notes: Hi everyone! This fic is over 4 years old now! I guess it's not 2025 yet. I understand why A Song of Ice and Fire is never going to be finished. Keeping track of who knows what, who's doing what, and how that interacts with other people is a bear.
Happy Pride, and support your local protestors.
A few things:
1. Some of the Sunshine girls are older than the initial LL! girls, and Dia and You are not ex-idols. (Mostly because this is primarily muse's story and the sunshine girls are just supposed to be fun cameos.)
2. All secret agent agent references are a 100% made up. The PSIA Third Intelligence Department does not exist.
PSIA Third Intelligence Department Assistant Director/Lead Scientist/Grant Writer Dia Kurosawa had never been to the state of Ohio. She'd never been to a place like the overcast, run-down village of Cauliflower Junction, and yet, there was a feeling that she'd walked this same street, had stood next to the same person, already had the same conversation.
Dia had tripped and stumbled down the uneven concrete of Orchard street in her three-inch heels. The old houses lining the road had peeling paint, rotten porches, dirty windows. Clouds hung with rain. In the distance, Dia saw the elongated chimneys of a nuclear power plant, shooting plumes into the air. Why had they come here? She walked faster. They had something to do. Something crucial to everything that had happened. And yet she couldn't remember anything.
Out of the corner of her eye, Dia saw green streaks of light lining each cloud. When she focused on them, the cracks would vanish, leaving nothing.
The sky was angry.
Her heart pounded. Something was going to happen. The woman with the blue eyes had told her something very important.
"Dia!"
"Damn, Dia! We picked a real nice town," Dia's colleague said, as she pulled the luggage along the rugged sidewalk. "I can't believe you really went for this sidetrip." You Watanabe, Data Security Specialist, for travel purposes had been delegated to Dia's old role - professional coffee-fetcher, meeting note-taker, and bag-puller.
Dia looked up. The sky was an endless blue field with no sign of gathering clouds. She shook herself out of whatever… that was. She couldn't believe she had gone for this side trip either. "It was, unfortunately, the best lead after the 'physics' conference. So this whole trip wasn't a complete waste."
The sole bar in Cauliflower Junction was in the little hotel restaurant. The room was dark and closed-in, with fairy lights strung from the ceiling and candles on each table. Slim windows let the dusty almost-sunset through.
Weren't they doing something else? How did they get here?
"Do you remember walking in here, You?"
You laughed. "I know blowing off the Director's emails must be stressful for you, but try not to start dissociating, okay? C'mon, let's get drunk."
They sat at the bar. Dia already knew she would order wine, but You looked over the cocktail menu. Her eyes widened. "This is really cheap, wow. Last time we went out the drinks were like sixteen dollars."
A deal was a deal, even if her offer wasn't as generous as Dia had hoped. "Do you want dinner?"
"Sure, why not?"
They ordered their drinks. Dia looked around the room: an old man sat at the furthest end of the bar, drinking a pitcher a beer by himself, a pair of business women talking about the nuclear power plant deal, and a woman talking to herself about… aliens.
You nudged Dia's shoulder. "Hey. Did you mean that? About the weapon?"
"You, you know we can't talk about that here."
"I'm just.. Worried."
"I am, too."
The door opened. A small family came in, followed by an asian woman in a loose grey wrap. Long red hair fell from her silver hood, hitting almost her waist. The woman made a direct line to the bar, sitting a few stools away from Dia and You.
"A case of whiteclaw to go, please." She spoke in English, but there was an accent to her voice that Dia couldn't place.
She was stunning, Dia thought. And… familiar.
"ID, please."
The woman pulled a card from her wallet. You nudged Dia. "Dude, isn't she your type?"
Dia's current only type was "woman above the age of twenty-five with a job." But looking at the woman's elegant bearing, Dia was certain this woman met her definition.
"You, please, do you think I am capable of hitting on women at bars like some terrible college student?"
"Just… compliment her hair! Or whatever! You gotta try."
Dia rolled her eyes, but moved over to the stool next to the woman. The woman shot Dia a quick glance. On a closer look, she was about Dia's age - late twenties? Early thirties? She looked young, but there was a polish to her look and a physical resignation to her posture that suggested closer to thirty than twenty.
