bunnyfic 22.5, 23, 24
Nano = win. :D 1.5h before the deadline, ahaha. Yay. Curiosity satisfied. Now I never have to do it again, jkahwerg. xD; The story is not over, and I no longer know when it will be. D: But I guess we'll see how it goes. :D
EXPOSITION AHOOOY. 8D
Errant entity: 74-M. Legal: T41.
( 22.5: strange fruits )
[ MIDLOGUE, A DOZEN YEARS PRIOR ]
The boy was four, nearly five. He was kind of tall for his age, dressed in short shorts and a clean, pressed shirt. There was a cap on his head, and he stood by the door of his house with a boxed lunch of nutri-cubes and a pouch with his netgear in it.
His mother called him Yuuta, usually, but today she wasn't calling him anything. She wasn't looking him in the eye at all. His father had gone to work without saying good bye, brushing roughly past as if the boy hadn't existed.
Everything felt bad and weird and wrong. They were saying he had to go to school. He didn't want to go to school.
He started to cry.
Softly at first, biting his lip, but then louder. Louder, until his mother was forced to acknowledge he was upset. It didn't help, though.
"You're going," she told him.
The boy rubbed his eyes and cried all the more. "Mom, I don't want to go," he said, again and again.
But he still found himself outside some time later, standing on a street corner that he didn't know his way back home from. Wait here, his mother had told him, still not meeting his eye. The transport will come get you. There'll be other children on it, too. You'll make friends.
I don't want friends, the boy had sobbed. I don't want to go.
You're going, his mother had repeated. And then left so fast the boy hadn't been able to follow her through tear filled eyes.
And so he had stood on the corner and cried.
:::
"So, you were abandoned as a kid?" Fujigaya said. "That's not very nice. Want to talk about it?" Talking, Fujigaya firmly believed, helped a lot of things. Hurt was one of them, even for things that had been a long time ago.
Tamamori shrugged, not much of a storyteller. "Not really."
"Alright," Fujigaya said. "That's fair enough. Sometimes you don't really feel like sharing things that are really deep, especially when..."
He went on and on.
Tamamori kept his mouth shut and held on tightly and listened absently with one ear. Fujigaya seemed a lot nicer now that 'Mitsu' wasn't around, Tamamori thought. He also skated more smoothly than Nikaido. But then again Nikaido kind of skated like he was trying to break... somebody's neck, if not his own.
He hoped Nikaido and the short skater would be alright.
Takizawa, the First Guard, T41, 21-K, 53-N.
( 23: for real )
It was warm. The couch was soft. Nikaido decided he was very comfortable. And also, there was a nice weight by his side that was sighing and snuffling softly in its sleep. His toes tingled happily.
His toes.
Nikaido's eyes flew open at that realisation. He could feel his feet. He could move his legs. He still couldn't feel his ass, but that was just the kind of numb that came from not moving in forever -- he wasn't dead.
His head swam a bit, and he told himself to log off. Twice. It didn't work. Did that mean they'd locked him in another scenario, or was--
Was this--?
...the couch was kind of way too comfortable for any kind of government detainment place.
And Senga--
Senga was...
Here?
Breathing for real, and being warm and snuffling in his sleep and weird shit and being right here and real? Tentatively, Nikaido reached out the tiny space full of chasm between them, almost afraid that -- something. Something, like someone was messing with him and the scenario would disappear soon and he'd be back alone in a virtual cell with a crippled mental body and a pounding headache halfway dead and waiting to pass out for good with nobody there and somebody, somewhere, laughing at him while he angsted and maybe tried not to cry. Because it would suck that much, if not more. He'd probably cry.
His hand reached up, hovering millimetres from Senga's hair. His warmth was real enough. The slight stickiness of his hair was real enough, the Capital's perpetually balmy twenty-six degrees too warm for him or something...?
Reaching down, Nikaido pinched Senga's nose, and held it.
Senga tried to snuffle, brows knitting cutely in his sleep before he coughed and started breathing through his mouth. Nikaido snickered to himself. And poked Senga in the face. No reaction. He poked harder. Still no reaction. Well...
Poking wasn't waking the other.
Chewing his lip thoughtfully, Nikaido drew back his hand for a moment -- and then struck Senga's forehead with a solid palmheel, professionally delivered. Still the other slept on -- and Nikaido became aware of a second presence in the room: somebody laughing at him. But it wasn't a mean kind of laugh... not really.
Curious, Nikaido sat up and squinted slightly. "Do I know you?" he asked. "Have we met before?" He meant online.
Because he knew this was for real, now. He and Senga, they'd been logged out by somebody. And Senga was just taking a bit longer to wake up than Nikaido had -- but they were both fine. Thanks to...?
"We haven't met," the man said, smiling. He was flanked by two others, younger but maybe not by that much...? It was hard to tell. Nikaido's real eyes were alright -- good enough to skate pretty well with -- but not fantastic. Especially for things further away. "And you don't know me, though I know you."
Nikaido crossed his arms. "That's nice. So you're a stalker."
And there was that laugh again. It came from one of the flanking guys -- the one with weird hair. Big hair.
"Mitsu's training seems to lack an attitude correction component," the second flanking guy allowed. He had dark, straight hair, and looked totally normal to Nikaido.
"Taisuke, Tottsu, be nice please," the main guy said. Even if he was smiling too.
"So," Nikaido butted in, jutting his jaw in the main guy's direction, "if he's Takizawa, then who are you two? Sidekicks or cronies?"
"Did Senga tell you who I was, then?" Takizawa laughed.
"No," Nikaido grinned back. "But he said he worked for you. And that you collect little boys. And only a stalker could've put my full name on that scroll he had 'cause I haven't told anyone it since I was five, so it fits."
"I see," Takizawa said. "I assume you'd like to know what's going on, then...?"
"That'd be nice, thanks," Nikaido said bluntly.
Takizawa nodded. "We were just in the middle of a meeting, waiting for you two to wake up. You may listen if you wish; we'll see if Senga is awake by the time we're finished."
"Alright," Nikaido said, and curled back up on the couch.
