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sga_flashfic2008-04-05 07:36 am
saphanibaal.livejournal.com) wrote in sga_flashfic2008-04-05 07:36 am
Entry tags:
Nine Springs, by Sophonisba [family challenge]
-title- Nine Springs
-author- Sophonisba (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saphanibaal)
-warnings/ratings- Gen. Crossover with Shimpi no Sekai El-Hazard and most of Aoyama Gosho's works. Takes place in my pet asymptotic-to-canon AU.
-spoilers- Through third season, to be safe. Spoilers for... well, for somewhere in SG-1, but as it's something I learned through osmosis, I'm not sure where to judge it. Also, in case anyone cares, for the seventh OVA of El-Hazard, and for the first volumes of Meitantei Conan and Magic Kaito respectively. There are minor references to my Zophonisbeion stories "Miko and the Bears" and "The Sun Shines Bright On Every Stone."
-characters- Miko, OCs, two characters from El-Hazard, six from Meitantei Conan, two-and-a-half from Magic Kaito, and walk-on appearances from Rodney, Jinto, Wex, Sheppard, Teyla, and Terumi from "Watashi ni Uso o Tsuite."
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Nor is El-Hazard. If I were Aoyama, my pet MK threesome would be canon and at least somebody would have read Beatrice Gormley... i.e., not hardly. The idea of involving the Hope Diamond is from Ellen Brand (marsdejahthoris), who went on to do something utterly unique with it; "The world is large enough..." is from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and "As they have ever done" from J. R. R. Tolkien.
-word count- 6583
-summary- Miko, and background, and spackle.
Nine Springs
Kui, the village of the nine springs, lies hidden in a fold of the mountains that shield the bay of Edo, in the old land of Musashi, too far south of the Tama River and north of the Kai Province Highway to have risen to historical prominence. It has recently been incorporated into one of the cities within the Tokyo metropolitan limits, effectively confusing the grandchildren when they want to write home.
The peasants of Kui have lived there for time immemorial, a standoffish lot, largely keeping to themselves; even now that many of the young people live and work down in the special wards of the capital, they are still hesitant to marry outsiders. For example, when Kusanagi Ryousuke, of Tanashi, having built up a good job in Nerima City and more in the way of personal fortunes than he knew what to do with, told his mother that he was thinking about maybe getting married, she talked to her parents back in Kui and they talked to some of their neighbors who had granddaughters in Nerima, and before Ryousuke knew it he had a meeting arranged with Kuroba Yuuko, who had been born in Kui before her father decided to go where the employment opportunities were. (The meeting went well: he and Yuuko eventually married and had four children, a rarity for the chronically-fertilitally-challenged Kui indigenes and an occurrence which has most of the old gossips of Kui cheerfully suspecting Mrs. Kusanagi of infidelity, although Nobuo, Ayaka, Miko and Kenji match two of the three true-Kui faces between them.)
Wars and other disturbances have from time to time encouraged exogamy, though; while Ryousuke was conceived before his father left for the war, many of his mother's agemates were widowed childless or spinsters, choosing either to marry much older neighbors in the hopes of eventually conceiving or to marry the more virile sons of other boroughs and villages in the West Tama district, adding uncharacteristic names such as Mizuhara and Arai to extended family trees.
*
When the Meiji laws demanded that all households take a family name, the villagers of Kui decided, rather than settle on a host of unrelated names or unilaterally adopt their hamlet's name, to choose names beginning with the syllable "Ku." These range from the prosaic Kubo, Kuroba, Kuno and Kurogane to the more elaborate Kuwabara, Kuramabayashi,
Kusaka and the ostentatious Kusanagi adopted by the rector-priests of the local shrine and their descendants, who took the opportunity to claim descent from the Kusanagi glaive and reiterate their loyalty to the Emperor.
Unlikely as such a claim might seem to foreign eyes, it is nevertheless true that, of all the odd abilities and happenstances of the Kui dwellers, most of them tend to converge on the rectors and incumbents of their shrine, helped by the careful management of the arranging of their marriages.
Most noteworthy of them is the ability to see clearly, as they have put it; to look at a person and be able to know, without fail, that this person is fully and utterly human, that that person is partly not, that the person to whom they are speaking is descended from the mizuchi-aragami, the feral serpent kami of Kui lore.
(The current rector of the Kui shrine does not think much of the prevailing tendency to translate "kami" into English as "god," which latter carries a host of connotations alien to the Japanese word. Kami have power, or are power, some for good, some for evil, often for themselves. They are not necessarily omnipotent, or immortal, and even humans can become kami; they are honored or placated as the case may be, told how wonderful they are with respect but not necessarily with worship as the gods of other peoples are worshipped. Even tengu- and fox- and mizuchi-aragami, whom the villagers of Kui have challenged before and will challenge again, for the sake of the bloodline of the chosen heirs of the Lady Who Illuminates The Heavens and of all of humanity, are no less kami and deserving of respect for their power, if nothing else.)
The sight does not necessarily come with knowledge, however. The first time Ryousuke (or his daughters or grandsons, for that matter) saw persons with nonhuman genes, he did not know what it was that seemed different to him: yet they were somehow set apart, in his mind, from the general run of humanity, and he had no idea why. Nor did he or most of his branch of the Kusanagi family truly believe the reason when it was told to them; they were modern sorts, on the whole, and the world was big enough for them; "no ghosts need apply." (His younger daughter wound up being an exception, largely because she was too good a scientist not to at least entertain a hypothesis that continued to be supported by later evidence.)
Indeed, his grandson Mitsuhiko has yet to recognize this difference as something to look for when identifying people, despite obvious advantages to doing so.
His daughter Miko, on the other hand, on her last visit to the land of her birth, took the bus out to see her cousin at the shrine and dutifully reported that she had seen persons of gaki descent, trying as best she could to put into words what about those persons exuded the aura of the legendary hungry-wraiths without an example to show him.
"Gaki?" the rector said, startled.
"It is classified, you understand," Miko explained, "but should I and mine be successful on our part, the gaki themselves should never come here."
"Yet I have never heard of gaki mingling their essence with a human's."
"It seems," Miko Kusanagi said delicately, "that the resulting... hybrid... tastes better to a feeding gaki. One might hope that the gaki would end by eating each other up and leaving humanity alone, but they are not inclined to arrange themselves so conveniently."
"It is a pity, indeed," her cousin agreed mildly, and arranged for her to undergo a thorough cleansing before she returned again to a world that demanded she strive against hungry-wraiths.
*
Attitudes about the not-quite human have changed, perhaps partially due to decreasing belief in them -- when one of the new-named Kudou took a woman with mizuchi-aragami blood (and doubtless the memory of her mizuchi-aragami-scion ancestors back at least to the fourth generation, if not more; marked, at any rate, by the accursed inheritance of the mizuchi-aragami, proud and pitiless, the stink of their deeds an outrage under heaven, beneath whose borrowed feet the earth cries out) as his wife, he was cast out of the village and sent to make his way with his female as best he might. (Which, given the massive urbanization of the Imperial Capitol then going on, was scarcely as slim a chance as it might have been a generation or two before.)
When their descendant, Kudou Yanagi, began seeing one Kuroba Touichi seriously (younger brother of the new Kusanagi Yuuko, and thus likewise the grandson of an old and honored family of Kui), the neighborhood association of Kui discussed it ferociously, gathering in the precincts of their shrine to argue the matter.
In the end, Kuroba Souzou, father of Touichi and his sisters, only son of Kui of his generation to return alive and unmaimed, stomped to the forefront.
"It's probably no worse an inheritance than any outsider," he grunted, harsh and terse. "It's not as if anyone needed mizuchi-aragami in the bone for their deeds to reek as high as heaven, or for the earth to revolt under the corpses."
And, half-scandalized by the bluntness that would say as much rather than hint and imply, half ready and willing to come in the end to some accomodation whose terms would never be anything as uncouth as laid out, they let the matter be, several of the younger generation going so far as to keep in touch with Touichi and Yanagi after their wedding.