"Excuse me," Dia said in English, tapping the counter gently, "I just wanted to tell you that you have a lovely outfit. The top is like… light from the moon."
The woman gave her a long blank look, like she wasn't sure how to process that statement. Dia felt the red rise into her cheeks. Then, suddenly, warmth flushed the woman's face and a smile met her lips and eyes. "Thank you. You have a wonderful outfit too. I haven't seen such a beautiful pattern like that in quite a long time."
Dia blushed. "My name is Dia. My colleague and I are having drinks here, if you'd like to join us."
You bounced on her heels as she walked down the crooked sidewalk. She was so excited to work on this meaningless little mission. "So, the farming store and the McDonalds were the latest hotspots for temporal anomalies. I vote we check out McDonalds first, because that continental breakfast was a long time ago."
Above them, the sun beat down on their heads.
Hadn't they been doing… something else? Dia's head spun. She felt like she was drunk.
"Okay. McDonalds it is."
"Full steam ahead!"
It was summer, afternoon. People were leaving their offices, getting dinner, riding their bikes. Mothers with their children. A few streets away, Dia caught sight of the "temporal incident" farming supply store lurking behind a church.
Something was beginning to rise in Dia's chest...
They ordered their food and sat outside the McDonalds of Cauliflower Junction, Ohio, under a bright red umbrella. Dia ate a salad and made reservations at the hotel. You ate chicken nuggets and had begun some sort of hacking thing into the McDonald's security camera. Sweat dripped down Dia's back. People glanced at the two women in their business best, sitting at the curbside. Dia in her pencil skirt and heels, You in her little professional sailor-chic get up.
"Is this truly necessary? We could just ask the manager to see the footage."
"C'mon. What if it's aliens? Aliens! I wouldn't go letting people from out of town find evidence of aliens. You said it yourself. This is our best lead right now."
Dia sighed and dipped her plastic fork into her puddle of balsamic vinaigrette. With the Third Intelligence Department being so understaffed and overworked, special agent Umi Sonoda near-comatose, and the hard drive resistant to You's codebreaker attempts, the word of a strange woman talking about ghosts and aliens in a deserted Ohio town was unfortunately, truly their best lead.
"That's very sad." Dia could just picture the Director's red face; his rage at knowing they had come back empty-handed, after spending so much money and effort to travel there.
"Do you remember what Dr. Mayfair had said about the time fluctuations? She'd said the fabric of time had been ripped apart in certain places, and the fluctuations were it was fraying."
Sweat dripped down Dia's back. People stared-maybe; her righteous paranoia at how out of place they were was on high-alert.
The sensation of deja vu prickled Dia's spine.
The PSIA agents had taken four planes and several stressful cab rides to get to Cleveland for the International Relative Abstract Physics conference. This trip had been taken, as Dia told You( who had been carrying their bags into the hotel) to set a good example. One could not hope to work around the anomalies of space and time if one did not understand exactly what they were dealing with.
To Dia's dismay, the conference was, aside from a few talks from Dr. Mayfair and Dr. Akemi, a complete wash. The other topics had included interdimensional time traveling aliens, an older man discussing the viability of the Loch Ness Monster, and a woman who claimed to be Bigfoot's lover.
One woman claimed that there were aliens in Cauliflower Junction, a small town about two hours from Cleveland. Dia listened with drooping eyelids as the woman recounted missing time, strange visions, and a fissure of green that would appear in the sky at night.
You nudged Dia. "Hey, you know what that sounds like? Temporal irregularities."
Dia blinked, fluttering her eyes several times before responding. It sounded like a woman talking about aliens. Her soul was leaving her body. "Yes, quite."
"I bet this has something to do with the answers on that stolen hard drive! The weirdness of the New York case seems related to this, with the strange time fluctuations and green orbs and whatnot. Remember that woman who went missing for hours and couldn't remember where she'd been? It's related, somehow, I just know it."
