L-Fel
Iowa
Hospital
"Frederick, old lad", Steffen said, patting the old king on the shoulder as they entered the room. "How long it's been since we last saw you."
Henry scrunched his nose at the sterile smell of the hospital.
“Anyway... a lot of fuckshit has happened since we got split up”, Steffen replied Ackermann, suddenly becoming rather weary as he collapsed into a chair, downing the last drops of spiked grapefruit wine and throwing the empty bottle into a bin; it struck the rim of the bin and clattered on the floor, and Steffen, chagrined, climbed out of the chair to pick up the bottle and put it into the bin. “Pretty damn long story. I’m too tired to say it all, to be quite frank.”
“I can explain”, said Henry, sighing and running his hand over his now bald head, where there once was an elaborately-coiffed mop of bleached yellow hair. “It’s been a long twenty years, very long, but I can tell you the important things.”
Chieko and Xiao-song sat in the corner of the room demurely.
“So Koizumi- I’m sure you remember him, very great guy, very good hair... Junichirō Koizumi, it turns out he was appointed by the Gods of the Hotel as the Fifth Gate Guardian, who’s a powerful person who’s supposed to keep the multiverse safe, to be a deterrent-“
“Koizumi set out with the Left Arm to create a Grand Alliance”, Satoshi Tanakamaru interrupted Henry, explaining the happenings of the past two decades in a far less verbose and tangential manner, “a coalition of powers seeking to rid the multiverse of the tyranny of the Chimaera and the IGSE.
“It was eight years after you left that the Chimaera and the IGSE declared war on each other. At that point, we remained hidden from sight, building our forces and gathering more allies from across the multiverse. It was also around that time when Dr Lam Jih-yeung perfected the ghoulification process, and thus, unleashed armies of ghouls upon their enemies, the Chimaera.”
“Yea”, Henry interrupted. “These new ghouls, you don’t wanna mess with them. They’re stronger than the prototypes we fought and a lot more obedient. Very scary.”
“The Chimaera was eventually destroyed”, Tanakamaru continued, ignoring Henry, “when its former Chief Strategist Dar Brexit changed his allegiances and joined the IGSE, where he revealed the identities and location of every ranked commander of the Chimaera in the multiverse. Within five weeks, the Chimaera’s entire leadership was destroyed, and soon, they were no more.
“But it was only after the death of Lam Jih-yeung that the IGSE came to learn of the existence of the Grand Alliance. By then, we were ready to go to war, because we had studied the movements of the ghouls through our spies in the IGSE and by observing the wars waged between them and the Chimaera. And so we assembled our fleet, and under Koizumi's command, we met the IGSE fleet at Kisegaeisei, where Harakiri Haikarakainen himself had come to meet us."
Chieko got out of her seat and stood by the window, quietly looking out.
"The battle first went in our favour, because some of our commandos had taken out the IGSE's signaller ships before we began fighting, so they could not call for reinforcements. But then two things happened. "
Tanakamaru turned to look at Gönad, who subserviently tossed him a one gallon bottle of water, from which the retired, white-haired sumo wrestler chugged voraciously to moisten his dry throat.
"First, Junichirō Koizumi disappeared."
"And, like, literally vanished, while he was talking to someone", Steffen interjected, his eyes widening as he gesticulated wildly in an attempt to describe the impossible phenomenon. "I was in the room. I saw it happen."
"Second", Tanakamaru continued, leaning closer to Ackermann and Frederick and raising a finger, "the IGSE's flagship, the Burzum, began to grow tentacles and started eating our ships."
"Don't ask me how that's possible", Henry said, clearly still rather shaken by the memory of what had happened. "A lot of things have happened. They're very bad people, and they've done terrible, terrible things, even worse than human experimentation- very illegal and very uncool."
"Our forces were scattered, and without a commander, we were forced to make a hasty retreat, but by the time we could organise one, almost our entire had been decimated." Tanakamaru, by that time, had finished the entire gallon of water, and had tossed it into the bin with much accuracy.
"THEY ALL... THEY FUCKING MASSACRED US ALL", Gönad screamed, leaning against the wall and bawling his eyes out into the inside of his elbow. "I SWEAR TO GOD... EVERYBODY..."
Tanakamaru, despite Gönad's emotional outburst, shifted his chair closer to Frederick and Ackermann, clearing his throat.
"Of the 63 groups that made up the Grand Alliance, there were four survivors.
"First was the Left Arm, a cell founded by the former Soviet Union prior to its destruction by the IGSE. There are around ten of them left.
"Second, the Special Warfare Group of the Niril Republic. Although the Niril Republic has been disbanded, the SWG escaped largely intact, and they're now in hiding, relying on the scant resources they still possess."
Chieko cringed at the mention of the Niril Republic.
"Third, the 1st Ranger Battalion of the United States of Humanity. There's about 200 of them remaining now, but the USH is more or less a rump state at this point in time, so they're also very, very short of funding."
"Rump state... more like dump state", Steffen quipped, in an ill-timed attempt to lighten the mood. Nobody laughed at his lame joke, and his chuckles soon faded away. "I... I'm sorry."
"And finally... the Niijimagumi Yakuza. Akira Niijima was killed when his ship, the Hiei, was eaten by the Burzum, but the rest of his men managed to escape from the battle under his second-in-command...
"... Yotsuha Ikegami."
...
L-Fel
San Francisco
Bubble Tea
"I'm a military alchemist of the Kingdom of Inaria", Yrjo introduced himself, sipping at the tea Terasaka had ordered for him; to his pleasant surprise, it tasted very good. Sugar, in the world he had come from, was in very short supply, and so things as sweet as a bubble tea were obscenely expensive.
For a moment, Yrjo tried to think of more to elaborate, but soon realised that there was little more that he needed to reveal; anything else, he reasoned, could be explained later on, should Julian decide to join him in returning to his world and assisting him on the mission he had been assigned.
"Yea, I reckon that's about it." He looked at Terasaka, who brought a finger to his mouth and nibbled nervously on the fingernail, stopping intermittently to suck from his cup of bubble tea.
"Uhh..."
Yūichirō Terasaka turned a bright shade of red and attempted to avert his gaze from Jules and Yrjo, almost as if he was ashamed of something (which, as Yrjo gathered, he very much was). Scratching his belly, part of which hung from under the hem of his greasy T-shirt, Terasaka mumbled something incoherent to himself under his breath, and then took a deep breath to calm his clearly flustered and embarrassed nerves.
"I don't... um...", he stammered, pushing up his glasses and still unable to meet anybody's gaze. "I dropped out of high school, and I... well... "
"He does programming", Yrjo covered for Terasaka. "He modifies computers and writes software."
...
