Interlude: Chosen for the Grave, part 29
"Ooooooh!" Honoka said, her eyes going wide as she looked out across the vast expanse of magical mayhem below us.
"This is a mall," I said carefully. "Remember that you promised to stay right next to me."
"Of course!" she chirped, rolling a crit-fail on her Believability check.
"I'm serious," I said, taking her hand to physically restrain the urge to run off that was causing her to visibly quiver. "Right. Next. To. Me. Last thing we need is you running off and doing ninja stuff in front of a bunch of people with camera phones." I thought about the possibilities. "Or in any other way look weird," I added as a general catch-all.
She looked at me with a raised eyebrow, looked down at our linked hands, and looked up at me again.
"Is it weird for old guys to hold hands with fifteen-year-old girls?" she asked, her tone conveying that she knew the answer and was mocking me.
I sighed and let go of her hand. "Seriously, Honoka. You promised."
"Don't worry, Uncle Earl. I would never break a promise."
"At least Mari hasn't yet taught you to lie effectively," I grumbled. "This is such a bad idea."
She gave me an unrepentant grin that promised mayhem, mischief, and general misbehavior.
I winced and said nothing. What was there to say? Instead, I simply looked out over the mall and attempted to plot a safe course.
I wasn't quite sure how or why I had ended up in this moment. It was probably Mari's fault; Honoka had been whining at me for weeks to show her more of Earth and I had been pushing back. Earth was no longer my home, exactly, but it was still a place that I cared about and home to a lot of people that I cared about. Setting ninja magic loose upon it was only going to cause problems. Visions had been dancing in my head from the moment that Honoka first expressed interest in Earth. Mostly visions of my door being kicked down by men in black combat vests with great big guns who swept me away to a horrifying prison somewhere and tortured information out of me on how they could get their hands on these super soldier assassins.
Granted, they wouldn't be able to hold me. Still...
"Why is everyone so fat?" Honoka asked, breaking me out of my ruminations.
We were standing on the third floor mezzanine at the south end of the mall, looking out over the sweep of crass consumerist capitalism. The place was stuffed to the gills with a cross-section of America; grandparents with little ones, harried adults shopping for a gift or clothes or whatever in between other commitments, teenagers working hard to show how disaffected and unimpressed they were, and employees whose fixed smiles were the only thing restraining them from releasing the murderous impulses caused by interacting with retail customers and running amok in an orgy of horrifying yet entirely understandable slaughter. Nearly everyone involved in the scene had the build of a typical American, meaning that they ranged from 'swivel-chair spread / dad-bod mode enabled' to 'land whale in need of scooter'.
I pondered how to answer that. It wasn't a simple question—lobbyist-induced farm subsidies meaning that corn was so overabundant that people actively looked for ways to use it, which meant high-fructose corn syrup as a sweetener being incredibly cheap while market competition drove inexpensive food to be sweeter, saltier, more intense. Puritan work ethic and exploitative capitalism causing overwork that meant most people had little energy for cooking, thereby driving consumption of those inexpensive and unhealthy foods. Decades of active assaults on public schooling by half of the government meaning that few people had sufficient information about nutrition. Food deserts pushing people away from produce and other healthy sustenance and towards the aforementioned obesity-makers.
"Well..." I said, thinking. "It's complicated. The short and oversimplified answer is that a lot of the food here is too sweet and people's lifestyles make it easy to eat too much and exercise too little."
"That's dumb. Why don't they just eat better and exercise more?"
I restrained a surge of anger. This place might not be my home anymore, but it was the place that had shaped me for most of my life. Hearing some bratty, entitled little—
Breathe.
Honoka had grown up with a degree of privilege unimaginable to most Americans, or even most Terrans. A favorite daughter of the richest, most powerful ninja clan, she had been showered with love and attention, given every material object and as much schooling as she could handle. Born into the lucky half a percent of superhumans, trained from birth to be above the common herd. Yes, attitudes towards civilians were slowly shifting, and the Gōketsu were probably the best clan for non-bigotry, but the fact still remained: ninja were superior to civilians in most measurable ways. Baseline stronger and more athletic physically, superhumanly strong when they wanted to be, and gifted with magic powers. How could they not see civilians as lesser? Arguments that all humans had intrinsic value simply because they did were a hard sell.
"Do you remember when you were seven and you asked your tutors why everyone spent the entire Warring Clans period fighting one another? Why they didn't simply skip all that and move to the Village Era and the Great Peace right away?"
