I also needed a little “G” time, not much, but enough to plot out my current work in progress. I was usually a fast writer, but this one had been a strain on my psyche. What could I say? I was generally distracted, and with the success of Mutants in the Making, and all that things I had to do related to the book, I hadn’t really been giving it the attention I should.
So some “me time.”
Keeping as quiet as possible, and hoping not to wake Veronique (who slept next to me, curled in a ball) or Dorian (who slept on my other side), I moved away from the floor and over to my backpack, cringing the entire way.
Boy, did it hurt sleeping on that damn futon.
I shuffled past my uniform and found the laptop I had picked up a couple of weeks ago. It was basically a flat screen with an attached keyboard, and it was superlight, with a long battery life to boot. Figuring I would be clever, I also grabbed the bolo tie that Grace had given me.
Still in my Manchester Missions shirt, I put the bolo tie on and stepped out of the room, where I was startled to find the old Japanese woman waiting, a smile on her face.
“Bu-rek-fah-stee,” she said, ushering me to a side room.
“Breakfast?” I asked her.
“Hai! Bu-rek-fah-stee-oh kudasai,” she said, plowing ahead.
I wanted some time to plot, to do a little thinking and to research the city, so I was happy to see that the room she had designated as our breakfast nook was empty, just some food in the corner and a small coffee table in the center of the tatami mat.
She instructed me to sit using a hand gesture and I did so, the woman shuffling over to the side table and bringing me a cup of coffee.
She said something that sounded like “Nani-oh tabetai desuka,” and by the way she was pointing from the food to her mouth. I could tell that she meant that I should eat something.
“Okay, thank you,” I told her, bowing my head. “Yes, eat.”
She bowed back at me, so I bowed again, then she bowed again, and I bowed again.
“Thank you,” I told her, as she left the room, muttering something under her breath.
I couldn’t be certain that she said the word baka, but if she did, I knew what it meant, and she was right, I was sort of an idiot.
I had some super thick toast for brekky, an apple and a banana, plus another one of those pancakes like Michelle had eaten on the plane, the one with the syrup inside. I figured I would eat “second breakfast,” as the Hobbits called it, once the CBGs all woke up, so I still wanted to have an appetite.
I turned my laptop on and almost connected to the Wi-Fi, but then I decided against it, to just exist in a Wi-Fi-less world for a moment. It was amazing how strange that was, to not be connected, but the more that I forewent connectivity, the less manic I felt.
There was definitely something to that.
I pulled up the notes that I had been taking for the second book in my series, How Heavy This Axe?, about a transgender dwarf named Manchester who has a sexual relationship with the dragon named, well, Dragon. I was a bit surprised, but the audiobook of the first installment, narrated by Justin Jeffrey Ellicott-Winkel, had been pretty popular.
And damn, what gravitas on the narrator’s part!
I was up to a thousand reviews, which was pretty crazy considering how fucking odd the story was. Did I read those reviews? You bet your freckled ass I did, which was why I was now experiencing writer’s block when it came to plotting out the second book.
I knew that I wanted Manchester and Dragon to have an issue in the second installment, to both go their separate ways, but ultimately reunite, that was until the end, when something went wrong. I didn’t know what this thing was yet, and I also didn’t know who to make the bad guy.
I mean, the village of Dwarvington were all a bunch of bloody “arseholes,” as Manchester may have called them, but they weren’t bad guys.
And I needed a damn antagonist.
I looked through my notes for a moment, and a name came to me, and sure, it was a little cliché, but it would work.
Damon Lord would be the bad guy.
He was our bad guy, and now he would be Manchester’s enemy.
And regardless, fuck that guy.
But why? Why did Damon Lord hate Manchester?
It would be too easy to go the classic route by making him a homophobe, or some shit. No, I needed another reason, as this book really wasn’t about the LGBTQ community so much as it was about the hero’s journey updated for a twenty-first century audience of people who had already read way too much science fantasy and GameLit. Readers who needed something different.
I kept at it, trying to figure this character out more. Who is Damon Lord? Why does he hate Manchester?
Maybe Damon Lord had a previous relationship with Dragon, years before. But that would make it sort of a revenge/love interest type of thing.
I didn’t want that.
What if there was something else? A family secret that Manchester maybe didn’t know about, that Damon Lord had taken to heart.
Yes…
Something along these lines, something that involved familial betrayal, that linked a past Manchester never knew he had to the antagonist, who was keenly aware of what had taken place.
“You look busy,” Ingrid said as she entered the breakfast area, ushered in by the Japanese woman.
“Is Michelle up?” I asked, glancing around the room, expecting the young speedster to burst in at some point.
“She’s sleeping in for once, can you believe that?”
“Michelle? Sleeping?” I looked up from my laptop as Ingrid sat across from me, the Japanese woman bringing her a cup of coffee and saying something to her about eating food.
“Arigato gozaimasu,” Ingrid told the woman.
“Damn, did you pick up Japanese?”
“Don’t you remember? We ordered a lonely planet guide for Tokyo like three weeks ago. Three weeks, Gideon. I’ve been reading it over and over again. You’ve seen me with the book.”
