Fly, My Pretties

The hotel was about twenty-five clicks distant in some place called Yorii; a town nestled between heavily wooded hills. It was a traditional-looking building; single-story with weathered wooden siding the same color as the cedars covering the hill it was tucked against. Alone in the parking lot, with birdsong and distant city noises mingling with the ticking of the Humvee’s engine as it cooled, it all felt a little… different.

I was expected; the teenage girl behind the counter greeting me in barely-functional high-school English. From the ofuda tastefully decorating every doorway and the slight frisson in the air when I crossed the threshold I gathered the establishment catered to magi, but apparently I was still unusual enough to warrant a momentary double-take from her. She conveyed that my stay was already paid for, handed me a pair of slippers to wear, then stuck a bundle of neatly folded clothes in my arms and led me down a dimly-lit, wooden-floored hall to an empty room, which contained a CRT television, a futon laid out on the grass-mat floor and little else. The girl left me and I inspected the bundle – some sort of bathrobe, wooden platform sandals (?) two cloth tubes with forked ends (??) and towels.

The room had a private door leading to a little porch with table and chairs, offering a nice view of the forest (and a few trails vanishing into the trees.) Striding outside, I circled the building and was soon lugging two heavy Pelican cases from my Humvee back into the room without passing the front desk – I wasn’t in the mood to play twenty questions again. Then I spread out a towel and started field-stripping the Mark 48. Usually I’d leave it for the strange creatures that lurked in the armory, but I’d need it sooner, and it gave me time to think.

Ruriko hadn’t mentioned how they’d found me idly, and paying my tab was more than a courtesy. It was a very polite, Japanese way of doing it, but the message was clear enough – stay put. As I laid out machine-gun parts on the towel before me, I did the same with the problems.

First, I needed to get off the premises unobserved.

Second, I needed to secure alternative transportation.

And third, I needed to avoid drawing attention while en-route.

There was a polite knock at the sliding door, and a voice asked in slightly-accented English – “Mister Lanz? May I?”

“Sure,” I said absently, still turning the layout of the property over and around in my head as I worked out sight-lines and blind spots. The door rasped open and an older woman with graying hair stepped in. “I was just checking if…”

I looked up to find her blankly staring at me – kneeling on the floor in the provided bathrobe, a Mark 48 spread out over two towels. She lifted her eyes to stare outside, at my damp clothes fluttering in the wind where I’d laid them out on the table and chairs to dry faster.

“Don’t worry, I’ve still got my underwear on.”

“Is… is that oil!?” she asked, pointing at the light brown stains on the towels.

“Oh it’s just Ballistol,” I said, lifting the can. “Totally organic. Look!” I spritzed a little in my mouth. “Mrrhmh. Licorice. Anyway, uh, if you’ve got any paper towel or napkins or something I’d appreciate it.”

Her mouth opened and closed a few times. “Dinner’s in an hour,” she said simply, then let herself out.

I finished my prep, begged off dinner and caught a few hour’s sleep thirty minutes at a time, enough to dull the exhaustion without getting groggy. Night was finally falling when I brought in my mostly-dry clothes, drew the window blinds, and got dressed.

When I slipped into the hall I was in full battle-rattle. Fortunately Louisiana’s just as hot and humid as Japan in summer, and I’d had a suitable shirt in the Humvee; something lightweight and long-sleeved that was reasonably cool while warding off sunburn and skeeters. Tonight it was sort of concealing my plate carrier and short-barreled rifle. I had a helmet with mounted night vision as well, but my boots dangled from my neck by their tied laces. Carrying my favorite taxpayer-funded toy carefully in my hands, I crept down the hall like an American ninja till I was four doors down from my own, then eaaased the door open a crack and took a good three minutes to just listen.

Nothing but the creaking of the old building in the nighttime wind flowing down the hills.

Taking out my small back-up Ballistol can from my chest rig I squirted a little along the old sliding door’s bottom rail, counted to ten, and eased it open without the slightest creak. The room was indeed vacant, and within seconds I was kneeling by the exterior door and opening my little box. Within waited a combination screen/controller handset and a diminutive little helicopter; dark as the night.

A minute of quick programming later and I eased the wee drone out of the cracked-open door on my palm. It returned promptly, sticking the landing, and I plugged it into the controller with a USB cable. The flight replayed on the screen – the liftoff, then screaming over the huge patio cobblestones only an inch or two below – deacceleration, a graceful chandelle, climbing as it banked back towards the hotel–

–I paused the clip as I spotted it. A little white anomaly sitting on the rooftop. I zoomed in, and an origami crane showed up in all its pixelated grace in the headset… and tracing the crisp folds of its outer edges, a faint glow. I flipped from “FUSION” to “E/O” and the glow vanished.

