City Series:Volume7 Layer 4

Layer 4: Tears

11/15/1998

11:18

I love the lazy pre-lunch atmosphere of modern Japanese class. I could hear Sensei’s clear voice.

“From the Meiji era to the early Showa era, several bunraku performers drowned in Tokyo’s water supply, so it is said all the people of Tokyo have drunk bunraku Lives, giving them an advantage in the field.”

Makes sense to me. It’s just like drinking milk makes a girl’s boobs grow.

In the seat next to me, Lady passed me a piece of paper folded into a letter.

It was from you. I didn’t expect a letter from you during class when you’re in another building altogether.

I started with the first page.

“How are you doing? I want to ask you something during lunch, so meet me in the cafeteria.”

What could that be about? Onto the second page.

“Sometimes I suddenly feel like crying, but I don’t know why. Does that ever happen to you?”

My answer there would be no. But more importantly, there was a third page.

“I want to talk to you about Senpai.”

I see, I thought while folding the letter back up. I sighed and looked to the side to see Lady pointing forward.

I looked that way to find Sensei glaring coldly back at me.

“What do you think I was just explaining for the class? Can you tell me that, Mr. Mountain Graduate?”

“Well,” I said, standing up and slapping my cheek with the letter. “I now know what it’s like to suddenly feel like crying.”

I just about had to skip lunch that day.

Author Comment:

The title story shows us that the protagonist and Lady are classmates.

They are exempt from classes since they are in the Chancellor’s Officers, but Lady goes out of habit and the protagonist goes when he feels like it.

Record 54: What I Remember When I’m With You

03/01/1998

22:01

It might be March now, but it’s stall damn cold on the dorm building rooftop. I have the beginning of the final exams to thank for this. The Chancellor’s Officers have a lot less work to do at this time of year, but…

“Why do I have to watch out for students sneaking out at night when it’s still winter?”

My voice faded into the distance. I was looking at over a hundred monitors, each of which gave a different view of the area around the boys’ dorm. If I saw anyone suspicious on there…

“I hit the button for some light punishment.”

I saw something weird on monitor 8-1 on the upper right, so I pressed the button. A white beam of light shot into the sky from the admin building to the north. The beam curved back toward the ground and swallowed up the ground to the west.

After a moment, light exploded to the west. One down. There punishment was so light it was kind of boring.

I was tilting my head in front of the monitors when I heard your voice.

“Stop that. The neutron word cannon scatters the target’s elements around, making cleanup a real pain, so don’t fire it any more than necessary.”

I looked back to see you had arrived with some food for me. You raised the fast food bag in your hand.

“Feeling cold?”

“Yeah. But I can’t relax because there’s so many people I have to take out. That one suddenly started ninja-running through the hall without any clothes on. I bet he assumed no one would notice and was enjoying the thrill.”

“It is exam time. You never know what people will do when they’re stressed. But that’s unfortunate for him. If that had blown him away, he could have discovered something no one else saw.”

Maybe so. I checked the monitor to see the naked student now had an afro from the explosion. A gym teacher ran over and performed a giant swing on him.

I could hear their voices from the monitor.

“Well? How do you like this?”

“Ahh, more! Swing me more!”

Those two sure were enjoying themselves.

“Well, I doubt he’ll get into trouble again.”

I reached that conclusion and sighed. I pulled a burger from the bag you handed me. I looked through the monitors and switched on one that was still off. I aimed the camera toward the sky and zoomed in.

That displayed the starry sky, making for a simple telescope.

“My life would be so much nicer if I got to spy on the girls’ dorm instead. Look, you can see Kerry’s Comet that will be arriving next year.”

“Baron Kerry Bantham, right? They say he’s the instigator of the Grand Cross and a regular customer at the bank.”

Girls love that kind of story, don’t they? I thought while watching you stare at the monitor.

Now that is a nice ass, I thought just before you looked back.

“Did you just think something inappropriate?”

“Of course not. Oh, and hit the button for the second monitor from the right. There’s an idiot there.”

You switched from the neutron word cannon to physical artillery and fired. It wasn’t a tracer round, so I could only hear it flying north.

“I was just thinking.” You stared at the monitor showing the comet and began humming. “The night I first met Senpai was a lot like this one.”

