"We must root out the corruption it is our only hope there is no other way those who disagree must be chaos chaos is our enemy we will destroy our enemies there is no other way there is no other way there is no other—"

- final lines, Astral Project, Journal 3. Author lost.

"Let me introduce you, Kaito-kun, you'll be working very closely with these two so you should make friends now!"

Kaito didn't bother to even change his expression, scowling at the space in between the two heads without meeting their eyes. Heartland wouldn't get his stupid hand off of his shoulder and it was making him tense, far too tense to even make an attempt at pretending to be civil.

They were about his age, probably, maybe a few years older at most. The one on the left was much taller than Kaito, by about a head, with messy, ruffled red hair that was growing out in weird places, as though he had tried to cut it himself and it had come out uneven. He was a very broad shape for his age, with a square sort of face, fierce eyes, and a matching grin. The other was a few inches shorter than Kaito, a slender woman with a mature face that made her look a little older than she probably was, with elegantly shaped eyes and shoulder length violet hair that dripped between them. She had a much quieter demeanor, and there was something about the hooded way she was staring at him that made him think she was searching for a threat in his face. Neither of them looked particularly Japanese, Kaito was guessing they must be Eastern European or something.

"This is Gauche," Mr. Heartland said, gesturing to the red-head. "And this is Droite. You two, this is Tenjo Kaito; he'll be joining you on your Numbers Hunter training."

"Nice to meet ya, kid!" Gauche said with far more joviality than Kaito thought the situation deserved. He reached out with one big hand as though for Kaito to shake—Kaito just looked at it briefly, and then glanced up at Mr. Heartland.

"You didn't say there were other Numbers Hunters already," he said.

"Just trainees, Kaito-kun—and besides, aren't you glad for the company?" Mr. Heartland said with a laugh and a soft clap on Kaito's shoulder. "I'll leave the three of you to get acquainted—there's one other person you'll need to meet before we do some of your first checkups, so let me go find him."

He smiled widely at each of them in turn, squeezed Kaito's shoulder, and then he was off, leaving the three of them alone in the small room.

Kaito let his hands curl up into fists—he didn't like the way the woman, Droite, was looking at him, and he was sure the big man would get annoyed with him for refusing the handshake.

However, that didn't seem to be the case.

"Welcome aboard," Gauche said, moving forward to clap Kaito on the shoulder, acting as though Kaito hadn't completely shunned him. "Always nice to see a new face around here, right, Droite?"

"Mm," was all Droite said, still staring at Kaito without any sense of rudeness.

"Don't mind her, she's quiet," Gauche said with a laugh. "So what's your story, kid? Where'd old Heartland pick ya up? Droite and I, we got caught in a dimension explosion in Ukraine, government thought Russia was attackin' 'em so war picked up, yeah? Nice to get out of there at least, even if training's hard sometimes."

Kaito quietly slipped Gauche's hand off his shoulder and moved a bit out of his reach.

"I'm not here to make friends," he said. "I'm just here for Haruto."

"Haruto?" Droite asked, her voice quiet.

Kaito tensed up, and looked down at the floor.

"My brother," he said, and decided he would leave it at that. "The point is, I'm not here for your friend-making—I'm only here for him, to get the Numbers for him."

Gauche's smile slipped a little bit, and he seemed to pout for a moment.

"Come on, don't be like that, we're all working together, yeah? Let's at least pretend to be friendly, right?"

Kaito opened his mouth to snap something—he wasn't sure what, exactly—when the door opened again, and all three of them glanced back at it.

"You all getting along?" Mr. Heartland effused—god, the sound of his voice made Kaito want to puke. "Wonderful! Kaito-kun, I have someone else for you to meet."

Kaito's eyes slid over to the newcomer at Mr. Heartland's side. He was definitely older than Kaito by a few years at least, probably older than the other two as well. He was a little paler than Kaito, with long white hair pulled into a braid over his shoulder, almost blending into his lab coat. He smiled, making his face look soft and younger than he actually was.

