My Brother is not an Archeologist

“Your Daddy is a Dodo?"

“No Okame, that’s not what he means.”

“Well stop laying about, lets find out!”

The small monster girl climbed over the couch and over to the storeroom the three humans were just staring at. She went on her tip toes and opened the door into the windowless store room.

“Odd-ball? Dodo? Odd-odd?”

She wandered in and I slowly followed, stopping at the door. I Fumbled around on the wall for a light.

“It’s on the left.”

Keisuke was still on the ground, Ms. Hiyori rubbing his shoulders.

“Rei, Rei I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you but I just kept hoping I could fix it. Rei, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”

He just kept repeating until his whispers started merging into his tears again.

The room was pretty bare, and the overhead lighting was rough. A bunch of the lights had gone out over the years and Keisuke hadn’t bothered to replace them. Much like apparently many subjects in Keisuke’s life, this was a room I didn’t open without his permission.

“Odd-ball! What are they hiding in here?”

Okame had changed her size and was riding the dodo around the room. There were a few crates, and large boxes from its time as a warehouse. Boxes full of Keisuke’s stuff from his old apartment. Bags full of trash and old furniture lined the walls.

The floor tiles were also littered with hundreds of colorful eggs split in half, and the random menial prizes they held. The walls were battered with uses of various essences Keisuke had chanted over the years. Even I could sense the magical essence in the room. One wall was absolutely pelted with spherical dents.

Keisuke had two spells thanks to his Ether essence. His first was a medium length chant that let him summon a random person’s chant, and perform it just as they would; provided he had the necessary amount of essence and stamina. His second spell was a short chant spell that summoned a random essence type and shot it as a projectile.

I turned back into the room to face him. He looked back at me with those puppy dog eyes, the faint rainbow in his eyes bright from tears, the whites; red from crying.

“I would summon a chant and then stop halfway if I knew it wasn’t right, and that would cause the essence to clump. Sometimes the chants were too short to stop. I tried my best to cleanse it but then I would get angry and shoot at the wall. And then last week Odd-ball appeared.”

It wasn’t that unusual for monsters to manifest around people. Captain Kawakami’s cloud monkey was an example of a person’s essence clumping around and manifesting a monster. Our mother used her magic so much she had two monsters with her essence employed at her Café, to keep up with demand.

Keisuke’s was different though, his essence used very little of his own essence to summon the chant. Then it would be overpowered by the larger amount of the essence type of the summoned chant. To summon a monster of the ether essence he would’ve had to summon and cancel thousands of chants without cleaning this room.

“Neither of you are useless.”

I'm so glad Ms. Hiyori was here.

“That dodo had two platinum rank hunters chasing it down for almost an hour?”

Kei stopped crying a little bit out of surprise.

“You’re platinum rank.”

Ms. Hiyori flipped her hair.

“I mean I haven’t been active in five years; it probably needs to be renewed. But yes, yes I am.”

I heard their conversation in the distance as I closed in on the table in the back corner, there was a large box you might see in a museum. The kind of wooden box they might store a mummy in.

I felt a lump in my throat.

I walked up to the box and looked in.

My father was a very stoic man, not very keen on social cues or making friends. His son didn’t fall very far from the tree. This was a whole new level of stillness. Inside the box laying in a nest of packing peanuts was my father, turned completely to stone.

The essence started to clump around me, thick and viscous.

Most times; you had to reach for the essence. But essence wasn’t just reactive to thought, it was reactive to emotion too. That’s why epiphanies were called the moments when the head and the heart shared a common goal, when the two meet.

I was having a lot of emotion right now.

My father was in a box.

My brother had kept my petrified father in a box, for five years.

He had kept my father in a room, in a house that I had visited for five years.

I had sat on a couch with my brother, who knew my father was in a box, in a room, in his house, for FIVE YEARS!

“Wake up wake up wake up, things to do,”

The chant of my third spell just starting coming out of me.

“I need your help, rise from slumber with my essence.”

