At that point, the gleeful or perhaps desperate hysteria that consumed them when they realized they could talk to their loved ones finally subsided. Perhaps it was seeing someone's family member, talking to them. Naoya was real, so all of them were really alive. Living, breathing human beings instead of voices on the phone. Orpheus turned and lost Eurydice forever because he needed to see her to know that she would truly live again.

Maybe it finally occurred to them that they would see the people they knew again, and they didn't want those people to see them covered in blood. Somehow, none of them had really gotten much breakfast, or brunch by that point. Airi and Keita had already taken off together to yell or be sulky at people in relative peace, Hinako and Makoto wanted swimsuits, Joe and Daichi also wanted them to find swimsuits, Ronaldo the bachelor wanted to teach Jungo to make something besides his trademarked dish so he'd have help in the kitchen and everyone found something to do with a sense of relief, because this wasn't trying to find a distraction or do something before the end anymore. This was getting back to all the different things that made up living in a world that was hopefully much safer than it was yesterday.

Hiro meant to find a television and watch the news to see how the world was reacting, but when he did find one he ended up sitting down not to watch it but the window instead.

There were parks and landscaping in those cities, but not nearly enough unpaved ground to grow food for everyone. Even where it was relatively shallow, breaking up pavement had to be backbreaking work. They could have used their demons, though…

"What are you thinking?" Saiduq asked, following him for lack of anything better to do. He knew he shouldn't dispense knowledge anymore, not after what happened to the Hotsuin family. He hadn't given up the heavenly throne to be worshipped, either.

"I'm thinking about what people need to live," Hiro told him. And of the reasons he'd chosen Saiduq, why he'd known there weren't any other options, but he didn't say that. He might tell those reasons to Saiduq if the former septentrione ever had doubts, blamed himself for whatever happened to the new world too, but it wasn't very encouraging to tell someone that, 'I didn't know if I could trust you , but all the other options were worse.' Especially when his trust had meant so much to Saiduq.

"A reason?" Saiduq asked him, remembering their conversations, the ones that set them both on this path. "Or the ability and right to choose a reason. I took the right to choose away from his family, didn't I, by giving them such dangerous knowledge. Not to do anything with it would have been to just let others die, and that's not something humans do easily." That was why he'd programmed Nicaea to show those videos to the victim's friends instead of to the victim. "So he wanted to make a world where everyone was supposed to fight for whatever their reason was."

"Where he wasn't a bad kid for not wanting to do what they wanted him to," Hiro agreed, a little surprised by how perceptive a statement that was.

"If I had just replaced the world, then all of you who experienced this would have fought your former selves, and me. Because you're different people now, and you would have refused to become who you were before, even thought it might damage the Akashic Records and undermine the new world." That his kind understood, since it affected the Records, which otherwise encompassed past, present and future. "Then all of this would have happened again, as spelled out in the records, because none of you would have changed, circumstances would still be the same. I am also a different person now. I've changed because I met you, Shining One." That name again: why did Saiduq call him that, exactly. "I am glad this happened, but it's still… strange." He'd grasped after the concepts of change and freedom, tried to encourage them, but for a being that perceived the records, that used to live in eternal now?

"What are you going to do now?" Hiro asked him as Saiduq sat down, belatedly realizing that he should follow Hiro's lead and sit if he was sitting.

He'd known that Saiduq wouldn't be able to answer that, would be some degree of stunned by the question, the concept of infinite possibilities and having to create a plan, forge a path, but he needed to start thinking about this. Unless he couldn't. He just might not be wired that way, and if that was true Hiro needed to come up with something, for his friend's sake.

"I don't know, Shining One," Saiduq said slowly, then thought about that response, realized the implications. "I don't." When he used to be able to know almost everything, including the certain future.

Hiro remembered all the questions Saiduq asked before, that they were questions, not answers. Hiro was the one who had to figure out what Saiduq wanted, what was behind giving them everything. It was obviously more than just that humans were a part of the records. It made his head spin to think that Saiduq had desperately wanted something all this time, worked so hard, done things that were obviously for a single purpose, to make a single change in the world and he probably still thought that…

Ow.

Fortunately, Hiro knew Naoya and was used to things he would never get and shouldn't even try.

