Cherry Blossom Girls International

by Harmon Cooper

  “I can also check parts of the island,” Michelle said. “No one will know that I’m there.”

  “Maybe,” I said, looking over to Veronique, who was nodding.

  “Michelle could definitely do some scouting for us.”

  Michelle beamed over at the metal vampire as if to say, “See, I’m useful!”

  “We have to be on the lookout for this invisible guy,” said Chloe. “So what I can do is continue using my Echolocation power to see if anyone is approaching us. There are other things I can do to make sure that no one is able to sneak up on us, like using my Sound Detection ability. If I sense them, I won’t hesitate to pop their eardrums, which is painful, and will likely cause them to cry out, leaving them wide open for Veronique to finish the job.”

  “Gladly,” the metal vampire said, baring her teeth. “Damon Lord is likely on that island, so we need to operate under this assumption.”

  “If he is, all of our efforts need to go toward taking him out,” I said with finality. “No question about it. It doesn’t matter who else is there, from the albino woman to the invisible person. Natalie Johansson’s people may be there too. Doesn’t matter. Damon Lord can kill us quicker than any of the others, so if he appears, concentrate all firepower on him.”

  “Most definitely,” said Dorian.

  “And in that scenario, we will need someone to run some type of defense.”

  “I will handle that,” said Chloe. “Sound Sculpting. I’ve done it before, if you recall, I used it in one of our training sessions a few weeks back.”

  “You know we really haven’t used that as much as we should have,” I said, recalling that Chloe was able to create a wall of sound that had the power to lift anything that touched it. While this wouldn’t stop all of our enemies over the duration of a longer fight, it would give us the time we needed to take out Damon Lord. “It’s a good option.”

  “And if Grace and Stella aren’t on the island?” Veronique asked me.

  “Let’s not even operate under that assumption. If they aren’t there, then we leave. But they are there. Dorian’s power doesn’t lie, so they are clearly there.”

  “Unless they are underwater…” Dorian suggested.

  “As much as the sci-fi writer in me would love for Damon Lord to have an underwater lair that we could assault, I don’t believe this is the case. If it is, we will clear the island, and move forward from that point.”

  “I am so ready for this,” Michelle said. “So ready.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: To the Arcade!

  What student of history doesn’t know about Nagasaki?

  If Hiroshima hadn’t been enough to prove the power of the atomic bomb, Fat Man showed up just a few days later to decimate Nagasaki, killing nearly twenty-five percent of its population in a single go.

  Ka-boom…

  Yet aside from the Memorial Park that designated Ground Zero, it was hard to tell what had happened here eighty-five years ago. This gave me hope for humanity; no matter how severe things got, we were able to build again, to persevere.

  It made me fearful as well, considering that humans had that type of technology so long ago, and we had only gotten more destructive tech since.

  This also triggered another thought as the kind Japanese man drove us through the city, cruising along its nice and tidy boulevards to the electronics district—maybe this was yet another reason that the world needed superheroes.

  And sure, I was being a little overconfident assuming we could stop something like an atomic weapon, but if we were organized, there really was no telling what we were capable of.

  But first, we had to be whole, and to be whole, we needed Grace and Stella.

  The Nagasaki traffic wasn’t so bad, and we had already passed a number of buildings that looked less Japanese and more Western.

  I was by no means an expert on Japan, and hadn’t really done too much research on its other cities aside from Tokyo, but I had been a David Mitchell fan back in the day, and I had read his work, A Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which went into pretty heavy detail regarding the effects of Dutch trading on Japan.

  And I could recognize some of that influence here, especially when words were in English, like the sign pointing to the Huis Ten Bosch theme park, and other small, architectural things that had apparently survived the bombing.

  How gleefully life shreds our well-crafted plans, Mitchell wrote in his book, and damn if that didn’t apply to my current situation, or most of the situations the CBGs had been through in the past.

