Enter the Butler

         OCTOBER 20TH, 2006

CAFE PUMPKIN, SAN FRANCISCO UNIVERSITY 

 “You’ve lost your mind. Finally! But seriously, Zhou Chen, have you lost your actual mind?”

“I am in complete possession of my faculties, Butler Bai. I haven’t even reached the bugs on the wall stage of sleep deprivation yet.”

The girl sitting across from them was Heland Bai, their friend in the sciences and for Zhou, his fellow hobbyist in all matters of the occult. They’d met on Mystforums and after some exchanging of personal information, discovered they attended the same university, though Heland was a year above them (and a full head or two below them).

The reason behind the nickname “Butler Bai” was unknown to Kiya, and therefore out of principle shall remain unknown to us.

          Heland sent Kiya a glance that said “Is he for real?”

Kiya shrugged in return.

“Oh, you know he gets serious, Heland. You know Zhou and his crazy ways. His… loco moto-ives… Nope, I was trying to rhyme those but that’s not really how it works. I’ll keep workshopping it.”

          “His insane- his insaine brain.”

The two hi-fived.  

          Zhou moved the stack of notebooks again, this time to bequeath Kiya with the Look of Disapproval.

It had no effect.

“What exactly, then, did you think I meant when I emailed you that I had twelve notebooks?”

He then turned his glare on Kiya, pushing up his glasses in a way that made Heland want to laugh out loud. 

          “And this concerns your fate and your mortality, so don’t act like it has nothing to do with you.”

          Heland put her face in her hands. “You look like Connie when you do that.”

“I wanna meet Connie,” said Kiya, “you said she's got a pet mamba.”

          “Yeah, it lives in.. okay, I forgot! I met it once. It does ventriloquism! It’s crazy.” 

“Crazy.” muttered Kiya. “I wanna see that.” He tugged on Zhou’s sleeve. “Let’s go to Heland’s place after this...”  

          Removing Kiya’s fingers one by one from the sleeve of his jacket, Zhou had an idea.

Taking six notebooks off the stack of twelve, and placing them to the side, he now shot a glare of the highest level at both Kiya and Heland at the same time. 

Kiya had known Zhou long enough to know that now was the time to act if he wanted to avoid a lecture, deserved though it may have been.

          “Alright! Let’s get started! Here commences the first ever meeting of the… of the…”

Zhou’s glasses shone. “Of the Lotus Complex Investigation Unit.” 

Heland lifted her coffee as a toast. “Yay!”

Adjusting in her seat, she reached over and plucked a notebook from the double stack, and began flipping through. 

Kiya did the same. 

          “Actually, what if we named it the…” Now Heland caught on to the atmosphere created by a certain single glasses-wielding individual. “If we named it the, er, nevermind me anyways! Go on.”

Zhou turned down the shine on his glasses so he could read his notes.

“From what we know, the Lotus Complex is a phenomenon where the soul hovers in between life and death.” 

          “And you think… because of that, I had trouble coming back last time.”

“Exactly. Right now, you should be very firmly designated as alive. After all, you’re not supposed to die so often. It’s a fluke, or a bug; a mistake in your divinely inspired code. But-” He tore out a sheet of looseleaf to draw a little cartoon Kiya between two mountains labeled “ALIVE” and “DEAD” - “you’re stuck in between. So the system - it doesn’t know what to do with you.” 

“So it manages to spit me out eventually…”

          “But it takes longer.” said Heland, completing his thought from between the pages of Notebook #5. 

          “Yes, and…”

“Maybe it’s been getting steadily longer for a while now and I just didn’t notice.”

          Zhou shook his head. “This is why you should be keeping detailed records of your journeys.” 

“I’m not an occult freak like you guys!” groaned Kiya. 

"Yeah, we're not occult freaks like Zhou." said Kiya. 

"Come here." said Zhou. 

          “No, don’t.” protested Heland, but she opened her curtain of bangs for Kiya to give her a (light) flick.

          “I’m sorry he’s so mean to you.” said Zhou with mock concern.

“I’m not mean, I’m like the doting older brother she never had.”

          “I have an older brother.”

“Oh, do you?” Kiya didn’t know why, but he felt embarrassed all of a sudden. “Well… it doesn’t matter because we’re here to talk about something else right now.” 

          “Yes, the…Before you cut me off.” Zhou pushed his glasses back up again, and flipped through another notebook. “What I think is… If the Lotus Complex is real, and I’m not crazy, and Kiya really did come back-” 

          “Brother, don’t poke me there.” deadpanned Kiya.

“-and if the Kiya-who-will-not-be-poked does have what we say he has, then he should be able to do other things that people who are neither dead or alive can do.”  

“So, do we all understand the working hypothesis as of now?”

Heland and Kiya nodded.

          “And, now that we have our theory, the next thing to do…”

“Is to test it with an experiment.” grinned Heland.

The two turned to Kiya, smiling like they were about to discover Bigfoot.

          “What is that? Your scientific method... or something?”

“Nope.” beamed Heland. “It’s the occultic method, of course!”