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I'll perform a little light houskeeping before the story this time, to avoid the charge of being philosophical. Skip to the story if these things upset your Wa.

In the snoop-boop-a-doo of everyday existence, we stumble over stories on a regular basis. We collide with them, become part of them, maybe even hatch one or two. They are slivers of life, and whether they are happy or sad depends on when you jam the knife in. The story stops, and life goes on. This is a prelude to a future because the knife work came in a little earlier than normal. It means fewer words to read, and maybe a more satisfying future, ultimately.

Thanks to all the KS folks. Thank you especially for this great playground and for letting me play with the characters for awhile. I have repayed your kindness by invoking a sacred name or two in the back end of this story. This is underhanded and shoddy, but the plot seemed to demand it. I apologize in advance for any misrepresentation of character or intent. I especially apologize for not having a more complete list of perps and for not using some that I have. Thanks also to most of the folks who have commented on my futures so far. I took the comments seriously, and they may result in better stories down around the bend.

This will be posted in chunks as edit time and logic dictate.

P.T. Bridgeport

PS - This starts from the end of the Hanako path (good), though as always, other paths were mined for content and intentions.

Yatagarasu – Prelude to a Future

Prologue

The raven wheeled through the night sky, unnoticed by humans, who were more interested in staying dry than trying to track ravens at night. September is a very rainy month in northern Japan, with nearly twice the average rainfall of October, and tonight would help keep up the average. Ravens normally stay put at night – this one must have been driven from its cover by the force of the storm.

It flew in short bursts through the center of the city, issuing infrequent calls to non-existent fellow ravens. It eventually found a perch on the railing of a balcony near the top of one of the city’s finest hotels. Once there, it shook the moisture from its wings, pulled its head to its chest and closed its eyes. It looked like sleep, but ravens have ways unknown to humanity. If anyone had been around to see the bird, it might have caused some excitement. This raven had a vestigial third leg attached to the left leg – small, malformed, completely un-functional, but still there.

Seen by an environmentalist, the raven would symbolize the interference of manmade chemicals in the raven’s gene pool. It would be an indictment of what riotous overpopulation and carelessly applied science can do to the remainder of the natural world.

For a more traditional Japanese witness, the raven would be yatagarasu, a powerful symbolic figure in the traditions of the country. The three-legged raven is a visitor from heaven, and foretells the intervention of the gods in human affairs.

Chapter 1 – Evening Rain

Masato had been absently swirling around the brandy in his glass. He seemed to be listening – at least he was giving appropriate responses – but he kept his gaze on the liquid as it coated the sides of the snifter. Suddenly he smiled, a rather one-sided expression, accompanied by glistening eyes and a lowered brow.

“Well, I think it’s time for our traditional conversation. But I’ll save you the trouble of participating. If I go wrong, you chime in and tell me, okay?

I say, well, are you finally coming back home? You say, I can’t possibly, because the business will fail and I have too many responsibilities and why do you care anyway? Then I remind you that we’ve been having this conversation for many years now, with minor variations in the early years, when the problem with commitment was Lilly and not the Scottish gross national product. Then you remind me that we have both gone on with our lives, which have not in spent in monkish contemplation in any way, shape or form. You would probably be undiplomatic enough to bring up that boyfriend you took to Scotland who now lives in what, London? I grant that it’s true but remind you that I put a proposition on the table many years ago and you still owe me an answer.”

She grinned. “You should have swept me off of my feet when we first met, when I was scrambling for a job and you were the golden college boy.”

“As I remember, I tried rather vigorously. It must have had some effect, or you would have turned me down, with formality and probably your usual lack of tact. Yet here we sit, three or four times a year, whenever you come home, having the same talk. You know, I ran the whole thing past my mergers and acquisitions people, suitably disguised, of course. They said that not deciding is a decision in itself, and actions speak louder than words. That’s mergers and acquisition-speak for ‘forget about it.’ Which, if I had any sense at all, I would do.”

“Aaaaah, Masato, it doesn’t make any difference. Between your job and mine, three or four times a year would be all we’d see of each other anyway. This way, we get a nice meal in a good restaurant, instead of ordering takeout and sitting in the kitchen. Me in a bathrobe with food stains and you with your hair in your face, sitting there eating fried stuff. But I agree, that’s the conversation we’ve been having. I always admired how retentive your memory was.”

“Then turn me down.”

That earned him a laugh. “That would be stupid. You’d just get all moody and not want to go to bed tonight.”

He smiled back. “Yeah, probably.”

“Look, I’d turn you down if the answer was no. The answer is that I don’t know. I’ll be back someday, and then it’s something to think about.”

“Ki, if you remember, I am a few years older than you are. If we are going to do this, I’d like to be able to make it through the ceremony without a using a walker.”

