[ninniku]
by ayalesca
Ogata on the Shore (Inception fusion fic)
A normal suburban street wasn't what Ogata expected.
Then again he wasn't sure what he had expected. Maybe a video game arcade. Maybe a house. This wasn't a manufactured landscape; he hadn't had the money to pay for something as refined as that. No, he'd said boldly that he'd be able to find Sai if he could just get in.
Sai was the only thing he was worried about.
A couple that looked vaguely familiar walked down the street, ignoring Ogata. The man was pushing a baby stroller. The woman carried a plastic bag of groceries in one hand, and a box of candy in the other. Other people walked up and down the streets, oblivious to his presence.
Good.
Ogata looked around, unable to see any obvious way to go. He looked into the sky. The sun cast very few shadows; it was noon. He walked down a street at random and found himself in an outdoor arcade of small stores: video game parlors, a barbershop, a used bookstore, and ten or so different food vendors. He walked into the ramen shop, knowing of Shindou's favorite type of food. Unexpectedly, however, the interior was a snack shop.
"We have a special today," a suspiciously young clerk said, and held out a tray of plastic-wrapped rice balls. Strips of seaweed wrapped around the grains. "Which do you want to try? These have pickled plum filling, these have fish roe, these have fried eggs ..."
Ogata chose one. Just as he bit into the rice, he heard a crash outside. Ogata dropped the rice ball and ran outside, thinking that the dream was collapsing, that Shindou had figured it out, that he needed to get out.
He saw a flattened car -- four-door Toyota Camry, silver paint -- that had apparently just crashed into another, right in the middle of an intersection. One car was smoking, and the passenger was slumped over, blood leaking out of his ears.
He turned back to the clerk, who stared back at him blankly.
"What's going on?" Ogata demanded, pounding his fist on the counter.
"How can you just throw it away like that, a waste of good ..."
"Never mind the food," Ogata said, with gritted teeth. He turned back to the table and waited for gunshots to come. He hadn't expected Shindou's mind to be armed, but you never knew ...
Nothing happened.
As if to tempt fate, Ogata sat down, shook the lapels of his jacket, and asked for another rice ball.
"You already took one," the clerk said, frowning as if explaining something to a toddler. "You don't get another."
Ogata stared at the clerk.
"You wouldn't happen to be Sai, would you?"
The clerk shook his head. "I'm not Sai."
"Do you know where I could find him?"
"I suppose he must be somewhere in this city."
Ogata exited the shop.
He spent the better part of the day wandering the suburban landscape. It was a nice place, like many in Tokyo: older houses pressed to new ones, the courtyard of a temple next to a row of clean and desperately boring apartments. He came to a sparkling canal, with concrete sides and wire fence on one side. On the other side was a tall concrete wall. Ogata could see no way to surmount it. Maybe if he found a helicopter ...
Shaking his head, Ogata followed the Canal. If this was a border, there had to be a door in it. Perhaps past the door would be an entrance.
But the canal made a sharp ninety degree angle after perhaps six more blocks. Ogata followed it again. By now it was night, and he walked into an unoccupied three-star hotel (how did Shindou even know what the interior of one looked like?) and slept on a very comfortable bed that night.
In the morning he got up, and suspecting something, followed the canal. It made another left turn. He counted the blocks as he walked this time. In nineteen blocks, it turned to the left again. After thirteen blocks he was where he had started.
Ogata sat down and allowed himself a chuckle. He walked back to the ramen shop, counting the blocks as he went. It was morning; he assumed that the east, with its sun, was the right side of the board. Not that it mattered. Shindou had made the first move.
He had the next move in mind, but the intersection in question bordered a playground. Children ran about, building sandcastles, swinging, tossing each other up and down on see-saws.
This was going to be difficult.
"Get out!" He yelled at the kids. "Get out! Or a dinosaur will come get you!" It sounded ridiculous even to his ears, but the children scattered. Normally, he surmised, this was not advisable, as the dreaming mind would recognizes the invasion and collapse. But Shindou welcomed this intruder and challenged him to a game of Go. Which was the equivalent of spreading a red carpet. Liberally paved with land mines.
Speaking of which. He pulled out one of several grenades that he had constructed for this dream, pulled out the pin, and threw it at the twisty slide set.
