no Rondeau"
(Rondeau for Tomorrow)
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3. Yasashii Tomoshibi (Gentle Lamplight)
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"It's residue Gate energy from the Nikotama Massacre. It still echoes here, trapping people and Invaders in memories of being human," the tall, gaunt woman called Lich said in way of explanation to Kageyama's earlier question as they sat around a small campfire shored with pieces of concrete still with corroded metal rebar sticking out of them. 'Residue' was an understatement for lingering Gate energy so strong that it was also at fault for him involuntarily seeing into her mind when they'd touched, back on the crystalline sand of the Dead Zone.
She looked up into Kageyama's blank face.
"Oh, right, that was after your time. It's hard to keep track, sometimes," her expression softened for a moment, and she clamped down on it, hard.
"No, I want to know about you. Who are you? What is your connection to the Invaders?" He insisted.
"I'm a Gatekeeper, same as you."
"That's not all, that's not enough," he growled, tired of being fobbed off. "Where did you come from? How does your body think you are several different ages at the same time?"
"It's not nice to pry," she replied dryly, "and especially not about a lady's age."
"Then it's good that I'm not nice!"
She smiled, though it was a wry, unpleasant smirk more than anything else. "You forget the most important question: why are you here."
"I already know why. You brought me back to make use of my power."
She nodded. "The Gate of Insight. They say you're naturally clairvoyant too."
"I don't need any of that to see through you," he snarled,
"Good, then I don't need to say anything."
"... ..."
Kageyama wavered, unsure of what had just transpired. Did he just... lose?
"Eat your dinner," she nagged, shoving a foil-lined bag of some gloopy grey gruel at him.
Kageyama eyed it, and her, up with a good measure of disgust and stomped off to find a place to sulk.
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1 9 7 6
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When he didn't show up for their usual lunch date the next day, Ruriko locked herself in the office restroom and had a little weep.
Wait, maybe he thought he was giving her space? It does sound like the kind of blockhead thing he might do. But when she found out that he hadn't been home or at work since the night before, she started to panic.
"What if it's Invaders?" She latched onto Banchou in the alley behind the Tekkoutsuken, the only other remaining person in her life who knew of AEGIS and the power of the Gates. "We've got to find him, Banchou! Come on, right now!"
"But... but... I'm in the middle of work!"
"That's not important! Shun could be hurt!"
"UWAA, you're right! We should go right now!" Banba Choutarou ripped off his apron and grabbed Ruriko's arm, literally dragging her off. "YO, OYABUN! I'm taking the rest of the day off!"
"OI, BANBA! Where the hell do you think you're going? What about my customers, you bastard!" Kurogane Yuuzei, his boss and owner of the Tekkoutsuen, emerged into the back alley from the kitchen brandishing a large soup ladle.
Banchou quivered, suitably torn. "To hell with the customers! I'll make it up to you, Boss, but right now, Ukiya-kun needs me!"
"Eh?" The tough old man's expression changed. "Ukiya-kun? Isn't he in Nagoya?"
"NAGOYA?!" Ruriko exclaimed. What was he doing there?
"Ya, he's gone to see Megumi. Took the first train this morning."
Kurogane Megumi worked in Nagoya. She was the same age as this lot and used to go to school with them. They weren't friends, not really, but then Megumi has never been a very friendly sort of kid, to Yuuzei's eternal disappointment, even though he could not be prouder of his nurse daughter.
"Oh!" Both youngsters turned bright red.
"Then I guess I'm going back to wait on the customers-sama..." Banchou picked up his apron doggedly and crawled back to work.
"Are you ok, Ruriko-san?" Yuuzei peered kindly into Ruriko's burning face. "Did something happen with Ukiya-kun?"
"Nu... nothing!" She stammered and hastily backed out of the alley, dropping quick embarrassed bows every few steps until he went back inside.
He's gone to see Megumi. Ruriko's heart sank. Tears flowed unheeded down her cheeks all the way on her walk home, uncaring of what anyone who saw might think.
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It was a sunny afternoon in Nagoya, so it was unusual that there weren't more people taking advantage of it in the tranquil recovery garden.
