AN: Beta-read by
Carbohydratos,
Did I?,
Gaia,
Linedoffice,
Zephyrosis, and
Mizu.
Chapter 131: Adventures in Localization
A little under a week later, I found myself eating dinner with Dinah, and the topic, predictably, turned to the current Jump.
"Do you think this is Tedd or Grace's Jump?" she asked. "Or is it Anna's?"
I didn't understand the question.
"What do you mean, 'their' Jump?"
Dinah's eyes lit up the way they always did when she had a chance to provide exposition. "They've never outright said it, but it's pretty clear that Management chooses Jumps for each companion on a roughly first-in-last-out basis by way of recruitment order."
If that was true, it was something someone absolutely should have told me.
"Really?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Give me an example."
"Easy," she replied. "You joined and went to
Worm."
I stopped and stared off into space, my meal forgotten. Was that right? Had we really gone to Bet solely so Management could watch me faceplant on my first Jump?
Wait.
"That wasn't my
first Jump," I pointed out.
Dinah rolled her eyes. "Your 'first' Jump was barely a complete Jump at all."
"It counted towards the 'Return' to
Star Trek."
She raised a hand to object, then lowered it again. "Okay, that may be true, but it was still a special case."
"You have a lot more examples, then?" I asked.
"Of course. Going forward from there, we have Tess and
Breath of Fire and Zeke and
El Goonish Shive. Management specifically called Tess and Zeke out when they announced the Jumps, remember?"
"Yeah," I grouched, "and then they fucked each of them over while they were at it."
"They've never made it a secret that we're here for what we offer them, not our own sake," Dinah said. "We accept the risk of 'being fucked with' as payment for our tickets to ride—or we don't, and we leave."
"I guess."
That was the rub, really: I was more than willing to 'risk being fucked with' for the rights to power, adventure, and immortality, which should probably raise questions about both my priorities and intelligence.
"How did Max end up in my world, then?" I asked.
"I
think your world was Jenn's—"
That didn't seem right. "Jenn didn't join that recently, did she?"
Dinah shook her head. "No, hers was buried deep in the stack."
"Oh. Okay."
"And that's why that's only a best guess. It's hard to be sure when you get more than three or four queued Jumps deep, and I'm not sure what—"
"No," I said, "that makes sense."
Dinah frowned as though she wanted to ask, but ultimately decided not to. "I guess you'd know better than me."
I saw no reason to volunteer an explanation, and so moved on: "What's so confusing about the deep end of the stack?"
"It's only 'roughly' first-in-last-out," she explained, perking up now that she was once more in full exposition mode, "and people can retire before their turn comes up, so there are cases where it's not clear if a Jump was for person A or person B, and then A retires, and then the next Jump might be B's if the previous one was for A, but if the previous one was for B and A
would've been next, then it would have to be person C's—"
"Ambiguity," I said. "Gotcha."
Dinah pouted. "If you want to
vastly oversimplify the issue, then yes, 'ambiguity'."
"How certain are you about this?"
"Which part?"
"The whole idea that who joins affects where we go," I clarified.
She shrugged one shoulder. "It's not a hard pattern to spot when the only exceptions are the increasingly rare moments where the stack reaches 'empty'."
"Then shouldn't someone warn people they're liable to get a Jump specifically chosen to 'fuck with them' in some way right off the bat?"
Dinah shrugged again, unimpressed. "The last couple Jumps weren't exactly subtle about it. Maybe yours would have been equally obvious if Management hadn't decided to interrupt the regular schedule with a penalty lap."
"Maybe," I admitted, "but even if it had been obvious in hindsight, I'd much rather have been warned
before the Jump."
"That would interfere with the hazing," she pointed out.
"That's exactly why I could have used the warning," I whined. "I think you'd agree if you'd had your 'hazing'."
"I think Management used the
Trek vacation as my hazing."
That was news to me. "What? What happened?"
Dinah shrugged once more. "It wasn't anything 'big', just a particularly weird import."