“Sorry, I was distracted.”
“Clearly.” Ingrid took the small guidebook out of her pocket and set it on the table. “I have only picked up a little Japanese, just some basic things.”
“Really? Do you think you could help us get around the city?”
“Tokyo isn’t so difficult to navigate,” she said. “The subways all have English, and if we just stick to the Yamanote Line, we shouldn’t have any trouble. The Yamanote is a circular line, and it connects to pretty much all the important parts of the city. We don’t have to venture much further from there.”
“All right, you’ll be our tour guide then,” I told the young brunette. She smiled at me, and returned to her book.
“In that case, I should study up some. I am assuming the others will be awake in the next hour or so. And they will be hungry when they wake up. We should make plans now, so we can be one step ahead. What do you want to do?”
I thought for a moment. “We are near a zoo, right?”
“The Ueno Zoo, yes.”
“And a market, the black market that that American mentioned last night.”
Ingrid turned to a page in her guidebook and study the map for a moment. “Yes, that is correct.”
“And I personally want to see the anime capital of Tokyo…”
“Akihabara,” she said, turning the guidebook toward me and showing me that Akihabara was only a few subway stops away from Ueno. “That should be easy enough. Let’s have breakfast around here, get clothing, maybe walk to Akihabara considering it is only a mile or so away, have lunch and return. Once we are back in Ueno, we can go to the zoo. And then…”
“Yes?” I asked, registering something behind her eyes.
“I want to go to Tokyo Skytree. It’s like the Eiffel Tower. We could have dinner at the top.” Ingrid leafed through the pages for a moment, and finally found the image she was looking for.
I nodded, impressed by the design of the tower.
“It really does
look like the Eiffel Tower. And I agree, this would be an awesome day. So let’s stick with this plan then, and anything else anyone wants to do, we’ll just loop it back into this. Deal?”
Ingrid offered me a rare smile. “Deal.”
Chapter Sixteen: Terrorists to Tourists
I wish I could say that we didn’t spend the entire day in Tokyo fucking around, and instead we went straight to Setagaya in search of Damon Lord, but alas, that wasn’t the case.
What can I say? We were an easily distracted bunch.
“I give you, Denny’s,” I told the CBGs as I looked up at the second floor of a building not far from our hotel. “Now who’s ready for a good old-fashioned American breakfast?”
“I am,” Michelle said, “As long as there are pancakes!”
“Oh, there will be pancakes. Let there be pancakes.”
As we took the stairs up to Denny’s, I saw that they had pictures of the food available inside. They also had a display case with plastic models. Plastic pancakes drizzled in syrup with a square lump of butter on the top? A perfect omelet; a single egg, sunny side up; a stack of toast with chocolate and cream drizzled over it; a traditional Japanese breakfast with a sliver of salmon—this definitely wasn’t going to be like a Denny’s in America.
I was at the back of the group, Grace at the front, the others sandwiched somewhere between us. All of us were looking ready to proselytize in our Manchester Missions outfits, yours truly in a bolo tie and pink Denver cap, and I was glad to be able to get to some civilian clothes later.
Now that we had gotten through the airport, we really had no need to stand out as a group any longer. Of course, I still kept a morphed face, which was something I needed to focus on every now and then, just to make sure I wasn’t getting droopy.
“How should we order?” Michelle asked me, looking around excitedly.
“Just point at the picture,” said Ingrid. “I am sure they will understand. The Japanese aren’t another species, you know.”
“It is sort of like being in an alien world,” said Michelle.
“I guess that is one way we should think about it, and that also means that we shouldn’t cause any trouble, or bring any attention to ourselves,” I told her as I went for the door, all the CBGs passing in front of me.
“Thanks,” Chloe said, stopping and letting the others go by.
“I’m holding it for you too,” I told her.
“I know,” she said. “I just figured I would catch up with you back here and ask what our plans were for today. Because you have sort of been secretive about them, and you know how I hate secrets. Don’t make me hypnotize you into giving me the answer.”
“You really like ruining surprises, don’t you?”
“I am going to guess that our plans for today involve getting new clothing, right?”
“Yes, after this. And then…”
“What?” the brunette asked, her lips parting as she smiled at me.
The Japanese hostess threw her arms out and greeted us, immediately going for a bow. She had already motioned the others to a large table near a side window, and did the same for Chloe and me.
“Let’s just keep it a surprise,” I told the sound manipulator. “Well, it is more of a surprise for me than the rest of you. But I have a surprise for everyone today, and tonight. Trust me. Ingrid has it all figured out. She’s practically fluent in Japanese.”
“No, I’m not,” Ingrid said as I took my seat at a round table, a huge, placemat-like menu already sitting before me. Not far from us was an actual area for smokers in the corner, shielded from the rest of the patrons by a glass partition, which did little to stop the smell of cigarettes.
Breakfast was… weird.
The first thing that struck me as odd was that the food given to us looked exactly like the plastic food in the display counter outside the restaurant, and the pictures on the menu. It was almost as if they had a cloning machine or something, and they simply slipped the picture of our breakfast in and it came out the other side.