Well, the couch was comfortable and Senga was warm, and it wasn't as if Nikaido had to be sitting up in order to pay attention. The guy with the funny hair was smirking knowingly, but Nikaido ignored him. It was the normal-looking one who was talking anyway. He had his eyes very calmly closed and was either reciting a report by memory, or reading it off of the inside of his eyelids; Nikaido had no clue.
"54-N is still alive," the normal one said, "and seems to be working his way out from the second quadrant with a little more confidence. 04-A has kept his usual low profile for the past few days, remaining predominantly underground."
"Nozawa is still the least trouble of all of them," Takizawa mused.
The normal one nodded. "He is. Conversely, 45-I has fallen off the radar."
"He's totally disappeared," Big Hair said.
"Hashimoto?" Takizawa had his eyebrows raised. "Totsuka, please tell me what you mean when you say 'disappeared'?"
"Tono." Totsuka bowed, almost apologetically, and opened his eyes. "His contact sequence was last seen online forty-eight hours ago. He hasn't contacted anybody by any other traceable means since, nor has he shown up on satellite imagery at all."
"Which is unusual," Big Hair -- Taisuke, then -- said, "because he's not terribly bright. He usually gets the most satellite hits by a long shot. The government hasn't brought him in though, nor have there been any reports filed of bodies found matching his description. He might have died in an obscure location..."
"Or maybe, as I suspect," Totsuka offered, "he got lost underground and is currently unable to find his way out. I recommended he try hiding out there last time we met up, due to the aforementioned satellite hits. But that may have been advice given in error."
Nikaido's mind boggled at what he was hearing. What a ridiculous prospect, getting lost underground. The only way out from down there was up. Whoever this Hashimoto idiot was... Nikaido felt seriously sorry for him.
Takizawa rubbed at his forehead, as if trying to avert a headache. "Is that the business Goseki was off on yesterday, then...?"
Totsuka nodded. "He still hasn't found him, either."
"He'll keep looking," Takizawa said. It wasn't really a question, nor an order.
"Of course," Totsuka said. "And I'll be joining him after this."
Takizawa nodded, satisfied. "Is there much more?" he asked then, leaning back in his chair. No news was good news, really, when it came to the charges...
Totsuka glanced at Taisuke, an eyebrow raised. Taisuke shrugged. "Not much. Just the business with 74-M following Nikaido. And of course, the issue of Nikaido's status."
"Which doesn't concern your guard so much, does it," Takizawa said, turning back to Totsuka. "Take your leave."
"Thank you," Totsuka said, bowing. "We'll definitely find him."
"Please," Takizawa said. "And when you do..." He seemed to consider his next words carefully, but nodded in the end: "If he's still alive, monitor him more closely. He may have be our next target."
"Understood, Boss," Totsuka smiled at the door. "That would probably be easier for everyone, and safer for Hasshi, too."
"Do what you must," Takizawa said.
With a final bow, Totsuka took his leave.
"Do you get it now, Nikaido?" the one called Taisuke asked kind of pointedly.
"Yes," Nikaido said, sitting back up. "You freaks stalk boys, and then you pick them when they're ripe."
"Hey, hey, hey!" Takizawa protested, projecting an aura of fake anger. "That's not a very nice way to put it."
"So you're not denying the fact," Nikaido grinned.
"Have some respect, brat!" Taisuke said.
Takizawa tsk'd. "Taisuke, Taisuke. Some manners in front of our newest addition, please."
Taisuke's face turned despairing. "But, Tono...!" With a swift 180 in his countenance, he turned to mumbling at his feet cutely. "You always do this to me..."
Takizawa pretended not to hear him.
Nikaido just stared. "...you're kind of weird," he said at last.
Taisuke's eyes sharpened over a pout. "Says you, Bunny Boy."
"Hey, I have a reason for liking that avatar!" Nikaido countered.
"You sure about that?" Taisuke countered back. "Because so far as I know, rabbits are only good for snuggles and sex."
Nikaido launched an indignant, incoherent protest at Takizawa's laughter -- and another one after instinctively glancing down at Senga's sleeping face on the couch, and Taisuke started laughing at him too. "Hey! Just snuggles are fine, damn you!"
"Uh-huh. That's what they all say," Taisuke smirked, countenance changing again. "But don't you worry, Senga'll oblige. He even plays nice most of the time. Isn't that right, Senga?"
"What 'chu talkin' about?" Nikaido demanded, flustered -- but then got even more flustered when Senga stirred, murmuring something vaguely affirmative. And sat up, brushing his lips to the side of Nikaido's mouth with a smile. "Wha--" Nikaido jerked back. And fell off the couch.
"Eh?" Senga leaned over, peering down over its edge. He blinked at Nikaido. "What happened, Nika-chan?"
"What the hell was that for!" Nikaido exclaimed, and turned around to glare at Taisuke. "What did you do to him? Hypnosis? Remote control?!"
"Me?" Senga blinked, and held up three fingers in front of his own face. "...three?" he said, with a tilt of his head. Then looked at Nikaido out of the corner of his eye. "I think I'm alright..."
"What!" Nikaido said, voice raised, aware (and vaguely embarrassed) that Takizawa and Taisuke were watching on in amusement. "That doesn't work when you--" He held up his own hand. "How many?" he demanded.
"Four," Senga said, and Nikaido despaired. Until Senga added proudly: "~plus one thumb."
Taisuke cracked up laughing at the look on Nikaido's face.
"Senga's very cute, isn't he?" Takizawa observed warmly, smiling. Senga beamed.
Taisuke stopped laughing. "...am I cute too, Tono?" he asked.
"You're a bit big for it now, Taisuke," Takizawa said, with a note of patronising. "Conversely, you're a little more useful these days."
"Just 'a little'...? I'd rather be useful and cute," Taisuke pouted. "Can't I be both?"
"Oh my," Takizawa observed pointedly. "I remember when you first came here, such a shy, sweet thing you barely spoke! And softly at that. What happened?"
"These days, Taipi doesn't shut up!" Senga chimed in. "And his voice is super loud."