"Oh?"
"It turns out importing as a Vulcan is damned uncomfortable when you don't have the appropriate memories to help you acclimate."
"Ah," I said. Then: "What were we talking about again?"
"Whose Jump this is."
"Ah," I repeated. "I have no idea. Does it matter?"
"Kind of?" Dinah hedged. "I'm trying to keep track of when
my Jump is coming up."
"Ah."
She set her utensils down on her empty plate and started playing with a strand of hair that had come loose from her braid. "I'm kind of getting bored—no, not 'bored', but definitely… less impressed with this whole 'chain thing?"
"Not what you wanted when you signed up?" I asked.
Dinah shook her head emphatically. "No, don't get me wrong, our trip to
Star Trek was exactly what I wanted when I signed up, and
Breath of Fire was pretty good as a 'standard fantasy setting' even if I wasn't 'into' it the same way. The thing is, I've now
done those things, and I'm not sure it's worth waiting three or more years betweens variations on 'science fiction' and-or 'fantasy'."
"Too much down time?"
"Yeah. One year between Jumps? I can deal with that. Two years? Not great. Three or four? I'd go
stale."
"I think the phrase is 'go spare'," I said.
"No, like—
ow!"—her hand had made a grasping motion towards the idea she was trying to express and pulled on the hair wrapped around her finger in the process—"'stale', like… bread. Metaphorically."
I asked the obvious question: "Thinking about going home?"
"Yeah." Dinah tucked the errant lock behind her ear and put her hands on the table where they wouldn't pull on it again. "I have no regrets about coming along, but now that I've ridden the rides and seen the sights, I don't think I'm in it for the long haul—especially if the 'long' part of the haul happens while I'm whittling away subjective years in a fancy hotel."
"Why is going home the answer, if you don't mind me asking? You said the reason you don't want to import into worlds like this is that they're too close to home, so…"
"So why would 'actually home' be better?" she finished for me. "Because it would be
home. I'd be back with my family, and all my old friends. I wouldn't have to deal with leaving in ten years, having all my friends and accomplishments be
temporary. It'd feel like it 'mattered' more, if that makes sense?"
"I guess," I said, not sharing her opinion but willing to accept the logic all the same. "If you're still eager for 'fantastic' adventures, though, have you looked into side-Jumps?"
"Yeah. I almost went for one this Jump—two years couped up in here is too long—but an off-brand 'generic' setting doesn't have the same appeal as something like
Trek does." Dinah paused, then admitted, "Then again, there just aren't many places with the same appeal
Trek has for me in the first place."
"Maybe you can get Maeve to freeze you in a block of ice during boring Jumps, then."
To my surprise and mild alarm, she didn't react with laughter—or exasperation at my sense of humor—but instead by honestly considering the idea.
"Do you think it'd cost me anything?" Dinah asked. "Or would she do it for kicks?"
"That wasn't a serious suggestion!"
"Yeah, but it's not a bad one. I'll ask her about it tonight."
I sighed and facepalmed, sure it was only a matter of time before this came back to bite me somehow.
———X==X==X———
"Have you ever fantasized about being a robot?" Dragon asked me one afternoon.
I could have used Morrigan to split my attention between my current activity and the incoming call, but I still had a cultural bias against multitasking, so I closed the textbook I'd been perusing in lieu of actually working on the robot, leaned back in the chair I'd claimed in one of the Library's Reading Rooms—this one styled like a classroom, as befit the textbook—and turned my whole brain towards our conversation.
I was tempted to ask what brought the question on, but I had a feeling the answer would be an exasperated, 'People'.
"Yeah," I said.
Her next question was almost but not quite what I expected. "Why? Is it a fetish?"
"Like, a sexual thing? Not exclusively, I don't think. I've known more than a few people who would be very happy to be mechanical, and there's a pretty clear divide between the people who have it as a kink and the ones who are just sick of being organic."
"Why, then?"