It went down in a ball of flames, metal and plastic and wood all melting and burning onto each other. The smell was horrific and he coughed, wiping at his tearing eyes. When the first explosion cleared, most things were a twisted lump of melted carbon-based polymer. The wood chips and the trees had caught on fire and were burning.
Three blocks away, a small Cessna fell out of the sky and landed on a single-family home.
Ogata played aggressively in the waking world. It was perfect for this setup. The surge of adrenaline that accompanied the wanton destruction, the mass burning and breaking, were fuel to his flames. When the so-called pieces were captured, nothing appeared to happen. But Ogata knew that Shindou was keeping score. Just as he was. He had a large sheet of canvas that he'd torn from an awning, he had drawn out a grid, and he was carefully writing down the moves.
The sun sank below the horizon of Shindou's mindscape. After the sunset no stars or moon came out. Ogata navigated by the yellow lights coming from the houses and the sodium lamps lighting the path.
Then Shindou played a move, taking out a bookstore by breaking an adjacent telephone pole. The pole and attached wiring all came down at once, exploded in a fireball and a brief explosion of searing white light and a popping noise that seemed to tear the air apart.
There was a final blue spark when the electric wire snapped in two, and then all the lights went out.
It was perfectly dark. He could move and navigate by feeling for the borders of roads and sidewalks, but he could read no signs or landmarks to guide himself.
Ogata closed his eyes and walked carefully; the debris piled up in the streets, marks of his victories, caused him to fall over and gash his forehead once and twist his ankle another time.
It was going to be a very long game, Ogata thought as he forced open a door to an apartment complex and helped himself to a couch in an unoccupied room.
In the morning he washed and bandaged his head, splinted his ankle with a piece of wood and torn cloth from some of his own debris outside, and hobbled to his next destination.
The game went for weeks. Ogata's appreciation for the game was slowly, slowly becoming overshadowed by the boredom and silence of the landscape, the acrid fires that burned for days at a time, and the great loneliness.
Ogata dreamed within the dream, which was a comfort; the nightly visions provided a distraction from the bleak and only changing for the worse landscape that was his Go board.
On the sixtieth day he made his way back to the snack shop where he'd started. The shop had started to serve ramen. Ogata ordered a bowl of beef noodles and then pulled out his kifu, peering at it as he ate. The canvas had become soiled and a little tattered, smeared with ashes and oil.
The clerk came by and wordlessly sat down at Ogata's table, carrying his own bowl of shrimp ramen.
"Do you play Go?" Ogata asked the clerk.
The clerk smiled and nodded. There was a Go set behind the counter. Ogata wondered if every household here had its own set. Very probably.
His opponent wasn't very good; Ogata won in fairly short order. It was invigorating -- not to win, but to play a different game, to sharpen his mind simply by changing the exercise.
After this, every day, Ogata came by the shop for lunch, and a game. The clerk didn't seem to mind losing. Ogata noticed a miniscule but consistent improvement in the other man's game every week. It pleased him to see this. He also knew that he was playing more creatively, inspired by these games.
On the hundredth day of the game, there was a thunderstorm. Ogata carried the kifu under his worn suit jacket -- he could have stolen one from a few clothing establishments, but he did not -- and trudged through the destroyed city blocks, mud squelching under his loafers.
He paused for a moment to glance at the kifu, and then suddenly the world was mud and rain and an impossible amount of pain running through his body.
Ogata was trapped under a utility pole that had fallen in the storm.
The pain did not recede, but through its haze Ogata noted that he had collapsed in front of the ramen shop.
"Help!" he managed to scream, which only amplified the millions of nerve endings that cried out in agony. "Someone!"
He didn't even know the clerk's name. One hundred days here and he hadn't learned a single person's name. They were mere shadows of people, and yet suddenly that fact seemed insurmountably sad to him.
The door creaked open and the clerk came out.
"What's your name?" Ogata asked, trying to distract himself from the relentless pain.
"I'm Shuusaku," the man said. "Have you found Sai?"
"No," Ogata gasped. "Shuusaku. Can you help me up?"
Shuusaku tried but the pole did not budge. Ogata was bleeding onto the pavement, red mixing with clear rain. His kifu had fallen out and was getting wet. Shuusaku picked it up gently and when lightning flashed, it lit the grid brilliantly. Ogata blinked through the red haze in his vision.
