bunnyfic 01, 02
I don't even know what to do with this thing. 8D I guess I'll post it? *filters to all of, uh... two three! people. LOL* Whatever. It's a planned out 30-parter, each bit a daily quota of 1600 words, since I have less of a problem with verbal diarrhea than actually completing proper stories. The plan itself was sadly already 1.5k long, in dot points. But! This one does have a sighted end unlike star seeker ;;! I'll clean it up come December (and will hopefully settle on their voices along the way). :D ♥ In the meantime though, if you want to read as it goes... maa, either way. xD;
[edit 09 Nov'09] Hovering over Japanese text will give you a translation. :D
high tech, low intel: ft2 go pseudo-cyberpunk in a round-robin of virtual idiocy.
(...aka. just "virtual idiots" thanks to silver_lined, harhar; also affectionately known as "bunnyfic".)
An illegal entity: government child M15.
( 01: 'underground', a prologue ten years prior )
M-i-Y-A-T-A, the boy wrote, diligently practicing his letters. T-O-S-H... i- Y-A. And then: 宮田 and 俊哉. The latter set were no longer convention-hadn't been since the First Collapse had brought down international boundaries years upon years ago-but the boy didn't know that. He only knew what his father had taught him, and that was two languages always side by side.
He didn't know a lot of things. Granted, a lot of that ignorance could be attributed to the fact that he was only eight years old. He would learn as he grew, but there were also fundamental gaps in his state of awareness. The boy didn't know, for instance, that his room was actually underground. He'd never left it before.
A sunlamp in the ceiling provided warmth and light. Flatscreen display panels lined two of the walls (old technology, but still serviceable) and their vistas changed every so often. Sometimes they showed blue seas or land formations; sometimes, greenery and wildlife, each scene as beautiful and colourful and extinct as the next, none of it seen in years. Decades. The boy knew from the pictures his father brought him that the real world was full of beige and grey and lifeless buildings of silence.
His room was kind of small, but then again that didn't matter too much either: the boy was small as well. And from what his father had told him of the real world, Miyata Toshiya didn't think he was missing anything too interesting out there.
He didn't really think anything too interesting was missing him either, until his father came in one evening wearing an expression that Miyata had seen on him only rarely.
The sunlamp had just dimmed itself out since it was late, but his father waved it back to a medium brightness. "Toshiya," the man said. "Can I talk to you?"
"Sure," the boy told him, happy. He liked it when his father visited, and liked it when his father talked. Nobody else ever did, and the boy didn't really like the sound of his own voice that much. He smiled.
His father usually liked it when he smiled, but this time it only seemed to make him hurt more, and Miyata's smile wavered. If it was going to be that bad, he wasn't sure he wanted to hear his father talk anymore.
His father shook his head and gave a wry, tired grin as he sat himself down by the side of the boy's bed. The boy put away his stylus and pad and shuffled closer, letting his father ruffle his hair. The affectionate contact was comforting, and the boy let his eyes slip shut.
"...I'm sorry," his father said at length.
The boy looked up then. "What for?"
His father shook his head. "My mistakes."
"What mistakes?" The boy was fairly sure his father had always been perfect and nice and perfectly nice as well. He wouldn't change anything about his father at any rate.
"Your mother hasn't come here for a long time, has she?" his father said instead.
The boy shook his head, saddened at the reminder.
"She always did think your sister was enough. That we couldn't afford another child." His father sighed. "But I wanted to keep you, which was irresponsible of me. I'm sorry."
"Keep me?" The boy's brow knotted slightly. He hadn't known he'd had an older sister.
"You know you're illegal, right?" his father asked.
"Right," the boy said. He knew that. It had been maybe a year or two ago when his father had last come in wearing a face full of pain like the one he had on today. He'd sat down that time too, and talked and talked, and the boy had remembered everything-mostly because it had been his father speaking, but also because remembering was just what he did. No matter how much it hurt sometimes, he knew it was important to know things.
His father's words had been confusing back then, so many of them and so confusing, but the boy had pieced together their meaning bit by bit in time. He'd figured things out. Things like how, even though his name was 'Miyata Toshiya', he didn't actually exist, legally, because his mother and father hadn't had enough money to pay for the tax on their child within the two year grace period after he'd been born.
He'd figured out that he was supposed to have been gotten rid of, but his father had forged the termination files and kept him instead, which had been a very silly thing to do in the risk department.
He'd figured out that he should be grateful to be alive where a lot of other children hadn't survived-but saddened to realise the kind of burden he'd put on his family. As far as the boy knew, the kind of legislation that the Government had built the Capital on wasn't cruelty: it was just sound economics. After the Second Collapse had made a lot of things very scarce, the population had to have been controlled somehow. Living standards had to be maintained.
Tokyo simply couldn't be the vast, sprawling lifescape that it had been in the past, that the screens on the boy's bedroom walls sometimes showed. There was only a bubble of sustainable environment these days, and only a certain number of people could live within it. The boy's presence was the type of hidden, leech-like existence that weighed down upon the perfection of the system, and-
"If you obey," his father murmured suddenly, quoting Government mandate, "you have nothing to fear."