*
Yanagi's brother, Kudou Yuusaku, once touched an artifact of the Forerunners (Alterans, eni Anquitas, Lanteans, Danavi, fourth of the Asura races) in Hawai`i.
It did nothing. Without the recessive ATA-gene (A-Treinibus-Agents, A-3-Agent, activating Agent-gene of the Ancient Artifice Activation gene sequence), the son of a Kudou and a distant kinswoman on the mizuchi-aragami side could not, of course, light so much as a crystal.
With four grandparents of not a little mizuchi-aragami blood (for so they are drawn, each to each, so that such is not uncommon. Indeed, it is only learned behavior copied from those around them that sometimes holds them back from seeking one another within the closest of family bonds, such that two of the nations who once sheltered those of mizuchi-aragami blood in the early centuries of their great diaspora were later epigrammatized as children of incest from their very beginnings; although such libels may also be attributed in part to incomplete euhemerization by scribes denying divine descent for the nations in question, holding their gods as nothing before the Name the writers would serve, and in part to a perfectly understandable if rather ugly war of ethnicities, faiths, and ideologies), and only one of them of the line of a Kudou with even as much Forerunner blood as the admittedly close-bred village of Kui had refined over the centuries, Yuusaku like the others of his line and generation was not even granted the merciful block to his inherited mizuchi-aragami nature that sufficient Forerunner genes ensures; his inheritance from Kui was all in his face, and perhaps a little in the timbre of his voice. A thousand crimes of selfishness, from simple theft to murder and worse, lined the halls of his memory, grown into shapes set before his birth of how it had been to do those foul deeds; and he wrote them all out into his books, weaving mysteries around them to bind them and force them into a pattern of the natural order restored at last and away from him, to make him money and have no further power to hinder him in his daily reaffirming of his self as his own self, and not that of yet another ancestor.
For all that, the first time he saw an adaptation of Le secret de l'eau bleu -- the Jean Renoir version, not the television series Yuusaku's son and the girl next door watched religiously -- he felt a terrible longing for something he could not place and not quite name, and dreamed of walking halls of silver and blue while windows gave onto the open sea.
The son his sister Yanagi bore her husband Touichi, though, was descended of Kui blood on both sides, and while Yuusaku had the face of their grandfather it was Yanagi who was granted more of his share of genes in the genetic combination lottery: her son recalled nothing of her memories save for his memories of her recounting them, and many and varied as the griefs and horrors he was to suffer in his life were, that at least was never among them.
*
It is not known how much of the population of Kui might at least possess the ATA-gene, as aside from speculations that enough Forerunner in one's makeup to render the effects of known drugs unpredictable might be likely to coincide with possession of said gene (and a little thought would count this hypothesis as highly unlikely, although not in fact impossible; Yuusaku's wife for one, a woman whom Kuroba Touichi judged no more than human -- and, if he did not have the Kusanagi sight, he had something very nearly as good, something he refused on his honor as a prestidigitator and a maker of magic to reveal -- was elsewhere in Hawai`i at the time and never saw the ancient creation masquerading as a hunk of overpriced junk that her husband set hand to unknowing), only three descendants of the Kui families have so far been exposed to ATA-based technology.
Kusanagi Miko labors in a city full of it, at the side of those who can use it and the gifts of the hands and their brains to avert or at least mitigate disasters. One way or another, they have saved her life so many times (despite her own small parts in such matters, now and again) that the cords of obligation have twisted and knotted and woven themselves into a net of duty, duty to her elders and to her masters and to her lords, and thus something that, once she has slipped into an ancestral mindset without even the crutch of inherited recollections, she can live with.
Mizuhara Makoto, grandson of Yuuko and Touichi's sister, great-grandson on the other side of a woman who left Kui to marry a Mizuhara and console him for the physical condition that left him unable to join the glorious cause that had swept up his friends and classmates, first encountered ancient (if not Ancient) artifice when it swept him and a few others up and flung them through something very like a wormhole, in order to force the formation of a stable time loop.
Because of the nature of the vortex, its edges disrupted the connections between the spirits, astral bodies, and bodies of those adjacent to it, leaving them with the ability to develop at least one of the skills that those of Forerunner blood often gained as they approached enlightenment, "gifts" that would be useful indeed if the ascending ones did not then go on to, in effect, lock themselves in a small box for the rest of eternity.
Three of the vortex's passengers, not seeking enlightenment, bore no qualms about putting their newfound gifts to use; when Makoto laid his hand on robot made by the descendants of castaway Forerunners with technology derived from Ancient Artifice and felt it quiver to life under his touch, he thought only that he at last had discovered his vortex-gift. Considering that the ATA-gene enabled him to disable a hard-coded slave circuit that was forcing an AI to attack him and his companions, both old and new, he was not inclined to question the blessings of good fortune.
Not so inclined, at least, until he attempted to use it to reverse the actions of the vortex, and found himself and the item he had been attempting to use, not on the grounds of his high school with the one who had sent him and the others thence mere hours if not minutes after she had done so, but on a beach with his mother's cousin Miko and some people she knew, a dozen years late. A beach, moreover, which was not in Japan, nor yet on Tellus, but on a planet known variously as Atlantica, Lantea, Neo-Atlan, or Fred, orbiting a star located in a cluster known as the Pegasus Galaxy.
Still, should one be lost with a piece of ancient technology that moves one through time, space, and the other, and should one be desirous of finding out how to work the device so as to go to a given place and time without unpleasant side effects for one or anyone else, one could do worse than land on a beach occupied by Kusanagi Miko-hakase. One would, in fact, find it hard indeed not to do worse than to land on such a beach occupied not only by Kusanagi-hakase but by Rodney McKay-hakase, despite the latter's long animadversions on Linking Through Another Dimension, Allegedly Intelligent Persons Who Somehow Believed This Was A Good Idea (Possibly Related To Their Ideas Of Conditions Of Servitude), and Would You Stop Calling It A Wormhole Because It Isn't.
Makoto gladly learned, and gladly brought the woman of his heart to meet them in return (introducing his cousin to her for the first time, and renewing Miko's acquaintance with her cousin's bride), worried about her lack of energy even after he had done what he could.
Miko and her superior took far less time to diagnose her than they had to unravel the mysteries of vortex travel; they solved her problem of drained battery, offered the Mizuhara couple positions once they had done with traveling in time the hard way, and cheerfully sent them on their way before Doctor McKay demanded a full and complete report on what else Miko had known or brought along that she hadn't thought worth bringing up.
Dr. Park Eun-hee has no desire to be connected with the village of Kui, wishes she had never heard of it, and would be delighted to ignore the whole matter for the rest of her and her parents' lives if the coworkers at her new position didn't continually mistake her for Miko-doing-something-different-with-her-hair. They don't even look that much alike, no more than, oh, that former alien boyfriend of Col. Carter's and Dr. Weir's ex-fiance.
*
The clear sight of the Kusanagi, in some cases, goes beyond simple recognition of another's humanity, adulteration thereof, or outright lack of it. Each of those cases manifests differently; the rarest version, fortunately, is that of being able to read the thoughts of someone when looking them in the eye.
This would be dismissed as sheer folk-tale-ness, if only a case of it had not cropped up; in the great-granddaughter of a woman who married an outsider, moreover.
Kusanagi Kenji first discovered this when she saw through his hasty, ah, veiling of the truth and identified him as an employee of a studio making erotic anime.
She eventually agreed, however, that while Kenji's motives for lying were self-serving, there was nothing inherently evil in wanting to meet girls without scaring them off in the middle of small talk. The two of them have struck up an odd sort of friendship, based on the fact that he completely understands that Terumi's power is more a nuisance than anything else and the fact that she's impressed by his vast and thorough collection of games and gaming systems.
(Although his coworkers will keep misconstruing their relationship. Kenji can't wait till Terumi at least graduates high school, because even if they still don't shut up about it he'll probably be less tempted to raise his voice to them.)