The reason becomes clear in a moment, as the doing of a small knot of eight men and women from as young as six to as old as eighty-nine crowded near a pair of glass doors, chocking down the only access to the garden. Most of them wore pale blue hospital regulation pajamas, though three of them wore nursing uniforms and one had a physician's white coat over a simple white shirt and black suit pants.
It wasn't clear if they were trying to eavesdrop on the man and woman meeting in the garden or secure their privacy, partly because they hadn't come to a conclusion on that amongst themselves yet.
"It's a man! There's a man here to see Nurse Kurogane! From Tokyo!"
"A man? Is he young or old?"
"Young! Twenties! Can't be more than twenty-five!"
"Really? Kurogane the Iron Angel? Our Nurse Kurogane?"
"What others could there be?"
"Is that the one she used to like in high school? Yuki? Yuji?"
"Can't be, that guy died,"
"This guy's called Ukiya, I heard it from reception."
"The one who's inheriting her father's shop?"
"Eee? Are they engaged?"
"What are they talking about?"
"I heard the word 'marriage'!"
Not thirty feet away, Nurse Kurogane stole a glance at the large picture window next to the hospital doors and sighed.
"You're an idiot, Ukiya Shun."
"I know that, Megu! That's why I'm asking you!" He cried in frustration, begging with both hands pressed together in front of his bowed head. "I wouldn't have made it through university if it weren't for you... Please! You're the smartest person I know!"
Ukiya Shun looked a mess. He hadn't slept nor changed his clothes for nearly forty-eight hours, give or take, and there was a crazed look in his eyes. Even at twenty-four, he was still just a brash, wide-eyed, fumbling idiot boy.
"What does Ikusawa think?"
"Ruriko doesn't know anything, and she doesn't have to!"
Megumi took a deep breath for patience. Idiot. There was no point explaining to him how that almost invariably guarantees Ikusawa Ruriko would have already found out about his whereabouts in the worst possible way, and why it was wrong of him to come straight to her the morning after telling his girlfriend he hadn't thought about marriage at all. Most people would assume it's because he'd then thought about it and has come to propose to his best friend Megu.
Shun and Megumi have never fully explained their relationship to anyone. There has never been the need. She was a pariah to the old AEGIS group back home, so naturally he never mentioned her around the rest. And since she'd been accepted and left for nursing school barely a month after graduating from Tategami Private High, none of their old set has had cause to mention her in more than casual passing since, either.
Indeed, how would the privileged little Miss feel about her boyfriend coming to her, dull, impoverished, gloomy, second-place wallflower her, instead of his smart, popular, pretty, rich girlfriend for advice?
"Fine." She grumbled. "Come back at six, I'll be off work then."
She stood up to leave, though not before placing an unopened cafeteria bento on the bench beside him.
"You can have that," she said unkindly, "I haven't any appetite."
It was a lie, they both knew it was, but he had gotten used to her years ago and hardly noticed it any more. The barbed words and thorniness are just over-vigilant defence mechanisms built into the walls of self-scorn she'd built around herself a long time ago for reasons he could not really understand. He would worry about her except she seems to have done well enough for herself despite it, so he didn't.
She headed back inside quickly with seemingly supernatural stealth and cleared her throat just inside the doors.
"Ahem."
"Nurse!"
"Kurogane-san!"
Shock, panic, embarrassment.
"How did you know we were here?"
Megumi pointed mutely at the cluster of drip stands between them, still heavy with saline bags and plainly visible through the windows.
"Alright, back to your rooms," she shooed her prying audience to their feet with a firm, matronly tone. "And you, Morizuka-sensei, for shame! Peeping with the rest of this lot like a bunch of Junior High Schoolers!" The young doctor hanged his head in shame.
If Shun had been in any mind to chat to her patients and colleagues, he would have been surprised. Megumi had changed, even though neither he nor her have realised this: she because she could never bear to examine herself, and him because they would always revert naturally to the way they were in high school when around each other, the way people often do with old friends. The same would be true of him, if he had changed at all.
