Cayeri (Return)

“Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod…”

“Noe? Noeee? What’s wrong, Noe?”

Merry was crouched down beside a hyperventilating, fetal-curling Noe. She gently placed a hand on her back, which seemed to send a shock through the girl, strong enough to stop her hyperventilating.

“I…I need to get home…” strained Noe.

“Hm?”

“I NEED TO GET HOME!!” she burst out. “Wh—Where am I? What is this place?! How far are we from Seikyo?!?!?!”

“A—Ack! Calm down, Noe! Please, calm down! Listen to me, you’re still in Kumamoto, okay? This is a convent and special facility of the Hospitaller Sisters south of the city. It’s, well, one of our bases; I’m usually the only one stationed here, since Shunji-kun works in the city. Sachiko-chan’s probably going to be here for a while, but we can get you home right away, okay?”

“O—Okay…” Noe slowly turned towards Merry. “But…what am I gonna say to—”

Merry giggled. “Oh, your dad? Well… Thanks to the info Justinho got from you, we were able to spoof the number of one of your friends and call him, telling him you’d be staying the night at her house.”

“Wait… Which friend?”

“Serena Miki?”

Noe sighed. She was thankful these people weren’t working against her. She hadn’t even remembered bringing her friends’ names up to Justo.

“Turns out, I make for a pretty convincing mother too, hee-hee!”

“An’ I guess I make for a pretty convincin’ dad,” said Justo. “I was the one who made the call to the school to tell ‘em you wouldn’t be comin’ in today. Also had to text your actual dad to tell him you were at school.”

“You do talk like my dad, if that’s what you mean,” said Noe, rising up to her feet. “Well, I guess I’ll be back by…five or six? That’s not too bad. …Thanks, guys.” She gave a slight bow as she said this—slight, but imparting genuine gratitude upon the Knights of the Monad gathered here.

Merry gave Noe a wide hug. “Aww, don’t mention it! We’ll be keeping in touch. By the way, do you have a nickname you go by? Nonha? Noelinha?”

“J—Just Noe’s fine,” said Noe. Now that she was up-close, Noe could see something metal tucked behind Merry’s ear, cleverly painted the same color as her skin and covered by her hair.

Huh, thought Noe. Well, I’m not going to question it. Most likely just some condition.

As Merry let her go, Noe also caught notice of that taciturn nun-girl who had been standing off from the rest of them this whole time. Noe walked over to her and addressed her.

“Leonor…right? I know we didn’t get the chance to speak much, but—”

“Good,” came the reply from the laconic Leonor. Noe’s jaw nearly hit the floor.

* * *

Love Kiong-Si!

Want you to be with me!

Once again, as on the way up to Kumamoto, the words of FCZN’s hit song reverberated through the cab of Justo’s truck on the way back to Seikyo. But Noe was not enjoying it in the slightest; Justo picked up on this and switched the stereo off.

“My fault,” he said, laughing this off, “leave it to me to not read a room. Or a cab.”

“…Sorry, Justo,” said Noe.

“Hm? Sorry for what?”

“For being so…on edge. I just…I feel like I have a lot going on in my life already, and all this possession business on top of having to actively seek out answers is just more and more stress for me. I let it get out of hand, and…yeah. That’s why I was so rude to you all at first. I really apologize.”

Justo chuckled. “Hah, don’t even mention it! Sachi and I’ve had some folks absolutely freak the hell out, trust me—and their cases were nothin’ compared to yours. You’re takin’ this a lot better than I think you realize, pal.” He tapped Noe on the shoulder with his fist as he said this. The gesture, combined with Justo’s choice of words, made Noe crack up with a smile for a moment. Then Justo continued.

“…‘Sides, I dunno if you could tell, but we’re all pretty on edge too. Well, me, maybe not so much, but you complained about how Sachi was behavin’ in the park, right? There’s a reason for that.”

Justo’s gaze shifted far beyond, beyond even the other drivers on this highway that seemed to stretch on for miles.