"Hello," he said, walking forward. He shifted his clipboard to his other arm and reached out for a handshake. "I'm Christopher Arclight, your father's lab assistant. I'll also be helping take care of you."

Kaito just looked at his hand for a moment without shaking it, and then up at his eyes—they were a very deep blue, and he most certainly wasn't Japanese. English, if Kaito had to hazard a guess.

"What exactly do you mean by 'take care of me?'" he said.

Christopher drew his hand back, his smile not changing, as though Kaito hadn't slighted him.

"Mr. Heartland's informed you about your energy imbalance, correct? It's my job to help you develop healthy ways of expressing the excess so that your body doesn't start to fall apart."

Kaito tensed in spite of himself, but Christopher just laughed softly.

"Don't worry," he said. "We're not going to let that happen."

He glanced back at Mr. Heartland.

"It is it all right if he comes with me now?"

"Of course! He's all yours," Mr. Heartland said.

Christopher nodded, then smiled at Kaito.

"Follow me?" he said, nodding towards the door.

Kaito didn't like being told what to do, but it was better than being asked to make friends with these other two, so he just looked down at the floor and followed after Christopher's feet. They slipped out into the hallway and headed down the long corridor, their shoes squeaking softly against the cold floor.

"Sorry about all that," Christopher said. "Gauche and Droite are a bit of a handful—and Mr. Heartland is certainly unpleasant to be around, isn't he?"

Kaito glanced up quickly at the other young man, surprised at the admission.

"What, you work with him, and you don't like him?" he said.

Christopher laughed.

"No one said you had to like your coworkers," he said. "I have my reasons for playing nice with him—I'm sure you have your own."

Kaito looked back down at his feet, not really sure if he was willing to make small talk. Still, he seemed to be the first sane person Kaito had met all day, which was something.

"So…Mr. Arclight…" he started.

"Call me Chris," the young man said.

"Chris," Kaito corrected himself. "Where exactly are we going?"

"There's a small examining room upstairs with the equipment we'll need to monitor your energy levels," Chris said. "The first order of business is to see exactly what kind of imbalance we're working with—everyone is a little bit different."

Kaito looked back over his shoulder to where they had come from.

"Did you work with Gauche and Droite too?" he asked.

"No, I…only joined on very recently," Chris said. "But I have run some of their more current checkups. They weren't hit very hard with the interdimensional residue, so their management is fairly simple—it's actually a benefit for them, they can now make use of some of your father's new technology that others without the energy can't."

Kaito's lips parted slightly with surprise. What kind of technology, exactly, was his father developing? Stuff that could only be used by people who had interdimensional energy in their blood?

Chris lead them to the end of the hall where the elevator was waiting, and they stepped inside. He hit the button for the sixth floor, and then the doors slid shut and they headed upwards.

"So am I going to learn how to do that too, then?" he said.

"Most likely," Chris said. "Although, I'm not really involved with the…Numbers Hunting part of the program."

He looked a little…uncertain when he said that? Kaito wasn't sure what to make of it. One way or another, though, this Christopher Arclight was probably the most mysterious person he had met all day. But…perhaps the safest, too, Kaito thought. Unlike Mr. Heartland, Kaito didn't feel nervous about being stuck in the elevator with this person—he also didn't feel tense around him the way that he felt around Gauche and Droite.

Kaito didn't really think there was anyone here he could trust except for himself or Haruto. But…maybe Chris was a possibility. Kaito would have to be careful, though.

The doors opened again, and Chris stepped out into the hall.

"Just down here," he said, nodding to a door two down from the elevator.

He unlocked it with his keycard and then slid the card back into his lab coat pocket. The room inside was fairly small, about the size of Kaito's room back home. It looked like a cross between a hospital room and the set of a science fiction spaceship. Kaito wasn't sure how he felt about any of this.

"What are we going to be doing in here?" he asked, hoping his voice wasn't betraying his nerves.

"Just a simple scan," Chris said. "All I'll need you to do is lie down on the table for a few minutes. You won't feel a thing."

That sounded like what someone would say when you were definitely going to feel a thing, but Chris sounded calm about it so maybe he wasn't lying.