The Kurogane Megumi Nagoya knows is a dependable, no-nonsense young woman with a secret soft, fluffy side that seeps through the seams more often than she would care to admit. They called her the Iron Angel behind her back, tough as nails and angelically kind. True, she wasn't the prettiest nurse nor the most popular or highest performing, she wasn't even very compassionate, because true kindness rarely is; but she was always there where it mattered the most and can always be counted on to fight for you, provided you've told her the truth, which she had a knack for finding out too.
"Ne, Kurogane-san, who is he?"
"Is that your fiancé?"
"Ack, no," she made a face, firmly herding the little gossip club back towards the wards. "No, he's more like... a little brother."
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It was cold and his hand was starting to hurt where he'd cut it on the green sand that he now realised was in fact the fragments of thousands of crushed Invader crystals. Kageyama bundled his tie around it and hugged his knees closer to his chest, feeling sorry for himself. Maybe his hand will get infected and he will finally turn into an Invader too, free of the suffering of the mortal coil.
That night, he dreamt about a world taken over by Invaders. They stood on every corner, leading astonishingly normal lives, bartering and gossiping with each other in strange screeches of static, nearly human; and of people living like rats, wild-eyed and feral, scuttling in dark alleyways, filthy and diseased. It was an old dream, one he has had before. He recognised his father and saw him ripped apart for food by other dirty, rag-clad, scavenging people even while he dug into himself, stuffing his face with bloody mouthfuls of his own flesh and guts.
As usual, he turned and fled from the carnage, only to find similar pockets of people feasting on each other everywhere, filling the city with a rust-red miasma that consumed him with terror beyond any imagination. He daren't scream, in case the blood-fog got inside him. He daren't cry, in case they came for him.
Somehow, at this point, he would always find himself holding a pair of sunglasses like the ones the Invaders wore, he can never remember how, and he would discover that putting them on blocked out the horrific humanity and its atrocities, even purged him of the smell, taste and feel of their deadly pollution. The sunglasses kept him safe. He puts them on, and the dream ends.
In this dream, this time, however, they did not appear. He stumbled through the city with his heart pounding in his chest and his jacket tied up around his nose and mouth, a poor defence against the searing fog but the only one that he could muster, growing more frantic with each passing moment, looking for those sunglasses...
Then he woke and, remembering where he was, had a little cry.
Once that was out of the way, he was able to pick himself up off the ground and head back towards Lich's camp for breakfast and some answers.
Ruka had found them sometime in the night and now slept curled in a foetal ball in the swaths of her heavy, dusty cloak beside the fire, at Lich's feet. The light danced in the latter's steely eyes as she watched him, hawk-like and dispassionate.
"It was rude and childish of me to run off, I'm sorry," he said from the other side of the fire, nearly doubling over in a deep, exaggerated bow. She said nothing.
"I'm a self-anointing idiot," he flashed a small self-depreciating smile and told her both versions of his dream.
"I thought in the dream I was choosing a way to salvation, but I'm not. I'm just avoiding reality. I thought I was seeing visions of the future and that it was somehow my job to save everyone. It isn't, is it. What has happened here happened because I'd confused my dream with reality, so now it is my responsibility to fix it. That's why you've brought me here, it's time I grow up."
"Where I'm from we call that the chuu-ni syndrome," she listened patiently and smirked when he was done, the self-important delusions of teenaged kids caught between the duplicity of wanting to stand out and wanting to fit in. She seemed gentler, now that Ruka was back with them safe and sound, but not by much. "You'll never grow up while carrying that around."
"Please, Ogawa-san, tell me what is going on. Please tell me what I need to know."
It seemed for a moment that she wasn't going to. Then she shifted, unfolding, and stirred up the fire between them with a stick.
"Sit down and stop calling me that," she mumbled sullenly. "Names are dangerous. That Bitch can find you with it and destroy your existence. So here, now, I am Lich. You should pick something too."
It sounded like good advice. "By 'That Bitch' I assume you mean one of the Officers like Aku..."
"Don't!" She cut him off sharply. "Didn't I just say? Names are dangerous. If They hear themselves mentioned, they will show up, bunch of sick bastards."
Ok, so the Invaders are being led by boss Invaders and people know who they are. Kageyama frowned a little, trying to think.