Dia watched the woman presenting on Cauliflower Junction's aliens move to another slide. A blurry picture of a person in loose clothing, standing at the edge of one of those green rifts. The ghost, the woman said, was a part of major alien incidents, often appearing before or after.
"I remember."
The hotel bedroom was dim and cramped. Two twin beds and a single window. Fussy olive wallpaper. A television from 1975 sat on the dresser. If there had been a single other hotel within an hour of Cauliflower Junction, they would have stayed at a nice chain hotel instead.
You immediately went back to her laptop. Dia sat down on the bedspread, trying to unwind. Everything felt like it was spinning.
Bare skin on silken sheets, rustling, naked legs brushing up against each other. Long hair tumbling down. Blue eyes, full of so much pain. A burst of sensation at her core...
Dia's phone vibrated and she opened her eyes. Her heart was beating fast. Were these moments she recalled...little rips of space and time? Someone must have been intimate in this room recently. The bigger jumps obviously were bigger rips. They would have to come back with some equipment to measure these strange effects. Their findings were great, but until Dia could get some objective data there wasn't much she could do.
Dia opened her phone without thinking. The Director's name popped up. URGENT, it read, followed by more texts.
"Shoot."
You turned towards her. "What's up?"
"The Director wants us to come back, now." Dia exhaled. "Apparently there was some sort of emergency in the lab that he wants us to manage."
'Emergency?"
"He didn't clarify."
You laughed and pulled out her phone. "Let's find out."
"Alright, well I'm going to get dressed while you hack the director's email."
"Aww, why? I think the office lady thing really works for you."
Dia snorted. No one thought the office lady thing worked for her on any of the dating sites she went on. She settled on a red dress and an intricate floral jacket. Dia had hoped to have worn this to the second day of the conference, but… there was no way they were going to stick around for Moth Man: Friend or Foe?
"Oh wow! You'll never believe this. The emergency is that the Director forgot about that grant deadline and needs you to come take care of it."
Dia applied her lipstick. "He knows we have laptops with internet access, right?"
You laughed. "I doubt it."
"Well. The plane doesn't leave until tomorrow. There's nothing to be done until then."
The woman sat next to Dia and You, smiling. A gentle ballad started playing on the jukebox. Above them, the strings of lights cast warm light into their drinks.
"Hello! I'm You!" You said, in Japanese.
Dia shot her a dirty look.
"It's nice to meet you, You." The woman responded, in fluent Japanese. "You two are colleagues?"
"Yes, we're actually secret agents. Like the X-Files. But for Japan. Dia runs around studying weird science stuff."
Both women worked primarily in the lab and had only investigated in a handful of cases. Calling themselves "secret agents" was a stretch.
The woman looked to Dia for confirmation. Dia sighed. "We're not very secret agents anymore, I suppose."
"What brings you to Cauliflower Junction?"
"We're investigating tem-"
Dia kicked You. "We just finished studying some soil samples out in the fields. There have been several Bigfoot sightings in the area, and we wanted to see if there was a special microbiome that attracted them." This was factually wrong, the Bigfoot sightings were in the other part of the state. "You is actually the premier authority on paranormal soil composites."
The woman smiled, with raised eyebrows. Very nicely done eyebrows. "That sounds… fascinating."
"Let me buy you a drink. Who are you? Tell me about yourself."
She looked away from Dia and You for a moment. "Oh, I'll have… a glass of rose." The woman shrugged, and then winked at them. "You can call me whatever you'd like for the evening. I'm a freelancer. I guess… I'm just trying to find my way right now."
Dia rolled her eyes. If she'd been on a real date, the refusal to give a name would have been a deal breaker. But Dia was never going to see this woman again, so...
"Can I call you Ginger?"
"Whatever you want." The woman, perhaps Ginger, slid one gloved hand next to Dia's. Their wrists bumped. Their fingers interlaced. It was sweaty and hot, she pressed it into her own drenched skin. Dia quivered.
"What do you mean, find your way? Are you lost?"
The woman sighed. Her hood slid off, revealing her full head of hair, with several white streaks in it. "I'm not really sure where I'm supposed to be." She laughed. "You didn't even get me drunk yet, and here I am rambling."
"This is important. You need to go. Now."
