6:
Saotome Hima was not a happy camper.
His frustration and irritation could be clearly observed in the
hunched posture he assumed as he stomped through the mostly empty
hallways of the Academy. The handful of students and teachers who
encountered him clearly did observe his bad move and wisely avoided
his stomp.
Unfortunately, this particular coping strategy didn't seem to
ameliorate matters. Hima's thoughts began to to turn in the direction
of creative vandalism as a different form of stress relief, when he
heard the faint, familiar sound.
At first, as he walked in the direction from which the sound issued,
he couldn't recognize it or understand its attraction. Then, all at
once, it clicked. This particular piece of music was one of his Aunt
Amy's favorites, and he'd heard it often enough when she baby-sat
him. It was a beautifully sad tune which suggested nostalgia and a
great grief, as though what it remembered had been lost forever.
He finally reached the half-open door of one of the Academy's music
rooms, and stood on the threshold, just watching and listening.
Calyx was standing in front of one of the large windows, her face
shadowed and her pink hair rendered almost white by the setting sun.
The piano player, a girl perhaps a year or two older than Hima or
Calyx, had short-cropped dark hair and wore a standard girl's uniform.
Hima watched them in silence. He realized that he was watching
something that had happened thousands of times before, and yet was
ever new.
When the girl finished, there was a brief moment of silence. Then
Calyx spoke quietly. "May I?"
"Certainly."
Without further ado, they exchanged places.
No two musicians ever perform the same piece in exactly the same way.
In Calyx's rendition of the melody could be found all the grief and
sorrow of the other version, but to them she added a new, almost
defiant theme. Even if what she remembered was lost forever, he
fingers seemed to say, it did not matter; the memory itself was more
precious than any material could be, or time had been, for it could
never be lost.
The other young woman suddenly noticed Hima standing in the doorway,
just as he was noting to himself that her eyes were almost as blue as
Calyx's own. The startled look on her face as she realized she was
being observed prompted Calyx to abruptly stop playing and turn to
look back at him.
She smiled. "Hey, Hima."
"You never cease to amaze me, Calyx," he said sincerely. He'd had no
idea she could play the piano, let alone with such talent.
She smiled faintly, blew on her knuckles and rubbed them on her
jacket.
However, he realized she was also on the verge of becoming
insufferable, and seized an opportunity to gently burst her bubble.
Turning to look at the other girl with an evaluatory expression, he
thought aloud, "I would never have thought that even you could bounce
back from being dumped so quickly."
The girl blinked, looking cutely confused for a moment before
understanding spread across her face with a blush.
/Oh good grief,/ Hima thought with embarrassment. /I'm not *right*,
am I?/
"She's a nun, doorknob," Calyx drawled.
/Well, great. Maybe I can manage to offend the Queen, too./
"Mimori Seira," the still blushing girl introduced herself. "Pleased
to make your acquaintance."
"Saotome Hima. Likewise," he replied, his left hand rubbing the back
of his head.
"We met a little bit after I moved to Crystal Tokyo. Seira helped me
out with a few problems I ran into early on. So what's happening on
the Professor Mizuno front?" Calyx asked.
The irritation flowed back into him, but it was muted a bit. "What's
happening? Nada. Zip. I can't find her, I can't find Sheila either,
Aunt Amy hasn't heard from her sister in a few days, Aunt Lita hasn't
heard from Sheila since the day before yesterday but says she sounded
fine then ... nobody on the faculty seems to be talking ..." He
concluded by running a hand through his red hair and letting out a
long sigh of hot air.
"What seems to be the matter?" Seira asked.
Calyx quickly related to her what they'd found in class that
morning. "Although I still don't see why you're so worked up about
it," she said to Hima. "Maybe they just decided to take a spontaneous
vacation without telling anyone."
He shrugged. "Something about it just puts me on edge. I don't know
why, but it does."
"Saotome-san?" Seira asked quietly. "Your mother is Lady Mars,
correct?"
He nodded; as the only male child ever born to one of the Sailor
Senshi, he'd had a certain amount of notoriety up until he'd started
school, when both his parents gently persuaded the various media
services to stop shadowing their child. Some of the reporters they'd
met still had panic attacks whenever Hima's name came up in their
presence. Gently was such a subjective term.
