Bull in a China Shop

As he came to, the world unveiling itself from the blurriness of regained senses, two things immediately came to mind: that his father came back, and that his father had done something horrendously stupid. Is that the word? he wondered as he blinked things back into focus.

Standing above him, adjusting something, was his father. He gave Akihiro his sheepish smile and patted his shoulder.

“Good, thought I’d lost you. You all right?”

Akihiro shoved his hand away, and a clinking came from his left arm; the kote had been affixed to him. Scowling at it, and then at his father, he asked, “What the hell happened? Why am I wearing this?”

“I’ll get to that. How have you been? I meant to ask earlier, but, well. You know.”

“Get to it now,” Akihiro muttered. “I don’t have a lot of patience for deadbeats.”

“Careful son,” Naoki warned. “I’m still your father.”

“Barely, considering that’s exactly what you haven’t been for the last twelve years.” Was he really trying to pull the parental card? Now?

Naoki uprighted a swivel chair and sat down in it, rubbed his face in his hands. “I know you want answers, but for the time being, you’ll just have to take things as they come.”

“Sure. Whatever that means.” Akihiro held up his arm. “What do I need this for?”

“To control the magic I just transferred to you.”

Akihiro narrowed his eyes at him. “What magic? We’re agentless.”

From the almighty sigh that seemed to pull him down from the shoulders, it was if whatever information he was going to present physically pained him.

“You know how for those couple of years I stayed with you and okachan? How I left for weeks at a time for that other job?”

Akihiro nodded. Where was this going?

“I was a researcher for Y.E.S.’s R and D department. For, you know, magical items. That kote you’re wearing? It’s a containment unit. A containment unit for an unimaginably powerful form of magic that the science division discovered a few weeks ago. That magic is in you, now, and that kote is the only thing keeping it from going ballistic.”

A sort of heaviness set in, and Akihiro leaned against the wall to steady himself. Wherever this happened to be going, he definitely didn’t want to follow.

“Okay, so what kind of magic are we talking about? Did they find a way to merge wood and metal or something?”

His father shook his head. “They called it ‘aether.’ In essence, it’s a microcosm of the universe, though it seems to be more inclined to manipulating the laws of physics than anything else. If it had been tinkered with more, I don’t doubt the bastards would’ve been able to get it to restructure molecules. I got the only viable sample out before then.”

Akihiro didn’t like the sound of that.

“So, what, you stole it?”

“Yes. But it would’ve been catastrophic if I hadn’t,” Naoki said. “This magic gets out, and weaponized, it would effectively nullify all other forms of magic. This isn’t just a game changer, Hirokun. This is a game ender. It defines the rules of the next game.”

Akihiro decided that at the present moment, theorizing about the apocalypse didn’t do either of them any good. Table it for now.

“So why did you give it to me?”

Naoki slowly got to his feet, stretched out his back, and walked to the front of the shop. “There’s a limit to how long the human body can carry aether. I’ve been running like a chicken with its head cut off for two weeks with it in me, and that was enough to push my body to the breaking point. I look older than I should, right?”

He turned around; it was true. The man was only sixty, and yet his temples had turned gray bordering on white, the wrinkles on his face were far more pronounced than they should have been, and his eyes looked tired, as if his soul was exhausted. Even his shoulders slumped.

“Two weeks, and it’s taken its toll. The kote will protect you from the worst of it, as will your age. Your metabolism, your body’s ability to heal itself, they’re in better shape than mine. But even so, I…” He looked at his hands. “I didn’t want it to come to this. But I couldn’t trust anyone else with it. You’re all I have in this world, Hirokun. And right now, I need you to trust me, and to carry the aether, to save it.”

“What?” It just tumbled out of his mouth, more or less. “Save… what?”

“Look,” Naoki said, glancing outside. “We don’t have much time before Y.E.S. starts bearing down on us. Maybe a few hours. Right now, all you need to know is that we need to get to Nagoya. There, I can run some tests and figure out how we’re going to get rid of this thing.”

“Wait, just wait,” Akihiro said. “Is this magic going to kill me? What can it even do?”

“No, it’s not. I’ll explain everything, I promise, but getting to safety is the only thing we should be worried about right now.”

“Why can’t we just give them the aether back? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

“Easier, yes,” Naoki said as he pulled the metal sheet covering the front of the shop down. He locked it into place. “But I didn’t do all of this because it was easy. I did it because it was necessary.”

How many times had he used that excuse to justify himself? God forbid, did he use it when he abandoned his family twice?

“Okay, fine. But why Nagoya?”

“The lab I worked at’s there, as is the infrastructure we need to use for testing. It’s a very hush-hush sort of thing, so not many labs are equipped to handle it. As far as I know, Nagoya’s the only one. We’ll lay law at okachan’s until we have to go.”

“Hold on,” Akihiro said as his father was halfway out the side door. “I can’t just leave work. People are expecting us to be open.”

“The world’s at stake, Hirokun.”

“Yeah, well, so’s my damn paycheck.”

“Okachan’ll understand.”

Akihiro wanted to laugh. But he couldn’t find the humor in any of this.

“Twelve years’ must’ve put a real damper on your memory of her,” he said. “But fine. Wake the dragon all you want. Just let her know I didn’t want any part in it.”