The predawn light found him perched on the edge of an unpadded bench that decorated the wide hallway outside Tsunade's office at VRA Industries. The edges of the wooden slats bit into the underside of his leg, and he suspected that the uncomfortable design was intentional – Tsunade was a busy woman and worked hard to discourage interruptions.
His knee jittered impatiently, rattling one of the loose slats in an almost soothing syncopation. Twice now, he'd risen, sucked in a deep breath, and completed a brief circuit around the hall to try and calm his nerves, but the twitch came back anyway a few moments after he settled back into his watchful position.
"You always were tenacious." Each syllable had a slight tinge of irritation.
"Tsunade-sama." Iruka rose to his feet as soon as she spoke, both a show of respect and a refusal to back down under the glare aimed in his direction. He knew full well that she would have to admit him into her office before she could even scold him for showing up. The walls had ears in most big companies, and VRA Industries was no exception. None of them dared let a hint of their true purpose escape the confines of their secured areas. Iruka willfully exploited that paranoia.
With a final frustrated glance, Tsunade strode past him and unlocked her office, holding the door wide behind her to allow him to follow.
The invitation was much more than Iruka had expected – had she slammed the door in his face, he would not have been surprised – and he gratefully stepped inside.
The minute the locking mechanism engaged, Tsunade snapped. "You're fairly intelligent, Iruka. I thought that you would be able to take the hint. You've requested a meeting on the hour, every hour for the last two days, and you have yet to be granted one, but you show up anyway?"
An expression of feigned confusion slid over his face. "I was told you were busy, Tsunade-sama. I had hoped that, by coming early, I'd be able to catch you for a few moments before the day began. Are you trying to say that you were refusing to meet with me?"
She slammed her hand down on the desk. "Don't even try to pull that innocent bullshit, Iruka. I have nothing to say to you."
The reaction took him by surprise. He had suspected that Tsunade was actively avoiding him. Though her schedule was always packed, she had never failed to make time to meet with him when he requested it. The fact that his persistence and insistence on the gravity of the meeting had not produced a satisfactory result had been a fairly blatant sign of her true intentions, but he had no idea what he'd done to so thoroughly piss her off.
"What were you thinking?" Her irritation still marred the words, but was being overwhelmed by a different emotion that Iruka couldn't quite identify.
"Ma'am?"
"Gathering all of the messengers together. What were you thinking? It would have been the perfect opportunity for them to take you all out in one fell swoop!" She glared at him over the expanse of her desk.
"All of us?" Iruka felt his own anger rise to meet hers. "All? There were two of us there, Tsunade-sama! Something is wrong. What has happened to the other messengers?"
"Perhaps they all realized what a stupid idea it was."
She didn't believe her own words; Iruka could see it in her eyes. "Where are the messengers?"
Between one minute and the next, the anger drained from her face and she suddenly looked every one of her fifty-two years. "That's need to know information."
"And…?" He prodded when she didn't seem inclined to elaborate.
"You don't need to know, Iruka."
"What? This has to do with the messengers, but I don't need to know?"
"Exactly."
Her stare warned him against pushing further, but his temper almost overwhelmed his common sense. After a fierce internal struggle, he sank his teeth into his lip to hold back the tirade. "Alright. Fine." He threw his hands up in surrender and turned towards the door.
"Don't."
Her voice cut off his frustrated retreat. "I'm sorry?"
"Don't look into it. I mean it, Iruka. Any action on your part will be met with the strictest disciplinary action as set forth by this company's by-laws. Do I make myself clear?"
People are missing! Doesn't she care? Iruka gaped at her. Had he been in her position, he would have enlisted all the help he could muster to ferret out the information needed to put the puzzle together.
"Do I make myself clear?" Tsunade snapped.
The intensity behind her stare confused him – she desperately wanted him to promise to back off, but he couldn't understand why, and anger at her apathy washed the confusion from his mind. "Crystal." He ground out between clenched teeth, turned on heel and stalked out.