“Use of romantic old nickname noted and appreciated, but I think we have some time left before you fall apart. Besides, Masato, how well do we know each other anymore? You’ve got your art friends and your symphony friends and all those intellectuals you hung around with in college. How well do you see me fitting into that life? ”

“I don’t know, Akira, but I would love the chance to find out.”

“Masato, you’re asking me to move my life halfway around the world so you can figure out if we belong together, and that’s regardless of whether I think we belong together or not. Monday, go ask your mergers and acquisition folks what they think of that offer.”

He laughed in spite of himself. “Point taken, and conversation ended. Now tell me, do you have any assets in Greece? We were thinking of putting an assembly plant there and…”

Some hours later, the door to the room opened, and a hand hit the switch on the wall. The bright lights from the room poured through the glass door and onto the balcony. The lights and the rustlings disturbed the raven, who shook her head vigorously and flew off. Rain continued to plunge from the sky and the temperature dropped another degree or two.

Chapter 2 - A Certain Symmetry

The raven flew in a lazy counterclockwise circle, alighting in the entranceway to a nondescript apartment building north of the city center. She hopped around on one foot for a few seconds, again shedding moisture, then flew up to a precarious perch on a stanchion underneath the eaves of the roof. Again, the raven closed its eyes – again, she looked like she was asleep. Had she peeked in the window below and to the right of the stanchion she would have seen Hisao Nakai padding over to the TV remote to turn it on.

After his heart attack, he had watched enough TV to last three or four lifetimes. He normally avoided the thing and briefly toyed with the idea of not having one. In the end, he bought a rather small, cheap one, almost hoping it would break soon.

He had memorized one channel and time, for only one show. He was embarrassed about having gone even that far, but the first five minutes of the program scratched some indefinable itch – nostalgia, maybe, or some sort of search for himself in his past. The channel locked in just as the opening credits began to roll.

They used big pink letters, each with a black block behind it to provide depth. “IN THE PINK”, it said, and then in smaller letters, "With Misha Mikado”.

Hisao stared at Misha, standing there in a leotard that made no attempt at hiding the contours of her body. Her hair was still pink, but that was about the only thing recognizable from Misha at Yamaku. What was once a cute but pudgy little person had turned into a well-toned, beautifully contoured young woman. Of course, the change had been enhanced by professional grade makeup people and camera angles that made height hard to determine, but Misha had become a poster for the benefits of exercise and careful diet, which was the point of the program.

In The Pink was an exercise program for women (and men who liked to look at women exercising) that had started local and gone viral. The city channel broadcast it in prime time now, and there was a rumor that NHK, the national network, would pick it up if the business details were right.

The opening credits ended and the show started. If Misha didn’t look like the Misha of Yamaku days, she certainly didn’t sound much different. “Hey, all you wonderful people out there – are you ready to start controlling your life? Because if you aren’t ready to start, you’re probably finished. BWA-HA-HA-HAAAAA. And the first step to controlling our lives is controlling ourselves, and that means putting less effort into filling our stomachs and more into getting the energy that comes from what we eat. Because if you don’t have energy, you’re powerless. BWA-HA-HA-HA.”

Hisao winced. The first time he stumbled across the show, she had done a shout-out to her old high school chums, and while he wasn’t one of them, he still recognized some names. Curiously, Shizune wasn’t one of them either. Apparently, the shout-out was a one-time thing, and she wouldn’t repeat it. There would be a few minutes of pep-talk while everyone stretched, and then the Pink Ladies would appear on stage. They were Misha’s supporting cast, and she would lead them through jumping jacks, squat thrusts, and sit-ups for the next twenty-five minutes. On cue, the Pink Ladies arrived, forming the arms of a V, with Misha at the center.

Hisao could see the popularity to the program from a male point of view, but wasn’t terribly interested himself. The Pink Lady to the left of Misha kind of appealed to him, but it was rather like admiring the architecture of a computer. If you didn’t have access codes and authorizations, and were unlikely to ever have them, there’s no real point in looking at it very hard.

He killed the power on the TV and started to go over his Chemistry Lab notes. This year, he would have to be very sure that the first years didn’t blow something up, like last year. And that little so-and-so Yamaguchi was sure to try. He would partner Yamaguchi with the more humorless and competent members of the class for this experiment. It’s the art of the educator to solve problems before they arise.

The wind blew the rain against the window, creating a loud drumming that came and went with shifts in direction and velocity. It would be too wet for his usual morning bike ride – if he rode in the hills, he would encounter impassable mud and if in the streets, cars with drivers that could not see him. That was depressing – he hadn’t been out for the better part of the week.

The mind builds thoughts from scraps of information. Mild depression, gloomy weather, and memories of Yamaku could only point Hisao in one direction and to one person. Was it that he thought of Hanako frequently, or was it that she never really left his mind? It didn’t matter – it was all academic. They even hadn’t seen each other since his third year of college.