"The winning move," he said. "Shuusaku. Do you see it? Do you know how to win that game?"
"I do," Shuusaku said softly.
"This intersection. Right here. If I take it, black wins. That's the game I've been playing here, all along, in this world. If I take that, I win."
"How can you take this intersection? You can't do anything."
Ogata looked up sharply. The pain in his body was receding. He knew it was not a good sign. "Are you a part of this game, then?"
"No. I am only a bystander. But I know that you can't take anything, not in your condition," Shuusaku said.
"Yes, I can," Ogata said. "I've got one more grenade on me. I'm trapped. But my hand's crushed under my body. I can take out the pin, you know. I can take this point."
"Then you'll die," Shuusaku said. "And you know what happens when you die in a place like this ..."
"I know," Ogata said. "So you should get out of the way."
"I'm not real anyway," Shuusaku said, with a rainy smile. "I wish I could go with you to see Sai, you know."
"Then come," Ogata said.
With one final wrenching movement he pulled the pin from his final weapon.
He managed to hang on long enough to feel the destruction of his body and see the intersection that he was in explode into debris, but one infinitesimal moment later, in the last instant that he was alive, Ogata thought he saw the sky turn blue, and the destroyed molecules of the city seemed to reassemble themselves even as his own blood and flesh vaporized in a cloud of red and white and gray ...
Ogata woke up on the sandy shore of a river. The sand and pebbles under him had been smoothened by the same water that was running over his legs. He opened his eyes and stared up into a glorious canopy of maple leaves in fall, blazing in orange and red and gold.
A young man in robes of the ancient courts was standing over him, his silk garments dripping as if he had jumped into the river, fully clothed.
Ogata looked around, expecting to see court buildings, or to hear other people. But there was nothing. Just an endless river, surrounded by an infinite maple grove and ...
... a Go board sitting on a tree stump, along with two bowls of Go stones.
"I am Fujiwara no Sai," the man said politely. "It has been very lonely here, all these years. Will you play a game of Go with me?"
"Be careful what you ask for," Ogata said dryly. "I may play many more than one game with you."
Sai beamed. "I think that even a thousand years would not be enough to play Go."
"We may yet find out," Ogata said, and picked up a stone.
Ogata on the Shore (Inception fusion fic)
A normal suburban street wasn't what Ogata expected.
Then again he wasn't sure what he had expected. Maybe a video game arcade. Maybe a house. This wasn't a manufactured landscape; he hadn't had the money to pay for something as refined as that. No, he'd said boldly that he'd be able to find Sai if he could just get in.
Sai was the only thing he was worried about.
A couple that looked vaguely familiar walked down the street, ignoring Ogata. The man was pushing a baby stroller. The woman carried a plastic bag of groceries in one hand, and a box of candy in the other. Other people walked up and down the streets, oblivious to his presence.
Good.
Ogata looked around, unable to see any obvious way to go. He looked into the sky. The sun cast very few shadows; it was noon. He walked down a street at random and found himself in an outdoor arcade of small stores: video game parlors, a barbershop, a used bookstore, and ten or so different food vendors. He walked into the ramen shop, knowing of Shindou's favorite type of food. Unexpectedly, however, the interior was a snack shop.
"We have a special today," a suspiciously young clerk said, and held out a tray of plastic-wrapped rice balls. Strips of seaweed wrapped around the grains. "Which do you want to try? These have pickled plum filling, these have fish roe, these have fried eggs ..."
Ogata chose one. Just as he bit into the rice, he heard a crash outside. Ogata dropped the rice ball and ran outside, thinking that the dream was collapsing, that Shindou had figured it out, that he needed to get out.
He saw a flattened car -- four-door Toyota Camry, silver paint -- that had apparently just crashed into another, right in the middle of an intersection. One car was smoking, and the passenger was slumped over, blood leaking out of his ears.
He turned back to the clerk, who stared back at him blankly.
"What's going on?" Ogata demanded, pounding his fist on the counter.
"How can you just throw it away like that, a waste of good ..."
"Never mind the food," Ogata said, with gritted teeth. He turned back to the table and waited for gunshots to come. He hadn't expected Shindou's mind to be armed, but you never knew ...
Nothing happened.
As if to tempt fate, Ogata sat down, shook the lapels of his jacket, and asked for another rice ball.