Still, Saiduq seemed to think that Hiro was the power here; Hiro was the one that made this change, when Saiduq was the one who created Nicaea. Who attained the power of the heavenly throne and reshaped the world. Since humans were the ones who might be free, who might have the power to make change? Saiduq really wouldn't have been able to even contemplate doing this without, even if he'd already been severed from the mind shared by Polaris and the others and they'd put him to sleep: why? Was Polaris worried that if the others could still share Saiduq's thoughts, access his feelings, they might side with him?

Alcor and Mizar weren't a binary system, but they were very close, close enough the septentriones were named for the number seven instead of eight: had Alcor really been that inseparable from Mizar once? Wouldn't Saiduq's twin star have sided with him if anyone did? Was it really change Al Saiduq had trouble with, or was it just something he couldn't do alone?

Hiro was trying to understand the septentriones still, because they had been his enemies and one was his friend, but there weren't any anymore. If becoming human would have driven Al Saiduq insane, what would becoming a demon do to him?

Saving the world didn't mean worrying stopped; it just meant he couldn't kill what was threatening his friends anymore.

In the quiet, they could hear the others moving around. Joe's chatter, Ronaldo's instructions, even Airi's voice, muted by distance or insulation. Her father was in almost as much trouble as Kama. It was impossible to feel alone, impossible to think that they might drift apart when even when they were apart, a part of him still listened for them; their comforting presence still surrounded him.

Hiro himself was used to having his brothers as backup. Oh, they'd never interfered when someone tried to bully him, for example, but they'd certainly supported and motivated him, in their own ways. Listening to Naoya muse about what he'd do to the bully if Hiro didn't do something about it first had both given him gleeful vicarious vengeance and the knowledge that even if the bully was a jerk, he was still a human being and didn't deserve things like that, so Hiro needed to do something quick.

Or maybe it was that, once upon a time, he hadn't had his brothers there to help him.

He knew he could do it alone, be the rock everyone stood on even though none of them had much support to give him in return, but he was pretty sure he hadn't liked it at the time.

He wasn't alone this time. Thank goodness for Daichi, for everyone.

"Hello?" he heard from the doorway. "Hiro!"

Atsuro would totally have been Uncle Atsuro if he admitted he was old enough. Still, being Naoya's indentured servan-Apprentice made him part of the family anyway. "Were you looking for me?" Hiro asked as 'Atsubro' stepped into the room.

It was Naoya that nicknamed his cousin Able, supposedly for being a clever little monkey that very quickly learned to ride bikes, climb trees, take the subway on his own and do everything it took to get the cousin who just moved in with them to play with him short of actually picking locks.

Now, everyone knew it was really Abel, but Hiro, when he was little, really did think that both his big brothers could do anything. Even put up with Hiro calling him 'Can' all the time because he'd misheard Cain, in Naoya's case.

That was when he'd though his nickname meant, 'if you sit there quietly, I won't kick you out and you can watch all the (cool) stuff I do until you know enough to ask smart questions and then do it yourself.' Which was hard.

It was a good thing he'd known enough about the interface of magic and technology to ask the right questions, though.

"Don't get me wrong, I want to hear all about it, but Abel dropped Gin, Haru and Yuzu off and now he wants everyone's addresses so he can get their people," Atsuro said, looking at Saiduq.

"Mine doesn't exist anymore." The Akashic Records were gone: human thoughts and actions belonged only to themselves and the world they lived in. Without the Records, there was no way for a single being to monitor or edit all of those actions.

"Oh, right, you're a demon."

Saiduq nodded. "Now, yes."

"Hold on." Atsuro fished around in one of his pockets. Digging out a business card case, he frowned, put it back in, and kept digging until he pulled out the other one. "Here," he said, opening it and taking out a card. "This is my other card."

"Where's Yuzu?" Hiro wondered.

"She's talking to that new friend of yours." From the way he grinned, Atsuro might have asked if anything happened if he was still a teenager (although he hadn't grown confident enough yet to just ask like that back when he was still a teenager) and this wasn't a kid who had been in diapers when Atsuro was a teenager. 'That polite young Miss Kuzuryu' had a lock on formal babysitting jobs, but they'd still spent plenty of afternoons hanging out together with the baby in the room so they could keep an eye on him until his parents got back. "You know…"

"You and Yuzu didn't get together because of the Lockdown, so don't start that up." They hadn't started dating until years later because Atsuro assumed Yuzu was into his friend and didn't want to get between them. "I'm old enough to know that Hollywood's wrong and adventures don't automatically mean you get a girl. Both my brothers are still single." Judging from the terrifying way he'd delivered The Talk, Naoya also had issues about being the result of humanity's second act of unprotected sex.