"Well, a lot of reasons, actually." I folded my arms, then adjusted one hard to hold my chin instead, then ended up putting that hand on top of my head. "My body—my
original body—honestly sucked. Being the wrong gender is the obvious problem, so if I had to choose between what I had at the time and a robot body that I liked, it'd be no contest."
"Why would you fantasize about having a fitting robot body instead of a fitting biological body?" she asked.
"You say that like I can't do both."
"That doesn't answer the question," Dragon said.
"Mechanical things are more easily conceptualized as being 'customizable'," I explained. "Swap one part for another, replace a limb or an eye or whatever else needs addressing—which brings me to the next point: a mechanical body would be, in the ideal case, 'serviceable'. You've never had to deal with any serious health issues as a human, have you? I mean, you got your first shot at biology in
Star Trek, of all places…"
"I have not had to personally deal with chronic health issues," she admitted.
"Yeah, well, I can tell you from experience that it
sucks. I mean, mine were pretty mild by how the standards of how badly wrong a body can go, and it still sucked. I can't imagine living with the types of disability or chronic pain some people have to deal with. So that's another big reason people fantasize about being a robot: it's a fantasy about having a body you can repair. Open up the chassis, swap a few parts around, and you're whole and able-bodied again. You're not a slave to the foibles and limitations of the squishy, messy, all-too-fallible flesh you inhabit.
"Which segues nicely into the final part of the fantasy," I continued. "Not being biological means not having an 'expiration date'. Another thing you haven't had to face, if you don't mind me saying so."
"It's true," Dragon acknowledged.
"In the fantasy, being a robot means that when something wears down, you can swap it out—without the pain and recovery of something like a hip replacement, and without being limited to just the most basic mechanisms. Just a trip to the mechanic—or roboticist, or whatever—and you're good as new. Repeat effectively forever."
"That all seems to rely on a hefty exaggeration of the reliability of mechanical and, presumably, electronic systems," she noted dryly.
"Putting aside that this is, as we've established, a 'fantasy'," I said, "and at the risk of making an ad hominem argument: you've never had to deal with the horrifying
unreliability of biological systems. I don't just mean in terms of actual malfunctions, either—I mean walking around apparently healthy but still made of meat you barely trust."
There was a moment's pause, more to indicate serious thought than enable it.
"I suppose I have never had to confront a fear of dying," Dragon admitted. "At least, not of sickness or old age. As an electronic lifeform, the only causes of death I was likely to experience were violence or some sort of wide-reaching natural disaster, and now I don't even have those concerns."
"Mhm."
"How do people deal with it?" she asked. "Death, and aging?"
"I think for a lot of them—
us—we deal with it by
not dealing with it. Focusing on the present and not acknowledging the inevitable."
"Is that what you did?"
"Somewhat," I replied. "I… had a really complicated relationship with death. For a long time, I was in a dark enough place that it didn't really mean anything to me, dying. I hated the thought that people around me would die—that one day I'd lose my parents, maybe my friends if I ended up outliving them—but I was so empty that some days I hoped I
would die. And then… then I finally realized why I'd been so miserable my entire life, and it was like a light at the end of a tunnel… but at the same time, it was horrifying, because I was already thirty, damn it! I'd let the healthiest years of my life pass me by while I was just barely 'existing', and now I had to face the fact that I was only just starting to 'live' after I'd passed my prime."
"Thirty isn't that old," Dragon objected.
"Maybe not, but all I knew was that I already had pain in my joints and gray in my hair—"
"At thirty?"
"Yes, at thirty! I said my body barely worked as a body, and I didn't like it enough to take good care of it, you know?" I took a deep breath and blew it out in a huff. "I had pain in my joints and gray in my hair, and I just felt… I had so much regret, and grief, for how I'd spent the years I'd had, years I could have been 'young and attractive', years I was
healthy, years I could have been
doing things if only I'd listened to what I'd known deep down since I was fucking
sixteen. And that… that fucked me up good, Tess.