"You already took one," the clerk said, frowning as if explaining something to a toddler. "You don't get another."
Ogata stared at the clerk.
"You wouldn't happen to be Sai, would you?"
The clerk shook his head. "I'm not Sai."
"Do you know where I could find him?"
"I suppose he must be somewhere in this city."
Ogata exited the shop.
He spent the better part of the day wandering the suburban landscape. It was a nice place, like many in Tokyo: older houses pressed to new ones, the courtyard of a temple next to a row of clean and desperately boring apartments. He came to a sparkling canal, with concrete sides and wire fence on one side. On the other side was a tall concrete wall. Ogata could see no way to surmount it. Maybe if he found a helicopter ...
Shaking his head, Ogata followed the Canal. If this was a border, there had to be a door in it. Perhaps past the door would be an entrance.
But the canal made a sharp ninety degree angle after perhaps six more blocks. Ogata followed it again. By now it was night, and he walked into an unoccupied three-star hotel (how did Shindou even know what the interior of one looked like?) and slept on a very comfortable bed that night.
In the morning he got up, and suspecting something, followed the canal. It made another left turn. He counted the blocks as he walked this time. In nineteen blocks, it turned to the left again. After thirteen blocks he was where he had started.
Ogata sat down and allowed himself a chuckle. He walked back to the ramen shop, counting the blocks as he went. It was morning; he assumed that the east, with its sun, was the right side of the board. Not that it mattered. Shindou had made the first move.
He had the next move in mind, but the intersection in question bordered a playground. Children ran about, building sandcastles, swinging, tossing each other up and down on see-saws.
This was going to be difficult.
"Get out!" He yelled at the kids. "Get out! Or a dinosaur will come get you!" It sounded ridiculous even to his ears, but the children scattered. Normally, he surmised, this was not advisable, as the dreaming mind would recognizes the invasion and collapse. But Shindou welcomed this intruder and challenged him to a game of Go. Which was the equivalent of spreading a red carpet. Liberally paved with land mines.
Speaking of which. He pulled out one of several grenades that he had constructed for this dream, pulled out the pin, and threw it at the twisty slide set.
It went down in a ball of flames, metal and plastic and wood all melting and burning onto each other. The smell was horrific and he coughed, wiping at his tearing eyes. When the first explosion cleared, most things were a twisted lump of melted carbon-based polymer. The wood chips and the trees had caught on fire and were burning.
Three blocks away, a small Cessna fell out of the sky and landed on a single-family home.
Ogata played aggressively in the waking world. It was perfect for this setup. The surge of adrenaline that accompanied the wanton destruction, the mass burning and breaking, were fuel to his flames. When the so-called pieces were captured, nothing appeared to happen. But Ogata knew that Shindou was keeping score. Just as he was. He had a large sheet of canvas that he'd torn from an awning, he had drawn out a grid, and he was carefully writing down the moves.
The sun sank below the horizon of Shindou's mindscape. After the sunset no stars or moon came out. Ogata navigated by the yellow lights coming from the houses and the sodium lamps lighting the path.
Then Shindou played a move, taking out a bookstore by breaking an adjacent telephone pole. The pole and attached wiring all came down at once, exploded in a fireball and a brief explosion of searing white light and a popping noise that seemed to tear the air apart.
There was a final blue spark when the electric wire snapped in two, and then all the lights went out.
It was perfectly dark. He could move and navigate by feeling for the borders of roads and sidewalks, but he could read no signs or landmarks to guide himself.
Ogata closed his eyes and walked carefully; the debris piled up in the streets, marks of his victories, caused him to fall over and gash his forehead once and twist his ankle another time.
It was going to be a very long game, Ogata thought as he forced open a door to an apartment complex and helped himself to a couch in an unoccupied room.
In the morning he washed and bandaged his head, splinted his ankle with a piece of wood and torn cloth from some of his own debris outside, and hobbled to his next destination.
The game went for weeks. Ogata's appreciation for the game was slowly, slowly becoming overshadowed by the boredom and silence of the landscape, the acrid fires that burned for days at a time, and the great loneliness.
Ogata dreamed within the dream, which was a comfort; the nightly visions provided a distraction from the bleak and only changing for the worse landscape that was his Go board.