OOOOOOOOO
The sound deadening padding built into the doorframe made it physically impossible to slam her office door, but Iruka clearly gave it his best try. Tsunade winced, but no part of her regretted her firm stance. She knew that Iruka had a devilishly inquisitive nature hidden behind those innocent eyes; she had hired him in large part for that trait. Leaving him in the dark might be akin to adding fuel to an already roaring fire, but telling him the truth would be the equivalent of dumping gasoline on it.
"I don't want to lose you too." The empty office around her offered no consolation.
OOOOOOOOOO
An insistent beeping drew him out of his thoughts. Kakashi saved the file and shoved his chair away from the desk, rising carefully and only stepping forward when he was sure his legs were fully underneath him. Even so, he dropped a hand to trace the edge of the counter as he crossed to the microwave. The food was steaming hot when he pulled it out, and he dropped it to the counter with a hiss. He leaned back against the counter, shaking one leg and then the other to keep blood flowing, and waited for it to cool.
The laptop screen glowed at him from across the dark apartment. The surrounding desk was buried under pieces of scrap paper covered in barely legible notes. Numbers, dates, file names and websites all gathered in an organized mess that made sense to him but looked like little more than a pile of random facts.
He stared through the information he'd been steadily gathering over the last two days, trying to pull a pattern from the seemingly chaotic.
They crossed the roofs together in silence, headed in the direction of the exit portal. In his peripheral vision, he could see the messenger's eyes flicking from spot to spot, never focusing long enough on any one location to gather any information. His lips moved every once in a while, as if the quiet vocalizations were helping him process whatever occupied his brain.
Kakashi knew that troubled look all to well. He'd worn the same expression on many occasions when his subconscious was throwing up warning flags even though his conscious provided no logical reason for it. He usually obeyed the imperative – it had saved his life on more than a couple of occasions – and rarely worried about the original reason for the anxiety.
"What's wrong?"
The messenger gnawed on the side of his thumb. "Something."
Something was indeed wrong, and the minute the messenger had mentioned it, Kakashi had felt it as well. A nagging sensation that he'd forgotten something extremely important, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.
The realization hadn't come until he was floating in the bath, his head draped back over the edge of the tub, staring at the cracked tiles that decorated the upper wall of the shower and dozing in the comforting heat.
There were too many people.
The sudden thought drove him out of the water and across his apartment stark naked and dripping on the floor. He'd grabbed a dirty shirt to toss onto the desk chair to keep from soaking it and fired up his computer searching for the website he'd run across a few weeks ago.
The report was filed as an editorial in a local paper from a town several hours north of Lans, and he had brushed it off originally as alarmist reporting intended to bring recognition to the small town reporter. It included a table of recent deaths of LM2 players along with a very nice colored graph to demonstrate just how dramatically the numbers had risen in the last three months.
It also had current numbers of registered LM2 players.
One of the marketing ploys used by the Kasuo Corporation was the loading screen itself. The time needed to immerse the mind in its false reality was long enough that they had opted to project a two dimensional image of the LM2 logo into the player's mind to assure them that they were not simply unconscious or stranded in the dark. After the popularity of the game had spiked, they added a counter that displayed the number of registered LM2 players - the advertisement working on a very simple human impulse.
Everyone else is doing it, so you should be too.
The number quoted in the article was lower than what Kakashi had seen the last time he'd entered the game by close to thirty people.
The article was dated two days before Kakashi had last plugged in. The data were listed as current as of the day before that. LM2 had reached a stasis several years ago – people simply didn't influx that fast anymore.
The messenger had been right. Something was wrong.
OOOOOOOO
Death was a very real possibility in the game – the assassins made their living on that simple principle. To kill the mind was to kill the body, so any fatal activities attempted in game could be just that, fatal.
Even so, even intuitively knowing that half of his actions in game could end just as badly as they would in real life, Kakashi had never been as terrified as he was now, hanging over empty space, suspended from roof of VRA Industries by a knot that he fervently hoped he had tied correctly and a long length of climbing rope that he had purchased that afternoon. He'd sprung for the extra couple of bucks a foot to not purchase the absolutely cheapest option, but now he really wished he'd coughed up the extra money and bought the best rope.
