Editing City Series:Volume7 Layer 7 (section)

===Record 67: Just Accept It===

'''06/12/1998

'''20:43

We were out on a job at night. I had been doing some gamble mount punching in the meeting room, but now you and I were in the Boss’s car traveling to Hachioji. We were taking National Route 16 south.

I saw the lights of Hachioji Station to the left while the Caddy shook.

“So what brings us out here so late at night?” asked the Boss while he drove. “It’s gotta be more than some trivial student-level fighting.”

“Divine Punishment City – Yokohama contacted us to say a causality battle might break out on our border,” you explained, flipping through the faxed document in the back seat.

“The entire country is still dealing with the effects of unifying the east and the west,” I said. “And I bet Yokohama is still dealing with the effects of the Bakumatsu period. By the way, where’s Lady?”

Wasn’t she from Yokohama? She must have had a good reason to move to Tokyo. I considered contacting her and you must have noticed.

“I called her already. I think she should be able to make her own decision about this.”

“I see,” I said before punching the car we were riding in.

'''If you throw a punch with belief in your heart, all things will receive the blow in accordance with the conservation of energy.

I punched away the slow parts of the car and the Boss turned back toward me.

“What the hell, dude!? Don’t punch my car!”

He started operating the gear shift and steering wheel while he said that. The gear display was an analog gauge and it now went all the way up to gear 99. If you did the torque calculations…

“We can easily break the sound barrier,” said the Boss.

The car accelerated, but someone flew south through the sky even faster than us.

It was a comet.

The fox star had a long bluish-white tail and Daitarou got up from your lap when he saw it.

“Food.”

No, that’s not food. That is Kerry Bantham who is scheduled to fly through next year.

He was known as quite the dandy for being so young, he had been given a peerage rank despite being a homeless comet, and he was the instigator of next year’s Grand Cross. I had heard he was flying all over the sky in preparation for that.

You set the faxed pages aside and picked up Daitarou.

“He’s probably here to see the causality battle. Because the Spacetime Lives get distorted during battles of cause and effect.”

“Why would a comet be interested in seeing a spacetime distortion?” asked the Boss, upset that the figure in the sky was outracing him.

You shut your eyes as you responded.

“Long ago, Kerry’s Comet was said to carry a toxic gas and bring misfortune, so no one went out to see him. But there was just one person – or machine that went out to see him.”

You spoke slowly, choosing your words carefully.

“There is a time-telling Sein Frau on the roof of Kanda’s House of Time clocktower that resonates with the world’s time. She sang for the baron, but her service life is coming to an end soon.”

“And the other countries told the Japanese government to scrap her because a Sein Frau that can resonate with time is a risky thing to have around,” I added.

The Boss glanced back to give us an impressed look. Except this knowledge wasn’t really all that special.

“We went to see the House of Time with Lady that one time, remember? That’s the place. She had already lost her singing voice by August of last year. But she’s being given the chance to see the Grand Cross commanded by the baron one last time. Then the government will sever the House of Time’s time resonance and tell the other countries the deed is done.”

“So the baron is investigating spacetime in the hopes of extending that Sein Frau’s lifespan?”

The Boss added “just like me” to the end of that thought, but I didn’t ask about it.

The car accelerated and Lady never did contact us.

'''Author Comment:

The story of the Grand Cross isn’t told in this Tokyo book.

I don’t know when it will be told.

And Kerry will be touched on more later.