On the sixtieth day he made his way back to the snack shop where he'd started. The shop had started to serve ramen. Ogata ordered a bowl of beef noodles and then pulled out his kifu, peering at it as he ate. The canvas had become soiled and a little tattered, smeared with ashes and oil.
The clerk came by and wordlessly sat down at Ogata's table, carrying his own bowl of shrimp ramen.
"Do you play Go?" Ogata asked the clerk.
The clerk smiled and nodded. There was a Go set behind the counter. Ogata wondered if every household here had its own set. Very probably.
His opponent wasn't very good; Ogata won in fairly short order. It was invigorating -- not to win, but to play a different game, to sharpen his mind simply by changing the exercise.
After this, every day, Ogata came by the shop for lunch, and a game. The clerk didn't seem to mind losing. Ogata noticed a miniscule but consistent improvement in the other man's game every week. It pleased him to see this. He also knew that he was playing more creatively, inspired by these games.
On the hundredth day of the game, there was a thunderstorm. Ogata carried the kifu under his worn suit jacket -- he could have stolen one from a few clothing establishments, but he did not -- and trudged through the destroyed city blocks, mud squelching under his loafers.
He paused for a moment to glance at the kifu, and then suddenly the world was mud and rain and an impossible amount of pain running through his body.
Ogata was trapped under a utility pole that had fallen in the storm.
The pain did not recede, but through its haze Ogata noted that he had collapsed in front of the ramen shop.
"Help!" he managed to scream, which only amplified the millions of nerve endings that cried out in agony. "Someone!"
He didn't even know the clerk's name. One hundred days here and he hadn't learned a single person's name. They were mere shadows of people, and yet suddenly that fact seemed insurmountably sad to him.
The door creaked open and the clerk came out.
"What's your name?" Ogata asked, trying to distract himself from the relentless pain.
"I'm Shuusaku," the man said. "Have you found Sai?"
"No," Ogata gasped. "Shuusaku. Can you help me up?"
Shuusaku tried but the pole did not budge. Ogata was bleeding onto the pavement, red mixing with clear rain. His kifu had fallen out and was getting wet. Shuusaku picked it up gently and when lightning flashed, it lit the grid brilliantly. Ogata blinked through the red haze in his vision.
"The winning move," he said. "Shuusaku. Do you see it? Do you know how to win that game?"
"I do," Shuusaku said softly.
"This intersection. Right here. If I take it, black wins. That's the game I've been playing here, all along, in this world. If I take that, I win."
"How can you take this intersection? You can't do anything."
Ogata looked up sharply. The pain in his body was receding. He knew it was not a good sign. "Are you a part of this game, then?"
"No. I am only a bystander. But I know that you can't take anything, not in your condition," Shuusaku said.
"Yes, I can," Ogata said. "I've got one more grenade on me. I'm trapped. But my hand's crushed under my body. I can take out the pin, you know. I can take this point."
"Then you'll die," Shuusaku said. "And you know what happens when you die in a place like this ..."
"I know," Ogata said. "So you should get out of the way."
"I'm not real anyway," Shuusaku said, with a rainy smile. "I wish I could go with you to see Sai, you know."
"Then come," Ogata said.
With one final wrenching movement he pulled the pin from his final weapon.
He managed to hang on long enough to feel the destruction of his body and see the intersection that he was in explode into debris, but one infinitesimal moment later, in the last instant that he was alive, Ogata thought he saw the sky turn blue, and the destroyed molecules of the city seemed to reassemble themselves even as his own blood and flesh vaporized in a cloud of red and white and gray ...
Ogata woke up on the sandy shore of a river. The sand and pebbles under him had been smoothened by the same water that was running over his legs. He opened his eyes and stared up into a glorious canopy of maple leaves in fall, blazing in orange and red and gold.
A young man in robes of the ancient courts was standing over him, his silk garments dripping as if he had jumped into the river, fully clothed.
Ogata looked around, expecting to see court buildings, or to hear other people. But there was nothing. Just an endless river, surrounded by an infinite maple grove and ...
... a Go board sitting on a tree stump, along with two bowls of Go stones.
"I am Fujiwara no Sai," the man said politely. "It has been very lonely here, all these years. Will you play a game of Go with me?"
"Be careful what you ask for," Ogata said dryly. "I may play many more than one game with you."
Sai beamed. "I think that even a thousand years would not be enough to play Go."
"We may yet find out," Ogata said, and picked up a stone.