As Taisuke's glare turned murderous, Nikaido put in a two-cent declaration: "You're all crazy."
Taisuke crossed his arms. "Well that's okay then, isn't it? Welcome to the roost. You'll fit right in."
"Who says I'm joining you guys?" Nikaido demanded.
Takizawa nodded. "You're a protected pre-registrant now, but that status can always be removed. The choice is yours, once you hear what we have to offer."
"Ne, Nika-chan~" Senga murmured, sliding his arms over Nikaido's shoulders in a hug from behind. "Won't you stay? You can sleep with me~!"
Nikaido wanted to kick himself for thinking Senga meant anything other than sharing a room or something, but his stomach flip-flopped anyway.
"No need to convince him, Senga," Taisuke said, dismissive. "He'll stick around if he's got any sense. They all do."
The light codesmen: Y00, I14, 74-M.
( 24: this is how we roll )
"...wait," Tamamori said uncertainly, not quite sure he was getting this right. "So. You're saying you're in an army."
Y00 laughed. "Well, that's what the boss likes to tell us, anyway."
Y00's name was Yokoo Wataru, Tamamori had learned, and I14 was Iida -- from what the skaters had said. Iida Kyohei, Yokoo had added. And he wasn't quite as dead as Kitayama ('Mitsu', the short skater) and Fujigaya (the taller one) had lead Tamamori to believe.
He was dead, but...
Yokoo had spliced Tamamori's netgear onto Takizawa's local connection. They were all currently sitting in the whiteroom -- which was pretty much the same as Tamamori's blueroom, except that it was white. Tamamori was feeling pretty at home already, sitting on a chair that didn't exist, and listening to a two-part live firewall -- literally, live -- speaking out of one avatar, and one disembodied voice.
It was kind of a weird set up, but Tamamori didn't mind too much. Online was pretty much a sandbox for weirdness anyway. He was used to it.
Yokoo continued, talking at the ceiling as he rocked a little from side to side in his virtual hammock (that didn't exist either). "We're not really a unified force in the way that the word 'army' implies -- though each of us can fight in his own way, of course. That's a given when you're coming up against bad guys who'll do your head in at the drop of a hat. But we don't exist to fight: we fight to protect."
Tamamori didn't really see the distinction, but nodded anyway.
Iida had a smile in his voice when he added to clarify. "You know how it is. The reproduction tax, education tax, and every other tax at the moment makes money more valuable than human life." Tamamori nodded. He knew that first hand. Everybody did. Iida continued: "It originally served a purpose by way of population control, but Takizawa believes that this long after the Second Collapse, our Capital's resources are no longer stretched so thinly as to warrant such high costs. That the government is just being complacent and greedy in the conservation of its resources."
Yokoo hummed in agreement. "Tono -- and those like him -- want to prove that the population cap can be substantially raised, if not removed. And to that end, he helps the kids set for termination who don't have anything." Glancing over, Yokoo gave Tamamori a pointed look. "He helps them stay alive."
"Ahhh..." Tamamori said in a small voice, understanding.
Yokoo nodded. "It's not that our Capital needs more people, so much as it can afford for less people to die for the mere technicalities of outdated rules. 'We've survived this long without a change in living standards with x-amount of errants estimated to be leeching off of the system,' Takizawa wants to prove, 'So why can't we have the population cap increased by that number?' That is his argument."
"Is that why there are no girls here?" Tamamori asked.
Yokoo blinked for a moment, uncomprehending until he laughed. "You are ridiculous, 74-M."
Iida fielded that one. "It's true that a separation of sexes would decrease the likelihood of excessive reproduction," he allowed, "but..."
"Boss is just not interested, I'm pretty sure," Yokoo snerked dismissively. "He's had it bad for Panelist Imai from Head Tsuyoshi's cabinet for as long as anybody here knows."
Tamamori scrunched up his nose at that. Head of State Domoto Tsuyoshi's...? It wasn't that he minded about... whatever, really. He was learning quickly that the government wasn't all bad. Or even mostly bad. But the girls...
"Oh, don't worry," Yokoo said, easily reading Tamamori's expression. 74-M's real face avatar was programmed with surprising accuracy. Then again, perhaps not so surprising given who'd helped him in code along the way. "Takizawa isn't the only one who runs 'shady' organisations like this, mind. There are others. There are ones for girls. There are ones for both genders. They're just run a little differently, is all."
"Okay," Tamamori said, dropping the issue at that. Just in case he didn't want to know.
"Smart," Iida chuckled.
"Anyway," Yokoo went on. "There are a few things we do around here. I mean, there are a few elements involved in keeping termination kids alive."
Tamamori nodded.
"One:" Iida said, "make sure they aren't terminated."
"Ah," Tamamori said. Well, certainly that made sense.
"Sometimes, we hijack the transports bringing the collected kids to the government centre," Yokoo explained.
Ah, that made sense.
"...I was on one of those," Tamamori mumbled. "One of the hijacked ones." He still remembered that sequence of events clear as day, after he'd been abandoned, and-- "One of the friends I made on board was killed when that happened... a lot of the kids were."
Yokoo nodded sympathetically. "There is collateral, I'm sorry. But if the transport had made it to central, you'd all have died."
Tamamori nodded. Deep down, he'd known that too. But it felt less bad dismissing the 'collateral' when he wasn't the one telling himself that it couldn't be helped... "I know."
"...there are some," Iida amended, his disembodied voice a little distant. "A rare few with certain skill sets that the government itself chooses to keep alive rather than terminate." He paused. "But I'm sure you know that isn't much of a life either."
Tamamori said nothing, looking down at his toes, and wondered how much Takizawa's people knew about Miyata...
Yokoo watched him for a moment before moving on: "The kids who survive, and other ones we find along the way, we monitor. And help where we can. Teach them how to get by, at first -- indirectly, a lot of the time. Make them aware of the satellites, and the ways of the government in general. Just the basics. Ironically they don't need any real supervision until they're old enough to strike out by themselves."
"When they acquire an online presence," Iida said.