Saiduq was looking back and forth between them like this was entertaining but incomprehensible, sort of like big Hollywood or Bollywood movies with costuming and special effects but without dubbing.

Until he noticed the rain suddenly falling on the roof, rising wind blowing it in under the overhang, against the window. "I hope he's found shelter."

"What is it?" Hiro asked, remembering how Saiduq's first priority after Hiro allied with him was recommending Hiro find a safe place to sleep.

The gift he'd mentioned first was fire, so it seemed Saiduq did understand the importance of warmth and shelter to humans.

"Hotsuin Yamato."

What? "What do you mean?" Hiro asked, avoiding sounding startled because Saiduq would likely assume he'd messed up again. If he already knew he was terrible at dealing with humans, he must still be afraid he'd mess up. Honestly, it was pretty clear from the start that he wasn't a human, and he certainly wasn't a demon, so Hiro put two and two together from all the obvious hints about administration and so on long before Yamato declared it like he was laying out a trump card, like they all had to hate the septentrione as much as he did.

"I did bring him back on the island, because he was your friend and you saw him die." That should have compensated for Saiduq's (Alcor's) own death, as he went with Heaven's Throne into nonexistence. Before, he would have said that he'd also hoped that Yamato would hear that Saiduq was fading from sentient existence and that might have made him decide not to pursue his goal to his death a second time, but, "He probably didn't show himself to you because of me, Shining One." Had it hurt, to see the only one Yamato considered a friend with the enemy he hated more than anything? How angry must he be at Fumi, his former ally saving Alcor's life with her timely theory?

Ah-ha! "Naoya must have sensed him earlier," Atsuro recognized. He'd learned to read Naoya's smirks over the years. "That's why he said that maybe they weren't gone after all. They control the dragon stream, and the dragon stream is the energy of the natural world. The world that was created for humanity." He qualified that with, "In some systems. Either way, humans are part of earth's ecosystem and Naoya's attuned to that energy more than most people." Naoya was the first child of one born from the earth's flesh, among other things. "If the Hotsuin are too, and according to some reliable sources they are," Atsuro had figured out the government's plan to destroy everything within the loop without Naoya's help, and learning him from him had only honed his ability to ferret out the truth, no matter how well hidden, "Naoya would have sensed an unusual power point once he started looking. Even with this island's chi the way it is."

"So there is something wrong with it?" Saiduq asked, with that downcast look again.

"Not wrong, just new," Atsuro said, finally dropping down into one of the chairs. "It hasn't been shaped by living things yet. Don't worry, Naoya will make sure there aren't any missing microbes or anything that'll make the jungle ecosystem collapse or alignments that'll let the power flows get stagnant." He wasn't good with animals, but Abel was. Now Atsuro leaned forward. "Should I go look for this friend of yours? I'm sure he has enough sense to look for shelter, but take it from me, it's not good to be alone after something like this." A whole week? So much like the Lockdown it gave Atsuro chills even in the tropical heat. He tried not to wince with sympathy. Hiro had survived, and he wasn't going to rub in how bad things must have been by dwelling on it.

Saiduq looked at Hiro, knowing he was the absolute worst person to make this decision.

Hiro was already standing up. "I'll go: he should talk to me."

Knowing Abel, Atsuro didn't even try to talk him out of walking through a jungle in the rain, with clouds blotting out the sun. All he said was, "Let's at least look for a coat or an umbrella first, ok?" He wasn't going to let his best friend's little brother get sick, or explain to Naoya why he let Naoya's other little cousin that also turned out to be a brother get sick. Illness still freaked Naoya out a little, after thousands of years before modern medicine, when diarrhea would drain all the salt and nutrients out of a little kid's body until they just died or strep throat bacteria's camouflage would trick the immune system into destroying the heart. When Atsuro and Yuzu were little kids, Naoya would kick them out of the house and forbid them to come within six feet of Abel if they so much as coughed, and when Abel or his parents got sick? They'd all thought it was because Naoya didn't want to lose anyone else the way he had his parents: his mother died in the accident, but his father caught something antibiotic-resistant in the hospital while he was still weak from the trauma and the surgery.

Knowing a little about how nasty history was, Atsuro had to wonder exactly how many of his birthparents over the millennia Naoya had lost to disease.