  “Hamanmachi ma-ru,” the Japanese man kept saying as he looked around frantically. He was on a first name basis with Ingrid, but she hadn’t told us his name yet. She sat in the front of his tiny van, the rest of us piled in the back like a bunch of goddamn sidekicks.

  And I do mean piled.

  This was no minivan by American standards; it sort of reminded me of a crossover SUV, bulky in a way, yet spacious inside, white on the outside and with more get-up-and-go than I was expecting.

  Still, fitting five of us wasn’t easy, which was why Veronique sat on my lap, Michelle in Dorian’s.

  “What does he keep saying?” I asked Ingrid as a policeman walked out to the road. He politely asked us to stop, letting a construction vehicle move by. Once it passed, he bowed to us and the old man continued.

  “It’s the mall we are going to, you know, where you are going to get your smartphone.”

  “I think I should get one too,” said Dorian.

  “Me too,” said Michelle. “I really wanted to take pictures yesterday, I mean, the day before. Yesterday was shitty.”

  “Language, and I agree, all of us should have phones going forward. We can set up a joint email account to communicate if we ever get separated again, and some type of private messaging group too.”

  I recalled teleporting on the rooftops of Setagaya, running to the station, hoping that the albino woman didn’t catch me.

  Maybe if I’d had a phone, I could have gotten in touch with Dorian, and brought the fucking cavalry.

  Without mental messaging as an option, this would have been a way forward.

  “It’s definitely a good idea for everyone to get phones, even if you all don’t have them on you at all times,” I said. “We just need to be careful how we use them. No social media profiles, nothing like that. Shit, if that isn’t a can of worms… But we should get a communication app, which would allow us to video chat if need be. Most of that stuff is encrypted anyway, and increasingly hard to trace due to consumer protest.”

  “Are you serious?” Michelle asked, trying as hard as possible to contain her excitement. “Can we get a new pair of Heelys too? I miss my last pair.”

  “I don’t think that they’re going to have it at the mall that we’re going to,” I told her. “But we’ll get some when we get back to America. Wait a minute, what happened to your last pair?”

  “I wore them out when you guys were in Washington. Sorry!”

  “No need to apologize, it’s just what you do.”

  Chloe laughed at this statement. “For some reason that sounds both cruel and cute at the same time.”

  “Don’t be mean to me,” Michelle said, playfully sticking her tongue out in my direction.

  “Trust me, that definitely wasn’t my intent.”

  Veronique lifted her hand and placed it on the side of my cheek, draining just a small bit of my energy. “Be nice to her.”

  “Really, I wasn’t trying to be rude!”

  Before our playful bickering could continue, the Japanese man took a hard left and pulled into a parking spot. He pointed at a street filled with cute shops, some of them covered by canopies, others not.

  “That’s a mall?” I asked. “It’s more of an arcade.”

  “That’s what they call it,” Ingrid said as she got out of the vehicle. “And I’m pretty sure that’s not the definition of an ‘arcade.’” She looked to Chloe. “Tell him to wait here for us.”

&nbs
p; “Can he park here?” I asked.

  “I’ll handle everything,” Chloe said, focusing on the man.

  He nodded, grunted the words, “Hai, douzo,” and grinned.

  What a nice guy, regardless of the fact he was technically under our control.

  All of us were in disguises, Dorian and Chloe dressed as Muslim women, Veronique wearing a beanie, Ingrid in a big pair of sunglasses, Michelle in my gray beret and a pair of thick rimmed glasses, and Yours Truly in a pink Denver cap, clean shaven, with a bolo tie around my neck.

  Since we had more time at our borrowed Japanese home, I had managed to clean up some, and as many have said before me and many will say long after I’m gone: I hardly recognized myself without a beard.

  It felt good to be clean-shaven though, aside from all the teasing I had gotten from the CBGs. Each one of them wanted to touch my face, and a few of those ‘quick touches’ turned to slaps. Nothing hard, but still.

  And I knew we would catch a few eyeballs, but not that many.