"Right," the boy agreed.
"Does that mean, then," his father continued, "that one misstep means you should live in fear forever?"
The boy considered that. And the fact that his entire existence was a technical felony. "I don't know about you, Dad," he said at last, "but I'm not scared." He smiled, sincere and confident, not really seeing how his words broke his father's being and put it back together again all at once: "You'll protect me."
"...I have," his father said, and took the boy's hand, squeezing it with a gentle strength. "And I will continue to do so. Whatever happens."
The boy nodded.
"We love you, you know," his father said. He met the boy's eyes, his words coming out all in a rush. "I love you, and your mother does, too. She always did, but she-we would have lost your sister as well, and so..."
"That's okay," the boy said, and smiled again. "I understand."
His father crumpled with an amused snort. Scrubbed a hand over his face. "You know, that is exactly what depresses me."
The boy grinned. "I'm sorry? I can be dumb if you like..."
"No, no~" his father smiled. "You're good the way you are."
"Well, I'm glad to hear that," the boy snickered, "since it'd be all your fault if I wasn't."
"Ahh, don't remind me..." his father chuckled, joking on the surface but troubled beneath. Before he lost the nerve to carry bad news, he continued quickly: "Toshiya, I think they're on to me..."
"...wait, who are?" the boy asked, thinking for a moment that they were still talking about education and upbringing. They weren't.
His father shook his head, brow creased with clear worry. "The Government. I think they're on to me-or rather, I think they're on to you. Ah, I'm sorry I never found a way to get you connected, either..."
"Connected?"
"...the net. I-well, I don't know how all this will turn out, but maybe you'll be able to find out one day."
The boy smiled. "Alright, Dad. I can wait."
His father shook his head, and gave the boy a kiss on the head. "You're a good kid, Toshiya." Standing, he checked his chrono. The longer he stayed below, the greater the chance somebody would notice something amiss aboveground. "Do you remember the drill?"
The boy nodded. "Yes, Sir. If anyone comes in..."
"Do what they say, but...?"
"Only use Old Local. 覚えますよ~"
"Right." His father smiled, heading toward the pulley system in the corner that lead up to the hatch in the room's ceiling. Climbing up and unsealing the hatch, he said again: "You're a good kid, and we love you. それも忘れないで、俊哉。"
"はい、はい~" the boy grinned. "I'll remember that as well."
His father climbed up through the hatch-turning back for a second, he winked, smiling down from above. "Oh, but we'd love you even if you weren't a good kid, okay?"
"Okay, Dad~" the boy laughed, settling back down in his bed as his father sealed the hatch back up. "I won't forget."
That ended up being the last he saw of his father.
Two days later, the boy's stash of snacks dried up; the day after that, he ran out of water, too. That evening, he decided to try the hatch.
He was a sure-spirited type of boy, the kind to be confident that everything would work out alright in the end-that was just his nature. But in the meantime, what if something had happened to his father? The man's words weighed heavy at the edge of the boy's mind like a muted kind of paranoia, but he still couldn't help but think, what if it was just something simple? Maybe his father had just taken a fall or something, and couldn't get up...
He'd never tried the pulley system before; it shot him up faster than his father usually went. He winced as his head smacked into the ceiling but then held his breath just in case he could hear anything from above-he couldn't.
Unsealing the hatch the way he'd seen his father do a hundred times, the boy slowly lifted the heavy square and poked his head out. Seeing nothing in the dark house, he was about to climb through when a flashlight passed over his face and shouts rang out: "Movement! He's shown himself!"
The boy gasped and dropped back down, forgetting to reseal the hatch in his haste; he landed hard on an ankle, shooting pain up his leg, knees buckling. Quickly, quickly, he scrambled under his bed.
For all the good that did him, really.
A laser cutter made quick, unnecessary work of the hatch. It fell to the floor of his room with a dull whump, followed by the spill of torch light and a man's voice deeper than his father's: "Show yourself!"
Seconds later, the dark-clad figure dropped to the floor of the room in a combat crouch, and the boy held his breath as the flashlight slowly panned around...
His stomach chose that moment to growl.
The next second the flashlight was in his eyes and the searching man had grabbed his arm, dragging him out. "Alright, you little-"
"オレは八つ!" The boy shouted the first thing that came to his mind, heart racing. "もう小さくないよ!"
The man just stared, though his grip on the boy's arm didn't relax. The boy struggled until he thought to bite the man-which didn't prove a good idea; the dark cloth was thick and tough, and the man hit him in the face with the butt of his torch. The boy cried out, tasting blood.
"What the hell's wrong with you?" Another man above shouted down. "You lost that last round fair and square. Just terminate the damned rat and get back up here."
"No! No, listen-" the man yelled back. "Listen-" He tore off his helmet mic, holding it up by the boy's face. "Speak!"
"何で?" the boy demanded. "父はどこ? 話したくないよ、テメエに!"