Tamamori nodded. "Because that's when the seekers and chasers become aware that they're out there, and they get themselves onto hit lists. So they have to be more careful."
He could have sworn Iida was smiling. "Exactly," Iida said. "You were always one of the easier ones to mind."
"You just like the kids who carefully go about doing their own thing," Yokoo snerked. "All your charges are like that."
"Of course," Iida laughed. "If they were all trained that way, Kitayama and Fujigaya would have much less trouble themselves. Not to mention the Honor Guard's set."
Iida preferred to help those under his care to learn evasion, and pre-emptive defence. Kitayama was sort of in the middle, maybe more toward to the opposite side of the scale, but polar to Iida was Fujigaya -- who quite often literally protected his charges by skating out and getting to a chaser before the chaser got to his charge. And kicking his head in.
Fujigaya's charges -- like Fujigaya himself, really -- were never very much about flying under the radar. That was why the Morimoto brothers had to have been brought in early, and Kyomoto Taiga and Nikaido Takashi as well.
Well.
Taiga had been Kawai's fault, but that was just a technicality. And Nikaido had been technically Senga's fault -- but since Senga had been Fujigaya's responsibility to start with...
Yokoo shook his head, turning back to Tamamori to continue the lesson: "Of course, it'd be easier to just never have the errants online. But the offline world isn't much of a world anymore. You know this. With the lack of natural resources, there's nothing and almost nobody who'd rather be left out than hooked up. If you want to learn, you join a classroom scenario. If you want to meet people, you go club, get drunk--"
"Wataru," Iida chided.
Yokoo grinned. "Please, Kyon. As if."
"Well, some people do."
"That's because they're stupid and have nothing more worthwhile to concern themselves with..."
"Then the third part," Tamamori said quietly, "is that you bring them here...?"
"Well," Yokoo shrugged. "Sometimes. Most times. Some of our charges die on us before it happens, for one reason or another. Other times, they're actually quite happy just spending most of their time offline and just existing. But the ones who survive and who want it, who develop their own fighting instincts and sharpen their fangs--" Iida chuckled at Yokoo's word choice there. "--shut up, Kyon. They join us, and bring with them the skills to monitor and bring up their own charges." It was a cyclic system like that.
"Of course, Takizawa foots each pre-registration and registration tax bill as if he were paying for his own children, plus ongoing costs," Iida said apologetically. "So while he is not poor, it's impossible to just bring everybody under his banner if the work we do is to continue." Watchtower were charged with monitoring Takizawa's financial affairs, too. Well, Yokoo was anyway. Iida just kept the eggs secure.
"And we aren't a child care centre," Yokoo added. "We simply don't have that capacity, god forbid we ever gain it."
"Wataru..." Iida chided again.
"Don't get me wrong," Yokoo said calmly. "I like children. They taste like nutri-cubes."
"Everything tastes like nutri-cubes," Tamamori muttered.
"What was that, 74-M?" Yokoo grinned.
"Nothing," Tamamori said.
"Sure," Yokoo said, giving Tamamori the benefit of the doubt. He shrugged, and got right down to business: "So now you more or less know what we're about, what do you say?"
Tamamori looked torn. For a moment, his avatar hesitated -- and Iida knew what his answer was going to be.
"...sorry."
Yokoo raised an eyebrow. "Really?"
Tamamori nodded, eyes glued to his feet with a look on his face as if they'd been amputated from being full of gangrene because he didn't wear socks to bed like his mother always told him to. A bit of annoyance. A bit of disgust. But mostly just discomfort and regret. "With my scrambler," he said uncomfortably, "...they might not be able to trace who I am each time, but they can still trace my location, and I..." Tamamori pursed his lips. "Well, even if I go through your firewall, making my location technically untraceable... it's still suspicious. There's someone -- I can't put them at risk like that."
Miyata's supervisors -- the government -- would know if Miyata met up with a guy located at Takizawa's place, and it would place him under more suspicion than he needed. Especially since, if Tamamori was registered and legal, Miyata would deliberately stay out of the way and stuff, since that was just the way he was, and...
Tamamori looked up, decided, and met Yokoo's eyes for a fleeting, awkward moment. "I'm grateful to you guys for everything. And I do really want to help out. But if that means I have to register, then tell your boss I'm sorry."
Maybe he'd be able to help every now and then anyway, in the future... Now that he knew what had been going on in that frozen forest -- if he'd known at the time, he'd have just busted Senga and Nikaido out. But it was too late for that now.
Too late for regrets.
Yokoo looked back at Tamamori evenly, with an unreadable expression. "You're making a mistake," he said. Not pushing or accusing, Tamamori knew. Just posing a statement. "Accept our offer and sever communications with him. It's safer that way for both of you."
"No, I... I know I even said I've been looking for you guys for a long time too, but." Tamamori's eyes were back downcast, his voice soft. "I've known Miyata for longer, and I can't do that to him. I'm sorry."
"...that's alright," Yokoo said. "I understand."
"We'll keep in touch," Iida added. And materialised a small white piece of card in Tamamori's pocket -- similar to the one that Yokoo had given the archer in the forest, but with a different contact sequence on it. "You know where we are now."
Tamamori nodded mutely, his words run out.
"Meet me at the hatch Taisuke brought you in through, before you leave," Yokoo added. "I've got a few things to give you."
With another slow nod that turned into half a bow, Tamamori disengaged from their local connection first and disappeared. Leaving silence to reign over the remaining link.
"...'a mistake', Wataru?" Iida said at last, not accusing, not pushing. Just... posing a statement.
"I was just saying..." Yokoo said stiffly.
"...what you really think," Iida finished for him.
"Kyohei..."
Iida wasn't wrong, and they both knew it. But there were things Yokoo wanted to tell him instead. Reasons, like how a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush -- unless it couldn't sing anymore. How in hindsight, he'd rather just know Iida was out there somewhere, than have him trapped in the walls of these servers.
But he didn't.
"...I'll catch you later," Yokoo said instead. "Tamamori will be waiting." And logged off.
1- man, i feel super lame for puttying up the remainder of my wordcount with exposition rather than skating action for, say, kitayama. 8D but it had to happen eventually is done now.