Somehow the knowledge that his body was not somewhere else, resting comfortably in a semi-suspended environment, made this all the more real. His hands were sweating profusely and slipped on the rope as he wound it through the carabineer and slowly began to repel.
The familiar action soothed his nerves a little – he'd reached many apartments through this method, and while the whole situation was so much more real here, the process was identical. In fact, if he concentrated hard enough on the rough rope sliding through his hands, he could almost forget that he wasn't in game.
Tsunade's office occupied the northwest corner of the twenty-third floor, two floors from the top. He braced his feet against the slight ledge under the wide, one-way windows, and stared at his reflection.
Most people simply could not be recognized between LM2 and the real world. While their surroundings were dictated by their desires, their own appearances depended almost entirely on how they saw themselves. An incredibly vain person might appear beautiful, and the same went for someone who was ugly but believed themselves to be sexy. On the other hand, a truly gorgeous person who saw only their own faults – a crooked tooth, bad proportions, fat that was not truly existent – and could not see the beauty in themselves would appear average or even ugly, depending on how hard they were on their appearance. Even age wasn't a given – some believed themselves to be permanently twenty-something, some saw themselves as older, some as younger.
For that reason, people in the real world might look like their LM2 counterpart's sibling, parent, or cousin, but very rarely like themselves.
Kakashi was one of the few that fell into the later category. Anyone who had seen him in LM2 would instantly recognize him on the street, so he covered his face as much as he dared while in game as well as covering his mod in his left eye. Not only was it a fairly unique identifier, but it also drew unwanted attention that his clothing typically did not. Enough people in LM2 dressed strangely that his choice of grab rarely drew more than a second glance.
Not for the first time, he wondered about the messenger. The scar that marred his face held his interest more than anything else. Scars almost always appeared to be worse in LM2 than they actually were in real life, because people who bore them fixated on them so much. Was the messenger's scar fainter? Shorter? Was it even there, or was it the shadow of an injury that had not caused a permanent mark on his skin, but was so ingrained in his psyche that it rose to the surface when he entered the game?
Would I know him if I saw him?
Though he was lost in unrelated thoughts, his hands worked deftly to fit the glasscutter to the window. The security at VRA Industries was top notch, but Kakashi had more than enough practical experience outwitting computer systems from LM2 to be slowed by that. He'd hacked in before beginning his descent, turned off the motion sensors, and set the cameras to a continuous loop. The door to her office was close enough to being impregnable to make it not a worthy access route, and the same went for all the air handling ducts. The window was really the only logical entry point, but it faced the central plaza, was dangerously exposed to the guards that passed by below every five minutes, and with the one-way glass, it was almost impossible to tell whether or not someone was inside. He worked quickly, not wanting to be spotted by the guards, but was almost continuously checking the non-looped feed from the cameras that was displayed on a tiny monitor at his waist.
After Obito's death, Kakashi had entered the darkest period of his life so far. It had yet to come to an end.
He'd dropped out of school, too bored and simultaneously too furious with a system that should have at least put in some effort to save Obito, rather than just ignore the indefinite absence until it was far too late. He'd turned to thieving to make ends meet, living in a loft in the worst part of Lans that had running water three days a week, if he was lucky.
Luckily for him, intelligence was the key trait for successful heists, and he'd leveraged his own extraordinary brainpower to climb the rungs rapidly from petty cons to elaborate thefts that brought in more revenue. He chose to buy equipment rather than moving out of the rat-hole he inhabited, which allowed him to increase the span of his raids, until the day that he decided to steal from an up-and-coming CEO who had been raised in a family of old money and had a vault of priceless jewelry and stones that would leave him sitting pretty for several years.
Three weeks went into the surveillance and planning for that heist. Getting into the compound had been easy for him, getting into the estate even more so. The safe itself was poorly hidden - even if he hadn't learned the exact location prior to the heist, he would have been able to find it within a matter of minutes.
All in all, the relative simplicity of the ingress should have raised concerns, but Kakashi had been very young and very sure of himself.