Kenji is a nice guy, withal, and likes his job largely because it pays well enough to keep him in gamerdom. He also gets studio copies of most of the works; not that he has time to watch many of them, what with beating his latest three games and all. It did, however, prove very useful to be able to rip them to computer and give them to his elder sister when she told the family that she would be working in Antarctica; from everything he had ever heard of Antarctica, such videos would prove useful indeed to Miko as trade goods.
He did, of course, go through them himself and interview his coworkers -- Terumi helped with the interviews, after he had stammered through the request and she'd finished laughing -- to be sure that the ones he ripped for her were sane, nonviolent, often funny, largely consensual porn, such as a guy might give his sister.
*
The first few times Mitsuhiko met his Great-Uncle Touichi's son, the difference in their ages alone would have rendered the former far more interested in something else. It wasn't often; Great-Uncle Touichi had died before Mitsuhiko was even born, and his widow and son had slowly lost touch with most of the extended family; the last time Mitsuhiko's Great-Aunt Yanagi saw him, he was three and two-thirds.
The next few times Mitsuhiko met his Great-Uncle Touichi's son, he didn't recognize him.
He hasn't actually met him all that often, although the last time, Mitsuhiko did notice that two people who had the same... something... odd about them were later revealed to be two disguises of the same suspicious person.
He'd think there might be something to it, but he's noticed this same oddity about other people, including one of his friends from school (who is far too short to be a disguise himself).
The first time Mitsuhiko met the boy in question, he noticed two things:
The boy looked like a number of his cousins.
The boy did not act like any of the cousins he had met recently, and moreover, there was something... odd... about him.
Mitsuhiko thought he was kind of weird and would have left him alone, but his friend Ayumi used her Powers of Extreme Cuteness to charm him into helping her befriend him, and soon enough the new boy was, if weird, just Conan-kun being Conan-kun. Mitsuhiko hasn't really thought about it one way or another for what, over a year now?
*
The last time Miko went back to Japan, before she went to see her cousin at the shrine in Kui, her sister Ayaka talked her into taking Mitsuhiko and his friends out for the day.
It went fairly well, all things considered: she watched them as they ran around the park, took them to a science museum where they watched a movie about wonders of the universe and then wandered through most of the exhibits, bought each of them something relatively inexpensive from the museum gift shop, and was just taking them for a snack at a noodle cart when a body slithered out of the cart roof's rafters, bounced off the counter, and wound up folded over a stool.
Miko called the police, held the door-curtain out of the way while the kids sketched the body's position in Ayumi's new dinosaur notebook, helped intimidate the witnesses into staying put (and she'd never thought of herself as an intimidating person before, but she might perhaps have been putting some of her coworkers into her manner), held Conan up so he could get a better look at the rafters, took down the children's notes in Ayumi's notebook once it was determined that she had much the neatest handwriting of the five, and persuaded the officers who came to collect the corpse and the witnesses to stop at a fried-fish-on-a-stick cart so she could get her nephew and his friends something uncontaminated to eat.
It wasn't until her father's expostulations at the family dinner that night that she realized there had been anything incongruous about the affair: after all, ten-year-old Jinto and Wex had been equally blasé when the giant pot fell over and broke open to reveal a very dead body, that time she'd been their families' designated driver to the market in question.
When the conversation turned into an indictment of the parenting techniques practiced by Ayaka and her husband, however, Miko murmured that she had promised to take her nephew to see the fireworks at Tropical Land and decamped with him, joined in short order by Kenji.
"Thank you very much for your present," Miko said while they watched their nephew on the children's "jungle canoe" flume ride. "It has been very useful."
"I thought they might." Kenji smiled with modest pride. "From everything I hear, Antarctica is very lonely."
"Ah, that is, in the settlements of one and two people, I am sure it is, but..."
"But?"
"But, you see, I work with very many people, but there are not many places to go, and so everyone lives next to each other, and knows everyone else, and talks about everyone else, and it is like the grandparents' tales of the old village. We work together, and eat together, and rest together, and soon everyone has seen or read everything."
"Ah, it is like that." Kenji's face had grown distressed and then more cheerful as his sister explained. "I am putting together more so that you may take them back with you, if you have run out."
"Do you perhaps have the next volume of Anata Ttara?" Miko asked eagerly. "Everyone thought that was very funny, and they want to know what will happen with the twins who can feel each other's nerve endings."
"I, uh, think so," her brother muttered, dull flush burning up his cheeks.
*
When Miko was seventeen, someone knocked on the door of her family's apartment, and when she peered through the doorhole she saw her uncle Touichi, dimly lit by the full moon before she hastily turned on the outside light.
"I have a cold," she warned him as she opened the door.
"If it is the one going around, I recovered from it last week," her uncle smiled, limping in, a bundle of blue-and white cloth under his arm. "Good evening, Miko, it is nice to see you. Unfortunately I have sprained my ankle; is your mother, perhaps...?"
"They have all gone to a party with karaoke," Miko explained. "Shall I help you with your shoes?"
"I think I can manage them, if you will help me up again," Touichi smiled, his face betokening nothing other than mild pleasure and some self-pride.
Eventually Touichi was deposited on the Western sofa in the living room, a blanket found to preserve his modesty while he divested himself of his white trousers, and his ankle propped up on the sofa arm while his niece carefully washed it before applying the stretchy bandage wrap Ayaka had had when she hurt her elbow.
"That must hurt," Miko remarked, fingers feeling the heat of the puffiness of the joint, swollen to grapefruit size.
"It's not the most comfortable I've been, yes," her uncle agreed, a hiss escaping his pleasantly smiling lips as she tried to scrub the puffy bit back by the heel tendon.
"Here," Miko said hastily, scrabbling for the leather cord of her o-mamori and pulling it over her head. "Squeeze this."
"That's... very peaceful," Touichi said as he held the protective amulet tightly.
"'A small serenity,' he said," Miko explained, drying his ankle off with a handkerchief. "A pair of Canadian sennin gave it to me."
"I didn't think they had o-mamori in Canada," he said mildly.
"I do not think so, either; see, they made it out of a luggage tag for me."
"I would not have thought there were sennin in Canada, either," Touichi said eventually, endeavouring to hold his foot as perpendicular as possible.
"I... often, I think it was just a child imagining, and they could not really have been sennin, any more than the world used to be full of miko who ran around and destroyed monsters until evil foreign sorcerers stole all their power, so that now miko are just vessels and assistants. But it is a small serenity, that I can touch, and reasons why something works after all are always being discovered, so perhaps... "
"We think we are very wise to put aside tales," her uncle agreed, "and then one comes flowing by us and we find ourselves caught up in it, and wonder how to decide the right thing to do."
"As we have ever done, the book says." Miko shoved her glasses up on her nose and carefully wound the last of the bandage around.
"Then it is a wise book; for good things don't stop being good, and evil deeds don't stop being evil, just because the world has widened out. I've borrowed your necklace; here, wear this as surety until I give yours back!"
Something dropped over Miko's head and nearly thumped her knuckle as she set the little metal tacks that would hold the bandage in place. Automatically, she pushed the last one fully in, head jerking upward.
"Uncle Touichi," she breathed, one hand going to the chain of brilliant diamond-like stones and the blue-grey crystal circled in more of them that hung from it, easily the size of a ten-yen coin. "This is -- dear me -- where in the world --?"
"A man I know made an exact replica of the Hope Diamond."
"And you bought it from him?" Miko straightened up, pulling the chopsticks out of her untidy bun and recoiling it. "It's very beautiful, but somehow it doesn't seem the sort of thing my aunt would wear... "
"Actually, I'm borrowing it, as it were."
"You must be good friends, then." Miko began cleaning up, putting the bag of defrosting peas back on her uncle's newly-bound ankle and picking up his trousers. Five or six dirty patches promptly met her eye, and she dropped to sit on the floor, scrubbing at one of the patches with her wet cloth.
