Tatake hated pressure suits. It was hard to move in them, you couldn’t hold a pen for squat, and they chafed. But while the pressure dome repairs were still going on he had to wear one to get into this part of town. He walked among the empty streets, trying to keep from looking at the bruised, frozen bodies. He had seen enough corpses in his profession but at least they had been killed by someone, they had died for a reason. And there were never more than five or ten at a time. Here there were thousands, hundreds of thousands. All dead, killed indiscriminately.It made him sick just thinking about it. As he neared the local Imperial Magistrate Precinct, whose jurisdiction had been the entire planet of Fu Leng, he saw a figure appear in a doorway, naked, saw its skin begin to rupture under the pressure differential, and then disappear. Perhaps he had seen too many bodies.

But no, something else was moving now. Through a window on the top floor of the Magistrates building, he saw someone. Someone moving, walking without a pressure suit. Their skin looked a little discolored in places, but not the full body discoloration associated with exposure to open vacuum. And this figure didn’t disappear, it merely looked through filing cabinets and at fallen officers. Tatake pulled his Imperial vacuum pistol out of its holster on his leg, once again cursing the pressure suit, and walked as quietly as he could into the building.

He was halfway up the second flight of steps before he realized he was in an airless environment. He could have run up the stairs wailing like a Crab berserker and it wouldn’t have made a noise. Still, he had to keep out of sight.

At the doorway he stopped. Moving very carefully, he tried to get a better look at the intruder. It was a man, fairly tall and lean, and wearing nothing but a simple green loincloth – and tattoos, covering his body in sinuous designs from the top of his shaven head down to the soles of his bare feet. And he was looking through the files.

Tatake aimed his pistol slowly and deliberately, trying to show as little movement as possible. He didn’t really want to fight with someone who could walk around without a p-suit but if he had to he was damn well going to do it from a good thirty feet away. Or at least, that’s what he intended. What in fact happened was this: Tatake drew his gun and aimed but when he pointed it into the room, the intruder was not there to aim at. The magistrate had just registered that fact when he felt a pain running through his arm. And his neck. And his legs. As he closed his eyes against the pain, he saw the man again, looking down at him with a completely unreadable gaze.

“Well what the hell do you want me to do with him? For the love of… Dammit, I’m a shugenja, Jimu, not a doctor. I thought you monks were supposed to be calm and quiet and staying aloof, not drop-of-a-hat-kaze-do-friggin-action-movie-cop-killers. For fuck’s sake.”

“He was… disturbing me. He had a gun, what would you expect me to do?”

“Can’t you freaks stop bullets or something?”

“First, I would appreciate it if you did not call my people ‘freaks,’” he rolled the word around in his mouth like a piece of bone in a bowl of rice, “Second, that’s the ‘S’ tattoo. As I am sure has been explained to you, different tattoos grant different powers. You understand, ne?”

“But, shit man, you dropped him hardcore. Wicked hardcore. I may not know too terribly much about biology but I know that an entire body covered in black and blue is a bad thing. By the way, how do you pull that off through an inch of rubber?”

“This matter is closed. If there is anything you can do for him I ask you to please do it. I have questions I would like to ask him.”

“YOU have questions to ask HIM. Mm Hmm. Yeah, I suppose I have something here that can fix him up a bit but next time be a little more careful?”

The shugenja walked across the room an knelt down next to Tatake. He had never much been into common shugenja fashion – he wore a black spandex bodysuit rather than the traditional robes and his close cropped hair in a variety of pastel colors – but a scroll bag was a necessity. Reaching into it he rifled through many of his more useless spells until he found what he was looking for: a nice, basic anaesthetic spell given him for the purpose of treating agents in the field. Waving his right hand a few times and mumbling, Agasha Nishi lay his free hand on the magistrate and tried to read the scroll pinned under his kneel. The trouble with scrolls was that they curled up at the most inopportune times. After much effort, however, Nishi managed to finish entreating the kami and Tatake’s body was noticeably less bruised.

“He should come to in a few seconds.” A smug little smile crept onto Nishi’s face as the Unicorn sat up.

“You’re going to feel a little stiffness as you wake up. Before you say anything – let my partner,” Nishi, having since stood up, gave Jimu a sharp jab in the ribs, “explain.”

Jimu, who had not shown any notice of the shugenja’s offense, returned the blow before he began to speak. The young man immediately crumpled into a gasping ball on the floor, “My name is Togashi Jimu and this,” he gave the lump on the floor a firm kick, “is Agasha Nishi. We are making investigations into the recent murders … and now into the cause of this catastrophe.” Nishi waved his arm to indicate the room around him.

Tatake took this opportunity to take in his surroundings. He was in a small bare room, probably a bar. He could see through the reinforced window that he was still in the depressurized quarter of the town, not far from the police department he had been in. He guessed from the tables and shattered bottles of sake that it was some sort of restaurant or perhaps a pub. There were no bodies in the building at all. That coupled with the presence of breathable air suggested that these two had been in here some time and that at least one of them was a magician. A glance at the scroll satchel on … Nishi was it? … Nishi’s shoulder confirmed that but then… what was the other one, that he could walk in the vacuum unscathed? Wait .. Agasha? Togashi? Tattoos? Dragons.

“Who the hell are you? What are you trying to do anyway? You knock me out cold, you waltz around the destroyed quarter with no regard for the laws of physics, and to top it all off, you should not exist. All the REAL Ise Zumei were killed a thousand years ago, and those neo-Ise Zumei were all wiped out with the rest of Rokugan.” Tatake hated surprises. Tatake hated a lot of things, really.

“Friend, you have no notion of that with which you deal. These murders bear the mark of a calculating mind… and of patience. Each one was killed with no witnesses, with no evidence of the means of death. They simply dropped. There is no area of concentration beyond this city, no central point of distribution. No pattern whatsoever that I can make out, nor that the poor dead magistrates can discern neither. But it is sure that they are planned, meticulous. Nearly every person has some sort of relation to the DSOC. Usually they are redundants, people who work on off shifts. By themselves they mean nothing and are beneath notice. But together? Together there are huge periods of time when the DSOC is not looking anywhere, where it is currently short staffed. In short, someone doesn’t want them to see something.”

“What he said.”

“So you’re saying that these people were killed by some kind of uber-conspiracy? Ninja? Kolat? C’mon… the Kitsuki – your own people – wiped both organizations out years ago. The Oni’s Eye is obsolete. The Shadow is dead. There ARE no more conspiracies.”

“Mmm. You’re right. There’s no such thing as a conspiracy. Fu Leng, The Shadow, The Kolat. They were all killed. They’re a thing of the past, a myth, a superstition. Just like Ise Zumei.”

Jimu’s face stretched in ways that were quite clearly foreign to it, into a smile.