"I hadn't cared enough about myself to take good care of myself, you know? And now I had all these stupid regrets making it hard to care about changing or improving anything in the 'now' because I felt like I'd already lost my chance. I was terrified that I'd only begun to appreciate my life after the best parts were already over and the damage of neglect had been done, and that I'd die before I had the chance to properly
live—to experience so many things I'd passed by over the years."
Another deliberate, communicative pause.
"You didn't hesitate to join the 'chain, I take it," Dragon commented.
"I did not." To my mild shame, I'd been so eager I hadn't even tried to say goodbye to anyone but my cats lest I miss my chance.
"Do you think you'll go home, now that you've gotten your youth and health back?"
I hesitated not because I had to think about my answer, but because I was reluctant to admit what I already knew.
"No," I admitted, "probably not—not permanently, I mean. It's not like those were the only things I wanted from all this. I'd like to visit, someday, if I can—offer some of the same miracles I got to my friends and family—but nothing back there could pull me away from what I've got here."
The following silence was not an affectation but the approaching end of the conversation.
"What brought these questions on, anyway?" I asked.
Dragon let out an exasperated sigh and grumbled, "
People," exactly as I'd expected.
———X==X==X———
I did not build the robot.
I learned a lot
about building robots. I even learned a few things about building
giant robots. But the more I learned about Giant Robot Engineering, the more I learned that I didn't really enjoy it, not the way I'd enjoyed working through the theoretical and practical problems with transwarp drives. I liked engineering—I'd loved my job as a Starfleet engineering officer—and I even liked robotics to a point, but mecha, specifically, were not my 'thing'.
I could clearly do it—there was a whole show about the result, for crying out loud—but absent of a pressing
need for a giant robot, I had no desire to do so. Things must have been pretty bad for me to turn it into my life's work.
The exercise also gave me the lingering feeling that my robotics course in college existed like a footnote in a backstory to explain away some absurdly out-of-place skill, like how I'd heard people describe bits and pieces from their import histories that served to justify perks they'd taken that Jump. In hindsight, it even made a weird sort of sense that it fit that mold, considering the absolutely ridiculous stories attached to it. As a backstory, my original life kind of sucked—in a 'poorly conceived' way, not a 'lame' or 'unpleasant' way (even if it was one or both of those things)—which fit perfectly with what I'd seen of the show.
Being fictional was
weird.
No, when I wanted a creative outlet—and I did, quite often, want a creative outlet—I found myself returning to the writing hobby I'd tentatively begun in the waning years of the previous Jump. If I ever wanted an example of just how different even the smallest details of my life were from the time before I'd joined the 'chain, writing
for fun might be exhibit A—and hey, people had told me I was a good writer on the occasions I managed to do it at all. Now that it wasn't like pulling teeth, maybe one of these Jumps I'd be able to spend a decade as a professional author. It'd be a heck of a challenge to do it without perks to that effect, but talent was a myth; the real key was practice, and I had a very, very long time to practice.
In addition to gaining a handful of engineering skills I was less interested in using than I'd expected and developing compositional skills I was more interested in using than I'd have
ever expected—and in addition to all the leisure activities I'd come to enjoy during our inter-world breaks—I continued practicing my various magicks and combat skills.
El Goonish Shive was a quiet slice-of-life kind of world, and
Ace Attorney was almost as peaceful even if violence took a major role in its narrative. The general consensus among people I spoke to regularly was that there wouldn't be a third 'quiet' Jump in a row, and I wanted to be as ready as I could be if I found myself diving back in.
Mostly, that just meant the same sort of practice I'd already been doing—though with a wider selection of melee weapons and Morrigan's full complement added to the mix—but remembering my conversation with Zero many Christmases past, I also asked Rita to unlock my Aura. Rather than the one-and-done 'jumpstart' I'd expected, Rita elected to take me through the training necessary to awaken to it 'naturally' with the help of the Magic School's gym. It was the most 'spiritual' sort of training I'd encountered thus far—'power of the soul', natch—and usually took years to draw out, but Rita crushed that time into just under three months. It could have gone faster, even, if I'd dropped everything and focused 100% of my energy into training, but I wasn't trying to set a world record, and my next 'deadline' was almost a year away. Three months as a 'leisurely pace' was still absurd by the standards of the original world.
