Editing City Series:Volume7 Layer 2 (section)

===Record 80: Everything About the Past===
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'''09/06/1998

'''8:22

It was kind of dark inside a bomb shelter. Which wasn’t too surprising.

At any rate, our odd job for the day was to investigate the one that was discovered over summer break. If it looked usable, we could probably turn it into a living room for the Chancellor’s Officers since it was next to the Student Council Room.

I walked through the narrow passageway with a maglite in hand.

Lady was with me to record everything. She must have been worried because she asked a question.

“Um, is it just me or have a lot of things been passing by us?”

“Well, this bomb shelter has been forgotten about since the end of World War Two, so it’s desperately trying to fill in the holes in the memories. That way it won’t be lost to the people of the present.”

Lady quickly hid behind me to clear the way for something to pass us by. I looked back and saw her pushing her largish glasses up her nose.

“Did you see who just passed by? It was the sun. And it held a large paper bag.”

“Really? To be honest, I couldn’t see at all who it was that passed by.”

“Then only I can see it? I wonder why.”

“Maybe this bomb shelter likes you. In Tokyo, it can’t exist unless it remains in someone’s memory, so it really wants someone to remember it.”

“But I’m not very smart. What if I make a weird assumption, create a memory that shouldn’t exist, and create a fake version of this place in my memories?”

“If it happens, it happens. Memory is power, so you just have to believe that it’s true.”

I turned around again and found a wall there.

Lady was gone.

''Oops.'' Apparently there had been a real-time discrepancy between the internal layout I had seen and the one Lady had imagined and written to her memories. I quickly shined my light on the wall and saw an old metal door.

The door opened from the other side and Lady stepped in with her face pale.

“That was scary. I was searching and searching for you. For quite a while.”

“Sorry, sorry. I should have shined the light around more to give us a better shared understanding. Okay, let’s get going.”

Lady tilted her head when I said that.

“What are you talking about? …We’re outside.”

I looked around and found that we were indeed behind the school building. It had been morning before, but now it was evening. And Lady held out a piece of record paper that was filled with blue glow-in-the-dark ink providing the bomb shelter’s internal layout.

She looked between my face and the record paper.

“I omitted a fair bit on the way. Can you go get the missing parts filled in at the Time-Seer’s shop later?”

“If you want. More importantly, did you go all the way in? Did you find anything there?”

“There was nothing at all. Just a big room with something spray painted on the wall.

She smiled a little.

“It said, ‘Welcome back’.”

'''Author Comment:

Lady appears. The map she’s holding is the first basement of a certain game, but it’s made so it works with the hidden doors, one-way pathways, and the rooms mentioned later on.

This is a little off topic, but I think there were a fair number of abandoned bomb shelters when we were kids during the early 80’s.