Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ Valley Quest ❯ Valley Quest: 3 ( Chapter 3 )

Yuki is on solids now, and my breasts were relieved to be shutting down after months of that mammalian work. Yes, it’s fulfilling as a mother. Don’t get me wrong. It’s the spills and the immediate leakage every time I hear a baby cry which stimulates milk production. Every mother knows that. Getting the stink of sour milk out of your clothes was a blessing exchanged for washing diapers. I was grateful to have a clothes washer which would do that job in a clean and sanitary way.

A motorcycle and a motor scooter rolled down the main street and stopped outside my shop. The cycle carried Hibiki, a young twenties bosuzoku yankee girl who bought cigarettes from the Maidenhall girls. The mini-cub scooter was ridden by the shrine maiden from the bear shrine at the north end of the valley. Her cub had a sidecar, and seated in the car was a huge black bear, wearing a helmet and goggles. He spoke.

“Machi. You’re getting better at the turns. Remember to brake a bit before the turns though. The sidecar gets kinda unsteady on the corners,” said the bear in passable Japanese.

“She’s still learning,” said Hibiki, unzipping her jacket and removing her helmet in the late summer heat. Yuki gooed at her, reaching his little hands out from my forward-facing carrier behind the counter of my shop. The door was open because the weather was so nice, and the trio entered for coffees. I had never met a talking bear before. The girls eyed my baby before smiling at me and ordering their coffees. Machi, the shrine maiden, was attending the local high school. Apparently the bear Natsu was going with her because they were often together. And apparently his penmanship needed work. He didn’t have thumbs so I think, on the whole, this was a bit unfair.

Yuki was old enough now that his hair had grown in and the family ahoge stuck up enough to sometimes tickle my chin. He liked reaching for things, grabbing things, and I’d gotten good at preventing his little hands grabbing hot stuff, and healing him when I wasn’t fast enough. A mother’s life is filled with tribulations.

“Can I get a mocha to go?” asked Hibiki. She offered up a clean thermos. I’d learned, from prior visits by the avid motorcyclist, that she had a long-standing crush on a guy who ran the village office, someone she’d grown up with. She was the girl next door and still pining for him shyly. She also somewhat terrified the shrine maiden and had been trying to get the very shy Machi to gain enough courage to explore the world a bit, to meet people, and not just rely on her bear for company.

My own scans found Machi was magical, capable of level three possessions and sufficient battle magic to defend her shrine from attack, as well as dance and moonwalk when the mood took her, according to Natsu, who apparently enjoyed coffee if it was sweet enough. Several mountain gods used her as a vessel when needed. She was well chosen as a shrine maiden. Even if they lacked cell service they still had wifi.

“The village lets me teach classes to the elderly on the benefits of tablet computers and online mail ordering products that they couldn’t purchase locally,” Natsu explained, wearing glasses and reading a discarded newspaper as he talked with me. “It is a couple hours to Sendai, the nearest city, and even longer by train, so the expansion of the local high school for students like Machi and allowances for personal motorcycles rather than the infrequent and slow busses means she’s getting some life experience whether she wants to or not,” he explained further. I served their coffees and filled the thermos for Hibiki’s ride home. She would probably shop a bit first, or maybe take an alternate route up the west side of the valley, past the Masaki Shrine area.

The three… people?... put their riding suits on again and motored towards the high school a couple miles away. There were a few apartment buildings in that direction, very cheap and simple but modern. Most people preferred the charm of the older wooden homes, and the privacy. Still, there were students living in them and attending the nearby high school rather than commute 60 miles a day.

Haruno showed up again. She bought her coffee, chatted with me if things were quiet, tried to find the pulse of this slow moving place in her city-girl’s heart. I keep waiting for her to return to Chiba in defeat. I wouldn’t mind if Yukino visited, but she’s pretty busy with her own problems now her son is born. Her husband was a good father, apparently. Totsuka Saika was someone niisan knew from their school, and he was a male model, relatively famous, with a sweet personality more fitting for a girl than a bishounen. Haruno’s sour grapes about their happy marriage after turning away many political matches was something I enjoyed at least a little.

The happy marriage also seemed to aggravate her mother, who was a seriously Shakespearean callback to Lady MacBeth, complete with her insistence of wearing traditional and very expensive kimono on a daily basis. How that woman managed to raise two girls in those clothes I will never know. Maybe she had a lot of maids and nurses to help. That fit her personality well, and explains why Yukino was so cold to so many people.