  What can I say? As usual, the Japanese people were hyper respectful, most not making eye contact with us at all as we weaved through the market. Now wasn’t the time for shopping, but if it had been, I would have had a ball at this place.

  The shopping district had everything under the sun, from clothing to kitschy anime figurines, from cleaning goods to more traditional Japanese goods, and everything in between. There were places selling kitchen appliances, laughing Buddhas, little houses that I presumed were for the spirits of dead ancestors, sunglasses and souvenirs, even a place selling Harajuku-esque costumes.

  It was a treat for the eyes; but we were here for one thing, and one thing only.

  The electronics section of the market wasn’t right at the front, where I had assumed it would be, but eventually we found it, a few blocks back, past a coffee shop with limited outdoor seating and a place called Mister Donut.

  “Okay, I know we’re here on a mission, but everyone is getting a donut, including you, Veronique.”

  “A donut?” Veronique shook her head. “I saw you eat one of those things before. It looks absolutely unhealthy.”

  “If by ‘unhealthy’ you mean delicious, yes, it is absolutely ‘unhealthy,’” I told her as I opened the door for the group.

  In the end, everyone but Veronique got something from Mister Donut, but she did take a bite of mine, a Boston cream for old times’ sake and to pay homage to Krunkin’ Kronuts, the biggest fried dough seller on the East Coast.

  “Loving my donut,” Dorian said, the punk rock teleporter having gone with a vanilla frosted one, the same donut Ingrid had chosen.

  “Same here,” Chloe said, hers a strawberry-flavored one with white sprinkles.

  “It’s so good,” Michelle said, chocolate smeared across her face.

  “You eat too fast.” Chloe handed her a napkin. “Wipe your face.”

  “Sorry,” Michelle said, and I could tell by her stance that she was about to take off.

  “No running through the crowd,” I reminded her, finishing my bite.

  “Okay, but I just want to say that that would have been really fun, especially with so many people.”

  “Just behave,” Ingrid reminded her. “Gideon, I think this is the electronics shop you’re looking for,” she said, nodding to a two-story building with a glass storefront.

  “Nope, not the place I’m looking for,” I told her, licking my fingers. “That one is way too fancy. That kind of shop is going to make us buy a data plan, and we have no way to do that. No, we need something a little bit shady or something like…”

  We continued past the big brand phone seller, which I believe was called SoftBank, a strange name if I’d ever heard one. Sure enough, there were a few smaller stores next to it selling phone cases, and then I found a place I was looking for.

  It was a small electronics shop, glass tables, a proverbial graveyard of smartphones beneath the glass.

  I walked in with Chloe, and not long after, the two of us walked out with six brand-new-ish definitely not stolen phones.

  “Now we need to find some Wi-Fi,” I told them.

  “They don’t have it at the house by the ocean?” Michelle asked.

  “They didn’t have smartphones, and I didn’t see computers there, so I would seriously doubt that they have Wi-Fi. But there has to be a place around here…”

  We went back to coffee shop we had seen earlier, only to find there was no Wi-Fi. Luckily, the barista spoke some English and told us to try the McStarbucks a few blocks away. Once we made our way to the golden arches and the sexy green mermaid amalgamation, we saw that there was a line of people trying to get seating.

  “I’ve got this,” Chloe said as her throat started to glow.

  The crowd parted, all suddenly disinterested. We found a table, and all gathered around our devices. The phones powered up in Japanese characters, but there was an option to toggle to English, which I quickly did. The phone then reminded me that it didn’t have calling capabilities without a data card. After a few more terms and conditions, I was in.

  “Just like that,” I told Dorian, who had already figured hers out. Veronique merely looked at hers, the metal vampire raising a skeptical eyebrow. Michelle tapped her fingers on the table, a smile on her face as soon as her phone started up.

  Her first action once she was able? Taking a selfie.

  “And welcome to my youth,” I told Michelle as I worked with Dorian to create a universal email account for the CBGs to use going forward.