The girl who was once afraid to leave Lilly’s arm had become a woman who alternated months of solitary work with months of travel. The girl who was afraid to say anything became a woman who gushed words into a computer and then sold them to a world-wide audience. And it had all happened on his watch. And it had all happened suddenly, like hurling one too many electrons into a uranium mass. When that happens, things get incinerated, and that’s what happened to Hisao and Hanako as a couple.

If he missed Hanako, and he certainly missed the old one, he would be the first to concede that her new life was a vast improvement for her, as a person and as a professional. The third novel alone would keep her comfortable and secure for years, if the paperbacks sold at the predicted rate. He was happy for her, if a little uncomfortable with Arthur, the overbearing professor and love interest who made the heroine’s life so miserable. She had actually used snippets of their bickering as dialogue. He hoped that he had been a little more classy than Arthur.

Hisao looked at his watch. It was time for bed. If there would be no bicycle treks in the hills, then there would have to be the running machine in the smelly gym at about the same time. He turned out the lights.

I find this quite fascinating.

The use of the raven to connect things was interesting. I'll have to look up yatagarasu.

Looks like you're starting with a few vignettes to assemble into a greater whole. I look forward to the final product.

Whoa, heavy... I actually had to concentrate reading this. Definitely not the light reading common here.

The Pink Lady to the left of Misha kind of appealed to him, but it was rather like admiring the architecture of a computer. If you didn’t have access codes and authorizations, and were unlikely to ever have them, there’s no real point in looking at it very hard.

This made me laugh. It's very similar to my own approach to fanboyism.

And it had all happened suddenly, like hurling one too many electrons into a uranium mass. When that happens, things get incinerated, ...

Not sure that metaphor holds up if you examine it too closely.

For Griffon8:

Start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-legged_crow

There seems to be some contention on whether the thing is a raven or a crow. I arbitrarily decided to make it a raven, because I read Bernd Heinrich's books about ravens. I think ravens fit the description slightly better.

For Mirage_GSM:

Probably so. My grasp of physics is far less certain than physics's grasp on me. I'll look into it.

PT

Fardels wrote:For Griffon8:

Start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-legged_crow

There seems to be some contention on whether the thing is a raven or a crow. I arbitrarily decided to make it a raven, because I read Bernd Heinrich's books about ravens. I think ravens fit the description slightly better.

For Mirage_GSM:

Probably so. My grasp of physics is far less certain than physics's grasp on me. I'll look into it.

PT

Thanks, I actually found that on my own and haven't gone beyond it yet. 'Yatagarasu' redirects to the Japan subsection of that page.

Re: Physics—At least you know your place. "Kneel before gravity!"

Chapter 3 - A Discouraging Word

Dawn the next day consisted of a marginally lighter sky, still laden with moisture and coated with clouds. The wind had died down and the rainfall had stopped, but not for long, by the looks of it. The raven opened her eyes and briefly groomed herself, then flew toward the towers of the central city. It perched on the ledge of a medium-sized building in the middle of the downtown corporate district.

The cube beside the ledge belonged to Yoshihashi, the newest member of the marketing branch. Looking down at him were his manager and the director of marketing.

“You worked for Shizune Hakamichi, over in accounting, right?”

“Uh, yeah, for awhile. It wasn’t the highlight of my career…”

“What does this mean?” The manager swept her hand in a few vague motions and wiggled her fingers.

“Um, do you mean this?” He used the correct sign language symbols for what he thought she was trying to say. Sign language was one of the reasons they hired him, and the reason he wanted to stay in accounting. He liked it, and he was proud of his ability. But when the marketing opportunity arose, he fled without a trace of regret.

“Yes, that’s it. She shook her head pretty violently when she did that.”

“It means that she disagrees with whatever you told her.”

“You can say ’I disagree with what you are saying’ with only that many letters?”

Hoo boy. “Well, that wasn’t an exact translation, just the sense of it."

“Then what was the exact translation?”

He looked up at their stony management faces and knew that somebody had to take the fall. Well, it wasn’t going to be him. “Let me walk you through it. Sign language is symbol based, right? So the first letter is this. It’s an F. Then U-C-K-Y-O-U…” He stopped there.

The two managers looked at each other, and the director grinned. “Well, it seems that accounting thinks they run the company. It isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last, but it doesn’t help us do our jobs. I think our VP needs to talk to the financial VP about company cooperation. That’s not the right response, even with wig-waggy fingers.”

Yoshihashi recognized the grin right away. Within the company, it was known as the “executioner’s smile”. He didn’t want any part of this. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Oh no, you did just fine. Happy here in marketing, are you?”