Author Comment:

The protagonists are exempt from exams since they’re in the Chancellor’s Officers, but that means they have work to do instead. It’s probably not a good idea to be so cavalier about shooting people. I bet Snowy is out patrolling on her own.

Record 102: You Won’t Teach Me

01/02/1999

8:21

One busy morning at the shrine, you gave me an exasperated look.

“Wait, are you saying you’ve had a cold ever since Christmas?”

“It’s not my fault. Anyway, what are you plotting by calling me here today?”

“I don’t like that phrasing.”

You were wearing a coat and had your right hand against your hip while also holding White Fox Daitarou with it. Your left middle finger was pointed at my face.

“What’s the date? January 2, right? Have you visited the shrine yet? You haven’t, have you? Well?”

Well, what? I thought while taking a look around.

Lots of women and children all dressed up in a way that practically screamed “kidnap me” were lined up in front of the main shrine building.

“So you wanted me to flush my money down the toilet?”

“It’s called making an offering. And there are benefits to it.”

“Are there, though?” I checked the menu hanging on a nearby plum tree. “The special prize costs 50 thousand? What a rip-off. Hm, this Super Effective Shrine Maiden Set and Kung Fu Punch Priest Pack are certainly attention grabbing, but what even are they?”

“Just ignore the weird rituals, okay? …You don’t want to do this, do you?”

“Of course I don’t,” I said, taking another look around. All the people looked nice so dressed up.

But when I looked at you, I found you wearing a coat and holding Daitarou. You had a lot of his fur on you.

“Why aren’t you dressed up? And then you bring your kid along and make me pay for him. Do you have a grudge against me?”

“Daitarou is not my child, idiot. Besides, what’s the point of dressing up for you?”

“Did you dress up for Senpai?”

“No, he doesn’t like going out during the day. And he says he likes to avoid priests.”

It sounded like a tough life, but I soon walked over to the stand selling fortunes and spoke to the old man there.

“One Ceylon tea with lemon.”

“Ho ho? First time here, sir? These fortunes are made with that sacred tree’s-”

I didn’t bother hearing him out before selecting one of the fortunes. It said…

“Great-”

“Great loss. Prepare for an interesting financial year. By, god.”

You peered over my shoulder and read it for me. Annoyed, I tasted a corner of the paper. Seeing that, Daitarou looked up from your arms, opened his mouth, and spoke quietly.

“Food.”

You looked down at him in surprise. That was the first time he had spoken as a white fox.

I shook my head, grabbed him, and shook him up and down.

“Food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, fooooood!”

The bastard was nothing but endless hunger. Once I was out of breath, you laughed.

“Now you need to feed him. You can get a head start on your interesting financial year.”

Author Comment:

Daitarou’s first word.

You is incredibly lacking in sex appeal, but maybe because she’s always wearing her casual clothes around the protagonist.

This is just how it always is with them, I guess.

The guy running the stand is the same one as in the first layer.

Record 73: The Hole in the Sky

07/21/1998

21:04

“July 20 was ocean day. I hear it was a wonderful day.”

I spoke to myself in the night while looking down at my palms stained with blue paint. The Boss sat next to me looking at his palms stained with sunset-colored paint.

“July 21 is an unhappy day used to resolve the troubles brought by the happy day preceding it.”

“Stop slacking off, you two,” said Snowy, wiping the black paint from her palms behind us.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said and took a look around. We were on an artificial beach not far from Tokyo Bay. And we were sitting on…

“Why does it have to be an industrial tarp instead of real sand taken from a real beach?”

It was dark out and we were facing an ocean of words with some outdated slang wastewords mixed in. By watching the outdated slang wash up on the beach, I could feel my vocabulary growing in a weird way. Groovy.

I looked into the sky. It was already night, but there was a 5m hole in the sky.

That was thanks to the stars making an ultra-high-altitude dive into the ocean when it was opened up yesterday. Those of us who live here on the surface can’t get past the Great Canopy to access the outside world, but the stars can descend into a temporary body down here in Tokyo. Thanks to that, Tokyo had become something of a resort for them.

“Is Senpai doing the painting right now?”

