Chapter I: The Flame of Friendship
0750hrs, 15 May 2013, Tokyo, Japan
"My friends are my "estate."" Emily Dickinson
Serena Tsukino was not your average schoolgirl. She was in fact, below average, thank you very much. Her grades were not impressive, and she had a penchant for drifting off in class thinking of donuts or pizza or sticky buns. And she was late for school. Again.
"Dammit Mom, why didn't you get me up!" she yelled downstairs, putting on that (in)famous sera-fuku.
"I heard your alarm go off!" her mom responded.
"You know I don't get up at alarms!"
"Just hurry, okay? You're eighteen now, not in Junior High anymore."
Quickly throwing on her blouse, she hurried down the stairs and grabbed a quick breakfast of…
"Serena, you can't have those!" Mom yelled.
…doughnuts. These were the red-bean paste ones though.
"Sorry Mom, I'm in a rush!" Serena blitzed out of the house and made a dash toward the school, named Azabu Jūban High.
The Westminster chimes sounded the start of classes, just when Serena plopped into her seat for English to begin.
"Dammit," she said to herself. "Can't start eating those again."
"Say again?" Amy Mizuno, the more than nerdy, super smart student sitting in front of her mumbled. Her blue hair shimmered in the harshfluorescent lights, and despite attempts by the school administration, she had refused to dye her hair to fit in with the rest of the people there.
"What?" Serena sputtered out, trying not to think of doughnuts.
"Nothing, nothing." She quietly went back to staring at Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily".
The door to the class slammed open. Everyone stood up, as usual.
Unfortunately, the teacher that was usually taught English class was not there today. Instead, a substitute was in place. Her brown, wavy hair was mussed, clothes ill-fitting and she smelled of drink.
"Hello, I'm Yukari-sensei, yeah, get seated, whatever."
Yukari-sensei was not the best substitute teacher. She had gotten fired from her other teaching job after too many people complained.
"Okay, let me take attendance…" She ruffled through her satchel bag for thirty seconds. Everyone looked down to avoid the awkward situation.
Yukari finally got her shit together and called out attendance. After another thirty seconds looking for the English Literature book, she finally got on with the lesson.
"Can someone read the first paragraph of 'A Rose for Emily?'"
Silence.
"In English?"
More silence.
"Dammit, don't make me call out names!"
Very awkward silence.
Amy raised her hand, slowly.
"Ah…Mizuno!" Yukari looked down at the attendance roster to see if she was remotely right, and for once, she was. "Please, go ahead."
Amy stood up, looked nervously at the page, and began to read.
"Ouen Misu Emuri Gurieson daido, awah horu taon uento to hah funahraru: za men toru a soruto ofu resepekuru afuekushon foru ah farin monumento…" (When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument...)
It was really kind of pathetic to someone on the outside looking in. Even though Amy was super smart, English was a very difficult language (especially for the Japanese, where almost every sound ends in a vowel) and her skills were strained to read that first paragraph. She had been going to cram school, and despite the awkwardness of the pronunciation, she was doing quite well.
"Very Good!" Yukari said, in English. It really wasn't, but Amy was probably the best reader out of the entire class. "Can someone else read the next paragraph?"
Again, more silence.
"Okay then…ah…Tsukino?"
Dammit, Serena thought. "Me?" She said, trying to feign ignorance.
"Yes, you." Yukari was already getting bored. Chiyo-chan would have done so much better.
"Okay…" Serena stood up and picked up her book. The English words were just gibberish on the page; she didn't really know how to do English. Home Economics was her main strength but ever since the budget cuts, Home EC had been cut from the class schedule, replaced by a maths course.
"Eeto…uwasu….eh…biggu…su…su…(squarish)…furemu…" The sentence was, "It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires…" but Serena didn't even get that far.
"Yeah yeah yeah, that's enough." Yukari simply waved her off after a couple of failed attempts to read the sentence.
Bring bring bring.
The bell relieved everyone of the awkward situation.
"Okay that's it, bye bye!" Yukari was gone so fast that no one had time to stand up and bow.