“Oh, yes sir. Accounting can be a challenging place to work. Lots to do, you know? We have lots to do here too, but it’s more… predictable. Over there, we got caught up in analytical reports, sometimes.” He meant Shizune added hours of work to get financial inferences that were usually unnecessary and occasionally wrong. Textbook analysis doesn’t always work in the real world, even in accounting.

“Oh yeah. Accounting has been unpredictable for awhile now. I think I know what we can do to solve that problem.”

It was a pity Hisao missed the next edition of “In The Pink.” Misha brought out on stage “her dear friend from high school” who she “had just hired as my very own personal assistant to do the really important stuff around here.” Misha looked immensely pleased; Shizune looked far less so. But it was her first time on camera – maybe she was nervous.

The raven left the ledge well before that announcement, of course, and flew southward, toward the residential district known as the Hill of Pearls.

Chapter 4 – The Perils of Lisa

The Hill of Pearls sits on the southern edge of the city, just off the highway to the airport. The houses are widely spaced, each with a substantial plot of land. The people who own them have made their way in the world, and living on the Hill of Pearls is an indicator of prestige and success.

When people have enough freedom and resources to do whatever they want, they generally do whatever everybody else does. For the most part, the houses on the Hill of Pearls look like random boxes pushed together with a roof built over the collection. The Hakamichi mansion, which is on the western approach to the hill, is a fine example.

The raven alighted in a pine tree on the grounds of one of the exceptions. It was one story rather than three, and contained about half the square footage of most of the houses on the hill, though still enough for a large family. The grounds were much more heavily wooded than most, and the elaborate stroll garden led to a small teahouse on the other side of a large pond.

If the outside of the house was traditional, the inside was sleekly modern, muted wall colors accented with bright objects and colorful furniture. The angular furniture was built along the lines of the twentieth century tastemakers, but redesigned by craftsman to actually be comfortable. Large paintings, both abstract and realistic, lined the walls, each speaking of the width and breadth of human emotion. And smoke detectors – there were smoke detectors everywhere.

Occasionally, people visited the house to keep it elaborately clean and tidy. Aside from that, it stayed silent and somewhat remote. From time to time, a small figure in bedraggled fuzzy slippers made the transit from the office to the refrigerator and back. The office beside the bedroom was another exception – tidiness did not live here. The copious shelf space had been filled to capacity and overflowed on the floor. One wall was bare, but everything else had a layer of paper – magazines, books, and random paper sheets. The small figure sat at a huge desk to one side of the room, a desktop computer throwing pale light at her half-ravaged face. A fourth novel was being born, with far less noise than the average baby.

In this novel, tall, elegant, refined, blonde Lisa finds herself married to the short, evil, woman-hating Kenneth. He regularly practices all sorts of sexual perversion on her, which she is helpless to resist. She pines for her old life and her One True Friend, who she abandoned when they were still in high school. In this scene, Kenneth looms above Lisa, his glasses vibrating with lust and sinister laughter, and he stands over her with… with...

She was stuck.

She sighed, saved the file, and turned off the computer. She contemplated her feet critically. The bunny on the right foot was missing an ear, and the eye on the one to the left had some sort of stain on it. It was time for a new pair.

She rose and wandered to the living room, which looked out on the patio in back of the house and the pond beyond. Today was still cloudy and somewhat foggy – the mists travelled over the pond, giving it an eerie beauty. Her face was a study in sadness. She had everything she could possibly want and yet she was scarcely happy. What was it that she wanted? She didn’t know. A tear dribbled down her cheek. She didn’t know…

Chapter 5 - Burning Loneliness

It is probably a sin in some circles – lighting a Montecristo Number 3 cigar from the electric coil on a stove burner. It just made Rin hope that she never travelled in a circle – circles don’t go anywhere. She drew on the cigar and the burst of nicotine into her system made her lightheaded and somewhat euphoric. Rin’s mind had seen things that most minds cannot – emotions into shapes, sounds into colors, tastes into shadows – perhaps the cigar, an indecently priced gift from a client, would take her into other realms.

She looked at her work in progress – a large canvas that lay flat on the floor, because that was the only way she could reach the entire thing. It was an essay in pain. Aches throbbed dully in the background, sharper pains cut across the canvas, radiated brightly in corners, formed elaborately shaded spires at random.

Rin took another puff. Something was missing, and it would occupy a central portion of the canvas. What is the shape, the color, the texture of loneliness? Being lonely was worth a series of canvases, of course, and Rin had already done a few on the subject. But as one element of a picture, what is it, a dark mass, without a far shore? A bright light, choking out anything and everything else? Well she had about an hour’s worth of cigar left to work on it.

She could always leave it out, but that would be dishonest and untrue. When people asked her to do a special order, she tried to match the painting to the customer rather than keep the subject matter abstract. This painting would hang in the one bare space in Hanako’s office.