"It is not that so much as that a very unpleasant person scared my acquaintance into loaning it to him, and then kept on not returning it." Kuroba Touichi's face and voice were as even as a professional magician could hope, but his niece had known him for seventeen years and knew that he was very angry. "So I let myself in and borrowed it back, and I was going to take it back to its owner tonight, only I sprained my ankle."
"You shouldn't walk on that any more than you have to," Miko half-agreed. "And besides, these trousers are a fright. Elder Brother has left some of his here; shall I loan you a pair while I try and wash these?"
"I would appreciate the loan, although mine need to be dry-cleaned."
"Oh, of course, how stupid of me."
So Miko rummaged through the closet and found a pair of her brother's khakis, and her uncle told her all about the legendary curse of the Hope Diamond and the people who'd made it up, and then about the Great Chrysanthemum Diamond, and the Eagle Diamond which was stolen and never recovered, and the Star of India that had been taken with it and found in a train station locker, and the Ruspoli Sapphire, and the Blue Birthday, and the largest star ruby in the world -- the Neelanjali Ruby, which is a double-star ruby, and the Black Prince's Ruby that is actually a spinel, and an emerald the size of a peach that had been found when he was a little boy, and the Green Dream that was even larger, and the legendary abilities of emeralds to heal and bring good luck, and how this compared to the legendary ability of bezoars to neutralize all poisons --
";;Like a hairball?"
"More like a kidney stone, I believe. They do neutralize arsenic."
-- and of a gem which could bring wealth and dripped an elixir of immortality.
"But I have read about this. This is the philosopher's stone."
"Yes, but did the philosopher's stone glow in the light of the full moon while a comet is passing overhead?"
"How would that work?" protested Miko, whose suspension of disbelief tended to go all wobbly around subjects she knew something about. "The moon reflects light from the sun. There isn't anything in the moonlight that wasn't in the sunlight. If anything, it'd light up because it just darker, like the star stickers you helped put up, or the real Hope Diamond, or the hands on the clock here." She turned the light out to illustrate.
The hands and numbers of the clock lit up, a sickly green.
The ten-yen-sized crystal hanging above her breastbone glowed a brilliant red.
Miko turned the light on again, and she and her uncle stared at each other with wild surmise, his legendary Cool cracking, as she strode to the mirror on the wall and dragged the stone around her neck across it.
It scratched the glass, loud and ghastly.
"I hope Mother does not notice," Miko said, guiltily.
"When did he switch them? How did he switch them?" Touichi wondered, swinging his good leg down to the floor.
"Please, it would be bad if you stood!" his niece said. "And it is not certain, perhaps it is a very hard substitute... "
"Perhaps," Touichi breathed quietly. "But still... "
"It would be bad if you walked home with that in your pocket," Miko said. "It is not safe. We should perhaps -- the mail, there is a mailbox at the end of the hall, it would be safe enough in the mail, would it not?"
And so, while her uncle struggled into his nephew's khakis, Miko brought together a box and brown paper and stamps and a pen and a pair of socks with holes that she had meant to throw out, to pack it with.
"Which leaves the question," Touichi remarked when she had brought everything, "of a safe place to send it to."
"We could, maybe, send it to the museum where the real one should be? They will be able to tell which is real, and if we put in a note with the address they will know where to return the false one to... ah, how many stamps would that be?"
"Oh, I like that idea." He looked at her for a moment. "But put out the electricity again, if you would?"
Miko did.
"Nothing in my hand," he said, wriggling it in the pale moonlight and the faint red glow of the gem, "nothing up my sleeve; I turn your o-mamori -- it would be good if you replaced its cord, by the way, as it is nearly worn through here -- and ha!"
And with a flick of his fingers, he appeared to pull a small, ferociously glowing deep red jewel out of the maybe-diamond.
"I have been planning to, thank you," Miko began automatically before clapping enthusiastically. The pendant's glow slowly faded; the crystal in her uncle's hand, however, remained lit.
"That is much better at glowing in the dark than this," she sighed, turning the light on and pulling the necklace off. "I suppose gems were not made to glow in the dark."
"It isn't that common, no," her uncle agreed as she held it for a long moment before beginning to pack it up.
Soon enough -- aside from the moment when she realized she'd forgotten the string, and had to go get the string box in a hurry -- the gemstone pendant was packed away, addressed, bedizened with stamps, and a return address written on it just in case the postage wasn't sufficient; the address of Touichi's local police station, just to be on the safe side.
"One of my neighbors works there, a friend of mine," he offered, "so I will know if anything happens. I should be calling a taxi; do you suppose you could lend me a sweater, as well?"
"Of course, of course," Miko said, and hastily collected a sweater in a pattern of browns and golds, which should go well with the khaki (as opposed to the shirt and tie he was wearing, either one of which might have gone with his trousers -- at least, no less well than they had with the white -- but not in combination), and thought to add a furoshiki for his bundle.
He was still on the telephone when she reappeared, and she set her burdens down on his lap and dipped into the string box; the piece of cord she had noticed was treated on both ends, and thus ideal as the cord for an o-mamori.
"Thank you," her uncle said as she was loosening the leather cord from her o-mamori, finding it easier to pull the loop through the pouch itself free than to undo the knot in the pendant cord. "And one more favor?"
Miko looked up.
He handed the jewel from the magic trick to her. The lamplight had stopped it glowing, but in its red depths there still seemed a spark of fire. It was a little damp, doubtless from his sweat. "Could you perhaps find a safe place for this?"
Miko looked at it for a moment and then pushed it into the open top of her o-mamori, scraping it against the flat hard thing she felt when she squeezed and touching paper with her fingertips. She took the leather cord in both hands on either side of the thin place and jerked firmly; when it parted, she pulled it free, looped the ends of the soft cord she'd found through, and tied them in an elaborate knot that resembled a butterfly.
Touichi took it from her hands and laid it around her neck himself (she was right, the sweater looked good on him) and then bundled up his trousers and other whatever into the furoshiki while Miko put the peas back in the freezer.
When Miko returned, he had taken his first few steps, finding his balance again as he carried his bundle by the ends of the knotted giant kerchief. She scooped the package up under one arm and hurried to walk on his bad ankle's side, ready to provide emergency support.
"At least I could get my shoe on," Touichi said as his niece locked the door behind him.
"There is that," she agreed, tucking her o-mamori inside her shirt and matching her pace to his as they went to the mailbox and the stairs.
The less said about those two flights of stairs the better; at their bottom, the taxi was just turning onto their street, and Kuroba Touichi took the opportunity to thank his niece once again and tell her to tell them how sorry he was he had missed them.
"It was my pleasure," Miko said. "Please be careful of that ankle."
And then the taxi was there, and they bowed to each other before he awkwardly clambered in and was carried away.
It was the last time she ever saw her Uncle Touichi.
Over the years, she almost forgot that her o-mamori carried an extra element; thinking about it would have meant thinking about how she had acquired to it, and that would have brought to mind the as yet untestable hypothesis that the possible whereabouts of a valuable diamond and the death by equipment failure of a man religious about checking all of his machinery three times over before even a practice use were probably not unrelated, and that would have raised the nagging question of, if so, whether it were her fault.
Even with her frequent uses of the small serenity, she did not bring the rest of it actively to mind until Makoto's android girlfriend opened her navel port and ejected a dull, lifeless red stone of very familiar shape.
"It is a battery," she explained to her superiors, later. "All the legends -- they are not what it does itself, they are what the devices it powers can do."
"The Red Work was supposed to be more everything than the citrinity," one of them said thoughtfully; "does that mean this is more powerful or more efficient than -- "
"Well, we can hook something up through her and see how it is," Dr. McKay said airily. "What? It isn't as if I suggested yanking it out of her to run tests."
"Which is as well, as you have said she would likely have died without it."
"That's what I said..."
Miko apologized afterwards, to Makoto and his girlfriend. "I am sorry for them."
"It's all right," Mizuhara Makoto accepted. "They're your comrades. They're your family. Family is like that."