"What the-" The one above poked his head down the mauled hatch, staring. "I'll be damned. That's not Global no matter how you look at it."
"Right?" the other said, wide-eyed himself. "He's got to be speaking Old Local. We'll have to-"
"Yeah, we'll have to bring him in. They'll want him kept alive."
The boy only had a few seconds awake after that, after the big man slapped a funny mask across his nose and mouth. But he spent them with a new thought, wondering if maybe just keeping him alive alone was what his father had meant by 'protection'...
Errant entity 21-K.
( 02: 'that craving', time 00:00 )
Nikaido blinked slowly as his brain made its sluggish way out of sleep. It was nice where he was, curled up on a pile of blankets wedged in the cleft between two massive hot water pipes. The pipes were well-insulated but a steady, muted warmth emanated from them. Over the years, he'd found such places to be among the best to sleep underground, if you had a couple of blankets spare.
Of course, if you didn't have blankets you'd have to pick somewhere flatter or you risked getting bits of clothing or miscellany (or worse yet, smaller parts of your own physical person) stuck in the cleft when you first slid down into it. That wasn't very comfortable-a fact that Nikaido had also learned from experience.
He checked his chrono. A bit past two past midday... late. Well, kind of. Time was all relative underground anyway, and days were harder to waste when you had nothing in particular to do. But he'd missed the lunch crowd. It wasn't really peak hour for anything at the moment, but still... maybe some interesting people would be around. It was often during the times when everyone 'normal' was busy that the most interesting ones surfaced and weren't lost in the crowd.
"Alright," he said for the hell of hearing a human voice, even if it was just his own. "Let's go."
He left the blankets where they were, scrambling up one pipe's curve. Maybe he'd come back to them later, or maybe he'd just leave them for the next guy to find. They were still good after all, and it wasn't like he owned them.
The only things he never left behind were his footwear and goggles. His clothes and accessories changed on a semi-regular basis. Today's were a funny little open-topped beanie he'd nicked from aboveground (who the hell needed headwear like that in the Capital proper anyway? It was all climate-controlled up there), a baggy black throwover, belted at the waist with what might have looked like a cargo binder to the more fashionably discerning. His pants were grey and made out of some generic thick fabric. Their best feature was their multitude of pockets. Pockets were awesome-
Oh, and he'd never forget his netgear either. How the hell else would he remember he was human?
Standing atop the curve of one giant water pipe, Nikaido posted his hands on his hips and surveyed the underground sprawl. Pipes. More pipes. Access landers. Ladders. A rarely-used maintenance deck here and there, with their self-powered glowlamps that provided the only regular illumination around the place.
What you couldn't see were the repulsors. The entire city floated on massive columns of them, invisible and silent, compensating for the weight of everything above. They were carefully engineered so nothing would move. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you could hear the pipes creaking under the rumble of a distant earthquake, but natural disasters were largely a thing of the past. Nothing was natural anymore.
It was all clean enough, even underground. Dark, but not too dirty-the Capital had been rebuilt to very particular specifications after the last time it had been razed. (This place called 'Tokyo' always got razed, or so said the history buffs.) Though that had happened long before Nikaido was born, it hadn't been long enough for things to have deteriorated beneath the giant city yet. Machinery was usually all well and good with a status quo after all. Life was what messed it up. Underground, creatures were rare-and people were just as rare. Sometimes, this was a good thing.
Often, though, it just meant that things were really damn lonely. And that only the foolhardy and the guys who were kind of not quite right in the first place could avoid going utterly insane. (If there were more creatures than people underground, it was probably because some of the latter had turned into the former over the years-a slow and freakish process that made Nikaido's skin crawl just thinking about it.)
As for himself, Nikaido wasn't sure which category he fell into-the foolhardy or the pre-crazed. He was a little reckless, but not to a stupid extent, and he liked to think he was random rather than crazy. Not that he had any proper yardstick to measure that kind of thing by, though.
Or... thinking again, maybe he belonged to a third category: the handful of people who knew codes, had no problem with stealing and could get themselves a-
Well, correction: nobody underground had a problem with stealing. They weren't supposed to exist, so they weren't allocated Government rations of everything like all the Legals up there. It was do or die. Sometimes, Nikaido liked it that way-
Because he was one of the few who knew codes, overrides, and had been able to get his hands on a netgear set. Where the net was, people were. And people, for all their individual propensities to drive their fellows up the wall, often very much helped to keep your mental feet firmly on the ground.
Nikaido felt a dull pang in his chest. It wasn't that he particularly liked relying on people or anything, but sometimes he just...
It was just.
Well...
Hn.
"Let's go," he said again, quieter this time. His brain wasn't really cut out for deep thinking.
Once more he checked that his netgear was still securely strapped into its pocket. Seeing that it was, Nikaido turned around and with a last look at the blankets made a mental note of their location and took a deep breath.
Raising his arms, he threw himself from the pipe in a backward flip, soaring for a minute, arching around before he began to plummet into the Underground's lower reaches.