Dia's stomach lurched. Something had happened. Something would happen.
Everything had felt so off since she came to Ohio. Went to that conference. Meet this woman. Had seen the tape.
Tape?
Dia made eye contact with the bartender.
The cracks were spreading. It followed Dia, tugging on her, asking her to subsume herself.
Dia tripped and stumbled down the uneven concrete of Orchard street in her three-inch heels. The clouded-over night was an angry unreal orange. Sputtering street lights were the only illumination.
A green rift caught her legs. Moments replayed. Her feet caught on the pothole. The constant flickering of an overhead lamp. You's terrified face.
This was because of the woman.
Behind her, green light saturated the area, like a rovering beacon.
"C'mon, Dia!"
You had run ahead in her sensible shoes. "What the hell is that thing?"
Dia knew the answer now. "It's an unraveling time thread. There's a rift here."
"Wow! This is amazing!
Another fissure caught her. Dia tripped again, falling into another abyss.
The woman sat on the edge of Dia's hotel bed. Her long hair tumbled down into waves that reached her waist. "I've never done this before. I haven't… in so long."
How did she get here? Her head was pounding. Wasn't she just-?
There was a woman in Dia's bed. Suddenly nothing else mattered.
Dia wanted to say to the woman, how, you're so beautiful, what's wrong? Instead, Dia only said it had been a long time for her, too.
"A beautiful, worldly woman like you? A secret agent travelling the world?"
"Flattery. Come here." Dia patted the bed.
With a hesitant touch, the woman reached for Dia's legging-covered calve. She stroked her fingers up and down, only daring to caress with the pads of her fingertips. Dia relished each gentle motion, her legs tensing and relaxing with the woman's movements.
"So muscular," The woman said, "It's hot."
Heat stirred within Dia. "Is that so?"
"So strong." The woman leaned over Dia, their mouths not quite touching. She smelled like alcohol, but underneath was the scent of oranges and yuzu. "So powerful."
Dia held out her hand. "Touch me."
Their palms connected.
There was a shock.
Why had they come here? She walked faster. They had something to do.
Their fingers interlaced. Images flooded into Dia: The green sky shattering overhead. The smell of hot pavement in the summer. Take-out, again.
Dia pulled away.
The woman's blue eyes were full of so much pain. A liquid glint hung in them, ready to burst.
The fabric of time had been ripped apart in certain places, and there were fluctuations where it was fraying.
"Please, Dia."
Dia took the woman's hand again. It was sweaty and hot, she pressed it into her own drenched skin. More fragments: a phone call, the smell of a fresh tea bag, the sound of a guitar, the sound of her voice singing-
Dia kissed her. A full spark sizzled between them. The woman's lips were wet and soft and pliable.
"I want this." Dia said. "I want you." Something was brightening inside of her, outside of her, even as an undercurrent of anxiety ate at her.
The woman gave her another sad smile. "You might not remember this."
"Let me see you."
They disrobed. Dia's dress slid to the floor. The woman was beautiful and scarred. Dia let her eyes drift to several large healed wounds.
"Ginger, are you...?"
"Don't worry about it. It's not important."
"Oh snap! I got it. Come look!"
Dia felt sick. Something was wrong. She moved over to You's little circular bench.
The laptop's black and white screen showed a woman, mid to late twenties, standing outside the McDonald's near the ball pit. She was screaming into her phone.
"Can't you do anything? "This can't be forever. You must have done a million tests."
The woman's face crumpled as she heard the reply, and threw the phone down.
Dia knew the woman. She knew that face.
A wave of nausea took her. How could she know that woman? She'd never been to Ohio before.
Clap.
A flash filled the screen. It repeated again and again, dying but leaving a glowing verdant rift in the air. The woman had left.
"So that's the ghost." You said, and wolfed down the last of her fries.
Dia frowned. "What is that light? A… a space time rip?"
"Your guess is as good as mine."
"Zoom in, please. Get as close as your can."
You zoomed into the rift. There wasn't much but a glisten in a shimmer.
It was almost certainly just light, but… "You, can you sharpen this?"
"I'll try."