2- it's... so past midnight. =v=; oops. *clearly can't keep self-imposed rules*
EXPOSITION AHOOOY. 8D
Errant entity: 74-M. Legal: T41.
( 22.5: strange fruits )
[ MIDLOGUE, A DOZEN YEARS PRIOR ]
The boy was four, nearly five. He was kind of tall for his age, dressed in short shorts and a clean, pressed shirt. There was a cap on his head, and he stood by the door of his house with a boxed lunch of nutri-cubes and a pouch with his netgear in it.
His mother called him Yuuta, usually, but today she wasn't calling him anything. She wasn't looking him in the eye at all. His father had gone to work without saying good bye, brushing roughly past as if the boy hadn't existed.
Everything felt bad and weird and wrong. They were saying he had to go to school. He didn't want to go to school.
He started to cry.
Softly at first, biting his lip, but then louder. Louder, until his mother was forced to acknowledge he was upset. It didn't help, though.
"You're going," she told him.
The boy rubbed his eyes and cried all the more. "Mom, I don't want to go," he said, again and again.
But he still found himself outside some time later, standing on a street corner that he didn't know his way back home from. Wait here, his mother had told him, still not meeting his eye. The transport will come get you. There'll be other children on it, too. You'll make friends.
I don't want friends, the boy had sobbed. I don't want to go.
You're going, his mother had repeated. And then left so fast the boy hadn't been able to follow her through tear filled eyes.
And so he had stood on the corner and cried.
:::
"So, you were abandoned as a kid?" Fujigaya said. "That's not very nice. Want to talk about it?" Talking, Fujigaya firmly believed, helped a lot of things. Hurt was one of them, even for things that had been a long time ago.
Tamamori shrugged, not much of a storyteller. "Not really."
"Alright," Fujigaya said. "That's fair enough. Sometimes you don't really feel like sharing things that are really deep, especially when..."
He went on and on.
Tamamori kept his mouth shut and held on tightly and listened absently with one ear. Fujigaya seemed a lot nicer now that 'Mitsu' wasn't around, Tamamori thought. He also skated more smoothly than Nikaido. But then again Nikaido kind of skated like he was trying to break... somebody's neck, if not his own.
He hoped Nikaido and the short skater would be alright.
Takizawa, the First Guard, T41, 21-K, 53-N.
( 23: for real )
It was warm. The couch was soft. Nikaido decided he was very comfortable. And also, there was a nice weight by his side that was sighing and snuffling softly in its sleep. His toes tingled happily.
His toes.
Nikaido's eyes flew open at that realisation. He could feel his feet. He could move his legs. He still couldn't feel his ass, but that was just the kind of numb that came from not moving in forever -- he wasn't dead.
His head swam a bit, and he told himself to log off. Twice. It didn't work. Did that mean they'd locked him in another scenario, or was--
Was this--?
...the couch was kind of way too comfortable for any kind of government detainment place.
And Senga--
Senga was...
Here?
Breathing for real, and being warm and snuffling in his sleep and weird shit and being right here and real? Tentatively, Nikaido reached out the tiny space full of chasm between them, almost afraid that -- something. Something, like someone was messing with him and the scenario would disappear soon and he'd be back alone in a virtual cell with a crippled mental body and a pounding headache halfway dead and waiting to pass out for good with nobody there and somebody, somewhere, laughing at him while he angsted and maybe tried not to cry. Because it would suck that much, if not more. He'd probably cry.
His hand reached up, hovering millimetres from Senga's hair. His warmth was real enough. The slight stickiness of his hair was real enough, the Capital's perpetually balmy twenty-six degrees too warm for him or something...?
Reaching down, Nikaido pinched Senga's nose, and held it.
Senga tried to snuffle, brows knitting cutely in his sleep before he coughed and started breathing through his mouth. Nikaido snickered to himself. And poked Senga in the face. No reaction. He poked harder. Still no reaction. Well...
Poking wasn't waking the other.
Chewing his lip thoughtfully, Nikaido drew back his hand for a moment -- and then struck Senga's forehead with a solid palmheel, professionally delivered. Still the other slept on -- and Nikaido became aware of a second presence in the room: somebody laughing at him. But it wasn't a mean kind of laugh... not really.
Curious, Nikaido sat up and squinted slightly. "Do I know you?" he asked. "Have we met before?" He meant online.
Because he knew this was for real, now. He and Senga, they'd been logged out by somebody. And Senga was just taking a bit longer to wake up than Nikaido had -- but they were both fine. Thanks to...?
"We haven't met," the man said, smiling. He was flanked by two others, younger but maybe not by that much...? It was hard to tell. Nikaido's real eyes were alright -- good enough to skate pretty well with -- but not fantastic. Especially for things further away. "And you don't know me, though I know you."
Nikaido crossed his arms. "That's nice. So you're a stalker."
And there was that laugh again. It came from one of the flanking guys -- the one with weird hair. Big hair.
"Mitsu's training seems to lack an attitude correction component," the second flanking guy allowed. He had dark, straight hair, and looked totally normal to Nikaido.
"Taisuke, Tottsu, be nice please," the main guy said. Even if he was smiling too.
"So," Nikaido butted in, jutting his jaw in the main guy's direction, "if he's Takizawa, then who are you two? Sidekicks or cronies?"
"Did Senga tell you who I was, then?" Takizawa laughed.
"No," Nikaido grinned back. "But he said he worked for you. And that you collect little boys. And only a stalker could've put my full name on that scroll he had 'cause I haven't told anyone it since I was five, so it fits."
"I see," Takizawa said. "I assume you'd like to know what's going on, then...?"
"That'd be nice, thanks," Nikaido said bluntly.
Takizawa nodded. "We were just in the middle of a meeting, waiting for you two to wake up. You may listen if you wish; we'll see if Senga is awake by the time we're finished."
"Alright," Nikaido said, and curled back up on the couch.