"Sure."
"Your tutors told you that it was complicated and that the reasons for all that were the essence of the history and political theory classes that you would be studying for the rest of your time in the GED program."
"You're saying that it's like that?"
"I'm saying that it's like that: complicated."
"That's boring."
I let that go, because there was nowhere good that it could go. "What appeals?" I asked. "If you're hungry, we could hit the food court. If you want to browse stuff then there's a JCPenny at the far end. They've got a bunch of everything...clothes, jewelry, toys, sporting gear, that kind of stuff. There's a music shop just over there—"
"Ooh!"
"—aaand, she's gone," I said with a sigh as Honoka pitched over the railing and dropped.
With anyone else, I would have lunged forward in a panic and tried to save them despite the fact that they were out of reach before my brain even started to react. With Honoka, I didn't bother. She was a ninja, she was a Gōketsu, and it wasn't like a mere three-story drop was going to hurt her.
Sure enough, five feet from the ground, Honoka triggered the Reusable Rocket Boot seals on her shoes, slowing herself to a gentle landing. She raised a hand to wave frenetically as she trotted over to a group of teenagers sitting in the food court. They had taken over two of the larger tables, both of which were piled high in plastic trays covered in mostly, but not entirely, typical teenager fare—a stack of greasy fast food burgers and fries, but also a giant salad with chicken strips and hardboiled egg, and a bowl of something reddish that was either an Asian-fusion curry or a very strident tomato soup.
Every single head in the entire area snapped around to goggle at the physics-ignoring failed suicide of a bright-eyed young woman with a bouncy smile. There was a frozen moment that brought my heart into my throat...and then everyone moved on. Most of them were shaking their heads, undoubtedly telling themselves that they must not have seen what they thought they had seen. Some of them moved reluctantly, wanting to ask questions but unable to overcome social conventions about talking to strangers and deciding that it was better to simply move on.
I watched as Honoka arrived on the perimeter of the teenager group. They were, of course, staring.
I paused, analyzing the situation. I was obviously wearing my full combat rig, including the RRBs, because I wasn't an idiot. I wasn't expecting to be attacked, but the Chosen for the Grave world had a habit of trying to kill you without worrying too much about your state of expectation. The simple fact that I was back home on boring old Earth, home of absolutely zero electricity-spitting slash mind-controlling slash eyeball-eating monstrosities, had no bearing on my long-ingrained habit of preparation.
I could hot-drop after Honoka. Alternatively, I could circle around to the escalator at the midpoint of the mezzanine, run down, then run back to the food court. The first might get me there before she finished completely blowing our cover, at the cost of completely blowing our cover. The second would be less eye-catching but also slower. Both choices were terrible and would lead to disaster.
With a muffled curse, I turned and strode for the escalator as fast as I could manage without standing out.
I kept an eye on Honoka as I moved. She was on her feet, chatting animatedly with a seated group—four boys, two girls. One obvious couple based on the hormone-induced 'as much of me must be in contact with as much of you as possible at all times' seating arrangement. One of the boys and the uncoupled girl had been having a dance off; they had actual moves, which was an advantage of the new generation. A billion hours of dance tutorials and dance competition TickyTockies or whatever they were called meant that kids these days were much more able to cut a rug than those of my generation. We used to have to dance the way the gods intended—by shuffling awkwardly around like baby giraffes, trying to pretend we knew what we were doing.
I was sixty feet along the mezzanine when Honoka interjected herself into the dance off. She must have asked, because the girl stepped back and waved her in.
My niece, of course, went in
all the way.
She took the moves she had seen the other girl doing and threw it in a blender with a bit of the Elemental Nations' idea of dancing, a few moves from the Goddess Forms a Bouquet taijutsu kata, and some of the general athleticism and flexibility of a young woman who had been doing ninja training literally since she could walk.
She also had absolutely no shame, and the poor young man she was...competing with? Showing up? Seducing? Whatever the hell she was doing, she was doing it a lot better than him.
The escalator was jammed with a bunch of double-wides in red ball caps, taking up so much room that I couldn't get past them. I had to stand there, jittering and bouncing as the mechanical stairs carried me veerrrry sslllooowwlyyy down to the first floor.