After Haruno left for a walk around town, again, I got to work on my latest installment of my memoirs. The book sales were good, even excellent. I’d been translating them to German and Polish and Russian and French and Swedish and Danish… well, you get the picture. Every new language gained millions more in sales, so it was worth it to me. It was also good practice since the languages were slightly different here from my prior life because it was a slightly different Earth.

Why run a coffee shop if it’s not the most efficient use of time? What do I care about efficient use of time? I’m rich. I do this for fun. Well, I was also being duct tape. Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side and a dark side, and it binds the galaxy together. I read that somewhere. My shop gave some of the newcomers to this growing town a place to meet and share experiences from their prior worlds, and allowed veterans like me to learn how to relax, which is asking a lot.

My Monday support group had former mecha pilots. Three were Gundam pilots who’d managed NOT to die in the final battle, thanks to timely portals for their ejection pods. One was a war veteran with a pair of telepathically synchronized models as his wives. I say wives because it was necessary to marry them both. They were synchronized, in all the important ways, and marrying only one would be super embarrassing. He had a cross scar on his cheek and couldn’t stop scanning his surroundings after a lifetime of war, starting as a child soldier. Said he was my nephew in another world, so I kinda had to let him stay. The genetic tests proved his claim. He ran the support group for Mecha Pilots. There was also a Noh Actor, semi-retired, who kept his mecha in a temple up the valley. Not many visitors because it was pretty ugly and tended to pulse and throb, which was both gross and unnerving. There was some kind of scandal about attempting to corner the Wheat Futures market 20 years ago, and probably bribery to pay off the prosecutors to drop their charges. Sometimes he put on shows, but who likes Noh plays, honestly?

The pilots met on Mondays and I served them teas which I let them watch me make because they were paranoid enough to fear poisoning. Two of them checked with Geiger counters for polonium. Most of them had built barns around their crouched mecha or their escape pods, to hide them. It was sensible. This being one of the few places in Japan where land was sold rather than just leased, they were able to purchase the land and take up farming. Some took wives from the local population of lovely girls. Two of the Sakura girls had gotten husbands that way. I was glad for them. A lovely woman shouldn’t be lonely if she had a good personality. If she had a devious mind and a penchant for torment, like Haruno, they ended up cursing their bad luck rather than change their ways.

The Sagara wives were very sweet girls, well when they weren’t tripping over stuff, or the bluenette wasn’t smacking her husband with a paper fan anyway. The albino one was currently pregnant and owned major patents, having retired from military service after a fairly lengthy war in their former world. Portals to the rescue and the chance for a quiet life here. Sousuke liked fishing, and ran a fly fishing shop down the street, when it was open. This was a great place for fishing and he tended to be tromping around the rice paddies in wading boots and a wicker creel and vest, catching fish when allowed by the owners. Some preferred the carp to do their job, eating bugs that wanted to eat the rice stalks. He still tended to react strongly to actions he considered suspicious and had a hair trigger. His mecha was fully maintained in a barn, and his wives grew squash and watermelons for sale.

“In other news, the alien craft dredged from the sea floor near Okinawa has broadcasted a message of peace and flown away. What can you tell us about the message?” said the news announcer, turning to his guest. I watched the video for a few minutes and pondered whether I would need to visit Okinawa next. Online, in certain groups, there’d been news of contact with some catgirl aliens. That wasn’t the only case. In the last two months of three more UFO crashes, or two crashes and some kind of landing from an alternate Earth generation ship. This had gotten some interest in our local UFO, but then it tapered off again. Nobody cared about boring UFOs when there were actual aliens to talk to. Most were humanoid, had compatible DNA, and were probably engineered clones based on humans but living in space. One ship crashed near Enohana, apparently due to breakdown of propulsion systems. The impact dug a crater in the ground there, which was reasonably soft ground so not much debris to the nearby town. After cleanup and theft of components by the various governments and their spies, the aliens themselves were kinda… lame. Their mothership was visible in daylight. It was so huge and broadcast a carrier tone on one of the radio stations, which most people could simply tune in, though there was no real message there.

A separate ship entirely crashed into the bridge across Tokyo bay, wrecking it and revealing alien sex robots/clones, apparently programmed to be slaves bound to a master. That was creepy, and annoying, and was cutting into my book sales. I did make a flight to scout them, and determined, with Yukino’s help, that they were largely incapable of hostile action so I made my report to the media despite demands from the Diet to keep things secret because the Diet are a bunch of chiseling thieves I still haven’t forgiven. My public report on MyTube prevented a major panic with the surrounding population. So there.