“Yes. It is an hour before Lady’s shift ends, but it is his duty to match the city hall’s schedule.”

“Yeah, because Lady got addicted to Nancy and started laughing out of nowhere,” said the Boss. “It affects her faster because she’s so small.”

Snowy jabbed him from behind with her paintbrush handle for that.

“Do not mock people for their body type.”

“You didn’t have to jab me.”

“Be glad I did not use my Mobilized Writing.”

I moved between them and tried to calm the irritation growing between us.

“Calm down, you two. How about we go do something more radical and far out?”

I ended up using slang from the wrong era. Huh? I didn’t mean to say that, I noticed while the Boss and Snowy slowly exchanged a glance before pointing at me.

“Hey, Snowy. This idiot’s been infected by the old words.”

“Corrupted would be the better word. Idiot, however, was the perfect word choice.”

“What an awful thing to say, my amigos.”

“Oh, shut up. Excuse me, is there a medical team nearby? We have a case of Ocean Lover’s Syndrome over here!”

“As if. I’m doing hella fine over here.”

Uh, oh. It really did feel like the language center of my brain was being violated.

Then you arrived with some food in a paper bag. You took one look at me and…

“You look like you’ve been having fun. So what have you been doing? Something stupid no doubt.”

I recovered instantly. Yes, instantly.

Author Comment:

Wastewords are also touched on in the Osaka game’s Tokyo trip.

If the stars enjoy diving, I bet they go to the Fault for fun as well.

Record 39: To My Image

11/01/1997

7:43

I was eating lunch with the science club in the joint cafeteria when the Professor walked up to me.

“We’re about to go help set up for the school festival. Care to join us?”

I didn’t have anything better to do, so it was off to the general school building in the center of campus.

I could see the science club and the movie club doing something in front of the northern school building. The sunlight put that building’s wall in shadow, so they were hanging up a white screen and setting up a stupid long rail in the middle of the schoolyard.

The rail passed through the schoolyard and across the road outside the back entrance. The rail carried a Caddy they had probably gotten from the car club and a projector was mounted on the center of the chassis.

“Why would you mount a projector on a car?”

“This will display the past. You know how traveling faster than light causes time to flow in reverse, right?”

“No, I don’t know that.”

“Fine, I’ll explain this like I’m talking to an idiot. Which I am. Ready? We place a screen on the wall, we have the audience in the schoolyard, and we shine the projector’s light on the screen. Do you get that much? I’ll be mad with you if you don’t.” He pointed at the projector mounted on the car. “The car club is going to really put their back into it, so that projector will be super-accelerated from about 12km away. There are tons of exciting dramas, right? And just as many painful goodbyes, right? But none of that matters to us. Anything emitted from a speeding car will-”

“Will gain the car’s inertial speed.”

“Exactly! So the light emitted by the projector on the accelerated car will add the car’s acceleration on top of the ordinary speed of light and project the audience’s shadows on the screen. Those shadows will then move back in time to show us some incredible images.”

I pictured it for a moment, but got fed up with it pretty quick.

Then I heard a girl’s voice from behind us.

“I have one comment on this.”

I looked back to see Snowy for the first time in a while. She must have just gotten up because she was dressed casually.

“And what is your comment?” The Professor pushed up his glasses. “Hopefully not some shocking revelation that you have secretly been a girl all this time.”

“I will execute you later. I was wondering how you planned to stop this ‘super-accelerated’ car.”

Everyone in the schoolyard froze and Snowy turned to look at us all.

“This fist-obsessed idiot and I will not be assisting you. The Chancellor’s Officers have a duty to preserve the secrecy of personal information, so we cannot search out information from the past like this.”

Yeah, I guess she’s right. I stepped up next to her and whispered so only she could hear.

“That’s especially true with you, isn’t it?”

“Do not worry about me. What happened at the Mountain was only a reaction to the unexpected hit. I am fine.”

She crossed her arms with her usual unsociable look, so I scratched my head and nodded silently.

We watched as the Professor pulled a small device from his lab coat pocket and performed a conduction test with a tester. He kept fiddling with the device for a while and then turned to us with a cheerful voice.