"That was…strange," Amy said over lunch.
"I had her for English at my old school," Lita Kino said, shoveling down some rice. She was the new(est) transfer student. She was very tall for Japanese standards, and the school couldn't find a uniform that matched her height so they told her to wear her old one. That was two years ago, and everyone had given up on finding one that matched. The school had managed to get one but the shipment was lost in the 2011 tsunami, and they kind of just gave up after that.
"How was she?" Amy asked.
"She wasn't." Lita's curt reply ended that conversation. There was more silence as the girls shoveled down their respective lunches.
"Sooo…" Serena began.
"Yeah, what?" Lita replied in bored tone.
"Are you doing anything after school? Raye and Mina wanted to meet at the temple and then see a movie."
"Which movie?" Amy asked. She really wanted to see that new biopic on, of all people, Winston Churchill. She was actually going study for the entrance exams for college, but she had been doing that for the last couple of weeks and she needed a break. Everyone else had been studying…well, some more than others.
"I dunno, I think it's one of the Transformers movies," Serena replied.
"Are they still making those?" Lita was still bored.
"Yeah, they are."
"I'll go then," Amy said sadly. She still didn't have a lot of friends here, even after all this time at school.
"Sure." Lita's voice dropped a couple octaves.
"You okay there?" Serena asked absentmindedly. Lita was sure weird sometimes.
"I mean, um, yeah, sure." Lita's voice came back to normal. "I've been sick the last couple of days."
"Okay, then." Serena was thinking about the popcorn and the pop she would devour at the theatre.
After school had ended, they walked to the nearby Hikawa shrine where Raye worked.
"Hey guys, be right with you." Raye was helping two older ladies up to the shrine.
"That's really strange," Amy noted, yet again. Raye was completely calm, not like her usual fiery self.
"I think she's been doing some pot," Lita said.
"Oh come on," Serena rolled her eyes. "You've seen too many news reports." There had been a spat of investigative reports in the news about drugs and the increased use in Japan.
"Like, I can totally see Raye, like, doing that," a voice came behind them.
Everyone turned and glared at Mina. She was watching way too many episodes of Clueless and Gossip Girl.
"Sorry."
"Whatever." Serena noted that Mina could be even more ditzer than herself.
Raye came running back, changed out of her Miko dress and into street clothes.
"So, ready to see stuff blow up?" She asked excitedly. This was the Raye that everyone was used to.
"That's better," Amy said. "We were worried there for a moment."
"You know how it goes. I have to put on an act for the worshippers otherwise the temple goes kaput."
"Okay, let's do this!" Mina yelled and dashed down the street, toward the movie theater, with everyone in tow.
It was the last thing that they remembered of their old lives.
For a couple of days now, the locals had been complaining about an odd smell, like a very pungent odor of leeks or onions emanating from the sewer system. It had started when the public works company had come by, doing some "maintenance", but it seemed to start right after they left. The public works company came by several times again after a couple of calls, but they couldn't find anything. And the smell came and went, and it always never seemed to be around when the men in hard hats came. Most likely, everyone thought, it's a propane leak but they said it wasn't, maybe "sewer gas" or whatever the hell that was.
Well, it was.
A cigarette butt, tossed by a careless driver out the window forty seconds ago rolled toward one of the drainage slits in the road. It ignited the propane. In a span of a few microseconds, the flame travelled down to the sewer, and found the leaking reservoir from a nearby restaurant. For days, the gas had pooled in the sewer and with one spark, it caught flame. Another couple of microseconds passed. With nowhere to go, it expanded, taking the path of least resistance through the road and up into the air.
Boom.
Mina caught the explosion first. She was running past a bus station when the street exploded into fire. She the lucky one though. Most of the blast was absorbed by the metal and Plexiglas structure, but it was torn off its bolts and straight into Mina, pinning her to the ground, burning most of her blond hair and causing burns on ten percent of her body, but she was spared the horrors of what was to come.