The sheaves of papers he found within the safe were not at all what he'd been expecting. Money and jewels were supposed to fill it too the brim. He yanked one folder out followed by another in the faint hope that he'd find bundles of cash buried in the far back corners. The stack of papers in his arms grew heavier with each additional folder he removed until the bottom one spilled out from under his arm.
Its contents scattered across the floor, and Kakashi gave them a cursory glance before returning to the safe. His brain continued to piece together the snippets of imagery while he shoved his arm into the depths and groped around for anything else.
A rising phoenix logo. Annotated diagrams of the berths. Smiling faces with names written in thick, dark ink across the bottom. Men. Women. Children.
Obito.
His grip failed, and the rest of the folders crashed to the ground unnoticed. He scrambled through the mess of papers on the floor, searching for the photo he was sure he'd seen. When that chaotic tactic didn't work, he scooped the documents into a disorderly stack and sat back on his heels, flipping systematically through them.
Though he was looking for a specific picture, his curiosity wouldn't allow him to simply bypass the official memos interspersed with the images. One in particular caught his eye. Kakashi assimilated the information quickly, his eyes widening from the implications.
"I won't lie to you. We probably wouldn't have been able to save him, but we would have tried."
He whirled, clutching the folder to his chest and feeling very much like a five year old with his hand caught in the cookie jar. He'd been so absorbed in the information covering VRA's true purpose that he hadn't heard her come in.
Tsunade, VRA Industries' CEO, sat on the edge of an opulent couch directly behind him, one leg thrown over the other, wrists crossed and hands resting over her knees. The position should have looked defensive – after all she had just caught a teenager breaking into her house – but it wasn't, and she pinned him in place with a single look. "I know who you are, Hatake Kakashi. You're good, but my security team is better. We have to be." She raised her chin towards the documents he still held.
"I want in."
Her lips hooked up into a smile. "I thought you might say that."
Kakashi smiled at the memory. He half expected to remove the piece of glass, slide through and discover Tsunade sitting at her desk, her hands folded in front of her and one tawny eyebrow raised.
Perhaps, deep down, a part of him wanted to be caught. He thought he wanted to confront her with what he'd learned and to force her to tell him the truth, but that wasn't quite right either. No, in reality, he wanted her to tell him that nothing was wrong, that this feeling of impending doom was nothing more than a false alarm.
The round of window glass popped outward with a sigh from the slight positive pressure environment of Tsunade's office. Nothing was risked in this venture, not even the possibility of introducing a toxin into the air. Kakashi waited a moment for the pressure to equalize enough that he could slide the piece into the office and drop it slowly to the floor. He twisted to fit his shoulders and hips through after it.
With just a few minutes to spare before the guard below made his rounds again, Kakashi gripped the handle of the glasscutter and carefully lifted the section back into place.
VRA's permanent records lived in the safe set into the floor under Tsunade's desk. Any worries that she was actually lying in wait for him vanished the minute he lifted the false carpet. No simple safe here, unlike the one he'd broken into all those years ago.
Kakashi set the carpet aside and got to work.
OOOOOOOO
Still no word. Iruka leaned back in his chair and scrubbed his hands over his face. The short immersion had barely affected his body at all, and given the sheer number of names he'd been assigned during the last mission, he'd rather expected to be called up two days ago.
Perhaps he shouldn't have challenged Tsunade like that, but she wasn't one to hold grudges when people's lives were at stake, and he knew full well that he never would have been able to resist asking that question.
Messengers simply did not disappear like that, and they didn't quit, at least not en masse. What happened?
His computer pinged an alert, and he hauled himself forward reaching for the mouse even as the LM2 forum page popped up on the screen. His abstruse posting to the messengers, which had gone unanswered even in the game, had a single response.
Sensei: Loved the note; thanks for writing it. Sorry I tackled you. I guess I was just overwhelmed with excitement, but you do have to admit, it was fun. Same time, same place? I'll be waiting.
Sensei? Only Kit called him that, but this certainly wasn't from Kit. The man was clever; Iruka would give him that. The statements meant nothing to someone from the outside nor were there anything odd in them that would draw someone's attention.
He checked his watch. Four hours. Should he take the bait?