"Family is like that," Kusanagi Miko sighed. "No matter where you go, there they are."
-author- Sophonisba (
saphanibaal)-warnings/ratings- Gen. Crossover with Shimpi no Sekai El-Hazard and most of Aoyama Gosho's works. Takes place in my pet asymptotic-to-canon AU.
-spoilers- Through third season, to be safe. Spoilers for... well, for somewhere in SG-1, but as it's something I learned through osmosis, I'm not sure where to judge it. Also, in case anyone cares, for the seventh OVA of El-Hazard, and for the first volumes of Meitantei Conan and Magic Kaito respectively. There are minor references to my Zophonisbeion stories "Miko and the Bears" and "The Sun Shines Bright On Every Stone."
-characters- Miko, OCs, two characters from El-Hazard, six from Meitantei Conan, two-and-a-half from Magic Kaito, and walk-on appearances from Rodney, Jinto, Wex, Sheppard, Teyla, and Terumi from "Watashi ni Uso o Tsuite."
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Nor is El-Hazard. If I were Aoyama, my pet MK threesome would be canon and at least somebody would have read Beatrice Gormley... i.e., not hardly. The idea of involving the Hope Diamond is from Ellen Brand (
marsdejahthoris), who went on to do something utterly unique with it; "The world is large enough..." is from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and "As they have ever done" from J. R. R. Tolkien.-word count- 6583
-summary- Miko, and background, and spackle.
Nine Springs
Kui, the village of the nine springs, lies hidden in a fold of the mountains that shield the bay of Edo, in the old land of Musashi, too far south of the Tama River and north of the Kai Province Highway to have risen to historical prominence. It has recently been incorporated into one of the cities within the Tokyo metropolitan limits, effectively confusing the grandchildren when they want to write home.
The peasants of Kui have lived there for time immemorial, a standoffish lot, largely keeping to themselves; even now that many of the young people live and work down in the special wards of the capital, they are still hesitant to marry outsiders. For example, when Kusanagi Ryousuke, of Tanashi, having built up a good job in Nerima City and more in the way of personal fortunes than he knew what to do with, told his mother that he was thinking about maybe getting married, she talked to her parents back in Kui and they talked to some of their neighbors who had granddaughters in Nerima, and before Ryousuke knew it he had a meeting arranged with Kuroba Yuuko, who had been born in Kui before her father decided to go where the employment opportunities were. (The meeting went well: he and Yuuko eventually married and had four children, a rarity for the chronically-fertilitally-challenged Kui indigenes and an occurrence which has most of the old gossips of Kui cheerfully suspecting Mrs. Kusanagi of infidelity, although Nobuo, Ayaka, Miko and Kenji match two of the three true-Kui faces between them.)
Wars and other disturbances have from time to time encouraged exogamy, though; while Ryousuke was conceived before his father left for the war, many of his mother's agemates were widowed childless or spinsters, choosing either to marry much older neighbors in the hopes of eventually conceiving or to marry the more virile sons of other boroughs and villages in the West Tama district, adding uncharacteristic names such as Mizuhara and Arai to extended family trees.
*
When the Meiji laws demanded that all households take a family name, the villagers of Kui decided, rather than settle on a host of unrelated names or unilaterally adopt their hamlet's name, to choose names beginning with the syllable "Ku." These range from the prosaic Kubo, Kuroba, Kuno and Kurogane to the more elaborate Kuwabara, Kuramabayashi,
Kusaka and the ostentatious Kusanagi adopted by the rector-priests of the local shrine and their descendants, who took the opportunity to claim descent from the Kusanagi glaive and reiterate their loyalty to the Emperor.
Unlikely as such a claim might seem to foreign eyes, it is nevertheless true that, of all the odd abilities and happenstances of the Kui dwellers, most of them tend to converge on the rectors and incumbents of their shrine, helped by the careful management of the arranging of their marriages.
Most noteworthy of them is the ability to see clearly, as they have put it; to look at a person and be able to know, without fail, that this person is fully and utterly human, that that person is partly not, that the person to whom they are speaking is descended from the mizuchi-aragami, the feral serpent kami of Kui lore.
(The current rector of the Kui shrine does not think much of the prevailing tendency to translate "kami" into English as "god," which latter carries a host of connotations alien to the Japanese word. Kami have power, or are power, some for good, some for evil, often for themselves. They are not necessarily omnipotent, or immortal, and even humans can become kami; they are honored or placated as the case may be, told how wonderful they are with respect but not necessarily with worship as the gods of other peoples are worshipped. Even tengu- and fox- and mizuchi-aragami, whom the villagers of Kui have challenged before and will challenge again, for the sake of the bloodline of the chosen heirs of the Lady Who Illuminates The Heavens and of all of humanity, are no less kami and deserving of respect for their power, if nothing else.)
The sight does not necessarily come with knowledge, however. The first time Ryousuke (or his daughters or grandsons, for that matter) saw persons with nonhuman genes, he did not know what it was that seemed different to him: yet they were somehow set apart, in his mind, from the general run of humanity, and he had no idea why. Nor did he or most of his branch of the Kusanagi family truly believe the reason when it was told to them; they were modern sorts, on the whole, and the world was big enough for them; "no ghosts need apply." (His younger daughter wound up being an exception, largely because she was too good a scientist not to at least entertain a hypothesis that continued to be supported by later evidence.)
Indeed, his grandson Mitsuhiko has yet to recognize this difference as something to look for when identifying people, despite obvious advantages to doing so.
His daughter Miko, on the other hand, on her last visit to the land of her birth, took the bus out to see her cousin at the shrine and dutifully reported that she had seen persons of gaki descent, trying as best she could to put into words what about those persons exuded the aura of the legendary hungry-wraiths without an example to show him.
"Gaki?" the rector said, startled.
"It is classified, you understand," Miko explained, "but should I and mine be successful on our part, the gaki themselves should never come here."
"Yet I have never heard of gaki mingling their essence with a human's."
"It seems," Miko Kusanagi said delicately, "that the resulting... hybrid... tastes better to a feeding gaki. One might hope that the gaki would end by eating each other up and leaving humanity alone, but they are not inclined to arrange themselves so conveniently."
"It is a pity, indeed," her cousin agreed mildly, and arranged for her to undergo a thorough cleansing before she returned again to a world that demanded she strive against hungry-wraiths.
*
Attitudes about the not-quite human have changed, perhaps partially due to decreasing belief in them -- when one of the new-named Kudou took a woman with mizuchi-aragami blood (and doubtless the memory of her mizuchi-aragami-scion ancestors back at least to the fourth generation, if not more; marked, at any rate, by the accursed inheritance of the mizuchi-aragami, proud and pitiless, the stink of their deeds an outrage under heaven, beneath whose borrowed feet the earth cries out) as his wife, he was cast out of the village and sent to make his way with his female as best he might. (Which, given the massive urbanization of the Imperial Capitol then going on, was scarcely as slim a chance as it might have been a generation or two before.)
When their descendant, Kudou Yanagi, began seeing one Kuroba Touichi seriously (younger brother of the new Kusanagi Yuuko, and thus likewise the grandson of an old and honored family of Kui), the neighborhood association of Kui discussed it ferociously, gathering in the precincts of their shrine to argue the matter.
In the end, Kuroba Souzou, father of Touichi and his sisters, only son of Kui of his generation to return alive and unmaimed, stomped to the forefront.
"It's probably no worse an inheritance than any outsider," he grunted, harsh and terse. "It's not as if anyone needed mizuchi-aragami in the bone for their deeds to reek as high as heaven, or for the earth to revolt under the corpses."
And, half-scandalized by the bluntness that would say as much rather than hint and imply, half ready and willing to come in the end to some accomodation whose terms would never be anything as uncouth as laid out, they let the matter be, several of the younger generation going so far as to keep in touch with Touichi and Yanagi after their wedding.
*
Yanagi's brother, Kudou Yuusaku, once touched an artifact of the Forerunners (Alterans, eni Anquitas, Lanteans, Danavi, fourth of the Asura races) in Hawai`i.