I already knew the result but I needed to talk to something other than my stupid brother.

“Creaky joints and messy habits,”

My brother, who had one of the keenest essence senses in the world, crawled his way to the doorway.

“Rei! Don’t! oh please don’t Rei!”

“Come to my world this thing inhabit.”

The chant was almost done. Okame rode over on Odd-ball to see what was in the box.

“Rei, that’s not him. It’s a rock. It’s not going to have his personality. Please stop! Please, please, please”

He didn’t get to tell me what to do right now. How could he have kept this from me. I didn’t care if he was optimistic, thinking he would summon a spell to undo what he had done to him the next day.

The next day never came.

I would hear what happened in this house from a face I could trust.

“PERSONIFY!”

The essence shot from me into the stony statue of my father. He teamed with life and the marble like stone gained a pale hue as the essence ran through it.

“Ohhh hello, Are you perhaps Rei? You know your brother talks about you all the time.”

The stony arms rested on the sides of the box as the stony semblance of my father sat up. It wasn’t anywhere near close to my father’s voice, but it brought tears to my eyes just to see his mouth move, and his eyes blink. It was still my father’s face.

“Rei, rei, please dispel it. Please let your essence go, it’s unnatural.”

“Shut up!”

I didn’t even turn to look at him, I knew he still leaned against the door frame. He wouldn’t come over here. He didn’t have the guts.

“Oh, I've come awake at a bad time.”

My stony father said as he scratched his stony hair nervously. At least someone here had the decency to care about other people’s feelings.

“No, you; are fine. Actually it’s great to see you. I just have a couple questions for you and then you can go back to sleep.”

“Oh yes of course, anything for Kei’s sister.”

My mouth twitched a little bit. I wasn’t his daughter; I was the sister of the human that the rock had most interacted with.

“Has anyone besides Kei come in here?” 

“One, his friend Daichi. Kawaguchi Daichi.”

That was the name of the Mister Doctor Kawaguchi.

“When did he last come here?”

“Around two years ago, and then he stopped all of sudden. After that Kei started chanting more often. That’s also when he had his second epiphany and started shooting the other wall with orbs of pure essence.”

Kei had made it seem like he had his second spell for a while, but at this point that lie wasn’t hurtful in the least. Just another stupid thing he thought he should keep from me.

“How did you get here?”

There was more sobbing from Kei as Ms. Hiyori helped him to his feet. There was a thud as she was unsuccessful.

“Daichi stored me with his essence.”

I turned to Kei for the first time since I saw the contents of the box.

“Is this true? What is the Doctor’s essence?”

Kei looked at me and then looked down.

“It’s true, his essence is space, and he can store things in a sub-space inventory. When I turned him to stone with one of my spells during the research trip. Daichi stored him in there.”

I was absolutely furious.

“So, you told everyone that he had been killed by an arch-monster, and brought a dead body to your house to experiment on?”

Kei looked down at his shoes. I stared him for a while and then turned to stony father.

“Is this true?”

“Yes, I haven’t met anyone else besides Keisuke and Daichi.”

I was breathing kind of heavy. Okame tugged at my shirt, she sucked in a big breath and then exhaled really slow. I copied her, I was about to hyperventilate.

“Is there anything else I should know, please Mr. stone face?”

The stony father put his hands in his lap, and smiled at his new name. I felt awful seeing it.

“Yes, before Daichi stopped coming around. He said he had a lead on a relic that might be able to help.”

“A relic, do you know what kind or what essence?”

“I do not. Daichi just said it was a relic that would help with epiphanies.”

I took another deep breath with Okame.

“That’ll be all, thank you so much.”

The stony face nodded, and then carefully lay itself back down.

I let the essence go, and sunk to the ground for some floor time.

Okame got off Odd-ball and reached out to hold my hand.

“Your father is very nice, but he has dry skin.”

I looked at her, and choked, and giggled, and laughed, and began to weep.

My brother joined me.