Saiduq stayed there, following them with his eyes if he could do nothing else, his hand turning, over and over, the card that named Atsuro the Underworld and Heaven's joint ambassador to Japan.

He sat in a thatched structure that couldn't really be called a building as it only had one wall, with showerheads sticking out of it. At first he'd thought they were either ridiculous or hinted that the new god Hiro had so unwisely enthroned had a dirty mind: yes, he was aware the JPs locker rooms had showers, but who would undress and let anyone with a pair of binoculars watch them shower?

Then he'd seen that there were pairs of showerheads, the others at around knee height, and looked down at his shoes, caked now in mud, sand and bits of leaves.

Surprisingly practical, actually, he thought, at least until the wind picked up and he realized that it was fine to get one's shoes and socks sopping wet when they could be left out in the sun, but now he had cold, wet feet, which he'd been told caused illness.

At least the structure gave him some shelter, but anyone walking along the beach could see him and the wind kept blowing the rain in under it.

Clearly, his employees were fools. For going to places like this willingly, in addition to everything else.

What would happen now? If he left JPs he would have no money, no identification, no records proving all his education and qualifications, or even that he was allowed to be in the country that he'd served! Even if his men were loyal enough not to inform anyone that he was responsible for the last world's destruction, the government had made sure he knew he didn't have any other options. That the outside world ran on who someone knew and who knew them instead of merit. Trade one master for another that would demand he prove himself by licking their boots and conforming? At least the government knew he wouldn't be easy to replace and that gave him some leverage.

The trouble was that he wasn't easy to replace, so letting him go had never been an option.

He remembered how all of them, even Keita and Fumi, had someone they wanted to call. He honestly didn't have anyone he'd talk to without a good reason. Except Hiro, but seeing him accept that thing even when it showed its true colors? He'd ducked behind a tree when he heard that voice; fast enough none of the others noticed him. So all of that Special Forces training had been good for something other than proving that all that talk about the wonders of nature and long walks in the woods was utterly delusional. Perhaps it was some means of handling the trauma of being worked into exhaustion, yelled it by men with more muscle than anything else in their heads & winding up covered in scratches and insect bites, since the Hotsuin family's vaulted connection to nature apparently consisted of nature considering them particularly nutritious. Or perhaps tasty. Like takoyaki.

Still, he'd say one thing for this place: he couldn't feel the dragon stream. At all. No flows of chi, not even the little rivulets that flowed into the powerful ley lines, like the one bound to the defense of Japan's cities, the one he was bound to. It left him at a disadvantage, but he had to admit that it was restful not to have that feeling in his head, that constant reminder.

The rain and surf drowned most other sounds out, but he could feel someone getting closer to him. That was one more clue to the real nature of Hiro's latest acquisition, although it had never bothered to take a human form for his sake, when it told him all the duties he was burdened with. It wasn't alive, so it still didn't radiate any energy he could detect. Even rocks had some inherent power he could tap, the blood of the earth.

Hiro had a rather distinctive pattern, even though it seemed forgettable to the untrained eye, he mused, watching rain pour off the roof from the untidy ends of the palm frond thatch. Similar to that new arrival, the one who detected him.

The reclusive computer adept Naoya.

Once he was old enough to be of service, the government had given him almost anything he asked for, desperate to restore and refine their defenses against the supernatural. He could have anything except freedom, or so he'd thought until he'd had Fumi take a detector to one of her trade conventions. That produced several good candidates: those with creative or summoning gifts seemed drawn to computers, to the trade of crafting carefully-scripted instructions that had to be as precise and flawless as a demon's binding.

Yet the best candidate hadn't just been rejected: there was a flurry of panic among his minders, and he was told in no uncertain terms that he was not allowed to contact this man, study him, or do anything except forget he existed.

Yamato hadn't realized there was any connection between Naoya and Hiro, despite their shared family name. So Hiro not only possessed strong magical potential but it ran in the family? And Hiro knew Naoya used it? If they'd let him think of demons as relatively harmless, that both explained how Alcor could possibly have fooled Hiro after Hiro knew what he was and proved Naoya and Hiro's other brother were both fools, so his family still didn't explain Hiro's intelligence or tactical skill.

Hmm, to capture Hiro and use that boat Alcor created as part of this attempt to win Hiro's loyalty to escape with him or to take another approach? Surely Hiro would listen once he was away from that thing. Then they would work together to kill it.

Except it wasn't Hiro that deftly stepped around the wall and in under the shelter.