It did nothing. Without the recessive ATA-gene (A-Treinibus-Agents, A-3-Agent, activating Agent-gene of the Ancient Artifice Activation gene sequence), the son of a Kudou and a distant kinswoman on the mizuchi-aragami side could not, of course, light so much as a crystal.
With four grandparents of not a little mizuchi-aragami blood (for so they are drawn, each to each, so that such is not uncommon. Indeed, it is only learned behavior copied from those around them that sometimes holds them back from seeking one another within the closest of family bonds, such that two of the nations who once sheltered those of mizuchi-aragami blood in the early centuries of their great diaspora were later epigrammatized as children of incest from their very beginnings; although such libels may also be attributed in part to incomplete euhemerization by scribes denying divine descent for the nations in question, holding their gods as nothing before the Name the writers would serve, and in part to a perfectly understandable if rather ugly war of ethnicities, faiths, and ideologies), and only one of them of the line of a Kudou with even as much Forerunner blood as the admittedly close-bred village of Kui had refined over the centuries, Yuusaku like the others of his line and generation was not even granted the merciful block to his inherited mizuchi-aragami nature that sufficient Forerunner genes ensures; his inheritance from Kui was all in his face, and perhaps a little in the timbre of his voice. A thousand crimes of selfishness, from simple theft to murder and worse, lined the halls of his memory, grown into shapes set before his birth of how it had been to do those foul deeds; and he wrote them all out into his books, weaving mysteries around them to bind them and force them into a pattern of the natural order restored at last and away from him, to make him money and have no further power to hinder him in his daily reaffirming of his self as his own self, and not that of yet another ancestor.
For all that, the first time he saw an adaptation of Le secret de l'eau bleu -- the Jean Renoir version, not the television series Yuusaku's son and the girl next door watched religiously -- he felt a terrible longing for something he could not place and not quite name, and dreamed of walking halls of silver and blue while windows gave onto the open sea.
The son his sister Yanagi bore her husband Touichi, though, was descended of Kui blood on both sides, and while Yuusaku had the face of their grandfather it was Yanagi who was granted more of his share of genes in the genetic combination lottery: her son recalled nothing of her memories save for his memories of her recounting them, and many and varied as the griefs and horrors he was to suffer in his life were, that at least was never among them.
*
It is not known how much of the population of Kui might at least possess the ATA-gene, as aside from speculations that enough Forerunner in one's makeup to render the effects of known drugs unpredictable might be likely to coincide with possession of said gene (and a little thought would count this hypothesis as highly unlikely, although not in fact impossible; Yuusaku's wife for one, a woman whom Kuroba Touichi judged no more than human -- and, if he did not have the Kusanagi sight, he had something very nearly as good, something he refused on his honor as a prestidigitator and a maker of magic to reveal -- was elsewhere in Hawai`i at the time and never saw the ancient creation masquerading as a hunk of overpriced junk that her husband set hand to unknowing), only three descendants of the Kui families have so far been exposed to ATA-based technology.
Kusanagi Miko labors in a city full of it, at the side of those who can use it and the gifts of the hands and their brains to avert or at least mitigate disasters. One way or another, they have saved her life so many times (despite her own small parts in such matters, now and again) that the cords of obligation have twisted and knotted and woven themselves into a net of duty, duty to her elders and to her masters and to her lords, and thus something that, once she has slipped into an ancestral mindset without even the crutch of inherited recollections, she can live with.
Mizuhara Makoto, grandson of Yuuko and Touichi's sister, great-grandson on the other side of a woman who left Kui to marry a Mizuhara and console him for the physical condition that left him unable to join the glorious cause that had swept up his friends and classmates, first encountered ancient (if not Ancient) artifice when it swept him and a few others up and flung them through something very like a wormhole, in order to force the formation of a stable time loop.
Because of the nature of the vortex, its edges disrupted the connections between the spirits, astral bodies, and bodies of those adjacent to it, leaving them with the ability to develop at least one of the skills that those of Forerunner blood often gained as they approached enlightenment, "gifts" that would be useful indeed if the ascending ones did not then go on to, in effect, lock themselves in a small box for the rest of eternity.
Three of the vortex's passengers, not seeking enlightenment, bore no qualms about putting their newfound gifts to use; when Makoto laid his hand on robot made by the descendants of castaway Forerunners with technology derived from Ancient Artifice and felt it quiver to life under his touch, he thought only that he at last had discovered his vortex-gift. Considering that the ATA-gene enabled him to disable a hard-coded slave circuit that was forcing an AI to attack him and his companions, both old and new, he was not inclined to question the blessings of good fortune.
Not so inclined, at least, until he attempted to use it to reverse the actions of the vortex, and found himself and the item he had been attempting to use, not on the grounds of his high school with the one who had sent him and the others thence mere hours if not minutes after she had done so, but on a beach with his mother's cousin Miko and some people she knew, a dozen years late. A beach, moreover, which was not in Japan, nor yet on Tellus, but on a planet known variously as Atlantica, Lantea, Neo-Atlan, or Fred, orbiting a star located in a cluster known as the Pegasus Galaxy.
Still, should one be lost with a piece of ancient technology that moves one through time, space, and the other, and should one be desirous of finding out how to work the device so as to go to a given place and time without unpleasant side effects for one or anyone else, one could do worse than land on a beach occupied by Kusanagi Miko-hakase. One would, in fact, find it hard indeed not to do worse than to land on such a beach occupied not only by Kusanagi-hakase but by Rodney McKay-hakase, despite the latter's long animadversions on Linking Through Another Dimension, Allegedly Intelligent Persons Who Somehow Believed This Was A Good Idea (Possibly Related To Their Ideas Of Conditions Of Servitude), and Would You Stop Calling It A Wormhole Because It Isn't.
Makoto gladly learned, and gladly brought the woman of his heart to meet them in return (introducing his cousin to her for the first time, and renewing Miko's acquaintance with her cousin's bride), worried about her lack of energy even after he had done what he could.
Miko and her superior took far less time to diagnose her than they had to unravel the mysteries of vortex travel; they solved her problem of drained battery, offered the Mizuhara couple positions once they had done with traveling in time the hard way, and cheerfully sent them on their way before Doctor McKay demanded a full and complete report on what else Miko had known or brought along that she hadn't thought worth bringing up.
Dr. Park Eun-hee has no desire to be connected with the village of Kui, wishes she had never heard of it, and would be delighted to ignore the whole matter for the rest of her and her parents' lives if the coworkers at her new position didn't continually mistake her for Miko-doing-something-different-with-her-hair. They don't even look that much alike, no more than, oh, that former alien boyfriend of Col. Carter's and Dr. Weir's ex-fiance.
*
The clear sight of the Kusanagi, in some cases, goes beyond simple recognition of another's humanity, adulteration thereof, or outright lack of it. Each of those cases manifests differently; the rarest version, fortunately, is that of being able to read the thoughts of someone when looking them in the eye.
This would be dismissed as sheer folk-tale-ness, if only a case of it had not cropped up; in the great-granddaughter of a woman who married an outsider, moreover.
Kusanagi Kenji first discovered this when she saw through his hasty, ah, veiling of the truth and identified him as an employee of a studio making erotic anime.
She eventually agreed, however, that while Kenji's motives for lying were self-serving, there was nothing inherently evil in wanting to meet girls without scaring them off in the middle of small talk. The two of them have struck up an odd sort of friendship, based on the fact that he completely understands that Terumi's power is more a nuisance than anything else and the fact that she's impressed by his vast and thorough collection of games and gaming systems.
(Although his coworkers will keep misconstruing their relationship. Kenji can't wait till Terumi at least graduates high school, because even if they still don't shut up about it he'll probably be less tempted to raise his voice to them.)