“Nothing to worry about here. I secretly equipped the car with a self-destruct device last night. Casualties will be kept to a minimum.”

To keep the casualties to an even smaller minimum, I punched him out.

Author Comment:

An experiment in projecting the past. When writing things like this, I sometimes realize I don’t know how any of this works in real life. But I also think shadows really are an image of the past, just the very recent past thanks to the speed of light.

It’s strange to think that something so close to you doesn’t exist in the same time as you.

Record 15: Reminds Me of Something

05/18/1997

9:52

I had expected the studying and training, but once I got to the Mountain, I found there were three other annoyances I had to deal with: cleaning, laundry, and cooking. Under the supervision of the Religious League that ran the Mountain, we were dressed up like Buddhist monks and forced to work like workhorses. No, more like worker ants.

First thing in the morning, we had to clean the floors, sweep the paths, wash the shoes, dry the clothes, draw the water, and cook the rice. I’m something of a genius, so I had it mostly down pat after three days.

Yes, I dried the floor, drew the paths, cooked the shoes, swept the clothes, washed the water, and cleaned the rice. Damn, I’m a genius. The only way to reward myself was to go peep on the women’s open-air bath. My ultimate instincts told me a lot of the girls were morning bathers.

I dashed there. I wasted the covert skills I had learned over the past few days to run through the mountain and approach my destination. Someone was already there. Someone I didn’t recognize was clinging to the rocky mountain surface. He looked to be a little older than us, his right arm was a prosthetic, and he looked pretty friendly. I recalled that a few Kansai VIPs had arrived yesterday.

I began racing him up the mountain. We faced each other in front of the bamboo partition at the top of the mountain. His expression grew deadly serious and he readied his arms with the morning sun in the background.

“Well done surviving the climb, young hero. But only one of us may peep!”

“What are things like in there? No, you don’t have to tell me. They’re still undressing, aren’t they?”

We exchanged a nod and took fighting stances on our narrow footing.

Then the partition exploded and we were both blasted into the morning sky.

The last thing I saw was you and the others plus a girl wearing only a towel and aiming some kind of giant staff our way.

Author Comment:

The Osaka characters make a cameo. I knew at one point which of the airborne figures was the horny one and which one was the protagonist, but I forget now. I wonder which was which…

Record 43: Soothing His Weariness

12/03/1997

18:39

Our job was done. The Kansai students were all rethinking their lives after being punched or slashed into the Tama River. People from Osaka are apparently a lot sturdier than us, so it took some doing.

At any rate, I was sitting on a guardrail up on the riverbank when Senpai walked up to me and spoke.

“Now I have even more to worry about.”

He sat on the road. He held his sword in his arms and hung his head, but instead of weary, he looked more…how should I put it? There was a hint of impatience there and you hurried over to him.

But he held out a hand to stop your approach.

“That would only give me more to worry about. Keep at last 5m away from me.”

“What about me?” I asked.

“Why would I suck a boy’s blood?”

Oh, so that’s what this was about. Your face was pale with worry, so I waved a hand to tell you to calm down.

You gave me a “we’re having pork cutlets for dinner?” gesture back.

We were not communicating very well.

I gave a simple “go away” gesture and you didn’t look happy about it.

Whatever. I sighed and spoke to Senpai.

“You haven’t changed at all since I first met you, huh?”

“I have grown since then,” he said with a sigh. “But yes, I have not changed. Including the fact that only person in the world is capable of stopping me.”

Author Comment:

A look at something like a weakness in Senpai.

The protagonist and Senpai are friendly with each other, but I think it may be Senpai that lets it be that way.

Record 58: Never Forgets

04/05/1998

21:46

It was spring break, but I was in Surface Tokyo with Lady and Snowy on the way back from a job in Kanda.

We had only just submitted our Chancellor’s Officers personnel paperwork. The train was pretty deserted.

We had gotten a lot of detailed information at the Emergency Teachers station. Ordinary students advanced to the next year in April, but we wouldn’t do that until September. If there were no promising students from the Mountain by then, we would be the Chancellor’s Officers for next year too. Of the 128 primary members of the Tokyo Chancellor’s Officers, most would either serve for more than a year or recommend someone in April and let them take over.