  “The email ID is Cherryblossomgirls@googleface.com, and the password is… What’s a good password, everyone?” I asked the group.

  “How do we get on the Internet?” Ingrid asked. “We just connect to the three little bars, right?”

  “That’s right, just click there, and you will go to the McStarbucks log-on page. Should be easy from there.”

  “Okay, I see how to do it,” said the young beast morpher. Once she was on, she began helping Chloe connect.

  “What would be a good password for us?” I asked again.

  “How about ‘Michelle?’” Michelle asked, on her tenth selfie. She’d also found the built-in filters that allowed her to add dog ears and a tongue to her picture.

  “I mean, that’s not a bad password, but I want it to be something we will all remember.”

  “We will all remember that. Right, everyone?” she asked, looking around quickly.

  Everyone aside from Chloe nodded.

  “You can’t remember the password?” I asked her.

  “No, it’s not that,” she said as she glared down at her phone. “I’m getting news updates; the American media is talking about the CBGs’ attack in Japan,” she said, showing us her screen. “It’s Dorian.”

  “First off, that’s obviously not Dorian; it’s the albino, but we all know that. And I have to warn everyone about the Internet…” Even though I was in the middle of setting up a shared email account, I decided it was important to put my phone down and look at all of them for a moment. “There are life skills to be learned from utilizing the Internet, none of which I’ve quite mastered. But I can say this: do not dive too deep. Be careful what you start reading, or the things you start searching for. Another thing is to not believe everything you read online. Let’s just start there, with those two rules.”

  “How do you take a selfie?” Veronique asked Michelle.

  “Like this,” Michelle said, appearing next to Veronique and posing, offering the camera a wide grin.

  “No powers in public,” I reminded Michelle. “And did anyone give two shits about my Internet speech?”

  “No one saw me, Gideon, trust me,” Michelle said, still smiling and pressing that photo capture button. “Do you want dog ears for your pic?” she asked Veronique, who nodded enthusiastically, laughing as soon as Michelle snapped the photo.

  “For what it’s worth, I give two shits,” Ingrid said as she too took a selfie.

  “Same here,” Chloe sai
d, not looking up from her phone.

  “Same,” Dorian chimed in as she scrolled through the app store.

  What have I done?

  And in that moment, I wished Grace was here to share that little thought with me, to say something snarky, or cute, to ease my mind.

  I sighed, and returned to the task at hand.

  There was a ton to do, and rather than lecture the CBGs, I got right down to it. The first thing I wanted to do was set up another account for all of us to be able to use a messaging app. I figured I would log in with my Gideon email, and they could then log in with the Cherry Blossom Girls email, which seemed to work out.

  At least Ingrid, Dorian, and Michelle got the gist of it.

  After that was done, and with my email now open, I saw that there had indeed been a reply from Father, telling me that we should get back to Colorado, that maybe this was too risky.

  I almost started typing an angry email to him about leaving Stella and Grace behind, but I didn’t, figuring he could just stew on his bad idea for the time being.

  I also saw messages from Luke, which I sadly had to ignore. Right now was the time for research, and I didn’t know where to start, but I figured a quick GoogleFace search would do the trick.

  I typed “abandoned island off Japan coast,” and with very little scrolling, I found exactly what I was looking for.

  “Does this look familiar?” I asked, showing Chloe the picture of Hashima Island.

  “How did you find that so quickly?” she asked.

  “You are really good at this,” Michelle said. “And we should take a selfie after we finish researching.”

  “I will keep that in mind,” I told her.

  I checked that the island was indeed near Nagasaki, remembering the map our Japanese host had shown us.

  Yep, everything checks out.

  I took a bunch of screenshots and even found a small PDF about the island, which I downloaded. This would give me just enough research to figure out what the place was about, and to better plan our attack.

  Before we left, I went to the shared drive Father and I had hooked up and downloaded the CBGs app that allowed me to adjust their stats remotely.