Rita claimed my own understanding of my self and identity made it faster and easier, but I couldn't be sure she wasn't just stroking my ego.
So I had Aura for 'free' now, for some definition of 'free'; whether I'd be able to fit it into my slots was another matter. Without the backing perks and abilities got from the slot system, pseudomystical stuff like Aura simply wouldn't work anywhere it wasn't natively part of the world. However, for Aura specifically, there was a workaround: the transferability was a core part of the 'feature', so as long as I had someone to share the 'this works in universes its not native to' property through the weird little Aura Jumpstart Ritual, I'd be right back to where I would be if I'd slotted it myself.
Finding my 'semblance'—the unique superpower associated with Aura—would take a lot longer; years, possibly. As something individualized and personally significant, no one and nothing else's training enhancements would help. Rita'd seemed braced for disappointment when she told me, but I wasn't fussed; I had a 'unique superpower' I could slot already, and Aura alone was a significant step up in physical power.
How and why I was going to
need that power was still up in the air. Obviously, I could just sit out and wait for another peaceful setting, but I'd gotten
something from my time as a superhero and a naval officer and a knight. I wouldn't admit to 'enjoying' violence—it was a distasteful tool at the best of times—but I was comfortable with it in a way the me back home would likely have never been. No, on second thought, that was wrong: I knew just enough about the 'canon timeline' to know that the me back home would have gotten very comfortable with violence.
Though maybe not the 'shoot someone in the head and get over it by the next morning' levels of comfortable I'd arrived at after less than a year with the 'chain. Perhaps I should be more concerned about that than I was.
Then again, seen through the lens of some of the other cultures I'd immersed myself in, my 'home society' had a distaste for physical violence that bordered on prudishness. Not in our media, obviously—for some reason, we considered brutal murder less objectionable than consensual sex—but in our lives, physical violence was broadly abhorred by everyone lucky enough to think it couldn't happen to them. Physical violence was also, importantly, the only kind of violence most people thought of as 'violence' at all, which was convenient for the status quo: it delegitimized the party who resorted to
physical violence, which was usually the one resisting the establishment because the establishment had the power to use more subtle, systemic forms of violence as it pleased.
Or maybe I was just looking for an excuse to not feel bad about how much fun I was having with the training—or how much violence I'd already participated in, and how much I now knew my once-future self would have enabled and encouraged.
———X==X==X———
The year didn't fly by uninterrupted.
Homura found me in an empty classroom of the Warehouse's Magic School one day about five months into my year off. "Hello, Cass," she said. "Are you busy?"
"Not at all!" I dismissed the inky black shadows I'd been winding around my hands and rose from the desk. "What's up?"
"I was wondering if you wanted to go sightseeing."
"In Los Angeles?"
"Nominally," Homura agreed. "In actuality, however, it's just Tokyo with the wrong name."
I blinked.
"What, really?"
"Yes." She reached into an interior pocket of her pantsuit blazer and withdrew a map of California—which is to say, a map of Japan
labeled California. The cities were all mislabeled, too: Tokyo was Los Angeles; Kyoto, Sacramento; Osaka, San Francisco—
"Did they really just change the names and literally nothing else?" I asked as I found misplaced city after misplaced city.
"Yes."
"Wow. Ah, damn."
Homura questioned my disappointment with an eyebrow.
"Half the reason I skipped this Jump was because I wasn't particularly interested in visiting 'weird California'," I explained, finger quotes fully deployed on the final words. "If I'd known we were actually going to be in Japan, mislabeled or not, I might have actually gone for it. The 'chain means I can experience other cultures as a native, rather than just a tourist, and that's an amazing opportunity no matter how you slice it, you know?"
"It wouldn't help your Japanese."