Well, the couch was comfortable and Senga was warm, and it wasn't as if Nikaido had to be sitting up in order to pay attention. The guy with the funny hair was smirking knowingly, but Nikaido ignored him. It was the normal-looking one who was talking anyway. He had his eyes very calmly closed and was either reciting a report by memory, or reading it off of the inside of his eyelids; Nikaido had no clue.
"54-N is still alive," the normal one said, "and seems to be working his way out from the second quadrant with a little more confidence. 04-A has kept his usual low profile for the past few days, remaining predominantly underground."
"Nozawa is still the least trouble of all of them," Takizawa mused.
The normal one nodded. "He is. Conversely, 45-I has fallen off the radar."
"He's totally disappeared," Big Hair said.
"Hashimoto?" Takizawa had his eyebrows raised. "Totsuka, please tell me what you mean when you say 'disappeared'?"
"Tono." Totsuka bowed, almost apologetically, and opened his eyes. "His contact sequence was last seen online forty-eight hours ago. He hasn't contacted anybody by any other traceable means since, nor has he shown up on satellite imagery at all."
"Which is unusual," Big Hair -- Taisuke, then -- said, "because he's not terribly bright. He usually gets the most satellite hits by a long shot. The government hasn't brought him in though, nor have there been any reports filed of bodies found matching his description. He might have died in an obscure location..."
"Or maybe, as I suspect," Totsuka offered, "he got lost underground and is currently unable to find his way out. I recommended he try hiding out there last time we met up, due to the aforementioned satellite hits. But that may have been advice given in error."
Nikaido's mind boggled at what he was hearing. What a ridiculous prospect, getting lost underground. The only way out from down there was up. Whoever this Hashimoto idiot was... Nikaido felt seriously sorry for him.
Takizawa rubbed at his forehead, as if trying to avert a headache. "Is that the business Goseki was off on yesterday, then...?"
Totsuka nodded. "He still hasn't found him, either."
"He'll keep looking," Takizawa said. It wasn't really a question, nor an order.
"Of course," Totsuka said. "And I'll be joining him after this."
Takizawa nodded, satisfied. "Is there much more?" he asked then, leaning back in his chair. No news was good news, really, when it came to the charges...
Totsuka glanced at Taisuke, an eyebrow raised. Taisuke shrugged. "Not much. Just the business with 74-M following Nikaido. And of course, the issue of Nikaido's status."
"Which doesn't concern your guard so much, does it," Takizawa said, turning back to Totsuka. "Take your leave."
"Thank you," Totsuka said, bowing. "We'll definitely find him."
"Please," Takizawa said. "And when you do..." He seemed to consider his next words carefully, but nodded in the end: "If he's still alive, monitor him more closely. He may have be our next target."
"Understood, Boss," Totsuka smiled at the door. "That would probably be easier for everyone, and safer for Hasshi, too."
"Do what you must," Takizawa said.
With a final bow, Totsuka took his leave.
"Do you get it now, Nikaido?" the one called Taisuke asked kind of pointedly.
"Yes," Nikaido said, sitting back up. "You freaks stalk boys, and then you pick them when they're ripe."
"Hey, hey, hey!" Takizawa protested, projecting an aura of fake anger. "That's not a very nice way to put it."
"So you're not denying the fact," Nikaido grinned.
"Have some respect, brat!" Taisuke said.
Takizawa tsk'd. "Taisuke, Taisuke. Some manners in front of our newest addition, please."
Taisuke's face turned despairing. "But, Tono...!" With a swift 180 in his countenance, he turned to mumbling at his feet cutely. "You always do this to me..."
Takizawa pretended not to hear him.
Nikaido just stared. "...you're kind of weird," he said at last.
Taisuke's eyes sharpened over a pout. "Says you, Bunny Boy."
"Hey, I have a reason for liking that avatar!" Nikaido countered.
"You sure about that?" Taisuke countered back. "Because so far as I know, rabbits are only good for snuggles and sex."
Nikaido launched an indignant, incoherent protest at Takizawa's laughter -- and another one after instinctively glancing down at Senga's sleeping face on the couch, and Taisuke started laughing at him too. "Hey! Just snuggles are fine, damn you!"
"Uh-huh. That's what they all say," Taisuke smirked, countenance changing again. "But don't you worry, Senga'll oblige. He even plays nice most of the time. Isn't that right, Senga?"
"What 'chu talkin' about?" Nikaido demanded, flustered -- but then got even more flustered when Senga stirred, murmuring something vaguely affirmative. And sat up, brushing his lips to the side of Nikaido's mouth with a smile. "Wha--" Nikaido jerked back. And fell off the couch.
"Eh?" Senga leaned over, peering down over its edge. He blinked at Nikaido. "What happened, Nika-chan?"
"What the hell was that for!" Nikaido exclaimed, and turned around to glare at Taisuke. "What did you do to him? Hypnosis? Remote control?!"
"Me?" Senga blinked, and held up three fingers in front of his own face. "...three?" he said, with a tilt of his head. Then looked at Nikaido out of the corner of his eye. "I think I'm alright..."
"What!" Nikaido said, voice raised, aware (and vaguely embarrassed) that Takizawa and Taisuke were watching on in amusement. "That doesn't work when you--" He held up his own hand. "How many?" he demanded.
"Four," Senga said, and Nikaido despaired. Until Senga added proudly: "~plus one thumb."
Taisuke cracked up laughing at the look on Nikaido's face.
"Senga's very cute, isn't he?" Takizawa observed warmly, smiling. Senga beamed.
Taisuke stopped laughing. "...am I cute too, Tono?" he asked.
"You're a bit big for it now, Taisuke," Takizawa said, with a note of patronising. "Conversely, you're a little more useful these days."
"Just 'a little'...? I'd rather be useful and cute," Taisuke pouted. "Can't I be both?"
"Oh my," Takizawa observed pointedly. "I remember when you first came here, such a shy, sweet thing you barely spoke! And softly at that. What happened?"
"These days, Taipi doesn't shut up!" Senga chimed in. "And his voice is super loud."
As Taisuke's glare turned murderous, Nikaido put in a two-cent declaration: "You're all crazy."
