Sol slowly opened his eyes and found himself staring at the bottom of a white canopy with fridges on the ends. He groaned out loudly as he tried to remember where he was but the name would not come to him. Something with a K in it. Maybe it was all a dream.
But that doesn't explain why I'm in a bed right now. Sol thought as he sat up and stretched himself out. The bedroom looked pretty upscale by Sol's standards: freshly-painted walls, Gothic-style light fixtures, paintings of people he didn't recognize. If this is the afterlife, they could at least have given me some new clothes before I woke up. Maybe a hot babe too. I wonder if they have hot babes in Heaven? Considering half the nuns I ran into over the years, that's a low bet.
Looking down, he saw some blood-stained cloth wrapped around his chest as a crude bandage. Okay, so I'm not dead. But that still doesn't explain where I am.
A moment later, the door to the bedroom opened and Sol pretended to be asleep on top of the bed, watching through narrow eyelids. A familiar figure entered the room with a plate of scrambled eggs. "Hello sir, I don't know if you're awake, but Madam Rachel has requested that I provide you with some nourishment."
He stopped for a moment, and Sol wondered why. The man looked quite similar to Slayer, even seemed to have a similar posture and manners, but his voice was different. Then he continued walking towards the side of the bed. "Personally, I was surprised that you could survive so long, considering all you went through, and my knowledge of battlefield medicine only goes so far. But she seemed intent on studying you and those new weapons. So here we are."
Studying? What the hell does that mean? Sol waited until the man was close enough, then swung around and kicked at his head. The kick was powerful enough that it managed to shatter the plate in two, but the man only seemed disappointed as he grabbed Sol's leg with his other arm. "Really now, is that any way to greet someone offering you free food?" Sol felt the man's hand squeeze his leg with surprisingly strong force as he suppressed a groan. The man continued to talk in a measured tone, as if he was simply discussing the weather. "If it was up to me, I would have left you in that sewer, but milady has asked me to take care of you for the time being so I am doing my best not to strangle you right now. Do not make this any harder than it has to be." Valkenhayn tossed Sol's leg back onto the bed. Sol did not have the energy to make another attempt, nor did he have his sword to fight with.
"Valkenhayn, that will be enough for now." Sol and Valkenhayn both turned their attentions to the doorway where Rachel walked through with her familiars. "Get another plate of eggs, and be quick about it." Valkenhayn simply nodded and left the room to obey her request, leaving Rachel and her familiars alone in the room with Sol. "Well, we're alone. I suppose you want to take a swing at me?"
Sol was very tempted, but he didn't have the strength to do much more than sit up on the bed and listen to this girl.
"One thing you should learn, Mr…what should I call you anyway?"
"Sol."
"Well then, Mr. Sol."
"Just Sol."
"No last name?"
"Does it matter?"
Rachel simply shrugged her shoulders as her catlike familiar Nago morphed into the form of an easy chair, which she sat in, facing the bed. "Okay then, Sol, one thing you should learn is that there is always someone stronger than you. A second thing you should learn is that even a strange being such as yourself cannot go without food for too long, no matter how strong you are."
"Listen here, I've only been in this place for a short time. Everything and everyone I've come into contact with her has robbed me, threatened me, or tried to eat me. Why should I trust you?"
"Sol, if I wanted you dead, we wouldn't be having this conversation." Rachel rested her chin on her hand, showing him a sign of her own boredom. "I brought you here, because I thought you would be an interesting variable, one that could help save the world."
"Save the world?" Sol chuckled. "How long did it take you to come up with that line?"
"Don't be so full of yourself, you are not important alone, but perhaps in the grand scheme of things your assistance might help."
"So we're back to my last question, why should I trust you?"
"I'm giving you food and offering transport to anywhere you want to go once this situation is resolved."
"Great. Would you be willing to send me to France?"
"France? That place hasn't existed for over a century."
"What?" Sol was shocked. "Then where are we now?"
"At the moment, you are sitting in the guest bedroom of my house." Sol kept his mouth shut, but frowned, waiting for a better answer than that. "But if you want a little more detail about where you were previously, the sewer system in the Hierarchical City of Kagutsuchi."