...he liked how humans hadn't managed to screw up gravity yet. The thought amused him. In freefall, eyes closed, Nikaido gave a breathy laugh, loving the rush of everything flying past in a blind blur. Loving the gamble, how long can I fall before I hit something...?
Three seconds, five... eight... his ears popped.
At the end of his nerve, Nikaido kicked each of his heels in turn, activating the mini-reactors in his skates. Their internal power sources hummed to life in a familiar, comforting vibration that travelled up through his calves. A maintenance platform rushed up from fifty metres below him-forty, thirty, twenty, ten... The reactors warmed his feet under the added strain of slowing his fall.
He didn't touch the ground.
Nikaido grinned.
Angling his weight over kicked in the thrusters and he shot forward, leaving a fast-fading ripple of heat in the wake of his heels. He leapt from platform to coil and pipe in repulsor-assisted jumps, swinging from the smaller ones and riding the ascending few up toward the surface.
North seemed like a good direction? As good as any, anyway. He headed out.
A little bit later, he popped up through a chute in the basement of a warehouse in the industrial district. Though as tightly governed as the rest of the Capital, the sheer amount of net traffic in and out of the area during the average work day would probably buy him at least a little more online time than usual. With luck.
Keeping to the shadows, Nikaido scaled the back of a high storage rack, finding a gap that he could fit into between the cubes and pallets. He powered down his feet and pulled out his netgear, pulse quickening in anticipation. People. People he could talk to, however briefly. Even if it wasn't face to face, it was good enough, kind of-knowing there was somebody, living and breathing just like him, on the other side of that interface. Logged in.
He slipped the headset on, the pads of its readers sitting lightly over his temples. It flickered to life automatically upon sensing his brainwaves, scanning them in silence. A moment later the readers fed a new frequency right back into him and, without closing his eyes or moving his body, Nikaido's senses were overlaid.
He smiled, no longer in a crappy warehouse in the crappy Capital but at the top of a gentle slope in a wide, green meadow.
The landscape was open and calming, apparently endless. A gentle breeze ruffled his hair a bit. Nikaido filled his lungs with the sweet scent of the grass beneath his bare feet, the odd yellow flower tickling as he began to walk.
Or rather, hop.
His nose twitched, and a movement behind him caused his eyes to dart in that direction. It was just another flower though, a little taller so it stood out.
Nikaido sighed, as deeply as it was possible for a rabbit to sigh, and wondered who else might be hanging around a place like this. It was a fairly generic scenario-the green meadow with its rolling hills. Typically, this made it more likely others would be there with no specific business to conduct, increasing Nikaido's chances of just meeting people. People he could interact with, whether they were other rabbits in the scenario, or creatures or humans walking down by the riverbank... or even fish.
Nikaido didn't feel like going somewhere noisy and ridiculous like the races today. There would definitely be people in those places too, but they'd all be into the gambling and getting high. Scenarios like those were fine for people-watching (...avatar watching, really) sometimes, but Nikaido didn't feel like doing that today. He'd dropped in just two days ago, and more and more the avatars were starting to look the same to him: all tall and pretty, dressed up and impressive.
Which really didn't impress Nikaido much at all.
He could hear the running of a stream off to his left. Lacking anything else to do, Nikaido made his way over the hill until it started to slope down. Gleeful, he tucked his ears down over his eyes with his front paws and curled his large feet up, rolling down the green in a speedy, dizzying somersault of a ride that seemed to last forever (though relative to human form was only perhaps a couple dozen metres...). Not a very bunny-like thing to do, but hellishly fun.
He unfurled himself as he felt the grass thin out beneath him and skidded to a stop on all fours a few human spans from the water's edge. Giddy and breathing fast, Nikaido snuffled a laugh and shook his fluffy white head to get his bearings back, blinking delighted in the sunlight. As his long-sighed rabbit eyes stopped spinning and refocused though, a tiny, soaring movement high above caught his gaze.
A hawk.
Definitely, definitely a hawk.
Nikaido's pulse sped up yet again. Birds of prey were perfectly legitimate forms in a scenario like this, he reminded his bunny instincts. It was probably just someone else who liked flying and the feeling of the wind in his face as much as Nikaido liked rolling about, being stupid in the grass. Probably.
Still, he couldn't help a subconscious acknowledgment that certain types of people liked to use certain types of avatars... (He was pretty much harmless himself, most of the time.)
Not moving, his eyes kept track of the circling bird with a vague wariness, watching for any sign that it was going to swoop down on him, talons out. He was ready if that was going to happen-if somebody was stupid enough to try hack him for the fun of it. Nikaido had codes shorthand on a mental clipboard that could knock back any bored amateur, and a few tricks that packed a slightly more complicated punch too. He was ready.
Despite that though, underneath, mostly, Nikaido was just kind of hoping that the hawk might feel like resting its wings and fly down gently, maybe to that outcrop of stones on the other side of the river. And maybe there'd be a nice person behind it, and the two of them could just sit for a bit and talk...
1- source: LOL. i don't believe i needed research for this.