Raye was next. Her body was tossed into a concrete wall, shattering her legs, lower back, pelvis, five ribs, breaking her right arm, fracturing the left. Three fingers on the left hand were obliterated immediately by flying debris. She suffered burns on thirty percent of her body, mostly on the back as she was turned away from the road yelling at Lita when the blast happened.
Lita's left arm was completely torn off at the shoulder by the blast, but was immediately cauterized by the intense heat saving her from a death from blood loss. Flying debris smashed into her ribs, fracturing several of them. Burns covered twenty percent of her body. She was thrown into Raye during the explosion.
Serena got the worst of it. Both her legs were ripped off at the knee, as were two fingers on the right hand, most every bone in her body was broken or damaged in some way shape or form, major head trauma, major disk fracture of the spine, major damage to internal organs, major damage to nervous system, major facial disfiguration, and burns on forty percent of her body.
Amy was last. The heat melted a cheap plastic water bottle by her side, spewing hot water and plastic onto her leg. There was some polyester clothing she was wearing that melted onto her skin. Sharp glass and debris disemboweled her, but she was far enough away that she only suffered minor burns on five percent of her body, mostly from the plastic and polyester. If holding your guts in your lap counted as a minor injury compared to everyone else.
Everyone was knocked out for a few seconds, and only for a few seconds because blacking out doesn't work that way. But everyone wished they had stayed out or had died. Mina was the first to wake up. She felt a burning sensation on her arms and head. Reaching to touch her hair, she realized that most of it had been burned away. Dammit, she thought. And I just got it done yesterday. It was a weird thing to think, but then again, no one was thinking straight after this. Mina looked over at Raye. She was screaming something, her mouth moving back and forth but Mina was still deafened by the explosion so she couldn't hear her. Lita was sitting dumbly, holding what had been her left arm in her lap.
Mina then looked at Serena.
She was trying to stand up, trying to use legs that were no longer there, a spine that was too shattered to work properly. Serena was trying to say something but no words were coming out. She no longer looked like a girl, but a piece of charred flesh and bone that might have been overcooked at BBQ night. Further down the road, Amy was crying and screaming, trying to shovel her guts back into her body, blood everywhere.
Mina laid her head down. She wanted to die, it hurt so much.
She didn't get that chance.
In the ruined remains of the road, there lay something that would be easily missed by the cleanup crews and the police detectives. A melted lump of plastic that had once been a small, cheap kitchen timer attached to a mobile phone sat among the crushed asphalt. It merely appeared to be a stray item from one of the destroyed stores and would be thrown away when the rebuilding process would begin.
The six-man "maintenance" crew that had come by several times in the last week was anything but. One of workers punctured the exposed propane line and attached a mobile phone to the break. The kitchen timer was set for thirty seconds once the call came in from the other mobile. It would then ring, connecting a circuit of some simple wires that had been purchased for a couple yen. The resulting explosion would destroy most of the evidence. The maintenance worker wished he had some Semtex or C4, but that would leave a trace of foul play. Innocently enough, he turned on his gas sniffer, which detected nothing (because it had to be turned on outside to fresh air to be zeroed out) so he could tell the police when he came around that they had found nothing. The test holes they had also dug were at a pathetically shallow depth and their equipment would not detect anything. Satisfied with their work, they piled in their truck for lunch and then maybe after work, to a bar with the extra money they were being paid.
The careless driver, now a kilometer away, had been given a mobile along with a carton of cigarettes and told to drive near Hikawa shrine. At a certain time, he would be called park and to take a smoke for a while near the drainage slit then drive away when he finished. For this he was paid a cool 10000 yen and told to go on his merry way. He accepted, because he was out of a job and needed some quick cash to pay some gambling debts and it seemed pretty easy. He didn't know about the CCTV camera looking over the road, or the improvised bomb below him. He was just a distraction so the police would pin it on him for carelessly discarding lit cigarettes, and admonish the public for not following anti-littering laws. They would state that this was the natural consequence of antisocial behavior.
Five days later, the car with the man still inside it was found in Tokyo bay, just another tragic vehicle accident.