"What's the year?"
"Well, currently the year is 2199, though after a few weeks it will probably be 2200. Have you seen the decorations they're putting up around the upper levels of the city? Quite a spectacle they plan to hold when the New Year begins." Rachel smiled and then continued, "As if any of it will matter by the end of tomorrow."
"You...you're fucking with me, aren't you? You can't be serious." Sol ground his palm into his own face and muttered, "Dammit, of all the possible ways that could have gone wrong."
"Well then tell me this: what is the last thing you remember before arriving in Kagutsuchi?"
After a little prodding, Sol reluctantly decided to divulge what he remembered doing before arriving in Kagutsuchi, if only to buy time while he thought of a plan.
It started wrung the answer out of a certain informant stupid enough to think that a few soldiers, even highly-skilled ones sent by the Post-War Administration Bureau, would be a match for him. Unlike those people, the informant felt no allegiance to the PWAB, and was grateful when Sol threw him some cash and sent him away.
Someone had managed to kidnap Dizzy from the Jellyfish Pirates, apparently without Johnny or the others noticing. Sol wasn't sure why, but the list of people with the ability to pull that off was big enough to fit on a sticky note. The informant pointed him in the direction of France, so he figured he would ask his old "friend" Ky Kiske for some more information.
He planned to head to an old church where the two of them were initiated into the Holy Order several years ago, and sent Ky a subtle message to warn him, but trouble found him in the city of Paris where assorted INTERPOL agents tried to arrest him the moment he arrived in the country.
"Post-War Administration Bureau? INTERPOL?" Rachel mused as Valkenhayn returned with another plate of eggs. "Sounds a bit like the Novus Orbis Librarium these days, the way you describe them."
"Hey, who's telling you the story?" Sol didn't move as the eggs were placed on the nightstand next to the bed. After Valkenhayn left, he scarfed them down in barely a minute using the ceramic fork the butler had left next to the plate.
"Where did you learn your manners, you barbarian?" Rachel asked as he ate, but he didn't answer. After finishing the eggs, Sol continued the story.
On one hand, Sol didn't quite want to cause a scene and attract more attention than he had. On the other hand, he was a bit ticked off that Ky had responded to his summons by sending agents to arrest him. Then one of them stepped forward and handed him a note handwritten by Ky, giving him directions to an office building elsewhere in the city and a small head start before INTERPOL would be forced to hunt him down. Sol thanked them by simply escaping the area and not killing them outright.
After locating and entering the office building, he felt a strange tick at the back of his mind, some sort of familiar sense that popped up when a Gear happened to be nearby. Dizzy was here, somewhere in the building, and Ky had left a trail for him to follow in the form of scorch marks, incapacitated guards and broken machinery. The questions in his head continued to grow as he followed the trail: Why would someone kidnap Dizzy? What purpose would it serve? And why was Ky suddenly so interested in her? He followed the stairs down and hoped that he would find the answers in the basement of the building.
Rachel frowned. "Well, this story sounds rather…fantastic so far, but you're leaving out so many details. Who are these people? What are Gears? Who is this Ky Kiske you mention? Why do you not fill in any of this information?"
"You said you wanted to know, I'm telling you what you want to know. You want more details? Go ask Ky or someone else, I've got a job to do."
"Oh, and what would that be? Pout and whine about life, trying to hurt everything in your path so you don't have to take responsibility for any of it? You said you wanted me to send you to France? I could certainly take you to what is left of it, but I doubt that any of these things, if indeed they existed at all, would be waiting there for you when you arrive. Most likely all you would find would be monsters."
"Monsters?"
"Wild beasts drunk on seithr, mad with primal urges, stronger than anything you could keep in your thrall, yet able to adapt to the changed environment." Rachel chuckled for a bit, then added, "much like yourself, I might add."
"I am not an animal!"
Rachel laughed at Sol's reaction. "Oh, that was much more entertaining than your story thus far."
[A/N: Writer's block sucks. That is all.]