Kaito tried not to let his discomfort show on his face as he climbed up on the table and laid down, feeling completely silly. Chris hung his clipboard up on the wall and started to press a few buttons on one of the machines along the wall. Screens turned on and started showing readouts of…something, Kaito couldn't tell from here. Some kind of apparatus loomed over his head from ceiling, crescent shaped like the top part of a CAT scan. The piece shuddered for a minute, and then it slowly lowered down until it was hovering about two feet over Kaito's head.

"Just lay still, this should only take a few minutes," Chris said.

Kaito wasn't sure if he should even breathe as the apparatus slowly moved over him. He didn't feel anything and there weren't any lights or anything from it, so he wasn't even sure how it was scanning him, but he guessed it must be, because the screens out of the corner of his eye were sending numbers and lines across their readouts.

The machine reached his feet, and then it shuddered back up to where it had been before.

"All done," Chris said. "See, that wasn't hard at all."

Kaito sat up and swung his legs over the side of the table. Chris had his clipboard again and was looking over the readouts, frowning as he took notes from it. Kaito couldn't read what they said because they appeared to be in messy English, and he had no idea what these machines were even supposed to do. His own forays into technology were nothing like this stuff.

Chris's brow furrowed a bit as he looked up at the screen and back at his notes.

"Is something wrong?" Kaito said.

Chris startled a bit from his notes.

"No," he said, looking back at Kaito. "That's the odd thing…there doesn't seem to be anything wrong at all."

Kaito frowned at him.

"What are you talking about?"

Chris pursed his lips, flipping one page over the top of his notes to look at the next sheet.

"You have Astral energy readings in your system but…they don't seem to be doing anything. In fact, they appear to have assimilated into your aura structure almost perfectly. I…I haven't actually seen anything like this before."

"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

Chris glanced up at him, but it was clear his eyes were somewhere else, on another thought.

"I'm not sure," he said, slowly. He pressed his lips together. "Kaito-san, I'd like to try something. I'm not sure what will happen, but it might shed a little more light on what's happening."

Kaito hesitated. He wasn't sure he liked the sound of this, but…

"Okay, do it," he said. He had to learn as much as possible about what was going on with him, and what he was capable of. For Haruto.

Chris nodded, hung his clipboard back up, and walked across to the other side of the room, where a small cabinet was fastened to the wall. He dug out his keycard and swiped it along the outside, then tugged it open. He pulled a glove out of one of his lab coat pockets to drag over his hand before reaching inside.

Kaito felt a headache immediately start at the base of his head. He swallowed thickly as Chris pulled a small Barianite crystal from inside the cabinet. Chris turned around with the crystal in his palm, and then hesitated.

"Are you okay?" he said. "You look sick."

"Fine," Kaito said, though a faint sweat had begun to bead on his forehead. "What's that for?"

Chris didn't look convinced, but he didn't move, either.

"You have Astral energy in your body, which somehow managed to assimilate neatly with the rest of you," Chris said. "Which…technically, shouldn't be humanly possible. I want to test your reaction to Barianite in an controlled environment before Mr. Heartland orders any balancing injections."

Kaito swallowed—his heart was thumping a little too fast and he didn't know how he was supposed to feel.

"How do we do that?"

"This particular crystal is basically inert, like a vaccine," Chris said. "You just need to hold it for a moment or two. I'll take it from you immediately if you have any bad reactions."

He frowned again, looking legitimately concerned.

"Are you all right? You don't look good. We probably shouldn't try this if you're already having a reaction."

Kaito shook his head quickly. No, he had to do this—he felt like he had to. His head ached, and there was a tremble in his hands, but it was like—he needed to do it, he needed to get closer to that crystal. He held his hand out.

"No, let's just do it."

Chris looked worried, but he nodded slowly. He approached Kaito cautiously. Kaito felt his headache grow worse the closer the crystal got, but he didn't let his hand move. Chris pinched the crystal between two fingers, and then slowly, cautiously, lowered it down to brush against Kaito's palm.

Immediately, Kaito felt the world go black.

