Horrible Terrible Truths

At dinner that night, as Satoshi poked at his rice with his chopsticks and his mind wandered, the tension in the air could not have been higher.

Finally, he cracked and slammed his fist on the table.

"Seriously, the more I try to figure out what's going on, the more you try to ignore me. Why is that?" His chopsticks clattered on to the table as he dropped them.

"What if I told you your parents were using us as test subjects for cyborg parts, but they had no heart to use you?"

Satoshi's face fell. From everything that had happened before, he was sure something was going on behind the scenes, but...

As an inventor, he should have sided with his parents for making progress, as Celesta's and Nova's shows of superhuman strength definitely meant that there was some. As someone who'd narrowly missed out on being experimented on, there should have been at least some shred of gratitude.

However, as a person who'd lived with Celesta and Nova for almost his entire life, it felt - no, it was - unethical.
--
After trying and failing to contact his parents, Satoshi's troubles led him to the scrapyard behind the soba shop. There, in the shadow of monstrous mounds of scrap metal, sitting on a broken deckchair, was someone only a few years older than him.

The seated person's hair was auburn - even in shade, the dark roots made it clear the hair was originally black - and in his pudgy hand, gleaming in the harsh luminescence of surrounding light towers, was a hollow grey cylinder which seemed to be from a vacuum cleaner. As he got up, his loose-fitting button-up shirt got caught in the folding part of the chair, causing him to upend himself (despite still holding on to the cylinder).

Sighing at exactly how much this scenario made the older boy look like an upturned bug, Satoshi knelt and helped this stranger up.

"You don't happen to be the Satoshi my uncle was referring to, do you?" this person asked in natural-sounding Japanese, at a pace that was too slow for it to be his native language but not slow enough for his native language to be English.

Satoshi nodded, finally seeing the resemblance of the person in front of him to the man who ran the soba shop.