Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex Fan Fiction ❯ My Magical Gate Experience Was Ruined, As I Expected ❯ YGS: 1 ( Chapter 1 )

March 2013

“The sky over the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” It was the first line of a famous novel which started in Chiba City, where I was standing right now. It was the third time I said it, and the sky looked nothing like television. The city was clean, the people polite, and there was a fricking monorail. I wept for other reasons, standing in front of the Chiba station building, looking towards the bay.

No matter how many times I said the line, it wasn’t the color of television. It was nice clean air. I repeated the phrase, hoping for a different outcome. I know who I am, who I was. This is some kind of bad dream? His muffled memories and his broken spirit, and my new body, fat and so very alive in a way I hadn’t been since the start of my military service all those decades ago. When Motoko was the enemy, if only because wars had to have sides. Chiba was supposed to be run down and evil. It wasn’t supposed to be this clean place, with no world war, with no nuclear fallout scrubbers and fusion towers. This world wasn’t home. This wasn’t my time, and what had these people been doing? They had the nerve to be at peace, while a nuclear armed China prepared for a war of conquest, or division?

“Yoshiteru-san, you seem confused. Are you unwell?” asked a girls voice. I turned and identified the face from my body’s memory. Kawasaki Saki. A lovely example of feminine charms in this peaceful Japan, and a classmate of my friend Hachiman. She really was lovely.

“Forgive me, Saki-san. I find myself much confused at the moment. Like I’ve awoken from a bad dream. The feeling lingers.” I queried the mind remaining in this body for the name of a friend and found only Hikigaya Hachiman, and an address. It would have to do. Another thought found the body’s phone and its access pin. I thanked the maiden escorting her siblings to a nearby shopping mall and turned on the facing camera. I was fat, with big glasses, messy hair the same grey I’d always had. It was ME, obviously me, only far in the past, as a teenager. Before my despair drove me into the military service, and my eventual stint in Ranger school. Before I changed myself from a dreamer into a soldier. I needed a haircut. This ugly mop on my head and these huge glasses felt so very wrong.

Looking down I could see I would need a serious diet, a lot more protein, and a gym membership too. Sighing, I entered the shopping mall and purchased a fur collared bomber jacket, bought a pair of hair trimmers, and the optician for some smaller mirror shade glasses in my updated prescription. Dropping my ugly brown coat (sorry Firefly fans, but that just isn’t me!), I returned to my neighborhood by train. I found a local gym and signed up on the way home. Many things changed, starting with a buzz cut, and the study guide for military service in the JSDF.

Some time passed with my new routine. 100 pushups. 100 situps. 100 squats. And a 10 kilometer run in the fresh air. Strangely, this did NOT give me a punch that would defeat any enemy. It did shed the weight, however, and drinking whey protein milkshakes did wonders for shifting my body mass from a fat kid into a rapidly bulking up body builder. I worked out often. I did weights, and I could actually enjoy it and see the results. The lack of a heads up display and settings adjustments in a fully natural human body was something I was gradually adapting to. I made a point to visit Hachiman and got Kawasaki’s number, and gradually gained her trust and respect enough to visit her home. She had a bunch of younger siblings, including a brother who was sweet on Hachiman’s little sister. She was kind of weird, and worried her brother pretty often. Apparently she knew how to speak German, Polish, Russian, and could curse in French, and her English was almost as good as mine. Very odd for a little girl in Middle School with a happy and sheltered childhood. I wonder if she’s like me?

“Hachiman, you just don’t appreciate what you have. This is a time of unprecedented peace for our nation. The Warring States and centuries of banditry are far more normal for Japan. We both know our history.”

“Yoshiteru, I am still getting used to your haircut and serious demeanor. You haven’t been like this since junior high, before we both slipped a cog.”

“Thank you, Hikigaya-san, and I will eventually live down my childish whims. You accomplished this. I speak of the obvious love miss Yuigahama bears for you. That girl wants to marry you and have your babies. Does it really matter that she’s a terrible cook?”

“What? What kind of nonsense is this? How would you know anyway?” objected Hachiman.

“It is obvious to anyone with eyes. Less obvious is the tsundere tendencies of Yukinoshita, who seems to also carry a torch for you,” I chided him. But not as obvious that her strangely submissive tendencies around Komachi, who would get VERY bossy when Yukinoshita was around. Like they knew each other. And they both loved serious black coffee, and got into long discussions about military strategy and history of World War 1 for some reason. Yukinoshita was even more odd than she might be as a lonely and slightly pretty faced girl with delusions of beauty. She didn’t hold a candle to the perfection of Saki.

“I am not comfortable discussing my dating problems with you, Yoshiteru. And what is up with all the dieting and exercise? I thought you wanted to publish your novel.”

“Childish things must be replaced by grown-up things. We owe it to our future selves.”

Our future selves were very much unlike the self he might have become, and part of the reason he was training was no longer needed. Some things had changed from his old universe to this one. Like the plane crash that didn’t happen so little Motoko never became a paralyzed crash survivor orphaned by her parent’s deaths, on the bed beside that Solid State Society terrorist. Motoko is just a happy girl living at a hot springs, her mother the head cook. She will never know real hardship and never know me. I must protect her smile. Seeing her die, several times, was heart wrenching. It is why I am here, I think.

“So you’re really joining the JSDF after we graduate next month?” asked Hachiman.

“Yes, I really am. You should consider it too. It would give you some life experiences to write about, and it’s not exactly dull work like your parents. You’ll be away getting trained, but then you can just do the jobs they give you. With your tactician’s mind for dirty tricks, they’d probably want you.” I handed him the recruiter’s card.

“I was going to go to college and major in arts and literature,” Hachiman repeated. It was an old argument between us.

“How will that make you a house husband? How will that put food on the plate when Yui, pretty as she is, is such a bad cook? What is she going to do for a living if you aren’t here to look after her?”

“Ugh. I want to write novels,” Hachiman insisted. Not the rubbish I wrote, but actual literature which sells but still has a soul in it, stuff that would have value past its first printing.

“And you still can. JSDF has reservists,” I reminded him.

“But you’re going full time, Yoshiteru.” It was a statement.

“Yes. I suspect I have a specific inclination to be a sergeant. You can’t be one half-time.”

“But why military?” asked Hachiman, again. It was a frequent complaint of his, and his confusion at my decision, which looked very out of the blue to him, had a lot to do with my future memories from another world. I also had a looming sense of dread, some of which I’d confirmed through months of searching and stalking, truth be told. Motoko’s safety was my reason here, but not the only one. Kawasaki smiled at me sometimes, and blushed. She was lovely and very kind, and shedding 40 pounds of fat over the last year and gaining 60 pounds of muscle with a strict regimen of diet and exercise at least gave me the looks I needed. I even planned to bring back being called by my middle name again.

“You know, Hachiman, you can call me Batou.”

“That’s a silly name. What kind of military hero would be named Batou?”