He has never met any other high-functioning Invaders besides Akuma Hakushaku and Kikai Shogun. He recalled snatches of hushed conversations between the two that implied this was a deliberate machination on the Hakushaku's part to protect his own interests and standing, which in turn spoke to a degree of hostile rivalry between the pair and whoever the rest were.
Akuma Hakushaku obviously exists in this place. Who else?
"What about humanity? How much of us is left?" Please don't let them be all that's left.
Lich chuckled lightly, amused that the man who'd once widely derided the population of the world as "shitty bugs" would refer to humanity as "us".
"Jin Rui Zen Metsu." Humanity wiped. The words hit him harder than he'd expected. He barely caught her next words, though those didn't give him much hope either. "It's just several dozen Gatekeepers and a few million Invaders now."
"What year is it?" He asked weakly, not that that would change anything.
"I don't know," she replied truthfully. "My watch broke a long time ago." Something didn't sound right. His head spun. There seemed to be more that she wasn't telling him but he let it go, for now.
"What are we –am I– supposed to do?"
She shrugged with an unexpected note of sympathy in her voice. "You're the Gate of Insight, you tell us."
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1 9 8 0
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Lake Placid, New York, 18th February, 1980, five days into the 13th Winter Olympics. A striking, modelesque woman in a trendy hot pink coat with faux leopard print trims stood atop the summit of a 90-meter ski jump tower, taking photos of the wintery white world below through a giant high-powered camera that barely fit in her bare hands. The wind whipped her long black hair around in a deadly frenzy, much to her annoyance, but darned if she was going to admit she was wrong about not tying it up!
"Miss?" A man wearing a windbreaker bearing the official IOC emblem rose determinedly towards her on the ski lift. He had a piece of paper in one hand and a confused scowl on his face. "Miss?"
June Thunders turned her face towards him, but did not stop what she was doing.
"Miss, we can't verify your credentials. I'm sorry, Miss, you're going to have to give me your film and leave."
She wasn't surprised, AEGIS simply doesn't have the same clout as it used to ten years ago. She'd had to sneak up here using a fake press pass she'd bought off some kid behind the hospital.
"That can't be right," she exclaimed, lowering her camera and pulling off her snow goggles to reveal a pair of beautiful, incredulous eyes. "Please run it again! If I don't get this today my editor will kill me!"
The groundskeeper shuffled uncomfortably. "I'm really sorry, I can't let you do that," he said, feeling downright miserable as her eyes welled up with tears.
"No, don't cry, don't... aw shit... Alright. I'm gonna go check with my boss," he sighed, "then I'm coming back to get you out. It'll probably take me twenty minutes, and if you're not here by the time I get back I'm gonna assume none of this happened. Capish?"
"Oh, thank you!" June flung herself around the man's neck and planted a tearful kiss on his cheek. He blushed. As soon as he trudged off, her demeanour changed. Her shoulders squared, the tears disappeared, and her expression lost its innocent sweetness.
"Hound, this is Hawk. Come in, Over." She spoke quietly into a fancy wristwatch. A small frown sat on her brow until a static-laced female voice sounded in her ear via a hidden earpiece.
"Hawk, this is Hound. Standing by, Over."
"Wrap it up down there, Hound. Rendezvous in twenty, Over."
"Understood, Over."
She took a few more shots, then put the camera back into the large sling case by her feet, tiptoed onto the lift down and ran towards the exit like a privileged debutante unused to running, throwing a goodbye kiss at the groundskeeper's office for good measure, just in case he was watching.
"You did it again, didn't you?" The agent designated Hound sat down across from her at a diner near the Olympic village, greeting her with the accusation. "Isn't it time you act your age?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," June replied primly.
"Liar. You forgot to fix your lipstick."
June smiled sweetly as she pulled out a compact mirror and did just that. "I can't help it if I've still got it,"
"Oh, think of the devastation there'll be when those poor souls find out you're already thirty!"
"Excuse me, I'm only twenty-two!"
"Come on, you were twenty-two when I came to New York and I'm twenty-seven now!"
"That's right. Who's the old woman now?" She returned smugly.
Kaoru faceplanted on the diner table. How she'd endured seven years of June Thunders remains one of the greatest mysteries in the world to her.
"Anyway. Did you find anything?" June flipped into business mode.