Rin looked through the skylight at the clouds. Even though the sun wasn’t shining, it seemed like they cast shadows on one another – massive dark thick outlines to clouds that were already thick with moisture. Some days were like that – and some lives had more of those days than others. And – what was that? A dark head bobbed, peering through the skylight from the roof, a crow or something. It disturbed the scene, and she turned back to the painting, trailing cigar ash across the floor.

Chapter.6 – ...Do We Not Bleed? (The Merchant of Venice)

The blades splashed unevenly through the muddy water on the track. She had no rhythm today, but that was all right – she wasn’t here for the exercise. She shouldn’t be here at all – the track wasn’t good enough to run on, but she had to think.

Emi rarely thought while she was running – it just prevents you from focusing. But this wasn’t a real run, and she wanted to keep active while she decided what to do. A word formed in her mind.

Prick.

Her stepfather was a prick. He was pushy, he was picky, and he yelled, it seemed like he was always yelling. She was out of the house, of course, but she noticed the change in her mother. The once happy Mom that she once knew had become withdrawn, tentative. Once she had almost cried, something Emi hadn’t seen in years.

The man was a prick. He would have to go.

Would she leave him? Unlikely. Mom was the sort who dug in and hung on, despite all troubles. She never gave up, not on the most hopeless situations, and this one seemed as hopeless as any she had encountered. Would he change? That was unlikely too – he’d been a prick for close to five years now, and practice makes perfect.

He was some sort of salaryman, and his perception of what was right changed with corporate philosophy. It always seemed that the family was doing something wrong. Their friends, if that’s what you want to call them, were couples in the same company, and a gathering was mentally more like an ice hockey match than anything friendly. Emi understood competition as well as anybody, but the sniping, the gossip, the jockeying for position – was this really life?

Her anger took hold, and she took the next lap at a much greater speed. She didn’t know what to do. She focused on her anger and started to mentally measure her strides, knowing that she was close to her best speed. The faster she ran, the angrier she became and the more she focused – prick…prick…prick…prick.

The track beneath one large pool of water gave way as Emi’s blade dug into it. She toppled onto the infield and rolled several time before coming to rest. Her right leg throbbed – she had pulled a muscle or something. As she struggled to stand, the rain poured down again. Well, at least that will wash the gravel and mud from her shorts, she mused. The muscle rebelled against too much weight and she slowly limped to the stands.

That was stupid, and she knew it. But the man was still a prick.

The low clouds stretched across the sky – there would be no let-up, not anytime soon. The downpour clanged on the aluminum benches of the stands. A caw came from one of the light poles, their tops covered by the driving rain.

Chapter 7 – Going Mobile

Akira was unhappy - it was going to be one of those trips. The plane into Tokyo had a stuck overhead compartment, which would not open for anybody or anything. It briefly delayed takeoff, and she had to move rapidly through Narita airport to get to the international flight in time. When she was finally aboard the plane to London, the same thing happened on the transcontinental flight. It wasn’t that big a deal on the jumbo jet, but when you travel, little annoyances become irritating, because they may turn into big problems that interfere with the travel.

Black thoughts tend to gather and mass, like black clouds. What’s gotten into Masato anyway? It’s fine, it works, leave it alone… She wasn’t even sure she wanted to see him every day anyway. He was nice, but every day? She had built her life around herself, somebody she could trust. At first, she did it because she had to, and then she did it because she wanted to. It gave her a lot of satisfaction, and it made really good times over the years possible – with Lilly, with Hideaki, and yeah, even with Masato.

Lilly – when was the last time she saw Lilly? She’d have to take care of that when she’d worked off the backlog that resulted from this trip.

Pack up her whole life again, leave a job she didn’t always love but at least knew, push herself again into a situation where she would have to microexamine every aspect of her life? She was too old for that now, and it was never fun anyway. Masato had rocks in his head – though they were probably gracefully formed, interesting, exquisitely patterned rocks.

As she thought, the technicians looked at the plane that had carried her to Tokyo. One was on his cell phone.

“No, it’s not stuck – as a matter of fact, it’s open – the door is up. There’s nothing in the compartment, so no harm done.”

He listened briefly. “Okay, I’m looking… there are two things in the compartment. There’s a small stick that might have jammed the lock I suppose, but it wouldn’t just open if that had happened. The other thing? It’s a feather, a black feather. No, I don’t think so. It works now, so let’s just move on, can we?”

Chapter 8 – The Last Stop

Well, it was coals to Newcastle, wasn’t it?

What made her suppose that she could teach English to students who were (allegedly) already fluent in the language? Being perfectly objective, her knowledge was superior anyone she had met, but no one would hire a native Japanese teacher, blind in the bargain, to teach English at a school in the UK. Nobody.

So, after several months of searching, she switched ambitions. If she could not teach the Scots in the English language, maybe she could teach them Japanese. She understood that the market for Japanese was rather small, but she hadn’t counted on it being as small as it was.