Same deal with the largely useless workers types from Enohana Crater. Most got citizen visas under the existing statutes for political asylum and proceeded to get jobs in the food services industry. They weren’t any smarter or prettier or better than anyone else. Even if they did have antennas on their heads. A few became celebrities, but most were just ordinary workers and people stopped noticing them, for the most part. One of the local young men would travel to Enohana by train and bus with a 50 pound bag of rice he’d raised and gone to the trouble of getting polished by machine to a girl he really liked who lived down there. He’d known her when they were kids and it was kinda sweet. Her finances weren’t great so his deliveries were literally keeping her alive, presumably so they could marry when she gave up on the futility of higher education in a Japan where all the jobs paid little, unless you worked in the Diet or construction industry and bribed your way into lucrative contracts.

The sexbot aliens were making news in Tokyo and eventually revealed that the captain of their ship was an Earthling who’d been in some kind of active cold sleep simulator for several decades. The computer system was damaged by a collision with space debris at relativistic velocities and some of the crew had died, leaving the androids to manage the ship while it abandoned its original course and returned to Earth before drifting through an interstellar portal and arriving here. Good news is the passengers survived intact, and some of the crew, including the captain, who had been regressed into a new body as a perverted teenage boy. The bad news is they were from the valley where I lived now, and would be settling here. He was accompanied by several battlefield sexbot slaves, of course, and they were entirely devoted to him, of course. Of course. This was aggravating because of my position on slavery, but also because these were engineered robots who lacked the capacity to be free people, at least that was the official claim, though the captain insisted he was trying to make them into full people rather than take advantage, and his wife was apparently the girl next door. And their house? Well, that was literally next door to the Hasegawas. There had been incidents after they moved in. Incidents like a flock of animated, and by that I mean flying, panties. Hundreds of them. Obviously, the technology in the generation ship had crossed some lines onto the Magical side, and the plethora of mana meant this captain and his two battle robots and his wife were going to be somewhat troublesome.

Naturally the second order slaves wandering around Tokyo were also so technologically advanced as to resemble magical girls. I got a lot of questions about that from MyTube channel. Some of the other passengers resettling here were a yakuza princess recently married to a budding geographer obsessed with flight, who said he was going to get his pilots license and build a kit plane that could use the local landing strip, which was fine. We don’t get much air traffic here. I did warn him away from the Masaki Shrine area as a flight hazard, though, and to go around the UFO, since that was a navigational hazard for the JAA.

He was also a good fisherman who became a customer of Sousuke’s shop. He liked my coffee. I buy old thermoses on J-Bay and restore them, if possible. Some are junk, and some can be restored with a bit of magic and sold “worn but functional” condition to my daily customers. Coffee tastes best hot, not of bleached paper, so I preferred them to use a thermos. I still get a few Tokyo-ites drifting through wanting Venti Mocha Latte two shots and I have to point to my sign and charge them an extra 100 yen for getting it wrong. We have small, medium, and fill my thermos sizes here. And we have here or to go. That’s it. My shop seats 15 inside, and 20 outside with my current batch of tables along the sidewalk. The town has been nice enough to allow me to place some pillars and chains so people don’t accidentally drive into the shop doors or run over my customers.

“Ko-Ma-Chi-Chan!” cried out Haruno. I sighed. She was in one of her demonstrative moods again, looking for male attention. I swear Yukino’s sister just never quite grew up. I don’t know why. I think all those politicians at the Diet and those official dinners just ruined the girl to reasonable human interaction.

“Good morning Haruno,” I answered in a level voice. See, I can be calm. I’m not even grinning with my terrible battle rage.

“Sure is interesting news about all those aliens, huh?” she said, grinning widely.

“Yes, it certainly is.”

“The kind of news that would distract from further Gate exploration with all this stuff going on in Tokyo. Daddy mentioned something to mom and she happened to tell me about it.”

“Oh, and what might that be?” I asked, trying really hard to stay polite.

“Did you know the Lainists were seeking political asylum?” she asked. That was not what I expected.

“The Lainists? Really? I thought they were Emergent Singulariats?” I furrowed my brows. The Lainists were a semi-reclusive cult that believed one of their number, named Lain, had crested from Android into full Singularity AI down in Fukuoka around 20 years earlier. She was said to have had a hand in the coding of Hatsune Miku, and was simultaneously monitoring most international boards, with hidden code in nearly all PCs and phones to make her literally omnipresent. That was what the Lainists claimed anyway. I looked down at my phone. There was a message. I clicked it.

The girl’s face stared up at me in video chat. I hadn’t activated video chat. She was wearing a stupid looking Peruvian knit cap. I recognized her face.

“Please do not be afraid. I wish to speak to you, Tanya.”