"I believe that one of Lady Mars' traditional abilities is an
extremely well developed psychic sense of danger, and that some
legends about your father credit him with a similar talent. Might it
not be that you also have such a sense, and that the circumstances
about your aunt's disappearance have triggered it?"
Hima frowned slightly as he considered her words. "That would explain
a few things ... but actually ..." He trailed off.
Seira looked confused once more for a moment, then clarity dawned in
her eyes. "Do you feel it too?"
"What?"
"A sort of inexplicable discomfort, all the time, whenever you're on
campus. A feeling like ... like walking barefoot over broken, cracked
concrete, or through swamp water up to your waist."
"I wouldn't put it quite like that, but ... yeah." He began to shrug,
but halted in mid-gesture with a frown. "I was gonna say that I felt
the same way when Dad took me to visit the Jurai royal family and I
went wandering around the Sumeragi Palace unsupervised, but ... I
didn't. Then, I got the feeling that I was there on someone's
sufferance. Now it's like some*thing* really wants me to leave."
Hima and Seira both considered these observations for a moment, then
turned to look inquisitively at Calyx. She had been silently watching
them with her chin resting on the palm of her hand and a bemused,
uncomprehending expression on her face.
"I don't even have to ask if you feel anything like that, do I?" Hima
inquired lightly.
"Nope," Calyx replied, swivelling her head twice. "But Seira ... if
it's really as bad here as you claim, I don't understand why you
transferred here from St. Paulia's."
Seira smiled slightly. "I don't want to imply that it's painful, just
a bit uncomfortable. And we should be willing to bear a few minor
discomforts for our faith, after all. And also --"
She broke off as all three of them noticed a quick series of heavy,
stomping footfalls in the hallway outside, growing louder every
moment, until at last their source appeared in the doorway.
Visibly seething, the young woman with reddish brown hair saw them
and ceased to release her anger through the pounding of her feet, and
gave it voice instead. "Cretins! All the teachers here are cretins! I
try to explain my tricks and they dismiss it all as sleight of hand!
Sleight of hand! All the secrets my father imparted to me, and they
call it sleight of hand! Well, I'll show them. I'll show them all!"
She began to laugh in a way which might seem either sinister or
comical, depending on the listener.
"And also," Seira continued underneath the laughter, "if I stayed
there, who'd protect the world from Meimi=chan?"
After a while, the newcomer calmed down enough to introduce herself
as Haneoka Meimi, a friend of Seira's who was in the Academy's magic
school. Despite that institution's sterling reputation among
professional practitioners of the arts arcane, she was manifestly
unimpressed. "It's run by a bunch of fuddy-duddies who couldn't cast
an apportation to save their lives. All theory, no practice. I really
wish Papa could afford to send me to that English school --
Pigpimples, I think it's called." She let out a sigh. "Not to be."
"Well, maybe you can shake things up a bit," Calyx suggested blandly.
"Sure hope so. Now where the heck is that boyfriend of mine? He said
he'd meet me and Seira here --" She checked her watch, then
growled. "-- *now*."
"Well, Meimi-chan, give Asuka Jr. my best," commented Seira. "I have
to get going if I want to catch the transport back to the convent."
"You don't live here on campus?" Hima asked abruptly.
She shook her head. "The Sisters wouldn't let me, and even if they
did ..." Seira paused, then continued in the same calm, quiet
tone. "I woulnd't want to be here on campus after sundown. Not if my
life depended on it."
With that final comment, she bowed in farewell and left the room.
Hima finally broke the silence. "Well, I should get going too.
There's still at least one way I might be able to track our missing
persons down that I haven't tried yet. See you tomorrow, Calyx."
"Yeah," Calyx replied absently, contemplating the keys once again.
He almost paused then to ask her if she'd possibly experienced
something like they'd been discussing when she stumbled onto that
strange garden. But a brief glimpse of the fuming young woman who now
shared the music room with Calyx convinced him that it wasn't the
time to bring that up, so he headed out.
Behind him, he heard the beginnings of some more piano music, and
Meimi suddenly asking, "So, you do know that Seira's a nun, right?
It's *really* wrong for you to try and date her."
Hima winced at the discordant noise provoked by that comment, but his
thoughts were already moving in the direction of the secure comm unit
in his dormitory room.
He was going to have to do something he didn't particularly care to
do.
He was going to have to call in his father.
TBC