The situation at home didn’t help either. Her parents seemed determined to introduce her to every unpalatable single gentleman in Scotland. The Laird of Glencoe’s son was rather dense, in the same sense that lead was. His brother was less so, but markedly uninterested in the female sex, and who cared anyway? The procession of gentleman came and went.

She had broken the code well before. Her parents considered her possessed of a fatal flaw, worthy only to be matched with others of their class or ambitions who had similar flaws. She grew impatient and then hostile. Nothing she had done, nothing she had accomplished seemed to matter. And who said she wanted to be matched with anybody anyway? She would do this on her own terms.

The letter from Glasgow was a godsend. The school was a private school in the western suburbs, a place that her parents approved of once they digested Glasgow as a resting place for her. She interviewed, was accepted, and left Inverness with a speed that would cause envy even in Emi.

Saint Trinian’s was a girls’ school, situated in a tenth century abbey, which according to school legend, had been renovated twice in the eleven hundred years that followed. The last renovation had occurred sometime between the discovery of running water and the harnessing of electricity. She could not see the massive stone blocks that were the basic material of the walls and buildings, but she could sense them – either the heat of the sun (something that happened rarely), or the damp moistness of the cool and rain.

The interest in Japanese at Saint Trinian’s came from two sources. Some girls wanted to become yakuza, or hang out with yakuza, or maybe just act like yakuza. The others seemed to be interested in playing or translating or even creating visual novels. Lilly was peculiarly unsuited to help with either ambition, even if she would. The conflict in ambitions became apparent early, and Saint Trinian’s girls came to regard Lilly’s Japanese class as second only to chapel as the biggest waste of their time. There were exceptions to the rule, of course, and she cherished the odd girl who really wanted to learn the language and sample the culture. But that’s little enough to build a life around. The masters were pleasant enough, but not really friendly.

Lilly felt herself eroding – not her dreams, not her ambitions, but herself. She wasn’t even the person she was in high school. Her assumptions about the world had been flawed, and she would have to use every bit of the determination she used to overcome her blindness to build herself a place in it.

She walked down the corridor to her classroom. The door was partly open, not the way she had left it. She smiled grimly. This would be Miss McTavish, or perhaps Miss Abercorn, with an outside chance of it being Miss McAuslan. She pushed the door open with her cane, and the bucket of water tied to the top of the doorframe emptied its contents, but not on her.

She could not see the flash of black wings past the window of the school room.

While you can speak sign-language spelling out every single letter, that is something Shizune probably wouldn't do. It's more or less for beginners.

Hope you don't go in too many directions at once with this...

For Mirage_GSM:

Good point. My problem in setting up the scene is that the sign language for that particular thought is the gesture that pretty much everyone uses. If Shizune was trying to vent and still be a little opaque, she might well have gone back to spelling it out. My source for this is Galludet University in Washington DC, where a person or two either misinterpreted some idea I was trying to get across, or maybe interpreted it all too well.

PT

Chapter 9 - Highway to Heaven

The raven flew rings around the school, ever widening . She had no interest in the school – her attention was drawn upward. Here was different from where she usually was, and the angle would be different as well. She noted the sun as it fell to the horizon, felt the magnetic pull of the earth and watched carefully as the stars emerged in the darkened sky.

She landed in a tree and slept soundly. Then, as the right time came, she awoke and began her flight. She circled upward, to where the lights of Glasgow were only insignificant pinpoints of light. Her wings carried her past the tops of the clouds and the island became a speck in the ocean. The air thinned, but upward she travelled. She glided through the jet stream to rest, then continued upward. The air came thin, her heart pounded, the earth continued to retreat, yet on she flew.

Do ravens despair? The raven expert Bernd Heinrich believes that they do. If so, this one did, until she saw the light. She headed toward the light, down to her last ounces of energy. With those last ounces, she flew through the light into a sphere where she could breathe again, where a solo piano played a whimsical tune, where she had first been told to start the journey.

A more critical mind than a raven’s would have a hard time discerning this as any sort of heaven. The sun shined, but not always; there were marble halls, but not everywhere; the gods and creators did not congregate, but shot electrons at each other, impulses that passed bits of information to each other. Some of it looked like Oz, some like other places.

The raven flew above the houses until an impulse winked in her mind. She followed the beam as it became stronger, and swooped down into a small park, scattering pigeons as she went. There sat The One Who Had Sent Her, The Prettiest Girl, The Coordinator of Creation.

The Coordinator of Creation and the raven stared at each other for several seconds passing information without the trouble of electrons. The Coordinator’s face froze as the raven described what she had seen and what she had heard. The eyes of the Coordinator turned cold as the raven finished, and the popcorn meant for pigeons scattered in different directions as the bag hit the ground with considerable force. The Coordinator spoke two words and two words only, in a voice that was somewhere between a hiss and a growl.