“A couple weeks ago, FCZN was performin’ at an idol festival in Japan. During their set, a blogger who was trying to interview them died behind their stage. He was known as an expositeur.

“Violent, yet instantaneous; one of the only true cases of spontaneous combustion, if such a thing exists. One moment he was up and walking, the next he flew back and keeled over with third-degree burns on his whole front surface. I looked at his body with Sachi, and I watched the footage. There was nothin’ natural about his death. His burns had traces of black powder in them; it was a blast that killed him, a blast that nobody, not even the cameras, could see or hear.

“It was easy to suspect Sachi at first, ‘cos of her time-stoppin’ powers, but…I doubt it, and so does the Bureau. Any motive she’d have for carryin’ out something like that doesn’t make sense in the bigger picture, and no spell she’s used can make an explosion like that. Either way, Sachi’s definitely been feelin’ the pressure lately. And I think that’s intentional.”

“Intentional?”

“Yep. I think, personally, the attack was carried out by an onmyoji or some other rogue mage trying to destabilize the Bureau of Onmyo. Sachi’s a weak link in one of its most prestigious families. Even if the public doesn’t find out about mages right away, and even if they don’t know about FCZN’s ties to the government, it’ll still put a lotta doubt on Sachi and the group as a whole, which makes the link inevitably weaker.”

“When you say ‘rogue mage’, you mean…”

“Mages outside of the Knights who use their powers publicly.”

“How many are there like that?”

“Not many…but more than you’d think. Most of ‘em aren’t organized, but we lump the criminal ones all together anyways. The alchemists we call black magicians, and the onmyoji dark onmyoji. Don’t ask me why, but the onmyoji don’t like associatin’ black with evil. Y’know, got their yin-yang philosophy and all that.

“Anyways, most rogue mages crop up durin’ times of war. Take Merry, for instance. Her father was only found out to be a mage when he started healing victims of the attack on Kokura during the Chugoku War, an’ they got scooped up not long after. She’s the first one in her whole family to receive proper alchemist training. Same goes historically, too. The Bureau of Onmyo had its origins in the Tenno’s rise to power in Japan. The Alchemist Court grew out of the conflicts between Satsuma and Japan after the Sengoku period.”

“I see…but why keep yourselves so secret?” asked Noe. “Wouldn’t it benefit a lot of people if the public knew about magic?”

“…It’s complicated,” was all Justo could reply with. “I dunno the whole story myself. …Anyways, make sure to keep in touch with us, a’right? See ya tomorrow at school?”

“Yeah,” replied Noe, with the best smile she could muster.

* * *

It was a small, but fairly ordinary, apartment building that Noe stopped in front of after getting dropped off on the corner by Justo. Pale beige concrete, wide windows, and covered balconies. Neither humble nor extravagant, neither cutting-edge nor obsolete. Whereas the Japanese had the novel idea of calling these residences mansions, borrowing the word from English, in Satsuma they were known as condos, a term more globally accepted. However, Satsumans did borrow other real-estate jargon from the Japanese, such as the layout of these residences: 3LDK, that is, three bedrooms and a combined living-dining-kitchen area.

Noe lived on the top floor of this complex, which meant a long, anxiety-wracked walk up the staircase to her place. According to Justo and Merry, everything that took place last night had been smoothed over with her father, but Noe knew that their attempts at “smoothing things over” with her father had a snowball’s chance in hell. Only one thing could soothe her anxiety as she opened the apartment’s door, stepped into the entryway, and took off her shoes, and that thing came bounding at her.

“ROCCO!” beamed Noe, as something big, brown, and furry leapt into her arms and began to slap its tongue against her face.

“H—Hey! Geez, Rocco, I’m sorry, ha-ha-ha! Were you a good boy while I was gone? Did Daddy feed you and take you for walks? Who’s a good boy? Huh?”