I pouted. 「
私日本語をファインですかね！」
「
あんた下手くそわよ。」 she replied, then switched languages to continue, "If you have any interest in tourism at all, now may be the best time. Everything is in English."
I gave her a look demonstrating my displeasure at the clear snub to my language skills, then forgave her and moved on. "I wouldn't say 'no' to some tourism," I decided. "You have an itinerary, I assume?"
"I didn't know if you would be interested," Homura said. "If you wish, I will have one by tomorrow."
"If you're volunteering to do all the work, how could I say no?"
———X==X==X———
We made a day of it.
Homura leaned into the tourism aspect in her planning, guiding me around to the most tourist-y attractions on offer in a veritable where's-where of popular landmarks that could have been ripped straight off TripAdvisor's Top 10. After all, she noted, I'd likely get a 'native' experience one of these days, so it only made sense to play up the tourist role while I could. I had no objections.
We started with a walk through Ueno Park, then visited the Senso-ji Temple before taking a train to Akihabara (labeled 'Hollywood' because that's how things worked around here). After we'd had our fill of the sights there, we headed towards the Edo-Tokyo Museum (
not renamed—there was just "The Edo-Tokyo Museum" in the middle of "Los Angeles", "California"); Homura's first choice for lunch—a restaurant less than a block away—closed for unscheduled repair work, so we took a short detour to another restaurant before hopping into the subway to the museum, where our planned activities went awry.
As we began to climb the steps leading to the base of the turtle-shaped building's 'legs', someone shrieked and pointed towards the roof; I, with instincts born of nearly a decade of professional capital-H Heroism, sprinted forward just in time to catch the falling man before he finished his hundred-foot plummet onto the concrete surrounding the museum—an act I could safely perform only because I hastily cast a feather-fall spell in the half-second before impact. It would have been a lot more comfortable for both of us if I'd also had my Valkyrie frame equipped—I could have bled off his momentum with my Impeller rather than relying on panicked casting that was almost too late to matter—but I'd left it in my room because I'd thought it would be a distraction. Regardless, even with only a split second to act, the spell was effective enough at reducing the impact that we were barely bruised.
Well, I was barely bruised; the guy I'd just caught had a knife sticking out of him just in case the fall didn't kill him or something.
Homura was more sensible than the average bystander and was already on the phone with emergency services, so I sat and put pressure on the wound—and made sure I didn't need to do more than that to keep him alive—until the ambulance arrived, followed by a police cordon I watched assemble around me with that peculiar sinking feeling of, 'oh no, a plot!' I hadn't felt since my days in Starfleet. And what a plot it was; the medical assay I cast while we waited for the ambulance informed me that in addition to a life-threatening stab wound and the even more life-threatening drop, he'd been dosed to the gills with a black-market anesthetic—which is to say, a date rape drug—making for three different assaults on his person.
Random bystander Cassandra Kyogen had no reason to know that, so I merely emphasized to the paramedics that he was already unconscious when I caught him and trusted them to figure it out. The ambulance whisked the guy off to the hospital while one of the paramedics stayed behind and helped me clean up the blood, took my phone number in case the guy had any blood-borne diseases I'd need to be screened for—I already knew he didn't, which was lucky for everyone involved—then looked me over and offered some treatment for my developing bruises.
I then spent the next hour being accused of attempted murder.
"So, how did you know the victim?" Detective 'Dick' Gumshoe asked, one hand holding a notepad while the other searched the pockets of his faded green coat for the pencil currently tucked behind his ear.
"I don't?" I said. "To my knowledge, I've never met the man before in my life."
"Oh. I see." Gumshoe paused to let me lower my guard, then jabbed a finger at my face and demanded, "Then why are you covered in his blood, pal?!"
"Because… I was providing first aid?"
"Oh." He did the same pause, then jabbed his finger at my face again. "How do I know you weren't the one who stabbed him in the first place?!"
"Why would I stab him immediately after saving him from hitting the sidewalk?"