“Bloody fools. They've messed it all up. Characters - you can't trust them.”

The Coordinator left the bench and rushed home. Soon, electrons were beaming the raven’s news to The Other Creators. Responses came thick and fast.

“You can’t leave them alone for a minute, can you? You try to make them happy…”

“Who is working for WHO? I mean WHOM?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Not really, but I’ll let my beard grow out if that makes you happier…”

“Why doesn’t she just change her name to Hanako Bleeding McCullough?”

“It’s all your fault.”

“You carry them around in your head for months. You give them birth. And then they go and do this.”

“It’s all my fault.”

“I do not write music for exercise classes. Use the ‘Best of Smashing Pumpkins’ for all I care.”

“Who the hell is Masato, and why is he tracking up my story?”

He With Stripes On His Sleeve smashed a keyboard. She Who Glows kicked the cat. Only The One With The Apron did not speak, but agreed with everything that the others said. Well, almost. The One With The Bees commanded the bees to silence, and The Unknown One dropped a few digits. Many others had similar reactions.

At the end of the burst of electrons, one thing was clear: This Would Not Stand.

Chapter 10 - Highway from Heaven

Read any creation story you care to – Greek, Roman, Norse, Aztec – groups of gods do not work any better as a team than humans do. Only gods working by themselves get the job done with any efficiency, and that was not the case here. It would be done slowly, deliberately, and with care. It is one thing to knit a sweater, and quite another take a worn unraveled sweater with dirty frayed threads and return it to its former self.

A flock of ravens left the lighted sphere. They glided swiftly and easily to earth – the trip down was much easier than the return trip. The original raven led the flock, on the Creator’s promise that there would be no need to travel in the overhead compartment of a passenger jet ever again.

As the air became thicker, they separated, some heading for the far horizon, some heading for the Pacific. As the Pacific flock came closer to the city, they separated again, each to a different place to perform a different task.

It was evening when they arrived. One landed in a tree in front of a modest house with a pretty garden in front, pretty even for this time of year. Inside the house, a man yelled. The raven turned her eye toward the yelling man. She blinked once, and spoke. It was a low rolling sound, not unlike a cat howling, and it ended with a series of clicks. At the last click, a blood vessel in the man’s head, strained from so many years of yelling, burst and pumped blood inside his skull. The man would not yell again; the man would not move again or breathe again.

Bernd Heinrich thinks that ravens smile. He would have been gratified by the look on this raven’s face as she flew off.

Another raven flew to a news kiosk, and picked the second section out of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the world’s most popular business daily. He had flown away before the news agent noticed, and since it was evening, it didn’t matter anyway – he’d sold all he was going to sell. He headed toward the Hill of Pearls, to a large house that looked like a collection of boxes smashed together. He sat in the tree beside the driveway until the weary Personal Assistant to Miss Mikado arrived home. He left the tree and with great precision, and dropped the newspaper section on the head of the Personal Assistant.

The Personal Assistant saluted the bird with a gesture not limited to those who know sign language and grabbed the paper. It contained a story about how traders on the commodity exchange worked with their hands and eyes only, how the yelling and noise actually distracted traders from their jobs. It’s all hand signals and bits of paper – the rest is just trying to get the attention of people who don’t want their attention gotten. A glow appeared in eyes that had not glowed in months. A brain recently dedicated to accompanying Talent on mascara expeditions clicked into gear. How exactly does one become a commodities trader?

The other ravens positioned themselves around the city – their time would come.

The second flock flew to the horizon. Most of them glided toward west Glasgow – one headed toward Inverness. They landed and they too awaited the rising sun.

Not many hours later, the Headmaster’s door burst open, and Saint Trinian’s Provost walked in at quickstep.

“We’ve become part of an old movie.”

Part of being a Headmaster is to listen with imperturbable calm. “Oh, really?”

“Right out of Hitchcock! A flock of crows is attacking the girls. Whacking them with their beaks as they pass from class to class!”

“Interesting.”

“I should say. And worse, they aren’t just using the beak end. Several of the girls are soiled and smell rather badly.”

“I see. Who, pray, are the victims of these assaults?”

The Provost pulled a list from his pocket. “McTavish, Abercorn, Ferguson, McAuslan, Romero and O’Reilly.”

The Head permitted himself a smile. “You don’t say. Rather a Who’s Who of the less desirable element in the school, isn’t it?”

“Well yes, but on a more objective basis, the only thing they have in common is that they’re all in Satou’s Japanese class.”

“Have you asked Satou about it?”

“Yes. Seemed pleased, actually. Said it had focused their minds on the subject most wonderfully. Every time one of them tries to leave, a crow comes to the window and caws at them.”