It had just enough heat to register to the FLIR part of the wee Black Hornet drone’s sensors. I was no mage, but I’d learned a thing or six on the job and chief among them was that magic was as endemic to the universe as physics, and most constants were stubbornly persistent – they could be side-stepped, but never cheated, and even then it was often more trouble than it was worth. Few things were more stubborn than thermodynamics, so even magical energy tended to decay into heat.

I played the rest of the short pre-programmed flight and sure enough, there were two more white winks on the rooftop – positioned to cover the front and back doors, and anything moving out into the back yard or parking lot.

I inhaled deeply and nodded in the dark, staring at the zoomed-in freeze-frame of the paper crane.

A familiar little voice, the author of all my follies, took the chance to pipe up in my head.

That’s a paper shikigami, isn’t it?

Why yes, yes it is.

Just like in your animes, right?

Yes. A disposable familiar; just a talisman the spirit rides shotgun on, or something like that.

Wow, isn’t it so subtle and Japanese?

I bit my lip, breath frozen in my lungs, as the mental image of a “Monster Division” agent sitting in his car just down the road, dicking around on his phone as he paid half a mind to the link with his origami familiars bloomed vibrant in my mind.

But of course a barbarian American cowboy could never understand.

I eyeballed the Black Hornet drone; the latest, greatest, obscenely expensive mark nestled in its little cradle; the ultimate expression of egregious American wealth meeting the humblest form-factor imaginable.

Surely, you’ll be stymied by their subtle and cultured tactics until they can wrap this up nice and neat with their own people and deport you faster than an octopus enlisted in the Marines.

I felt the last of my resistance crumble as I cracked my knuckles, picked up the controller again and set to work.

A few minutes later the Hornet lifted off trailing my own origami; blank white paper folded into the vague approximation of a sparrow. (Hands-down the most use I’d ever gotten out of an ops briefing booklet.) Dangling from the drone’s ventral antenna on ten feet of black kydex tripwire cord, it felt just enough of the rotor’s downwash to twirl and flutter a bit. Hugging the building to duck the shikigami’s vision, I set off into the forest in search of a co-conspirator.

The drone’s thermal camera picked out one quickly; a small owl with prominent ear-tufts. The Black Hornet’s almost impossible for people to hear past ten feet, but not for an owl – but once I started jiggling the drone up and down, making my origami hop and flutter like a wounded bird, I had his full attention nonetheless. Something I’d learned from a Cherokee mage on a wendigo hunt – when you need to chat with Brother Owl and don’t have time or tools to do it right, all you need’s a little paper and a bit of line.

He must’ve been hungry because he made a pass for my decoy before I’d gotten halfway back to the hotel, so when I lofted my “sparrow” to the roof and made it “hop” towards the shikigami he was well and truly fed up. He bolted off the nearest tree branch like a missile and I nailed the timing; whipping my decoy away like a bullfighter’s cape to let the shikigami catch the charge. The owl missed; his tail sweeping the magical origami off the roof. His head pivoted left-right-left like the seeker of a missile and locked onto my decoy with renewed intent. I jerked my “sparrow” towards the next shikigami sentry.

At first the unseen magus returned his spies to their positions, but after a few passes the owl started attacking them unprompted, now peeping some kind of adorable war-cry. Pinning one down at last, he pecked at it, turning it this way and that before discarding it with visible disgust. A second shikigami fluttered over and tried to dive-bomb the troublesome tweeter but it just bounced off his fuzzy head, the ensuing flurry of panicked wingbeats blowing the origami into the bamboo rain gutter. It staggered airborne like a drunk butterfly, paper wings now damp and heavy.

I keyed the drone to follow one of a few pre-programmed routes I’d given it before the sortie, and crept barefoot down the hall, trying not to giggle like a demented imp. Pausing by the back door I checked the controller’s screen again and saw a roof quite clear of any little spies. Donning my boots I slipped outside towards the rendezvous and found my drone oscillating in place per its last instructions; the torn, slain decoy dangling listlessly beneath. I opened the box, cued it to return-and-land, and since I couldn’t help myself, flipped my night vision goggles down and scanned. And there he was, not twenty feet away in the top branches of an old cedar, victoriously wolfing down the piece of moistened beef jerky from my assault pack I’d tucked into the decoy to enhance its verisimilitude. I saluted my pint-sized pointman and hoofed it into the forest.

Origami is pretty,

but Owls are better,

I’m not good at haikus.