"Oh." Another pause and another finger jab. "Maybe you wanted to conceal that
you were the one to push him off the roof!"
"How would I push him off the roof and then make it to the ground outside in time to catch him?"
"Oh."
For a moment, I thought Gumshoe might be out of nonsense. I was wrong.
"Unless there are two of you!"
"…what?"
This went on for nearly the aforementioned hour before we were interrupted by a man wearing a flamboyant and instantly recognizable maroon suit.
"What in the blazes are you doing, Detective?" Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth, the series' original rival-antagonist, demanded of my interrogator. "We've already arrested the perpetrator trying to flee the scene."
Gumshoe wilted like a kicked puppy. "Just trying to find out what she knows, sir."
"Have you considered
asking her?" Edgeworth didn't bother waiting for Gumshoe's stammered confession that no, he hadn't before turning to me. "Perhaps you could tell me what happened in your own words, miss…?"
"Kyogen," I supplied because that was what the ID I was carrying said.
He paused for a second, then decided not to question it. "Miss Kyogen, then."
"Well, we were just coming from the station"—I waved a hand at the elevators only a few feet away from where I was sitting on the steps—"when I heard someone scream, and… I think they pointed up at the roof? And I was just close enough to run forward in time to catch him."
"When you say 'we'…"
"My stepsister and I." I nodded my head towards Homura, sitting a few feet away on the same step.
Edgeworth nodded. "Did you see the victim fall, or was he already falling when you first saw him?"
"I… sorry, I'm not sure. I don't think he'd fallen yet because I wasn't that close, so I had to run a bit, but I'm not sure."
"Did you see anything else while you were looking up at the roof?"
Like another person, perhaps? I couldn't help him there. "No. The sun was in my eyes. I'm lucky I managed to catch him at all."
"When did you realize the victim was injured?"
That was an easy one. "Right away. He was bleeding all over me."
"And then?"
"I put him down as gently as I could and kept pressure on the wound. I have first aid training, so I just did as best I could until help arrived."
"You did well, Miss Kyogen. The paramedics say you saved his life twice over."
I'd thought so, but it was nice to have confirmation. "Thank you, Mister…"
I stopped as I realized Edgeworth hadn't introduced himself, and I wasn't sure whether it would be weird for some random person on the street to recognize him; fortunately, he took my silence as an invitation to introduce himself, just as he'd given me earlier.
"Ah, forgive me." He took a second to preen and straighten his already impeccably ruffled cravat, then performed an unnecessary little bow. "Miles Edgeworth, chief prosecutor, at your service."
"Then, thank you, Mister Edgeworth."
"No, thank
you for your quick and decisive action." Edgeworth reached into an interior coat pocket and retrieved a crisp business card. "I must be going, but if you remember anything else, please don't hesitate to call."
"I won't." 'Won't hesitate', I meant, but it wasn't likely I'd remember anything else, either. The whole thing had been over in a flash. "Do you need me to stick around, or…"
"It would be helpful if you could." Edgeworth turned and walked away, Gumshoe in tow, and didn't quite make it out of earshot before he began muttering, "What a mess. Attempted murder in the middle of the day, a heroic rescue… the media are going to have a field day with this one."
"So much for the rest of the day," I said once Homura and I were once again alone.
Homura shrugged. "On the bright side, the victim is going to live."
"Oh, yeah. Saving a life is more than worth the inconvenience."
About a minute passed before a niggling suspicion worked its way through my brain.
"Did you know this was going to happen?" I asked. The timing had been down to the wire; if we'd been a second later, just from having come up the farther elevator, I might not have been fast enough to catch the guy.
"No," Homura said. "If I had, I would have dealt with it discreetly so it wouldn't interrupt our day."
"Ah. Yeah." Just tropes at work, then.
"I generally try to avoid rewinding for any but the most pressing reasons," she continued. "Remembering events others don't tends to strain personal relationships."
"You once used your time travel powers to put the right soda in the fridge."
"I did that by
stopping time, not reversing it."