“Ah well, can’t have that anyway. Have the groundskeeper exhume his shotgun and buy him some shells. Oh, and Provost? Have him practice a bit, will you? I shouldn’t think he’d be ready to go after the flock until, oh, tomorrow or the day after.”

The two men exchanged smiles.

Chapter 11 – Tending to the Knitting

Sweaters unravel when the threads wander off from each other.

Hisao heard the beating of wings at his window. When he looked, there was nothing there, but it drew his attention to the bright sunshine. It was a day to ride, to climb and descend the gentler hills, to park the bike when you are winded and watch the grass wave in the wind. Golden days had been scarce lately – that’s just what he’d do.

Hanako gazed at her exquisite garden. It was beautiful and it was hers, but it wasn’t what she wanted right now. Perhaps a walk in the hills would clear her head. A caw echoed through the trees.

Lilly’s computer spoke to her in a tinny voice that required some concentration to understand, but it read her texts for her. “I finally answered Masato. Madness consists of doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. With him out of the way, I really want to go back home, oddly enough. I have an offer to run an office in the commodities exchange, and I’m going to take it. Wanna come, maybe get back in the English business?”

If there’s anybody in the world Emi would want to tell about the death of her stepfather, it would be Rin. She wanted to talk about a happy, peaceful mother. She wanted to talk about a rapidly healing muscle, and the prospects of at least a light run in the near future. Instead, the first words she spoke were, “What’s that thing in your mouth?” Rin decided later that Emi had been rather jagged and somewhat more yellow-orange-red than normal. But it was okay – that was the last of the cigars anyway.

Sweaters, even those under repair, require new yarn to complete. If affairs on earth seemed to foretell a new harmony, the electrons of heaven told quite a different story.

“I just want to be sure I understand the theory. Do I send down a raven clutching a roll of toilet paper every time she heads for the loo? I put years of my life into this girl and I love her, but where does it stop?”

“You’ve forgotten more about music than I know, and what you composed is certainly faithful to the writing. Innovative? Absolutely. Aside from the 1812 Overture, ‘Yamaguchi’s Chemistry” is the only music I know that uses cannon. All I’m saying is that it doesn’t have the same feel as ‘Wiosna’. Which is the same problem I have with ‘Waltz Among The Pork Bellies’. Surely there are other commodities…”

“We’re running short of ravens again…”

In the end, it all turned out to be too much. Gods have lives too. The first decision to leave had been the right one after all. The electrons slowed and then stopped, as did the flow of ravens.

Chapter 12 – Forward To The Future

There was one last burst of electrons across the heavens…

“Checked up on them the other day. Hisao and Hanako are dating again, but it’s not like the old days. A good deal of potential, of course – they learned something from the first split - they really are taking it slow. By the way, the fourth novel was scrapped and she’s writing a biography of Nellie Bly instead. Non-fiction is rather more her style.

When the Satous came home, Masato showed up at the airport with several gardens worth of roses. Industrialists can be well-informed and stubborn, I guess. Akira called him a moron, but the tone of voice said something different from the words.

NHK picked up In The Pink and Misha threw a package at Shizune that she couldn’t refuse. It starts with the title Executive Producer rather than Personal Assistant. Akira is doing fine in commodities, but it really wasn’t Shizune’s thing.
Not a lot else. They grew up. What happens next is up to them.

By the way, for those of you not keeping track, 'Yamaguchi’s Chemistry' went double platinum the other day. It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?”

High time the dev team got their own fanfic
So who's "The Prettiest Girl, The Coordinator of Creation"? Aura?
"The One With The Bees" confused me as well.

Anyway, they must have been really pissed to take such ham-fisted approaches to fixing the story.

As I remember, attributed writers included Suriko, CPL_Crud, Aura, Hivemind, and Anon22. I also seem to remember Suriko answering some personal question in the blog by self-referral as "the prettiest girl." I apologized before the story and do so again, especially if I honked up the IDs.

Dunno if they would be angry as much as tired. KS was around for quite awhile before hitting the surface.

PT

I apologized before the story and do so again, especially if I honked up the IDs.

Not all that much. I've seen Anonymous22 shortened to A22 before but never to Anon22, and Hivemind so far never complained about any missing definite articles...
However, both "She Who Glows" and "The Prettiest Girl" are male. I'm not sure in which context Suriko referred to himself in that matter.

And I made the mistake to try to match up the Gods with the dev's personalities/project work instead of their nicknames. I.e. smashing a keyboard made me think of Nicol because he's a pianist.

Fardels wrote:The Coordinator spoke two words and two words only, in a voice that was somewhere between a hiss and a growl.

“Bloody fools. They've messed it all up. Characters - you can't trust them.”

So were the other words broadcast telepathically?

Well I didn't see that coming. I didn't think about it being a dev fanfic until Mirage's post.