After several minutes, the image now held a fragment of a person, a woman opening a door.
You squinted. "Is that… someone else? At a different time?"
A hope was beginning to rise in Dia's chest. Maybe this trip to nowhere wasn't a complete waste.
"Keep going. Get a few of these. See if you can find that woman later."
They played the tape further, with people walking in and out. Before and after the woman's outburst, there were strange ruptures and replays: people showing up again and again in the same poses, clothing, arriving at unconventional hours, people fainting or shaking, arguments about messed up orders…
Dia was the happiest she'd been in months.
The sun had gone down when they finally stopped collecting clips and Dia decided to wrap it up. "You… you've discovered evidence of a phenomena that matches what we've found in New York. Good work."
You beamed at her. "Do you want me to send it to the director?"
The last time Dia had sent information to the Director without a full explanation of what she'd found to explain it to him, he'd berated her for sending him meaningless information. "Not yet. Let's go to the hotel and get a drink. On me. You've got good instincts, You."
The woman moved above her, her legs clenching around Dia's muscular thighs. She sighed in pleasure as Dia rocked her leg in unison with her.
Their bare skin slid over the sheets, rustling softly. Naked legs brushed into each other. The woman's fingers reached for her core. There was a pleasant jolt. Memories of a shower head. Dia melted into heat, once loud and surprising, then again and again with an excited crescendo.
Each climax brought a new thought, new image. A redheaded woman at a poolside. A set of bloodied hands covered in sand. A dark haired woman raising her voice, with a gun in her hand-
Umi?
Dia looked up. The woman was moving faster, glowing. Dia kept her pace, kept pressure on the woman's slit.
"I'm so close, Dia."
Dia grabbed the woman's hips and pushed.
"I'm split." The woman's voice echoed in her mind. Between here and there. Between me and someone else."
There was a burst of light.
The woman's name was Honoka. Honoka Kousaka, the same name as the woman Umi was monitoring in the States. Dia got a flash of the woman standing before a mirror, applying a cream to her skin. Blue Eyes. Red hair. Honoka Kousaka, the 19 year old school idol who had gone back to school in Japan.
It couldn't be that Honoka. That would be impossible.
You stood in the parking lot with empty eyes. Green veins ran over her body, fragmenting her.
Dia paced. Her heels clipped on the pavement. What could she do? Wait for it to pass? This was closer to magic than science. She exhaled. This was not supposed to happen. A picture in her mind: Dia and You waiting for a cab. They had something to do. Something crucial to everything had happened. And yet she couldn't remember anything.
Was she going to forget about this? This scariest thing that had ever happened to her?
They needed to get away. The closer they were to Honoka, the more time blurred and fissured and gashed.
The sun had gone down. Customers trickled in and out. They'd split a plate of zucchini fritters and had done a round of shots. You was experiencing dating apps as a queer woman in rural Ohio for the first time. Honoka was unravelling her wrap, her long hair, her tongue.
Honoka. This was before they'd gone to bed together, but Dia felt like she was experiencing it for the first time.
Dia looked at You and Honoka and back again. Just two women sitting at a bar. No You with blank eyes. No Honoka with space and time cracking all around her.
"I… used to be someone. I used to be whole." Honoka said. Her voice was breaking.
"Whole?"
"I'm split. Between here and there. Between me and someone else."
An ex? An estranged family? Was she hiding from someone? How did this beautiful woman end up here? Her heart ached. "I'm… sorry."
"Thanks. I'm not supposed to be here, you know."
Dia snorted. "Neither am I. I was supposed to be a local politician."
Honoka took her hand. A whisper of sensation: The woman's lips were wet and soft and pliable. "What happened?"
"Well… I'd studied political science and statistics. The statistics were really there to look good. Statistics wasn't my passion, it was helping people. I'd gone into this wanting to make the world a better place."
"And then?"
"And then my political internship didn't give me a job, but the government lab I'd interned at offered to hire me full time. Sent me to graduate school. And now I'm here, looking for…" She looked at the woman, in her disheveled cloak. With her bright blue eyes. Dia recalled the photo of the "ghost" the woman at the conference had shown. Dia knew who the woman was now. "Looking for Bigfoot's preferred microbial soil samples."