Taisuke crossed his arms. "Well that's okay then, isn't it? Welcome to the roost. You'll fit right in."
"Who says I'm joining you guys?" Nikaido demanded.
Takizawa nodded. "You're a protected pre-registrant now, but that status can always be removed. The choice is yours, once you hear what we have to offer."
"Ne, Nika-chan~" Senga murmured, sliding his arms over Nikaido's shoulders in a hug from behind. "Won't you stay? You can sleep with me~!"
Nikaido wanted to kick himself for thinking Senga meant anything other than sharing a room or something, but his stomach flip-flopped anyway.
"No need to convince him, Senga," Taisuke said, dismissive. "He'll stick around if he's got any sense. They all do."
The light codesmen: Y00, I14, 74-M.
( 24: this is how we roll )
"...wait," Tamamori said uncertainly, not quite sure he was getting this right. "So. You're saying you're in an army."
Y00 laughed. "Well, that's what the boss likes to tell us, anyway."
Y00's name was Yokoo Wataru, Tamamori had learned, and I14 was Iida -- from what the skaters had said. Iida Kyohei, Yokoo had added. And he wasn't quite as dead as Kitayama ('Mitsu', the short skater) and Fujigaya (the taller one) had lead Tamamori to believe.
He was dead, but...
Yokoo had spliced Tamamori's netgear onto Takizawa's local connection. They were all currently sitting in the whiteroom -- which was pretty much the same as Tamamori's blueroom, except that it was white. Tamamori was feeling pretty at home already, sitting on a chair that didn't exist, and listening to a two-part live firewall -- literally, live -- speaking out of one avatar, and one disembodied voice.
It was kind of a weird set up, but Tamamori didn't mind too much. Online was pretty much a sandbox for weirdness anyway. He was used to it.
Yokoo continued, talking at the ceiling as he rocked a little from side to side in his virtual hammock (that didn't exist either). "We're not really a unified force in the way that the word 'army' implies -- though each of us can fight in his own way, of course. That's a given when you're coming up against bad guys who'll do your head in at the drop of a hat. But we don't exist to fight: we fight to protect."
Tamamori didn't really see the distinction, but nodded anyway.
Iida had a smile in his voice when he added to clarify. "You know how it is. The reproduction tax, education tax, and every other tax at the moment makes money more valuable than human life." Tamamori nodded. He knew that first hand. Everybody did. Iida continued: "It originally served a purpose by way of population control, but Takizawa believes that this long after the Second Collapse, our Capital's resources are no longer stretched so thinly as to warrant such high costs. That the government is just being complacent and greedy in the conservation of its resources."
Yokoo hummed in agreement. "Tono -- and those like him -- want to prove that the population cap can be substantially raised, if not removed. And to that end, he helps the kids set for termination who don't have anything." Glancing over, Yokoo gave Tamamori a pointed look. "He helps them stay alive."
"Ahhh..." Tamamori said in a small voice, understanding.
Yokoo nodded. "It's not that our Capital needs more people, so much as it can afford for less people to die for the mere technicalities of outdated rules. 'We've survived this long without a change in living standards with x-amount of errants estimated to be leeching off of the system,' Takizawa wants to prove, 'So why can't we have the population cap increased by that number?' That is his argument."
"Is that why there are no girls here?" Tamamori asked.
Yokoo blinked for a moment, uncomprehending until he laughed. "You are ridiculous, 74-M."
Iida fielded that one. "It's true that a separation of sexes would decrease the likelihood of excessive reproduction," he allowed, "but..."
"Boss is just not interested, I'm pretty sure," Yokoo snerked dismissively. "He's had it bad for Panelist Imai from Head Tsuyoshi's cabinet for as long as anybody here knows."
Tamamori scrunched up his nose at that. Head of State Domoto Tsuyoshi's...? It wasn't that he minded about... whatever, really. He was learning quickly that the government wasn't all bad. Or even mostly bad. But the girls...
"Oh, don't worry," Yokoo said, easily reading Tamamori's expression. 74-M's real face avatar was programmed with surprising accuracy. Then again, perhaps not so surprising given who'd helped him in code along the way. "Takizawa isn't the only one who runs 'shady' organisations like this, mind. There are others. There are ones for girls. There are ones for both genders. They're just run a little differently, is all."
"Okay," Tamamori said, dropping the issue at that. Just in case he didn't want to know.
"Smart," Iida chuckled.
"Anyway," Yokoo went on. "There are a few things we do around here. I mean, there are a few elements involved in keeping termination kids alive."
Tamamori nodded.
"One:" Iida said, "make sure they aren't terminated."
"Ah," Tamamori said. Well, certainly that made sense.
"Sometimes, we hijack the transports bringing the collected kids to the government centre," Yokoo explained.
Ah, that made sense.
"...I was on one of those," Tamamori mumbled. "One of the hijacked ones." He still remembered that sequence of events clear as day, after he'd been abandoned, and-- "One of the friends I made on board was killed when that happened... a lot of the kids were."
Yokoo nodded sympathetically. "There is collateral, I'm sorry. But if the transport had made it to central, you'd all have died."
Tamamori nodded. Deep down, he'd known that too. But it felt less bad dismissing the 'collateral' when he wasn't the one telling himself that it couldn't be helped... "I know."
"...there are some," Iida amended, his disembodied voice a little distant. "A rare few with certain skill sets that the government itself chooses to keep alive rather than terminate." He paused. "But I'm sure you know that isn't much of a life either."
Tamamori said nothing, looking down at his toes, and wondered how much Takizawa's people knew about Miyata...
Yokoo watched him for a moment before moving on: "The kids who survive, and other ones we find along the way, we monitor. And help where we can. Teach them how to get by, at first -- indirectly, a lot of the time. Make them aware of the satellites, and the ways of the government in general. Just the basics. Ironically they don't need any real supervision until they're old enough to strike out by themselves."
"When they acquire an online presence," Iida said.
Tamamori nodded. "Because that's when the seekers and chasers become aware that they're out there, and they get themselves onto hit lists. So they have to be more careful."
He could have sworn Iida was smiling. "Exactly," Iida said. "You were always one of the easier ones to mind."