I was wondering if I would eventually do that too when I looked back inside the train and noticed Nobody was sitting next to me.

“Hi,” he didn’t greet me. “Nobody never forgets. That’s just how it works. Yes, how it works,” I didn’t hear him say in a deep voice.

“Long time no see,” I didn’t reply before looking back in the train. I found nobody was there except for me and for Lady and Snowy in the seats across from me. And that was fine.

The two of them were looking out the window and entirely ignoring me. Lady was kneeling in the seat and fully turned toward the window while Snowy had her legs and arms crossed with just her head turned. Our girls had such different interests and tastes, but they got along really well and created what you would call a girl’s space where I don’t belong.

“Look, Snowy. The train is crossing the Great Tokyo Fault.”

“Yes. There was once a hole here known as the Northern Tokyo Fault, but it was hit by an aerial strike during the war my grandfather fought in. That expanded the fault into what we see now.”

Huh. I didn’t know much about the prewar period, so that was news to me.

“You know a lot about this, Snowy.”

She ignored me for some reason. Dammit.

But whatever. I couldn’t see well outside their window thanks to the reflection, but the train was now on an elevated track crossing the empty space of the Fault. That thing I saw in the distant sky had to be Koganei’s midair park.

Then out of nowhere, Snowy turned toward me, tapped Lady on the shoulder, and pointed out the window behind me.

“Do you see the lights of the Keio Line in the sky out there? You should see the lights of a large city past that. That is Chofu, known for its large airport.”

Lady turned around and looked behind me. It felt this awkward itchy feeling like they were looking at me.

“The colossal air-defense Heavy Barrel named Beautiful Broadcast was the foundation of the imperial capital’s defenses, but when it realized its power had led to the aerial bombing, it drew the bombers away and self-destructed in that land. It triggered a gravity overload in its engine, which is why Chofu still has uniquely powerful gravity even for the Fault.”

As soon as Snowy finished, I didn’t hear Nobody’s voice in my ear.

“Nobody never forgets. That’s just how it works. And it’s fine that way.”

I turned around out of sheer curiosity and only saw my own reflection in the window.

Author Comment:

I later gave Nobody a personality, so I rewrote this one a bit.

I thought about making it an unidentified voice with the night or something speaking, but the line didn’t really allow for that.

When driving through Chofu at night, the darkness opens up where the airport was and it feels like there’s a big hole there.

Record 109: Mistakes and Laments

02/15/1999

1:21

Senpai never did return and I never got any decent results playing gambling sleeper choke hold with the astronomy club who always work late into the night.

And I was kicked out of the bomb shelter meeting room when Snowy needed to use the bath past midnight, so it hadn’t been a good night for me.

I sighed and groaned on the way home. After walking 20 minutes, I arrived at the apartment where I live alone.

Getting inside required passing through the gate. The entrance door had a voiceprint lock, so you had to say the passphrase you had chosen yourself.

I took a look around to make sure no one was nearby before saying my phrase.

“This week’s Saturday night movie is the latest hit by the German genius Nachiheil Suanfurt: Forbidden Love – Clash of the Zengars 5.”

The door opened.

Unusual for it to work the first time. I usually ended up saying it 5 or 6 times while the women carrying shopping bags home gave me weird looks. If only my parents hadn’t forced me to set it up like this…

But whatever. The point was I was having a bad day.

But now it was time to change that! By getting to sleep.

Just as I was about to step inside, I saw a seated figure in the shadow next to the door.

Oh, no! Did someone hear that!?

No. A closer look showed this person was seated and asleep. No, wait.

“They aren’t breathing.”

I pinched my cheek once and shoved my head into the shadow to get a better look. The shadow filled my vision and tried to hide everything, so I activated my Mobilized Writing.

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

I blew away the darkness. I saw white tile and I could now identify the person sitting there.

“You? But why?”

You slowly looked up in response to my voice.

Your face was pale with exhaustion. But more than that…

“There’s blood on your clothes.”

You looked down at the large quantity of blood on your clothing, but you shook your head.

You looked me in the eye.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah, of course.”

You smiled a little at my immediate response.

A tear spilled from the corner of your narrowed eyes.

“I never grow cause I’m so dumb. So hurry up and ask. Tell me why you need my power.”