Honoka laughed. "Yeah, there's definitely a disparity there."
Dia took a sip of wine. Honoka was languid in her bar stool.
"I was supposed to be a normal woman, with a normal girlfriend. A normal musician. If I had only been so lucky to have been unremarkable, to have known unremarkable people." Her voice was frayed. "If only I had been someone else."
Dia knew this woman would never be unremarkable.
"Do you want to come upstairs with me?
"Are you awake?"
Dia started, awake and nude under the covers. A woman with red hair was shaking her.
Where was she?
The conference in the states. Ohio. Cauliflower Junction. The bar. The woman. Honoka Kousaka.
It was still dark out. Where was You? Did she make it back?
There was an eerie green light permeating the entire room.
"Dia, this is important. You need to go. Now."
"Honoka, I-"
The woman stared at her, as if she hadn't heard her name in years. Cracks of green appeared behind her.
The rift jumped between them, widening further and further. "What's happening?"
Honoka looked away from her. A green split was spreading over her nude body. "I'm sorry."
"Are you doing this?"
"I… can't stop it. I… should never have touched you. I never should have touched anything. You should go. I'm sorry about the laptop."
Dia had no idea what Honoka meant. The laptop?
"Will… you be okay?"
Honoka laughed. "No."
They had something to do. Something crucial to everything had happened. And yet she couldn't remember anything.
Out of the corner of her eye, Dia saw green streaks of light lining each cloud. When she focused on them, the cracks would vanish, leaving nothing but clouds.
The sky was angry.
You pouted at her. 'You're really not going to let me at least check this place out?"
"We don't have time. Director's orders. He called me bitching last night. I guess we missed some sort of deadline? "
"Ugh, fine. My laptop got fucked anyways. I guess something got corrupted when I was working with those crypto-programs?"
"I told you not to download strange programs. Yeah, I'll call a cab to the airport."
A woman in a long grey dress watched them leave. Fractals of light caught her face, her clothing, her body, until she faded into nothing.
You sat down on Dia's grey hotel comforter. She looked uncharacteristically worried. "Hey, can I ask you something?"
Dia looked up from her phone. "What's going on, You?"
"Why do you think this is so important, anyways? Since when does the Third Intelligence Department care about what happens in the states? I know we're like, the X-Files or whatever with our hidden department, but shouldn't we be looking at stuff in Japan?"
Dia smiled. "Do you want a fake answer or a real answer?"
"Both, I guess."
"The fake answer is that it's a matter of national security. These events started right after the Japanese idol group, muse, went to New York. In the same hotel that they stayed at."
"Mhm, mhm."
"But the real answer is that the Department is looking to weaponize this. Take advantage of the "temporal anomalies. The Director looks at Sonoda as a happy synchronicity, and therefore ideal for this mission. But.. a weapon that could send people in and out of time? Slow them down, shoot them away into a future that someone's prepared for?"
"That's… horrible."
"And with the side effects we've seen in New York, it could have environmental factors that will be long lasting."
"But we don't care about that, do we?"
Dia sighed. "No, we don't."
end notes:
What keeps happening to this fanfic is that I will write a chapter, realize there's no good precedent for some of what's happening, and I'll have to write another chapter to precede it. (So the powers/things happening aren't totally out of nowhere.) There were... 3 chapters before this one happened. I will (hopefully) be finishing those up in a timely manner.
There have been several re-writes of previous chapters. Chapters 1-4 got a small facelift, with more foreshadowing to the story. If you're caught up, you probably don't need it, it's just to iron out small issues/give new readers a better idea of what the fic is about.
This chapter was supposed to be 1000 words and ended up being close to 5k. I was thinking of doing a quick, artsy, X-files-esque short to explore more of Umi's faction. Then I tried to do a pacing exercise along with it. Then I wanted to show off some erotic writing... Most chapters will not be 5k in the future if I can help it.
Future Honoka is becoming my favorite character, and you'll be seeing more of her soon. I don't think it was an accident that I wrote a woman who cannot touch anything without causing serious problems in the middle of a pandemic.