"You just like the kids who carefully go about doing their own thing," Yokoo snerked. "All your charges are like that."
"Of course," Iida laughed. "If they were all trained that way, Kitayama and Fujigaya would have much less trouble themselves. Not to mention the Honor Guard's set."
Iida preferred to help those under his care to learn evasion, and pre-emptive defence. Kitayama was sort of in the middle, maybe more toward to the opposite side of the scale, but polar to Iida was Fujigaya -- who quite often literally protected his charges by skating out and getting to a chaser before the chaser got to his charge. And kicking his head in.
Fujigaya's charges -- like Fujigaya himself, really -- were never very much about flying under the radar. That was why the Morimoto brothers had to have been brought in early, and Kyomoto Taiga and Nikaido Takashi as well.
Well.
Taiga had been Kawai's fault, but that was just a technicality. And Nikaido had been technically Senga's fault -- but since Senga had been Fujigaya's responsibility to start with...
Yokoo shook his head, turning back to Tamamori to continue the lesson: "Of course, it'd be easier to just never have the errants online. But the offline world isn't much of a world anymore. You know this. With the lack of natural resources, there's nothing and almost nobody who'd rather be left out than hooked up. If you want to learn, you join a classroom scenario. If you want to meet people, you go club, get drunk--"
"Wataru," Iida chided.
Yokoo grinned. "Please, Kyon. As if."
"Well, some people do."
"That's because they're stupid and have nothing more worthwhile to concern themselves with..."
"Then the third part," Tamamori said quietly, "is that you bring them here...?"
"Well," Yokoo shrugged. "Sometimes. Most times. Some of our charges die on us before it happens, for one reason or another. Other times, they're actually quite happy just spending most of their time offline and just existing. But the ones who survive and who want it, who develop their own fighting instincts and sharpen their fangs--" Iida chuckled at Yokoo's word choice there. "--shut up, Kyon. They join us, and bring with them the skills to monitor and bring up their own charges." It was a cyclic system like that.
"Of course, Takizawa foots each pre-registration and registration tax bill as if he were paying for his own children, plus ongoing costs," Iida said apologetically. "So while he is not poor, it's impossible to just bring everybody under his banner if the work we do is to continue." Watchtower were charged with monitoring Takizawa's financial affairs, too. Well, Yokoo was anyway. Iida just kept the eggs secure.
"And we aren't a child care centre," Yokoo added. "We simply don't have that capacity, god forbid we ever gain it."
"Wataru..." Iida chided again.
"Don't get me wrong," Yokoo said calmly. "I like children. They taste like nutri-cubes."
"Everything tastes like nutri-cubes," Tamamori muttered.
"What was that, 74-M?" Yokoo grinned.
"Nothing," Tamamori said.
"Sure," Yokoo said, giving Tamamori the benefit of the doubt. He shrugged, and got right down to business: "So now you more or less know what we're about, what do you say?"
Tamamori looked torn. For a moment, his avatar hesitated -- and Iida knew what his answer was going to be.
"...sorry."
Yokoo raised an eyebrow. "Really?"
Tamamori nodded, eyes glued to his feet with a look on his face as if they'd been amputated from being full of gangrene because he didn't wear socks to bed like his mother always told him to. A bit of annoyance. A bit of disgust. But mostly just discomfort and regret. "With my scrambler," he said uncomfortably, "...they might not be able to trace who I am each time, but they can still trace my location, and I..." Tamamori pursed his lips. "Well, even if I go through your firewall, making my location technically untraceable... it's still suspicious. There's someone -- I can't put them at risk like that."
Miyata's supervisors -- the government -- would know if Miyata met up with a guy located at Takizawa's place, and it would place him under more suspicion than he needed. Especially since, if Tamamori was registered and legal, Miyata would deliberately stay out of the way and stuff, since that was just the way he was, and...
Tamamori looked up, decided, and met Yokoo's eyes for a fleeting, awkward moment. "I'm grateful to you guys for everything. And I do really want to help out. But if that means I have to register, then tell your boss I'm sorry."
Maybe he'd be able to help every now and then anyway, in the future... Now that he knew what had been going on in that frozen forest -- if he'd known at the time, he'd have just busted Senga and Nikaido out. But it was too late for that now.
Too late for regrets.
Yokoo looked back at Tamamori evenly, with an unreadable expression. "You're making a mistake," he said. Not pushing or accusing, Tamamori knew. Just posing a statement. "Accept our offer and sever communications with him. It's safer that way for both of you."
"No, I... I know I even said I've been looking for you guys for a long time too, but." Tamamori's eyes were back downcast, his voice soft. "I've known Miyata for longer, and I can't do that to him. I'm sorry."
"...that's alright," Yokoo said. "I understand."
"We'll keep in touch," Iida added. And materialised a small white piece of card in Tamamori's pocket -- similar to the one that Yokoo had given the archer in the forest, but with a different contact sequence on it. "You know where we are now."
Tamamori nodded mutely, his words run out.
"Meet me at the hatch Taisuke brought you in through, before you leave," Yokoo added. "I've got a few things to give you."
With another slow nod that turned into half a bow, Tamamori disengaged from their local connection first and disappeared. Leaving silence to reign over the remaining link.
"...'a mistake', Wataru?" Iida said at last, not accusing, not pushing. Just... posing a statement.
"I was just saying..." Yokoo said stiffly.
"...what you really think," Iida finished for him.
"Kyohei..."
Iida wasn't wrong, and they both knew it. But there were things Yokoo wanted to tell him instead. Reasons, like how a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush -- unless it couldn't sing anymore. How in hindsight, he'd rather just know Iida was out there somewhere, than have him trapped in the walls of these servers.
But he didn't.
"...I'll catch you later," Yokoo said instead. "Tamamori will be waiting." And logged off.
1- man, i feel super lame for puttying up the remainder of my wordcount with exposition rather than skating action for, say, kitayama. 8D but it had to happen eventually is done now.
2- it's... so past midnight. =v=; oops. *clearly can't keep self-imposed rules*