Kenji is a nice guy, withal, and likes his job largely because it pays well enough to keep him in gamerdom. He also gets studio copies of most of the works; not that he has time to watch many of them, what with beating his latest three games and all. It did, however, prove very useful to be able to rip them to computer and give them to his elder sister when she told the family that she would be working in Antarctica; from everything he had ever heard of Antarctica, such videos would prove useful indeed to Miko as trade goods.
He did, of course, go through them himself and interview his coworkers -- Terumi helped with the interviews, after he had stammered through the request and she'd finished laughing -- to be sure that the ones he ripped for her were sane, nonviolent, often funny, largely consensual porn, such as a guy might give his sister.
*
The first few times Mitsuhiko met his Great-Uncle Touichi's son, the difference in their ages alone would have rendered the former far more interested in something else. It wasn't often; Great-Uncle Touichi had died before Mitsuhiko was even born, and his widow and son had slowly lost touch with most of the extended family; the last time Mitsuhiko's Great-Aunt Yanagi saw him, he was three and two-thirds.
The next few times Mitsuhiko met his Great-Uncle Touichi's son, he didn't recognize him.
He hasn't actually met him all that often, although the last time, Mitsuhiko did notice that two people who had the same... something... odd about them were later revealed to be two disguises of the same suspicious person.
He'd think there might be something to it, but he's noticed this same oddity about other people, including one of his friends from school (who is far too short to be a disguise himself).
The first time Mitsuhiko met the boy in question, he noticed two things:
The boy looked like a number of his cousins.
The boy did not act like any of the cousins he had met recently, and moreover, there was something... odd... about him.
Mitsuhiko thought he was kind of weird and would have left him alone, but his friend Ayumi used her Powers of Extreme Cuteness to charm him into helping her befriend him, and soon enough the new boy was, if weird, just Conan-kun being Conan-kun. Mitsuhiko hasn't really thought about it one way or another for what, over a year now?
*
The last time Miko went back to Japan, before she went to see her cousin at the shrine in Kui, her sister Ayaka talked her into taking Mitsuhiko and his friends out for the day.
It went fairly well, all things considered: she watched them as they ran around the park, took them to a science museum where they watched a movie about wonders of the universe and then wandered through most of the exhibits, bought each of them something relatively inexpensive from the museum gift shop, and was just taking them for a snack at a noodle cart when a body slithered out of the cart roof's rafters, bounced off the counter, and wound up folded over a stool.
Miko called the police, held the door-curtain out of the way while the kids sketched the body's position in Ayumi's new dinosaur notebook, helped intimidate the witnesses into staying put (and she'd never thought of herself as an intimidating person before, but she might perhaps have been putting some of her coworkers into her manner), held Conan up so he could get a better look at the rafters, took down the children's notes in Ayumi's notebook once it was determined that she had much the neatest handwriting of the five, and persuaded the officers who came to collect the corpse and the witnesses to stop at a fried-fish-on-a-stick cart so she could get her nephew and his friends something uncontaminated to eat.
It wasn't until her father's expostulations at the family dinner that night that she realized there had been anything incongruous about the affair: after all, ten-year-old Jinto and Wex had been equally blasé when the giant pot fell over and broke open to reveal a very dead body, that time she'd been their families' designated driver to the market in question.
When the conversation turned into an indictment of the parenting techniques practiced by Ayaka and her husband, however, Miko murmured that she had promised to take her nephew to see the fireworks at Tropical Land and decamped with him, joined in short order by Kenji.
"Thank you very much for your present," Miko said while they watched their nephew on the children's "jungle canoe" flume ride. "It has been very useful."
"I thought they might." Kenji smiled with modest pride. "From everything I hear, Antarctica is very lonely."
"Ah, that is, in the settlements of one and two people, I am sure it is, but..."
"But?"
"But, you see, I work with very many people, but there are not many places to go, and so everyone lives next to each other, and knows everyone else, and talks about everyone else, and it is like the grandparents' tales of the old village. We work together, and eat together, and rest together, and soon everyone has seen or read everything."
"Ah, it is like that." Kenji's face had grown distressed and then more cheerful as his sister explained. "I am putting together more so that you may take them back with you, if you have run out."
"Do you perhaps have the next volume of Anata Ttara?" Miko asked eagerly. "Everyone thought that was very funny, and they want to know what will happen with the twins who can feel each other's nerve endings."
"I, uh, think so," her brother muttered, dull flush burning up his cheeks.
*
When Miko was seventeen, someone knocked on the door of her family's apartment, and when she peered through the doorhole she saw her uncle Touichi, dimly lit by the full moon before she hastily turned on the outside light.
"I have a cold," she warned him as she opened the door.
"If it is the one going around, I recovered from it last week," her uncle smiled, limping in, a bundle of blue-and white cloth under his arm. "Good evening, Miko, it is nice to see you. Unfortunately I have sprained my ankle; is your mother, perhaps...?"
"They have all gone to a party with karaoke," Miko explained. "Shall I help you with your shoes?"
"I think I can manage them, if you will help me up again," Touichi smiled, his face betokening nothing other than mild pleasure and some self-pride.
Eventually Touichi was deposited on the Western sofa in the living room, a blanket found to preserve his modesty while he divested himself of his white trousers, and his ankle propped up on the sofa arm while his niece carefully washed it before applying the stretchy bandage wrap Ayaka had had when she hurt her elbow.
"That must hurt," Miko remarked, fingers feeling the heat of the puffiness of the joint, swollen to grapefruit size.
"It's not the most comfortable I've been, yes," her uncle agreed, a hiss escaping his pleasantly smiling lips as she tried to scrub the puffy bit back by the heel tendon.
"Here," Miko said hastily, scrabbling for the leather cord of her o-mamori and pulling it over her head. "Squeeze this."
"That's... very peaceful," Touichi said as he held the protective amulet tightly.
"'A small serenity,' he said," Miko explained, drying his ankle off with a handkerchief. "A pair of Canadian sennin gave it to me."
"I didn't think they had o-mamori in Canada," he said mildly.
"I do not think so, either; see, they made it out of a luggage tag for me."
"I would not have thought there were sennin in Canada, either," Touichi said eventually, endeavouring to hold his foot as perpendicular as possible.
"I... often, I think it was just a child imagining, and they could not really have been sennin, any more than the world used to be full of miko who ran around and destroyed monsters until evil foreign sorcerers stole all their power, so that now miko are just vessels and assistants. But it is a small serenity, that I can touch, and reasons why something works after all are always being discovered, so perhaps... "
"We think we are very wise to put aside tales," her uncle agreed, "and then one comes flowing by us and we find ourselves caught up in it, and wonder how to decide the right thing to do."
"As we have ever done, the book says." Miko shoved her glasses up on her nose and carefully wound the last of the bandage around.
"Then it is a wise book; for good things don't stop being good, and evil deeds don't stop being evil, just because the world has widened out. I've borrowed your necklace; here, wear this as surety until I give yours back!"
Something dropped over Miko's head and nearly thumped her knuckle as she set the little metal tacks that would hold the bandage in place. Automatically, she pushed the last one fully in, head jerking upward.
"Uncle Touichi," she breathed, one hand going to the chain of brilliant diamond-like stones and the blue-grey crystal circled in more of them that hung from it, easily the size of a ten-yen coin. "This is -- dear me -- where in the world --?"
"A man I know made an exact replica of the Hope Diamond."
"And you bought it from him?" Miko straightened up, pulling the chopsticks out of her untidy bun and recoiling it. "It's very beautiful, but somehow it doesn't seem the sort of thing my aunt would wear... "
"Actually, I'm borrowing it, as it were."
"You must be good friends, then." Miko began cleaning up, putting the bag of defrosting peas back on her uncle's newly-bound ankle and picking up his trousers. Five or six dirty patches promptly met her eye, and she dropped to sit on the floor, scrubbing at one of the patches with her wet cloth.
"It is not that so much as that a very unpleasant person scared my acquaintance into loaning it to him, and then kept on not returning it." Kuroba Touichi's face and voice were as even as a professional magician could hope, but his niece had known him for seventeen years and knew that he was very angry. "So I let myself in and borrowed it back, and I was going to take it back to its owner tonight, only I sprained my ankle."