I choked back a giggle. "You're impossible."
With nothing more to say, we sat and waited. A policeman came by an hour later to take our written statements, and then we were left alone again.
"Think they actually got the right guy?" I asked Homura as the shadows began to lengthen.
"No."
"Not a lot of faith in law enforcement in this city, huh?"
"No," she repeated, "I was reacting to him."
'Him' was Defense Attorney Phoenix Wright arriving at the scene, kid sidekick in tow. They were just as easily recognizable as Edgeworth and Gumshoe had been: Phoenix Wright had his trademark blue suit and red tie, hair slicked back into the spikey wing shapes that matched his name; his assistant Maya Fey wore her equally trademark short light pink kimono and purple jacket, a bit of her long black hair doubled up into a little top-knot at the back of her head.
"Ah."
I should have known I was a side character again.
"They're going to want to talk to me, aren't they?" I whined.
"Inevitably."
The pair made a bee-line for the museum entrance, but I figured it was only a matter of time before they doubled back; sure enough, about half an hour later, the two left the museum and made their way over. Maya was the first to speak as they approached. "Phoenix! Look!" she yelped. "She's covered in blood!"
Rude. The first responders had helped me clean up—both for my own comfort and the fact that fresh human blood might be
the most dangerous disease vector—and the few bloodstains left on my clothes hardly amounted to 'covered in blood'.
"I can see that," Phoenix whispered back none too quietly, then actually addressed me. "You're the one who caught the victim, right?"
"That's me," I said. "Cassandra Kyogen."
"Nice to meet you, Miss Kyogen. My name is Phoenix Wright. I'm the defense attorney for the suspect in the case. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?"
"Not at all."
To no one's surprise, he asked nearly the same things Edgeworth had and got the same answers. Coming from the subway, the scream, dashing forward, applying first aid. Judging from his expression, it wasn't very helpful, but given how little I had to offer, I hadn't expected it to be.
Interview complete, Wright stood stock still, staring into the middle distance with one hand on his chin, for nearly twenty full seconds.
"What do you think of this?" he asked, pulling the pin off his lapel and presenting it to me.
"That's your attorney's badge, isn't it?" I asked. "You really do show that to everyone, don't you?"
"You're getting a reputation for this, Phoenix," Maya whispered.
"Um, yeah, I guess so," Wright muttered, returning the pin to his lapel and pulling out a grainy photograph. "What do you think of this?"
"I… don't know what that is. Is it important?"
"What do you think of this?" A manila envelope.
"I don't know what that is. Is
it important?"
"What do you think of this?" A slightly less grainy photograph.
"That looks like the knife the guy had in him—though now that I'm looking at it, it's more of a dagger, isn't it?"
Wright went through several more odds and ends, then pulled out a roll of photos—mug shots, really, or perhaps ID photos—from his wallet.
"That's the detective who accused me of trying to kill the guy whose life I saved. I don't know who that is. That's… is that the victim? He looks different when he's not half dead. That's the prosecutor, Edgeworth. He got the detective to stop accusing me of attempted murder. I don't know who that is. That's your assistant, she's
right there. I don't know who that is. That's
me, where did you get a photo of me?"
He blanched and tucked the photos away in favor of more odds and ends.
"I don't know what that is. Is it important? I don't know what that is. Is it important? That's a takeout menu—oh, hey, that's the place I wanted to go for lunch! They were closed today, though."
Wright tucked the menu away, then froze in the act of pulling out some other random miscellany.
"They were closed today?" he repeated.
"Yes. I think they had a pipe burst? We ended up getting hamburgers"—which had been nothing of the sort—"instead. Why?"
Rather than answer my question, Wright yelled, "Ah ha!" and pulled out a worryingly glowing lump of hopefully-not-
too-radioactive material from another pocket before sprinting off, Maya only a pace behind. I could do little more than sit there and stare after him, wondering what it was that I'd said.
"Good… luck… with the… case?"
———X==X==X———