Bone dry, while Yamato could guess at his own resemblance to a drowned gray cat. Noticing Yamato's look at his clothing, Naoya said, "Yes, I'm violating my parole for personal comfort. People who tried to destroy the world for the sake of their goals shouldn't throw stones. But you know that, don't you."

No, he hadn't known about any parole, but he certainly wasn't going to say that. Now that Yamato could see him, he realized that Naoya hadn't necessarily deliberately disguised his aura.

If Yamato had written out a description of the normal, baseline human aura for anyone else, both Naoya and Hiro would have matched it almost perfectly. That wasn't normal. Demons and gods had mated with humans for thousands of years: the idea that such a thing as a pure human without any supernatural blood existed after all this time was preposterous.

Yes, Yamato's own aura was similar to theirs, which might be why he fancied he'd felt a kinship to Hiro almost from the beginning, before Hiro had shown his true worth, but that was because of generations of exposure to the dragon stream, which was purely natural power. Whether they had adapted to better control it or it had changed them was irrelevant. "You're a Hotsuin, aren't you?"

"No, but you've forced me to admit that you are. Is that how they found one?" Naoya asked, leaning against the wall. "Did they track down a descendant of someone who decided to escape their family duty?" Had they bought or stolen a child young enough to begin the training at the proper age?

Yamato laughed: as if they would have gotten away. If it was possible, he would have done it. "The Hotsuin have always made use of the most advanced technology and techniques to accomplish their goals. After almost dying when he was only a little older than I am now, my father not only found a wife but put a sperm sample in storage. The family trust," administered by the Japanese government, "found a suitable egg and a surrogate mother."

Naoya's laugh… Yamato could swear they had to be related somehow. "Clever. I would remember that story if I thought I'd ever need to produce a tame sorcerer. It worked so well in your case." Fools. Trying to own and control something more powerful and smarter than they were against its will? That worked out so well for the stupid breed of sorcerers, the ones that didn't live long enough to breed. "Now." The laughter vanished from his eyes. "What did my little brother drag home this time?"

"You already know it isn't natural?" Something that shouldn't exist.

"The garden," Naoya said tersely, as though it should be obvious. "It isn't a copy of anything, unlike the rest of the world. Programs, spells or art: a creation will reveal the mind of its creator. Humans and demons all come from the same source, and their creations contain aspects of them in turn. All life on earth also comes from the same family tree. That garden was created according to classic rules and principles developed to express certain meanings, attain certain results just like any other programming language, and the mind that created it knew those principles. You could say I've spent a long time observing how people think, and all the languages they express those thoughts in. I've spent hours now examining that garden, and I still can't wrap my head around half of it." And if Yamato wanted to waste both their time, he was free to insinuate that this was because Naoya's intelligence was lacking, but he'd prove himself a fool if he did. "Even though I know the language, most the concepts expressed in it are alien even to me. Yet it's the half I can understand that puzzles me even more."

Not what it was saying, but that it could say it. Some part of the universal language resonated with this creature's mind, so why wasn't the rest of it attuned? At first he'd wondered if his grandfather wasn't the only sentience to arise out of the universe and go on to create, but there were concepts he recognized buried in there: were they combined with the utterly alien or simply twisted into forms too alien for even him to wrap his head around them?

As thunder rumbled in the distance, one of the fierce yet brief storms of the tropics, Yamato told Naoya, "He's one of the beings that destroyed the original world. They exist in the Akashic Records and control them, and us, by deleting and reshaping data. This one is responsible for my family, and has been manipulating humans by giving them information for millennia. Now it tricked Hiro into making it God." Would this man believe him? Would he have an ally here, one that might be like Hiro, the second person he'd ever met who was worth talking to, capable of understanding him?

"Interesting." Naoya's eyes narrowed. "I've met plenty of manifestations of the collective unconscious." This wasn't simply one of them. If he hypothesized a type of being that had come into existence in such an environment without the intervention of man or god? "A third, fourth," counting mankind, "power. One the others didn't know existed." Until now. Which was almost impossible unless they really could control knowledge.

Of course, that number wasn't counting all the different human and demonic factions. The King of Bel and Lucifer had about as much influence on what the other did as any two human rulers of sovereign nations.

Despite all this, "As touched as I am that you're so concerned for my little brother, have you considered that you may be wrong about who's manipulating who?" Naoya knew that Hiro was just as skilled as his brothers: some things ran in the family. "You don't have much reason to admire your ancestors," despite Japan's tradition of ancestor worship, "but do you believe in reincarnation?"