"Mm, here," Kaoru dug into her pocket and came up with a trio of green spiked crystal clusters each slightly smaller than the palm of her hand, reminiscent of konpeito candy. "Scalpers down by Equestrian Centre. Presence confirmed."
The senior agent nodded. "Good job. This should be more than enough to open an investigation."
It wasn't. June was being hopeful and Kaoru knew it. Every year things get more complicated in the business of Alien Extermination and Gatekeeping. When Konoe Kaoru first joined, AEGIS was a vast international network rivalling the United Nations organisation, with deep, government-backed pockets and a roaring can-do attitude. These days, it's all penny-and-dime politics. Sorties cost money, cover-ups cost money, recruitment costs money. Governments balked at the price tags and shied from everything supporting an alien fighting agency would imply while simultaneously imposing an ever-growing laundry list of rules and conditions to prevent any one government from benefitting excessively from the agency's action.
The result was a dwindling team of over-worked, underpaid, rag-tag agents being slowly ground into apathy, barred from exercising their power in public and a mountain of paperwork behind them delaying any sort of meaningful action. The inside joke was that when one day the Invaders enact a hostile takeover, by the time all the necessary authorisations have been approved and all political parties placated enough to support an official mission, the invasion would be over and done with.
Kaoru was lucky her Gate power was a personal enhancement type that only boosted her innate athletic capabilities, making it easy to use and excuse, so long as she didn't mind being called freakshow names like "The StrongMan Girl". Gate Keepers like June have a harder time explaining away how they are able to summon lightning to their fingertips at will, or move at the speed of sound. That sort of thing only happens in the comics.
She ordered a piece of pie and drummed her fingers idly to a Pink Floyd song playing over the little radio behind the service counter as June ducked beside the restrooms with a handful of change for the public payphone.
There is no pain, you are receding; A distant ship, smoke on the horizon,
You're only coming through in waves...
The reflection in the window showed a grown woman, shaggy, shoulder-length hair stuffed under a Yankees baseball hat, tired brown eyes staring off into space, trying not to look at herself. June, she thought enviously, has hardly changed at all since they'd first met in Tokyo, the summer of '69... gosh, has it been eleven years already? Where does all that time go?
A crackling Japanese voice caught her attention; it was a language she hadn't heard in nearly ten years: "What kind of shitty country is this? Is this how you treat your guests? Don't think just because we're small you can push us around!"
Kaoru twisted in her seat. It was a young man wearing a Yankees jacket watching a live interview on an Mtv-1 hand-held television set in the booth behind hers.
"Hey buddy, turn that up," she smiled tugging lightly on the tongue of her Yankees cap.
The young man looked her over suspiciously. "You know what the chink's saying?"
Ah, one of those. "Naw," she lied in a Brooklyn accent. "Is that the guy who tied for Silver yesterday? Bleedin' shame about that. What do they know about Ski Jumpin', you know?"
"Yea, right? You local?"
"Sure," she flirted back, watching the TV screen in his hand intently out of the corner of her eye. "NYC local enough for you?"
Some short-haired blonde was interviewing an embarrassed group in official Japanese Olympic team ski jackets. It wasn't the main competing representatives, Kaoru knew all about them with a sportsfan's fervour. The man speaking to the clueless interviewer wore a stiff, mad, grin, his face twitching ever so slightly in some weird spasm. If she hadn't understood his language she would probably have presumed, like her new friend, that he was nervous and excited to be on TV.
In fact, he was viciously decrying the living conditions in Olympic village and the various insults and injustices the Japanese team and their supporters have been forced to endure at the venues. "What is the meaning of this? We came here as honourable competitors, not to be treated like second-class criminals!"
It was then that she saw the familiar sunglasses the Japanese man on TV was pulling out of his jacket. A look of abject horror covered her face as he struggled with it on the other end of the signal, fighting and succumbing to the inexplicable urge to put it on. The boy holding the MTV-1 was ragging on about something or another to do with a ski lodge, but she was no longer listening.
"JUNE?" She started calling, eyes wide and glued to the tiny screen. "JUUUNNEEEE! You need to see this!"
The TV flickered and distorted. The man was changing.
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Next Time:
4. Heijou to Toki no Sukima de