OOOOOOOOOOO
He was late, but that in itself was unsurprising. The vast majority of his actions required precise timing - assassination and high-level thievery were not exactly sloppy businesses - but interpersonal meetings did not fall into that category. Too preoccupied with more important duties, Kakashi had never bothered to fret about the minor details.
Until now.
In the middle of checking the figures he'd gleaned from hundreds of different websites and articles, he'd chanced a glance at the clock. An outburst of swearing chased him across the room and into the berth.
The sight of a dark figure silhouetted against the white walls eased his nerves, and he slowed from a dead run to a much more relaxed saunter. If he was right, they simply could not afford to miss each other.
"Fun?" The voice had a lilt of barely concealed amusement under it. "You'd call our last encounter fun?"
"Haven't you ever heard of the thrill of escaping death?" Kakashi slouched across the open roof, hands shoved deep into his pockets.
"Thrill, perhaps, but fun…. There I would have to disagree with you." Iruka countered.
"It took me hours to find that post, you know. You could have made it a little more obvious."
"You're serious?" One of Iruka's eyebrows shot skyward, and he peered at Kakashi. "You are serious. Honestly, you're one of the assassins; you make your living staying below their radar. I would have thought that you of all people would be concerned with keeping to the cloak and dagger approach."
"I'm not the one hiding in plain sight, messenger." That statement earned him a puzzled look. The assassins were a bit of a legend within VRA, and only half the stories about them were true. Unable to associate with their non-murderous counterparts, it was impossible for the messengers to know just how much was fact and what was simply inflated stories.
The messenger would likely be very put out if he ever found out that the veil of secrecy did not work both ways. As an assassin, Kakashi knew everything about the messengers save for their identities.
"Then it's true that they remove your ID signatures?" The messenger waved the question away before Kakashi even got a chance to open his mouth. "Sorry. I know you can't answer. Shouldn't have asked you that."
He was infinitely grateful for the withdrawal of the question. Keeping the messengers in the dark was more for everyone else's safety than their own. They were the only ones who still had an intact ID signature, making it possible for the LM2 techs to find them in the real world.
As a group, the messengers walked a far more dangerous line than the assassins. The lack of an ID tag and the preference for atypical locations would attract the occasional beast to an assassin, but the messengers moved among the other gamers. Their job required far less skill but was infinitely more dangerous. One slip up and a quick search to the LM2 databases would reveal their true name and location and put them in extreme danger.
For that very reason, Kakashi had been surprised to find that the paperwork he'd stolen from her office was listed exclusively by ID tag. VRA must have lifted the numbers straight from the LM2 database - the data was 'publically' available to marketing corporations, but the personal privacy information was stripped from it to protect the gamers. Unable to get the entire picture from the ID tags alone, Kakashi was planning on turning the data over to Iruka. He expected his suspicions would be confirmed.
"So why did you want to see me?"
Kakashi cast a quick look around the rooftop - one could never be too careful. "I know what's wrong. More specifically, I know where the messengers are." He fished briefly in one of the many pockets of his jacket to retrieve a small tube, offering it to his companion.
"You know where they are?" Deft fingers pulled the rolled screen out of the cylinder, holding it taught between both hands to allow the imagery to load. Iruka blinked in surprise at the official documents that appeared. "These are...?"
"I broke into the boss' office the last time I was in the real world. One of those is you, isn't it?" He watched Iruka's eyes hesitate at an ID tag number about halfway down the list. It was one of only two that didn't have a date next to it. "26 messengers total. 24 have been marked with a date."
"One of the unmarked ones is me. The other one must be Kit." Iruka sagged back against the wall, brows knitted together, and traced a finger down the list. "These dates are so close together. The oldest and the youngest are barely separated by four days. What happened?"
What, indeed? When he discovered the files, he had hoped that VRA Industries had pulled all of their messengers from the game and that Kasuo had simply failed to remove them from the final count. Those hopes were dashed instantly by a visit to the LM2 forums. In order to facilitate cooperative play, you could search for who was currently online by either ID tag or name. "I checked the online status for those ID tags, and all of them are logged into the game. All except for these two." He indicated the two IDs without dates.