You nodded and loosened your coat’s collar.

You revealed your pale shoulder.

“Can you save anything and everything with your power?”

I saw two holes on your throat. Sharp, deep holes.

I stopped breathing and you started to weep.

I managed a trembling breath and asked a question.

“Did you already save something with your blood and tears?”

Author Comment:

Something bad happened.

Coming up with these movie names each time is a challenge. I feel like I may be misplacing my efforts there.

Record 33: I Don’t Understand

09/29/1997

17:49

Our Mountain training was ending the day after tomorrow. After finishing my work for the day, I went to visit Snowy who had collapsed during the final match of our exam. I walked down the mountain path for a bit and found the autumn leaves were already colored by the sunset. Once I arrived in front of the medical building surrounded by red leaves, I saw Snowy speaking with a woman. Snowy wore a white monk’s robe and stood in front of the vending machine. The brown-haired woman wore a brown coat and sat on top of the vending machine.

Snowy turned around when I raised a hand and greeted her. She didn’t look happy and asked why I was here with her eyebrows. I held my head proudly high as I responded.

“I’m here to see how the loser is doing. So who’s she?”

“Hello. Friend of hers? I am the West Wind. This girl has helped me out a lot over the past few days.”

The woman brushed up her long brown hair and summoned the wind. The red, crimson, and yellow mountain rustled and shook. The fallen leaves looked so beautiful blowing in the wind. …Hey, wait. We’re the ones who have to clean all those up.

“This is pleasant time of year, but it gets tedious with the South Wind, East Wind, and North Wind gone.”

“I see,” I said while walking up next to the vending machine. The West Wind suddenly handed me 150 yen from atop the vending machine. “I’ve never been given money by the wind before. Buying me a drink?”

“Sorry, but no. I feel like some coffee, but I’m so light in early fall, you know?”

“She says she can sit on windowsills and roofs, but she can’t stand on the ground. Buy the drink and hand it to her.”

Would she gain enough weight to stand if she drank enough sugary coffee?

I won a second one, so I gave it to Snowy to help her recover.

Author Comment:

The West Wind is wandering around.

The winds are generally Wind Lives data entities, so they appear in human form to anyone who wants to see them or that can see that kind of thing. Maybe there’s a connection to how people interpret spirits.

Record 94: I’ll Think About It

11/20/1998

11:32

Two weeks had passed since the end of the school festival, so the photos to distribute around the school had arrived. The psychic photograph of the dark side of the moon taken in a corner of a classroom made me really wonder what the students here are even doing.

I checked the clock to find it was nearly fourth period when Lady ran up to me.

“Senpai is out in the hall, but he says he wants to speak with you, not me. What did you do this time?”

“Sorry, but there are way too many possibilities for me to know which one this is about.”

She smiled bitterly at that. I patted her on the shoulder and then moved to the hallway.

Senpai was viewing the photos on the wall. It was an unusual scene.

“I am in this photo, but I do not recall it being taken. This is worrying.”

“It’s a simple trick. The date on there is yesterday, right? The astronomy photo team blew up a photo of the reflection in the icy surface of a frozen planet 7 light-days away. The light’s round trip time lets them take a photo of the earth two weeks ago.”

“I see,” he said before lowering his voice so only I could hear it. “Do not tell anyone – even the other Officers – about yesterday’s battle. We now know our enemy is not just Kansai students, but a corporation. They likely want to start a conflict that would correct the east-west power balance shift caused by Babel.”

I nodded and looked to the side. Lady was viewing the photos a step away from me.

An aerial photo of part of the closing ceremony showed the Chancellor’s Officers and the various club leaders waving into the sky from the roof. The date on the photo was yesterday. Lady viewed it for a while and then turned toward me with a smile.

“I’m surprised. I didn’t know Senpai could smile.”

Author Comment:

Senpai shows up to tell the protagonist to stay silent about the previous chapter’s battle. He appears to have realized some things.

As for the photos, that is another way of displaying the past.

I wonder what would happen if you did view the earth from a distant planet using an optical telescope. If the planet was 100 lightyears away, would you be able to see the earth’s air getting dirty from the industrial revolution?

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