Rocco, a five-year-old Vizsla that had become part of the family when Noe had started middle school, was almost always under the girl’s watch and care. It was this loyal, lively dog that had made Noe love not just dogs, but all animals in general, and woken her to the dream of caring for animals as a profession someday. His tail now frantically waved back-and-forth as his de facto owner caressed him, until she got back up on her feet.

“Out? Rocco, do you need to go—”

“I was ‘bout to put out a missing persons notice if you weren’t home in the next couple hours.”

Trundling into the entranceway, a stack of papers in hand, now came a third member of the family, and the man of the house no less. Wearing simple jeans, an open flannel shirt, and a beater shirt underneath, his eyes glared at Noe from under his dirty-blond locks, which complemented his beard. Noe looked up to meet his cold gaze for a moment, and then unthinkingly turned her eyes downward.

“D—Dad… I’m really sorry. But you got the call from Dona Miki last night, right?”

“Uh? About you staying over? Yeah. That’s not the problem here.” He stepped in closer, entering Noe and Rocco’s space. “You like sayin’ you’re not a pushover, Noe, but I know that ain’t true for ninety-nine percent of people. You say it’s ‘just this once’ your plans suddenly change, and then it turns into two times, and then three, and soon enough you’re out of the house damn near every other night and it only stops when I catch you gettin’ into some shit you shouldn’t be. So don’t expect this to turn into a habit, or I’ll have the search parties coming for you for real. From here on out, I want you telling me where you’re going and what time you’ll be back. Got it?”

“Got it,” said Noe with a sigh. “I’ll call you ahead of time next time. Sorry.”

Her father walked even closer and lightly tapped her head with the stack of papers.

“That was easier than I thought,” he remarked mainly to himself.

“PACO!” screeched a fourth voice from beyond the hallway. It sounded like it belonged to a woman well advanced in years. “PACO, GET IN HERE! THERE’S SOMETHING ON THE NEWS!”

Paco, Noe’s father, sighed. “Coming, Mama.”

He, Noe, and Rocco all followed the source of the voice into the living room, in that order. On the couch of the living room sat Noe’s grandmother, a hunch-backed little old lady, behind her walker. On the screen of the television were two images: in the foreground, an image of FCZN, the same that had been on Noe’s ticket the night before.

“Oh!” Noe exclaimed.

In an inset was a headshot of a man with close-cropped hair, a scant beard, and a bit of fat on his cheeks and chin. The caption read ÓTOMO FIROMASA: Hiromasa Ohtomo.

“Oh, hey,” said Paco. “I was following this one.”

"Shush!" exclaimed the grandmother to the both of them.

Beneath these images, a banner read NEW RUMORS ABOUT JOURNALIST’S MYSTERIOUS DEATH. A disembodied voice spoke:

New rumors have circulated on social media today regarding the story of the mysterious death of Japanese journalist Hiromasa Ohtomo, age 39, behind the set of an idol festival in Nara late last month. In spite of the presence of third-degree full-body burns and impact trauma, the medical examiner in the city ruled his death as an accident.

Prior to the incident, Ohtomo, famous for exposing celebrity scandals, had announced on social media that he was planning a guerilla interview with the members of the idol group FCZN, who were performing on stage at the time of his death.

Previous leaks of CCTV footage, which showed Ohtomo collapsing without the presence of any fire or explosion, sparked heated discussions online, and this latest rumor could add more fuel to the fire. Purported correspondence between Ohtomo and an unknown contact indicates that the journalist was preparing to ask one of the members of FCZN about ties to the government, with specific mention made of “ceremonies of a religious and ritualistic nature”.

The leak was first posted on social media by Jotaro Niiro, a retired major-general of the JPA, and later the JNA, who says he received it from a trusted source. Since his retirement, Major General Niiro has become a prominent commentator and podcaster online, where he has been critical of what he calls “overreach in authority” in both Japan and Satsuma. While he wrote that he was “not ready to speak with the press at this time”, he announced that his next podcast…

“Oh, my God…” muttered Noe in surprise. But this paled in comparison to Paco’s reaction, as he dropped his stack of papers on the floor and stared at the screen with a slacked jaw.