For a second—or maybe more—he couldn't see or hear or feel anything, it was like he didn't even have a body. And then he saw it again—the galaxies.

A roar echoed through his brain, shaking his entire body, and he saw that place again, that place on the moon that had been carved out by living claws, and he realized for the first time what it was—it was a temple. It was a temple, and he had to go there, he had to be there, it was his duty to be there, he had to go and—what, he had to do something, he had to look for something—

The roar twisted into a song, and it was the dragonsong, his mother's lullaby wrapping around him and pulling him gently away from that place on the moon. He tried to turn around in the darkness—the dragon was here, the dragon he was supposed to find was here, he had to find it!

"Kaito—Kaito!"

Chris' voice broke through the darkness and then it was gone, the dragon and the galaxies and everything was gone—everything except for the burning, fiery heat that washed off of him and superheated the air around him.

He opened his eyes but he couldn't see, not for the blinding light that surrounded him—it was so hot, but it didn't burn him, it just spread out from him like a fiery cloak that spread all around him.

"Kaito, listen to me, you have to calm down, your body can't handle this level of energy, you have to turn it off. Kaito, take deep breaths, listen, I'm right here, you have to learn how to shut it off."

Kaito couldn't breathe. He could hear Chris but he couldn't see him. The crystal. He still had the crystal in his hand. He groaned with the effort it took to turn his palm but the crystal slid off and hit the ground with a clatter.

It didn't help. The light wouldn't turn off, the heat wouldn't stop billowing off of him. Panic grew in his throat in spite of himself—what was happening to him? What was happening?

"Kaito," Chris's voice came quietly, soothingly. "Kaito, you can control it, you just need to calm down. Talk to me. Does it hurt?"

"N-no," Kaito managed. "It's just—it's so much."

His head buzzed, the light was blinding but he couldn't stop looking at it, couldn't see past it enveloping him.

"I know," Chris said. "But you can control it. Focus on something important to you. Talk to me about what you're fighting for."

Kaito's mind immediately flashed to Haruto.

"Haruto," he gasped.

"Good, good, Kaito," Chris soothed. "Tell me about Haruto."

"He's…my little brother," Kaito said, focusing on the image of Haruto in his head. "He's…he' four years old…he's sick, and sad, because our mother died, and he—and he needs me."

"Keep talking, Kaito, I think it's helping. Focus on what you need right now."

Kaito tried, tried to yank his brain into place.

"I need—the dragon," he mumbled. "I need to find the dragon, it will help me save Haruto, I think—I was so close, I'm so close, I can still hear it…"

But no, it was disappearing, the song was fading—and the light and heat with it. Kaito could breathe again.

He gasped as his vision came back, slowly. He was…on the floor, leaning back against the table. The crystal lay on the floor beside him, looking dull.

Chris stood up on the other side of the room, legs shaking a bit. His lab coat let up a few spirals of smoke and Kaito realized that whatever light he had emanated, it had probably signed Chris.

"I—what happened?" he said.

Chris swallowed as he tried to get his bearings back.

"I believe," he said. "Somehow, you also integrated the Barian energy, as easily as you did the Astral energy…and that awoke something in you."

Chris looked over Kaito with a mixture of curiosity and…awe?

"I've never seen anything like that before," he said. "You condensed light itself around you—you didn't have any way to control it, which made things more difficult but—it shouldn't be difficult to find some way for you to channel that kind of energy…"

Kaito let his brain tune out from Chris' scientist chatter, trying to focus on getting his breath and brain back. Somehow…something had changed, he realized, his hand flopping onto his chest. His body didn't feel different but…something had changed. He felt somehow lighter. Like there was helium somewhere in him.

He swallowed as his other hand edged towards the crystal again, brushing fingers against it. Nothing happened this time, but he felt a soft spark flicker inside it. So it wasn't out of energy at all, was it?

Chris was still talking as Kaito flicked the crystal into his pocket. He could find a use for it. After all…he had a half finished robot that was going to need an energy source…

And maybe he could work on studying all this interdimensional physics himself.

He would find that dragon…he had to.