"Yes," Yamato said, meeting red eyes with his own narrowed iron-grey. Of course he believed in things that obviously existed. Naoya might as well have asked if the master of the dragon stream believed in ley lines: it was just as patronizing.

"Hiro is one of the oldest souls in existence, less than twenty years younger than the human race itself. He remembers very little of it, but to make a long story short, he was the first doctor." Stuck trying to deal with broken hearts as well as breaking-down bodies, hold together a family that finally understood that there was no going back. "It's an old story: one learned to care for plants, one for animals, but it was the third that was forced to recognize that the proper study of man is man, that someone had to look after people, because they damn well weren't going to do it themselves." Since Yamato clearly didn't see that as a worthwhile pursuit (he must have hated all the people whose job it was to look after him, to shape him into a proper Hotsuin), Naoya explained that, "He was born into the aftermath of two world-shaking and incredibly stupid pieces of family drama. Even if he wasn't compassionate, he would have had to be a fool not to make the connection that when other people made a mess out of things; it meant more trouble for him." And a lack of godlike powers & immortality. "If it wasn't for him, the human race wouldn't have had a third generation." Although Yamato certainly wasn't going to be grateful. "And this wouldn't be the first omnipotent being he's manipulated."

Now the boy's eyes had narrowed, now he was actually listening. When Naoya was his age… Actually, when Naoya was his age he'd been in complete denial about the realities of his situation and spending most of his time ankle-deep in mud experimenting with cultivation techniques. Ah, such happy days of science. Tasty science.

Through a haze of pained exhaustion, Yamato remembered closed eyes, the source of his torment tensed as though expecting an inevitable blow. "Don't, Yamato Hotsuin," Alcor had said, and at the time it was one more thing to enrage him, that Alcor though he had any right to ask anything more of Yamato or his clan.

Now, he saw that Alcor had been afraid. Would he have begged if he was human enough to know how, or delude himself into thinking it would work? Alcor had been afraid that when Hiro knew he would reject him, even though Yamato had said it only seconds ago: it was obvious what Alcor was.

Yes, it was so obvious he almost wanted to laugh. Of course the one Yamato considered worthy to stand by his side must have known, must have counted on it. There had been absolutely no surprise on Hiro's face, and it wasn't just a matter of keeping calm so those others wouldn't panic and fall apart. He'd asked Alcor if it was true just to hear his response, and so that the others would hear it.

When Hiro told him that it was okay, Alcor had been just as shocked as Yamato was. Shocked and grateful.

Magnificent, magnificent Hiro. "He used him. He used him to create the new world he wanted," Yamato belatedly realized. Just like Hiro managed to turn the rabble JPs acquired into their most effective team. The being that had set Yamato's clan on this path, whose actions were responsible for everything, had been reduced to someone else's tool, just like Yamato had spent far too much of his life.

His last life.

"I used the Shomonkai, and Hiro's older brother used me. I didn't figure out until the end that he'd made me use him for exactly what he'd wanted to do all along," Naoya reminisced. "Hiro is still in second place: he's only gotten an island out of it, while his brother used me and our grandfather to get his hands on a kingdom." There was far more pride than even token resentment in his voice. "If you still want to make this Saiduq suffer a little, I suggest you stay out here until Hiro finds you and try to catch a cold. According to Atsuro, he's sitting alone in a dark room worrying about how you're alone and possibly dying of exposure because of him."

Yamato was used to defending his pride, declaring that he didn't care what others thought and couldn't be pushed around for the likes of them, but if this was true, he would have to figure out how to look pitiful. It might just be worth it. "So this is why they didn't want me to make contact with you."

"Well, that and the way I helped the Shomonkai tap the power of demons and kill your predecessor," Naoya said with an answering smirk. "Now," unless you need any more lessons in 'trusting your friends' or 'manipulation for dummies,' "I have a garden to rewire."

After several thousand years of not being able to garden, I think that the instant Naoya got rid of that curse he'd be hacking something to get funding to recreate the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or some other big, engineering-intensive project like that. We've invented all these techniques since he realized you could stick seeds in the ground, from irrigation to terraces. By the time Hiro was able to carry on a train of thought for very long, Naoya was splitting his time between agricultural and computer engineering.

He's still a mad scientist, or at least an engineer with serious issues.