2- ahh, and miyata's japanese. 8D *fail* oh well.
3- i admit there is absolutely no point to their code designations.
4- the setup could possibly make more sense if you've read tom clancy's net force, but. xD anyway.
5- tomorrow is tamamori, then senga. and it'll go around like that :D probably anyway.
[edit 09 Nov'09] Hovering over Japanese text will give you a translation. :D
high tech, low intel: ft2 go pseudo-cyberpunk in a round-robin of virtual idiocy.
(...aka. just "virtual idiots" thanks to silver_lined, harhar; also affectionately known as "bunnyfic".)
An illegal entity: government child M15.
( 01: 'underground', a prologue ten years prior )
M-i-Y-A-T-A, the boy wrote, diligently practicing his letters. T-O-S-H... i- Y-A. And then: 宮田 and 俊哉. The latter set were no longer convention-hadn't been since the First Collapse had brought down international boundaries years upon years ago-but the boy didn't know that. He only knew what his father had taught him, and that was two languages always side by side.
He didn't know a lot of things. Granted, a lot of that ignorance could be attributed to the fact that he was only eight years old. He would learn as he grew, but there were also fundamental gaps in his state of awareness. The boy didn't know, for instance, that his room was actually underground. He'd never left it before.
A sunlamp in the ceiling provided warmth and light. Flatscreen display panels lined two of the walls (old technology, but still serviceable) and their vistas changed every so often. Sometimes they showed blue seas or land formations; sometimes, greenery and wildlife, each scene as beautiful and colourful and extinct as the next, none of it seen in years. Decades. The boy knew from the pictures his father brought him that the real world was full of beige and grey and lifeless buildings of silence.
His room was kind of small, but then again that didn't matter too much either: the boy was small as well. And from what his father had told him of the real world, Miyata Toshiya didn't think he was missing anything too interesting out there.
He didn't really think anything too interesting was missing him either, until his father came in one evening wearing an expression that Miyata had seen on him only rarely.
The sunlamp had just dimmed itself out since it was late, but his father waved it back to a medium brightness. "Toshiya," the man said. "Can I talk to you?"
"Sure," the boy told him, happy. He liked it when his father visited, and liked it when his father talked. Nobody else ever did, and the boy didn't really like the sound of his own voice that much. He smiled.
His father usually liked it when he smiled, but this time it only seemed to make him hurt more, and Miyata's smile wavered. If it was going to be that bad, he wasn't sure he wanted to hear his father talk anymore.
His father shook his head and gave a wry, tired grin as he sat himself down by the side of the boy's bed. The boy put away his stylus and pad and shuffled closer, letting his father ruffle his hair. The affectionate contact was comforting, and the boy let his eyes slip shut.
"...I'm sorry," his father said at length.
The boy looked up then. "What for?"
His father shook his head. "My mistakes."
"What mistakes?" The boy was fairly sure his father had always been perfect and nice and perfectly nice as well. He wouldn't change anything about his father at any rate.
"Your mother hasn't come here for a long time, has she?" his father said instead.
The boy shook his head, saddened at the reminder.
"She always did think your sister was enough. That we couldn't afford another child." His father sighed. "But I wanted to keep you, which was irresponsible of me. I'm sorry."
"Keep me?" The boy's brow knotted slightly. He hadn't known he'd had an older sister.
"You know you're illegal, right?" his father asked.
"Right," the boy said. He knew that. It had been maybe a year or two ago when his father had last come in wearing a face full of pain like the one he had on today. He'd sat down that time too, and talked and talked, and the boy had remembered everything-mostly because it had been his father speaking, but also because remembering was just what he did. No matter how much it hurt sometimes, he knew it was important to know things.
His father's words had been confusing back then, so many of them and so confusing, but the boy had pieced together their meaning bit by bit in time. He'd figured things out. Things like how, even though his name was 'Miyata Toshiya', he didn't actually exist, legally, because his mother and father hadn't had enough money to pay for the tax on their child within the two year grace period after he'd been born.
He'd figured out that he was supposed to have been gotten rid of, but his father had forged the termination files and kept him instead, which had been a very silly thing to do in the risk department.
He'd figured out that he should be grateful to be alive where a lot of other children hadn't survived-but saddened to realise the kind of burden he'd put on his family. As far as the boy knew, the kind of legislation that the Government had built the Capital on wasn't cruelty: it was just sound economics. After the Second Collapse had made a lot of things very scarce, the population had to have been controlled somehow. Living standards had to be maintained.
Tokyo simply couldn't be the vast, sprawling lifescape that it had been in the past, that the screens on the boy's bedroom walls sometimes showed. There was only a bubble of sustainable environment these days, and only a certain number of people could live within it. The boy's presence was the type of hidden, leech-like existence that weighed down upon the perfection of the system, and-
"If you obey," his father murmured suddenly, quoting Government mandate, "you have nothing to fear."
"Right," the boy agreed.
"Does that mean, then," his father continued, "that one misstep means you should live in fear forever?"