"You shouldn't walk on that any more than you have to," Miko half-agreed. "And besides, these trousers are a fright. Elder Brother has left some of his here; shall I loan you a pair while I try and wash these?"
"I would appreciate the loan, although mine need to be dry-cleaned."
"Oh, of course, how stupid of me."
So Miko rummaged through the closet and found a pair of her brother's khakis, and her uncle told her all about the legendary curse of the Hope Diamond and the people who'd made it up, and then about the Great Chrysanthemum Diamond, and the Eagle Diamond which was stolen and never recovered, and the Star of India that had been taken with it and found in a train station locker, and the Ruspoli Sapphire, and the Blue Birthday, and the largest star ruby in the world -- the Neelanjali Ruby, which is a double-star ruby, and the Black Prince's Ruby that is actually a spinel, and an emerald the size of a peach that had been found when he was a little boy, and the Green Dream that was even larger, and the legendary abilities of emeralds to heal and bring good luck, and how this compared to the legendary ability of bezoars to neutralize all poisons --
";;Like a hairball?"
"More like a kidney stone, I believe. They do neutralize arsenic."
-- and of a gem which could bring wealth and dripped an elixir of immortality.
"But I have read about this. This is the philosopher's stone."
"Yes, but did the philosopher's stone glow in the light of the full moon while a comet is passing overhead?"
"How would that work?" protested Miko, whose suspension of disbelief tended to go all wobbly around subjects she knew something about. "The moon reflects light from the sun. There isn't anything in the moonlight that wasn't in the sunlight. If anything, it'd light up because it just darker, like the star stickers you helped put up, or the real Hope Diamond, or the hands on the clock here." She turned the light out to illustrate.
The hands and numbers of the clock lit up, a sickly green.
The ten-yen-sized crystal hanging above her breastbone glowed a brilliant red.
Miko turned the light on again, and she and her uncle stared at each other with wild surmise, his legendary Cool cracking, as she strode to the mirror on the wall and dragged the stone around her neck across it.
It scratched the glass, loud and ghastly.
"I hope Mother does not notice," Miko said, guiltily.
"When did he switch them? How did he switch them?" Touichi wondered, swinging his good leg down to the floor.
"Please, it would be bad if you stood!" his niece said. "And it is not certain, perhaps it is a very hard substitute... "
"Perhaps," Touichi breathed quietly. "But still... "
"It would be bad if you walked home with that in your pocket," Miko said. "It is not safe. We should perhaps -- the mail, there is a mailbox at the end of the hall, it would be safe enough in the mail, would it not?"
And so, while her uncle struggled into his nephew's khakis, Miko brought together a box and brown paper and stamps and a pen and a pair of socks with holes that she had meant to throw out, to pack it with.
"Which leaves the question," Touichi remarked when she had brought everything, "of a safe place to send it to."
"We could, maybe, send it to the museum where the real one should be? They will be able to tell which is real, and if we put in a note with the address they will know where to return the false one to... ah, how many stamps would that be?"
"Oh, I like that idea." He looked at her for a moment. "But put out the electricity again, if you would?"
Miko did.
"Nothing in my hand," he said, wriggling it in the pale moonlight and the faint red glow of the gem, "nothing up my sleeve; I turn your o-mamori -- it would be good if you replaced its cord, by the way, as it is nearly worn through here -- and ha!"
And with a flick of his fingers, he appeared to pull a small, ferociously glowing deep red jewel out of the maybe-diamond.
"I have been planning to, thank you," Miko began automatically before clapping enthusiastically. The pendant's glow slowly faded; the crystal in her uncle's hand, however, remained lit.
"That is much better at glowing in the dark than this," she sighed, turning the light on and pulling the necklace off. "I suppose gems were not made to glow in the dark."
"It isn't that common, no," her uncle agreed as she held it for a long moment before beginning to pack it up.
Soon enough -- aside from the moment when she realized she'd forgotten the string, and had to go get the string box in a hurry -- the gemstone pendant was packed away, addressed, bedizened with stamps, and a return address written on it just in case the postage wasn't sufficient; the address of Touichi's local police station, just to be on the safe side.
"One of my neighbors works there, a friend of mine," he offered, "so I will know if anything happens. I should be calling a taxi; do you suppose you could lend me a sweater, as well?"
"Of course, of course," Miko said, and hastily collected a sweater in a pattern of browns and golds, which should go well with the khaki (as opposed to the shirt and tie he was wearing, either one of which might have gone with his trousers -- at least, no less well than they had with the white -- but not in combination), and thought to add a furoshiki for his bundle.
He was still on the telephone when she reappeared, and she set her burdens down on his lap and dipped into the string box; the piece of cord she had noticed was treated on both ends, and thus ideal as the cord for an o-mamori.
"Thank you," her uncle said as she was loosening the leather cord from her o-mamori, finding it easier to pull the loop through the pouch itself free than to undo the knot in the pendant cord. "And one more favor?"
Miko looked up.
He handed the jewel from the magic trick to her. The lamplight had stopped it glowing, but in its red depths there still seemed a spark of fire. It was a little damp, doubtless from his sweat. "Could you perhaps find a safe place for this?"
Miko looked at it for a moment and then pushed it into the open top of her o-mamori, scraping it against the flat hard thing she felt when she squeezed and touching paper with her fingertips. She took the leather cord in both hands on either side of the thin place and jerked firmly; when it parted, she pulled it free, looped the ends of the soft cord she'd found through, and tied them in an elaborate knot that resembled a butterfly.
Touichi took it from her hands and laid it around her neck himself (she was right, the sweater looked good on him) and then bundled up his trousers and other whatever into the furoshiki while Miko put the peas back in the freezer.
When Miko returned, he had taken his first few steps, finding his balance again as he carried his bundle by the ends of the knotted giant kerchief. She scooped the package up under one arm and hurried to walk on his bad ankle's side, ready to provide emergency support.
"At least I could get my shoe on," Touichi said as his niece locked the door behind him.
"There is that," she agreed, tucking her o-mamori inside her shirt and matching her pace to his as they went to the mailbox and the stairs.
The less said about those two flights of stairs the better; at their bottom, the taxi was just turning onto their street, and Kuroba Touichi took the opportunity to thank his niece once again and tell her to tell them how sorry he was he had missed them.
"It was my pleasure," Miko said. "Please be careful of that ankle."
And then the taxi was there, and they bowed to each other before he awkwardly clambered in and was carried away.
It was the last time she ever saw her Uncle Touichi.
Over the years, she almost forgot that her o-mamori carried an extra element; thinking about it would have meant thinking about how she had acquired to it, and that would have brought to mind the as yet untestable hypothesis that the possible whereabouts of a valuable diamond and the death by equipment failure of a man religious about checking all of his machinery three times over before even a practice use were probably not unrelated, and that would have raised the nagging question of, if so, whether it were her fault.
Even with her frequent uses of the small serenity, she did not bring the rest of it actively to mind until Makoto's android girlfriend opened her navel port and ejected a dull, lifeless red stone of very familiar shape.
"It is a battery," she explained to her superiors, later. "All the legends -- they are not what it does itself, they are what the devices it powers can do."
"The Red Work was supposed to be more everything than the citrinity," one of them said thoughtfully; "does that mean this is more powerful or more efficient than -- "
"Well, we can hook something up through her and see how it is," Dr. McKay said airily. "What? It isn't as if I suggested yanking it out of her to run tests."
"Which is as well, as you have said she would likely have died without it."
"That's what I said..."
Miko apologized afterwards, to Makoto and his girlfriend. "I am sorry for them."
"It's all right," Mizuhara Makoto accepted. "They're your comrades. They're your family. Family is like that."
"Family is like that," Kusanagi Miko sighed. "No matter where you go, there they are."
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(Anonymous) 2008-04-05 04:20 pm (UTC)(link)I love this entire series of yours, by the way...
L
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