It took me a highly excessive four minutes to get from where I had started to the bottom of the escalator, with an insufferable amount of yet more time to get back to the teens if I stuck to a non-eye-catching walk. This felt like an eternity, as I watched Honoka finish her dance-off and plop down on the lap of a young cross-pollination of a theater kid and a hooligan: guyliner, all black clothes that included a black T-shirt with the logo of some (probably death metal) band I'd never heard of, black leather jacket, nasal bar, and three earrings in each ear and one eyebrow. He looked like a spiral-bound notebook.
Honoka saw me hustling up and her face fell for just an instant before shifting back into an aggressively vivacious smile.
"Hey, Uncle Earl!" she called. "Meet Denise, Skyler, Johnny, Tom, Rich, and Raven."
Raven, of course, was the one she was taking pains to ensure didn't fly up into the sky. By sitting on his lap.
There are moments of clarity in life. They feel like your subjective time has sped up so that an entire mental analysis can fly past, different opinions weighing one another, different actions being considered and picked through. Suddenly, I was having one of those.
I could do what I had instinctively intended. Act out the extreme version of the patriarchal, Puritan-esque social structure that I had instinctively internalized during my youth. Drag Honoka off 'before her virtue was compromised'. (Which would also play well with the 'do not let the existence of ninja magic get out into the world' agenda, come to think of it.)
Alternatively, I could be the Responsible Adult Chaperone. Sit down, engage the kids in conversation, learn who these new people were who were clearly going to become part of my niece's life if her expression was anything to go by. Bonus points: I could embarrass the hell out of Honoka in the process. That was fun in and of itself but it also seemed like a fair punishment for her running off on me.
Other alternatively, I could be The Cool Uncle. Give her space, let her make her own choices and her own mistakes. It was the riskiest course, the one most likely to reveal the existence of ninja and the Elemental Nations to the Earth world, but it was clear that I was going to have very little agency in that determination. Honoka was going to be coming back to Earth in the future, whether I liked it or not. She was not going to be bound to my side where I could keep her under wraps. And, being honest...did it actually, truly matter? If Honoka or any other Gōketsu ninja got captured by the men in black, I would open a rift inside their cell and pull them out. If I got captured...well, I was
the sealmaster. The level of restriction necessary to keep me from escaping would be beyond anything earthly authorities would likely consider necessary. Even lacking any other materials, I could use my own blood to fingerpaint a rift-opening seal, either the one that would take me to the Seventh Path or to the Human Path. I had practiced them both to the point that in the span of fifteen seconds I could draw them, infuse them, and activate them. And I could do it while blindfolded. I had practiced all that specifically so that I could escape from any imprisonment.
I scratched my arm, fingers tapping in the subtle motions of Gōketsu battle code:
Unexpected circumstances. No cover prepared.
Honoka was sitting crosswise on Raven's lap with her right arm around his shoulders, so her right hand was out of sight of the teens as she shaped the signs:
Mission doable. I am confident.
I nodded to the teens. "Nice meeting you all." I looked to Honoka. "H—ey, I'm going to swing by the bookshop and then hit up the vinyl store." I pointed down the way to the vintage music store halfway down the mall. "See you there in thirty minutes." I had almost said her name and then realized that I didn't know if she had given them an alias, so I barely managed to redirect the first word.
"Sounds good!" she chirped.
"You've got your phone, right?" I asked, knowing perfectly well that she didn't since I had never gotten her a phone. Hadn't even had reason to explain the part they played in modern society.
"Oh..." she said, suddenly realizing that maybe she was overestimating her ability to bullshit through an entire culture that she knew almost nothing about.
"You left it at home again, didn't you?" I asked, rolling my eyes. "You would forget your own head if it weren't tacked on."
"Uncle Earl! Don't embarrass me!"
"Hey, that's my job. You. Raven, right?"
"Yeah?"
"Set a timer on your phone, ship her off when it pings. I've got stuff to do after the mall."
He looked at me in confusion, visibly wondering who this old fart was and why RavenScytheWielderDarknessDragonEmoDeath6969 (or whatever his stupid IRL gamer tag was) should listen to him.
I met his eyes and stretched out the tiniest hint of my aura, tracing a filament of fear across the wet flesh of his brain.
He jolted, face going pale, and scrambled his phone out of his pocket, almost dislodging Honoka in the process. He swiped through apps and menus, set the timer, and turned the phone to me so that I could verify it was running.
"Thanks," I said, offering him a friendly smile. "Have fun, y'all."
I sauntered off, wondering if I had just doomed two worlds to war, destruction, and cultural cross-contamination by boy bands and bad street theater respectively.
Voting remains closed.