If there was supposed to be two chopped onions in the omelet, a few slivers visible on top, it looked the exact same. The butter on top of Michelle’s pancakes had the exact same dimensions as the plastic model, and the size of the pancakes was an exact match. Dorian, who had tried something different by going with a traditional Japanese breakfast, also had food that looked exactly as it did on the menu. The slice of fish was the exact same size, the garnishes seemed to be in the exact same amount, even the dollop of rice with a bit of soy sauce on top looked exactly as it did in the plastic model and the picture on the menu.
It was uncanny.
And it wasn’t as good as breakfast in America.
But then again, I had been raised on East Coast diners, with their heavy helpings of home fries, bacon, and pancakes saturated with maple syrup, or Eggs Benedict with more Hollandaise sauce than necessary.
So I had elevated expectations.
And also, Japan wasn’t really known for its breakfasts as much as it was the other foods on offer, which we would be sure to munch down on later in the day.
The bill settled by Grace, we left and turned to Ueno’s black market, which seemed to be divided by three streets that all connected to the main train station.
“All right, let’s divide up,” I announced to the missionaries.
“Shopping time!” Michelle said, her form wavering.
“No powers in public,” Ingrid reminded her.
“We will meet in an hour, at the same spot,” I told them. “Hopefully in new clothing. If we get a lot of clothing, one of us can run it back to the hotel…” I said, glancing at Michelle and realizing how this would be interpreted.
“But I thought you didn’t want me running through traffic?” She looked back to the street and the passing cars, pedestrians gathering around a crosswalk.
“By Dorian, I mean. A quick teleportation. Anyway, we’ll deal with the details later. For now, it’s shopping time!”
We had tested Chloe’s power at the restaurant, when Veronique had wanted more coffee and the others wanted juice refills, and it had worked. Chloe was actually able to use her sound manipulation ability to summon the waitress and put in our orders.
Now we were going to test it with money.
If that didn’t work, I would try a little bit of my mind magic, and if that didn’t work, then we would just stay at the shop until Grace could come around.
But hopefully, Chloe’s power would work.
We started down one of the streets, immediately coming to a fish market. A Japanese man wearing traditional clothing stood on top of a crate, yelling out fish prices and holding up crabs.
Actually, maybe he was yelling out crab prices.
Either way, it was a spectacle, and as we continued, we came to our first clothing shop, which had a black man in hip-hop clothing standing out front.
“Hello to the pretty ladies. You should come into my shop and buy something to make them look even better,” he said, in a heavy French-English accent. There was a similar shop next to him, also with a dark-skinned man out front wearing hip-hop clothing talking to people in the crowd, trying to hawk his goods.
“Where are you from?” I asked him.
“The Ivory Coast,” he said with a big grin. “Heard of it?”
“Near Ghana and Burkina Faso, right?” Ingrid asked.
“Ooo, this is a smart child here. Is this your child?”
“Um, yes,” I said, trying to remember Ingrid’s codename. I’d specifically chosen a name that started with the letter ‘I’ to make this easier, and it came to me in that moment. “Um… Isabelle, that’s her name.”
“Gee, glad you could remember my name, dad,” she said, offering me a quick elbow.
“And how funny is that! Let me guess, you need some new clothing?”
“That’s right,” Chloe told the jovial man. “We didn’t bring much aside from this.”
The man shook his head for a moment, loo
king at Chloe and Stella in a creepy way. “Luckily, I have just the shop for you. Come with me.”
“No, we should look around a little more…” I started to say.
“Nonsense, you have clothing needs, I have clothing. It is a match made in…” The man looked up at the sky, or better, at the awning covering the front of his shop. “Heaven.”
“Sounds interesting,” said Stella, looping her arm in mine. “Let’s go, Pastor.”
“A man of the Lord, huh?” the man asked as he led us into his shop, and from there, down a hallway that had other shops connected to it.
It may have seemed orderly from the outside, but seeing inside one of these buildings gave me a better appreciation for the black market beneath the modern facade. The four of us followed the Ivorian through several other shops, hanging a left, then hanging a right, winding up a slope, the man talking to Ingrid about his home country as they walked.
“How long have you lived here?” she asked.
“Five years. No, six.” He paused and counted the number on his fingers for a moment. “Yes, six.”
“And you came here to sell clothing?”
“Something like that,” he said with a sly grin. “There are lots of people from Africa in Japan. Some sell clothing like me, others work as doormen in Roppongi. I suppose that good Christians like you won’t be going to Roppongi.”
“Roppongi?” I asked Ingrid.
“It’s an area of the city with a lot of clubs.”
“That sounds like fun,” Chloe added.
“But not part of our plans for today,” I told her. “We have got a full day ahead of us, and we need to look good.” I said this last bit a little bit louder, so the clothing salesman would hear us.
“You want to look good, eh? Then you came to the right place. Seydou will take care of you,” he said with a chuckle. “My name rhymes, get it?”
We passed a shop selling fake Rolexes, and another selling cool jackets with embroidery on the backs.
In fact…
“I think I need to get one of these jackets,” I told Stella.
Cherry Blossom Girls International Page 12