The boy considered that. And the fact that his entire existence was a technical felony. "I don't know about you, Dad," he said at last, "but I'm not scared." He smiled, sincere and confident, not really seeing how his words broke his father's being and put it back together again all at once: "You'll protect me."
"...I have," his father said, and took the boy's hand, squeezing it with a gentle strength. "And I will continue to do so. Whatever happens."
The boy nodded.
"We love you, you know," his father said. He met the boy's eyes, his words coming out all in a rush. "I love you, and your mother does, too. She always did, but she-we would have lost your sister as well, and so..."
"That's okay," the boy said, and smiled again. "I understand."
His father crumpled with an amused snort. Scrubbed a hand over his face. "You know, that is exactly what depresses me."
The boy grinned. "I'm sorry? I can be dumb if you like..."
"No, no~" his father smiled. "You're good the way you are."
"Well, I'm glad to hear that," the boy snickered, "since it'd be all your fault if I wasn't."
"Ahh, don't remind me..." his father chuckled, joking on the surface but troubled beneath. Before he lost the nerve to carry bad news, he continued quickly: "Toshiya, I think they're on to me..."
"...wait, who are?" the boy asked, thinking for a moment that they were still talking about education and upbringing. They weren't.
His father shook his head, brow creased with clear worry. "The Government. I think they're on to me-or rather, I think they're on to you. Ah, I'm sorry I never found a way to get you connected, either..."
"Connected?"
"...the net. I-well, I don't know how all this will turn out, but maybe you'll be able to find out one day."
The boy smiled. "Alright, Dad. I can wait."
His father shook his head, and gave the boy a kiss on the head. "You're a good kid, Toshiya." Standing, he checked his chrono. The longer he stayed below, the greater the chance somebody would notice something amiss aboveground. "Do you remember the drill?"
The boy nodded. "Yes, Sir. If anyone comes in..."
"Do what they say, but...?"
"Only use Old Local. 覚えますよ~"
"Right." His father smiled, heading toward the pulley system in the corner that lead up to the hatch in the room's ceiling. Climbing up and unsealing the hatch, he said again: "You're a good kid, and we love you. それも忘れないで、俊哉。"
"はい、はい~" the boy grinned. "I'll remember that as well."
His father climbed up through the hatch-turning back for a second, he winked, smiling down from above. "Oh, but we'd love you even if you weren't a good kid, okay?"
"Okay, Dad~" the boy laughed, settling back down in his bed as his father sealed the hatch back up. "I won't forget."
That ended up being the last he saw of his father.
Two days later, the boy's stash of snacks dried up; the day after that, he ran out of water, too. That evening, he decided to try the hatch.
He was a sure-spirited type of boy, the kind to be confident that everything would work out alright in the end-that was just his nature. But in the meantime, what if something had happened to his father? The man's words weighed heavy at the edge of the boy's mind like a muted kind of paranoia, but he still couldn't help but think, what if it was just something simple? Maybe his father had just taken a fall or something, and couldn't get up...
He'd never tried the pulley system before; it shot him up faster than his father usually went. He winced as his head smacked into the ceiling but then held his breath just in case he could hear anything from above-he couldn't.
Unsealing the hatch the way he'd seen his father do a hundred times, the boy slowly lifted the heavy square and poked his head out. Seeing nothing in the dark house, he was about to climb through when a flashlight passed over his face and shouts rang out: "Movement! He's shown himself!"
The boy gasped and dropped back down, forgetting to reseal the hatch in his haste; he landed hard on an ankle, shooting pain up his leg, knees buckling. Quickly, quickly, he scrambled under his bed.
For all the good that did him, really.
A laser cutter made quick, unnecessary work of the hatch. It fell to the floor of his room with a dull whump, followed by the spill of torch light and a man's voice deeper than his father's: "Show yourself!"
Seconds later, the dark-clad figure dropped to the floor of the room in a combat crouch, and the boy held his breath as the flashlight slowly panned around...
His stomach chose that moment to growl.
The next second the flashlight was in his eyes and the searching man had grabbed his arm, dragging him out. "Alright, you little-"
"オレは八つ!" The boy shouted the first thing that came to his mind, heart racing. "もう小さくないよ!"
The man just stared, though his grip on the boy's arm didn't relax. The boy struggled until he thought to bite the man-which didn't prove a good idea; the dark cloth was thick and tough, and the man hit him in the face with the butt of his torch. The boy cried out, tasting blood.
"What the hell's wrong with you?" Another man above shouted down. "You lost that last round fair and square. Just terminate the damned rat and get back up here."
"No! No, listen-" the man yelled back. "Listen-" He tore off his helmet mic, holding it up by the boy's face. "Speak!"
"何で?" the boy demanded. "父はどこ? 話したくないよ、テメエに!"
"What the-" The one above poked his head down the mauled hatch, staring. "I'll be damned. That's not Global no matter how you look at it."
"Right?" the other said, wide-eyed himself. "He's got to be speaking Old Local. We'll have to-"
"Yeah, we'll have to bring him in. They'll want him kept alive."