"I haven't been logged on since you and Kit and I left. I doubt Kit has either, if the boss' reaction to my actions is anything to go on. Maybe she's just marking the last log-in date?"
Kakashi had started shaking his head before the question was even fully voiced. "Not according to the online status. They'd all been logged in for days, weeks, even months in a couple of cases."
"Then what...? You think they're dead." Iruka's dread-filled gaze lifted from the viewer to land on Kakashi. "You think they were killed in the game."
The wheels turning behind Iruka's eyes were clearly visible, and Kakashi held his tongue while he worked through the same arguments Kakashi'd gone through only a day before.
"Kasuo wouldn't want anyone - not the company, not the other gamers - to know, so they haven't removed them from the databases."
"My thoughts exactly, messenger."
"This can't be happening. They can't all be dead! If that's true..." A huff of air left Iruka's lips. "Why not me? Why not Kit?"
"I don't know." Kakashi retrieved the viewer from Iruka's nerveless fingers and held it up in front of his face. "Are you sure the other ID tag is Kit?"
"No. We don't know each other's ID tags. It's all part of that whole secrecy thing."
A certain frazzled note to his tone got Kakashi's attention. "Hang in there, messenger." He tugged on the edge of the screen, rolling it back into its case. "It's dangerous to draw conclusions based on uncertain information."
"You get to work with certain information?" A bit of levity snuck back into his voice.
Kakashi touched his covered eye. "As certain as their databases are."
"Databases." Iruka repeated, dark eyes narrowing. "We can verify this in their databases. Have you...?" He gestured in the general direction of Kakashi's eye.
"Can't. Not from here." Kakashi stepped away from the wall and looked towards the massive tower that dominated the center of the cyber city - a virtual representation of Kasuo's databases that maintained all necessary information for the game. "The security levels are too high. My mod can hack into the lower levels - player location and mods mostly - but it doesn't have enough underlying code to support anything more robust. I could try, but I'd set off every single alarm they have and bring the beasts down on us."
"The information won't come to us, so we have to go to it."
Nothing in that statement could even be remotely construed as a question. "We, messenger?"
Iruka bristled. "Everyone around me is dying, and you want me to sit by idle?"
"There's a distinct possibility that these people are trying to kill you, and you want to walk into their arms?" Kakashi snapped back. Being an assassin put him in an odd position. Though ending lives would not have been his first choice, the people he was assigned had been given the chance to live and passed on it. He had seen the aftermath of someone fading. Once with Obito had been one time too many.
But he had not seen someone fade once or twice. Between those he couldn't reach in time and the ghosts, he'd had seen far more than he ever wanted. Death was a constant. How you went was a variable, but that didn't mean you were completely out of control.
Kakashi didn't like people tossing their life away. "One look at your ID tag, and they're going to know exactly who you are. If they are really trying to kill the messengers, and they have any inkling that you suspect them, then no power on Earth will stop them from finding and killing you."
"Well, I guess we'll have to be sneaky." Iruka folded his arms across his chest and gave him a decidedly stubborn look.
Kakashi gaped at him. When that didn't evoke any sort of response, he glared. "You are not going with me, messenger."
"Or what? You'll kill me?"
He had always expected the messengers to be more...touchy-feely. Meeting Kit should have thoroughly disabused him of that notion. Even the brief time he'd spent with this messenger should have corrected his mental image. Unfortunately, neither of the encounters had managed to reset his expectations, so he blinked in surprise at the reaction and said the only thing that came to mind. "I'm not going to kill you."
"Oh good." Iruka hopped onto the railing that separated higher roof from lower and dropped lightly to the lower section of the roof before turning back and calling up to him. "Shall we?"
OOOOOOOOOO
New chapter! Okay, so I know only two or three people are probably still following this, but new chapter! And many more to come! (I'm such a failure for not getting this out in a reasonable time. Life just exploded on me and got so busy that finding time to work on something as convoluted as this was not really an option. Thankfully, things have settled out, and I'm going to make time. Damnit!) Anyhoo, that's probably enough of a tangent... I hope you enjoy the new installment! ~StL