The boy only had a few seconds awake after that, after the big man slapped a funny mask across his nose and mouth. But he spent them with a new thought, wondering if maybe just keeping him alive alone was what his father had meant by 'protection'...
Errant entity 21-K.
( 02: 'that craving', time 00:00 )
Nikaido blinked slowly as his brain made its sluggish way out of sleep. It was nice where he was, curled up on a pile of blankets wedged in the cleft between two massive hot water pipes. The pipes were well-insulated but a steady, muted warmth emanated from them. Over the years, he'd found such places to be among the best to sleep underground, if you had a couple of blankets spare.
Of course, if you didn't have blankets you'd have to pick somewhere flatter or you risked getting bits of clothing or miscellany (or worse yet, smaller parts of your own physical person) stuck in the cleft when you first slid down into it. That wasn't very comfortable-a fact that Nikaido had also learned from experience.
He checked his chrono. A bit past two past midday... late. Well, kind of. Time was all relative underground anyway, and days were harder to waste when you had nothing in particular to do. But he'd missed the lunch crowd. It wasn't really peak hour for anything at the moment, but still... maybe some interesting people would be around. It was often during the times when everyone 'normal' was busy that the most interesting ones surfaced and weren't lost in the crowd.
"Alright," he said for the hell of hearing a human voice, even if it was just his own. "Let's go."
He left the blankets where they were, scrambling up one pipe's curve. Maybe he'd come back to them later, or maybe he'd just leave them for the next guy to find. They were still good after all, and it wasn't like he owned them.
The only things he never left behind were his footwear and goggles. His clothes and accessories changed on a semi-regular basis. Today's were a funny little open-topped beanie he'd nicked from aboveground (who the hell needed headwear like that in the Capital proper anyway? It was all climate-controlled up there), a baggy black throwover, belted at the waist with what might have looked like a cargo binder to the more fashionably discerning. His pants were grey and made out of some generic thick fabric. Their best feature was their multitude of pockets. Pockets were awesome-
Oh, and he'd never forget his netgear either. How the hell else would he remember he was human?
Standing atop the curve of one giant water pipe, Nikaido posted his hands on his hips and surveyed the underground sprawl. Pipes. More pipes. Access landers. Ladders. A rarely-used maintenance deck here and there, with their self-powered glowlamps that provided the only regular illumination around the place.
What you couldn't see were the repulsors. The entire city floated on massive columns of them, invisible and silent, compensating for the weight of everything above. They were carefully engineered so nothing would move. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you could hear the pipes creaking under the rumble of a distant earthquake, but natural disasters were largely a thing of the past. Nothing was natural anymore.
It was all clean enough, even underground. Dark, but not too dirty-the Capital had been rebuilt to very particular specifications after the last time it had been razed. (This place called 'Tokyo' always got razed, or so said the history buffs.) Though that had happened long before Nikaido was born, it hadn't been long enough for things to have deteriorated beneath the giant city yet. Machinery was usually all well and good with a status quo after all. Life was what messed it up. Underground, creatures were rare-and people were just as rare. Sometimes, this was a good thing.
Often, though, it just meant that things were really damn lonely. And that only the foolhardy and the guys who were kind of not quite right in the first place could avoid going utterly insane. (If there were more creatures than people underground, it was probably because some of the latter had turned into the former over the years-a slow and freakish process that made Nikaido's skin crawl just thinking about it.)
As for himself, Nikaido wasn't sure which category he fell into-the foolhardy or the pre-crazed. He was a little reckless, but not to a stupid extent, and he liked to think he was random rather than crazy. Not that he had any proper yardstick to measure that kind of thing by, though.
Or... thinking again, maybe he belonged to a third category: the handful of people who knew codes, had no problem with stealing and could get themselves a-
Well, correction: nobody underground had a problem with stealing. They weren't supposed to exist, so they weren't allocated Government rations of everything like all the Legals up there. It was do or die. Sometimes, Nikaido liked it that way-
Because he was one of the few who knew codes, overrides, and had been able to get his hands on a netgear set. Where the net was, people were. And people, for all their individual propensities to drive their fellows up the wall, often very much helped to keep your mental feet firmly on the ground.
Nikaido felt a dull pang in his chest. It wasn't that he particularly liked relying on people or anything, but sometimes he just...
It was just.
Well...
Hn.
"Let's go," he said again, quieter this time. His brain wasn't really cut out for deep thinking.
Once more he checked that his netgear was still securely strapped into its pocket. Seeing that it was, Nikaido turned around and with a last look at the blankets made a mental note of their location and took a deep breath.
Raising his arms, he threw himself from the pipe in a backward flip, soaring for a minute, arching around before he began to plummet into the Underground's lower reaches.
...he liked how humans hadn't managed to screw up gravity yet. The thought amused him. In freefall, eyes closed, Nikaido gave a breathy laugh, loving the rush of everything flying past in a blind blur. Loving the gamble, how long can I fall before I hit something...?
Three seconds, five... eight... his ears popped.
At the end of his nerve, Nikaido kicked each of his heels in turn, activating the mini-reactors in his skates. Their internal power sources hummed to life in a familiar, comforting vibration that travelled up through his calves. A maintenance platform rushed up from fifty metres below him-forty, thirty, twenty, ten... The reactors warmed his feet under the added strain of slowing his fall.
He didn't touch the ground.
Nikaido grinned.
Angling his weight over kicked in the thrusters and he shot forward, leaving a fast-fading ripple of heat in the wake of his heels. He leapt from platform to coil and pipe in repulsor-assisted jumps, swinging from the smaller ones and riding the ascending few up toward the surface.
North seemed like a good direction? As good as any, anyway. He headed out.
A little bit later, he popped up through a chute in the basement of a warehouse in the industrial district. Though as tightly governed as the rest of the Capital, the sheer amount of net traffic in and out of the area during the average work day would probably buy him at least a little more online time than usual. With luck.
Keeping to the shadows, Nikaido scaled the back of a high storage rack, finding a gap that he could fit into between the cubes and pallets. He powered down his feet and pulled out his netgear, pulse quickening in anticipation. People. People he could talk to, however briefly. Even if it wasn't face to face, it was good enough, kind of-knowing there was somebody, living and breathing just like him, on the other side of that interface. Logged in.
He slipped the headset on, the pads of its readers sitting lightly over his temples. It flickered to life automatically upon sensing his brainwaves, scanning them in silence. A moment later the readers fed a new frequency right back into him and, without closing his eyes or moving his body, Nikaido's senses were overlaid.
He smiled, no longer in a crappy warehouse in the crappy Capital but at the top of a gentle slope in a wide, green meadow.
The landscape was open and calming, apparently endless. A gentle breeze ruffled his hair a bit. Nikaido filled his lungs with the sweet scent of the grass beneath his bare feet, the odd yellow flower tickling as he began to walk.
Or rather, hop.
His nose twitched, and a movement behind him caused his eyes to dart in that direction. It was just another flower though, a little taller so it stood out.
Nikaido sighed, as deeply as it was possible for a rabbit to sigh, and wondered who else might be hanging around a place like this. It was a fairly generic scenario-the green meadow with its rolling hills. Typically, this made it more likely others would be there with no specific business to conduct, increasing Nikaido's chances of just meeting people. People he could interact with, whether they were other rabbits in the scenario, or creatures or humans walking down by the riverbank... or even fish.
Nikaido didn't feel like going somewhere noisy and ridiculous like the races today. There would definitely be people in those places too, but they'd all be into the gambling and getting high. Scenarios like those were fine for people-watching (...avatar watching, really) sometimes, but Nikaido didn't feel like doing that today. He'd dropped in just two days ago, and more and more the avatars were starting to look the same to him: all tall and pretty, dressed up and impressive.
Which really didn't impress Nikaido much at all.
He could hear the running of a stream off to his left. Lacking anything else to do, Nikaido made his way over the hill until it started to slope down. Gleeful, he tucked his ears down over his eyes with his front paws and curled his large feet up, rolling down the green in a speedy, dizzying somersault of a ride that seemed to last forever (though relative to human form was only perhaps a couple dozen metres...). Not a very bunny-like thing to do, but hellishly fun.
He unfurled himself as he felt the grass thin out beneath him and skidded to a stop on all fours a few human spans from the water's edge. Giddy and breathing fast, Nikaido snuffled a laugh and shook his fluffy white head to get his bearings back, blinking delighted in the sunlight. As his long-sighed rabbit eyes stopped spinning and refocused though, a tiny, soaring movement high above caught his gaze.
A hawk.
Definitely, definitely a hawk.
Nikaido's pulse sped up yet again. Birds of prey were perfectly legitimate forms in a scenario like this, he reminded his bunny instincts. It was probably just someone else who liked flying and the feeling of the wind in his face as much as Nikaido liked rolling about, being stupid in the grass. Probably.
Still, he couldn't help a subconscious acknowledgment that certain types of people liked to use certain types of avatars... (He was pretty much harmless himself, most of the time.)
Not moving, his eyes kept track of the circling bird with a vague wariness, watching for any sign that it was going to swoop down on him, talons out. He was ready if that was going to happen-if somebody was stupid enough to try hack him for the fun of it. Nikaido had codes shorthand on a mental clipboard that could knock back any bored amateur, and a few tricks that packed a slightly more complicated punch too. He was ready.
Despite that though, underneath, mostly, Nikaido was just kind of hoping that the hawk might feel like resting its wings and fly down gently, maybe to that outcrop of stones on the other side of the river. And maybe there'd be a nice person behind it, and the two of them could just sit for a bit and talk...
1- source: LOL. i don't believe i needed research for this.
2- ahh, and miyata's japanese. 8D *fail* oh well.
3- i admit there is absolutely no point to their code designations.
4- the setup could possibly make more sense if you've read tom clancy's net force, but. xD anyway.
5- tomorrow is tamamori, then senga. and it'll go around like that :D probably anyway.