Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex Fan Fiction ❯ My Magical Gate Experience Was Ruined, As I Expected ❯ YGS: 2 ( Chapter 2 )

October 1998

Being born, again, again, was a lot like the second time. I’d been walking down the street in Berun after getting a nice coffee and a pastry there, reading my newspaper and smirking at my success. I was headed for the war college to continue working on my research paper on the effects of economic warfare and fascism in a post-war Europe when everything just stopped, turned off. Black. I suppose I was assassinated. You get shot with a rifle the bullet is going two or three times the speed of sound. You get hit before you hear it. And the shockwave shuts off your organs instantly, which is why rifles are so very powerful in warfare. It is called Hydrostatic Shock. Everything turned off and I was in the big black again. The moment before death, or some big moment of life changing grief, is sometimes where I’d have a conversation with Being X, but there was nothing. And then after some short time there I was being born. So my life as Tanya was over.

Instead I was here, in a very blurry sense with very bright lights and beeping… this means a hospital. Lots of people. And voices. A quick bath and a towel rubbing all the birthing goo off me and… Japanese was spoken, not Polish or German or English or Norwegian or French. It appears I am home and it’s modern times again. No more oil lamps and trenches. Thank goodness. But starting over being born again, for the third time? Ah well. That’s traditional. And apparently Being X had relented on his threat to deny me further reincarnations. Did that mean I had faith now? Did it sneak up on me? After all my years of being a die-hard atheist? I drifted off at my mother’s breast.

After what was probably a few hours and some naps we came home to a two story home in the suburbs. It was weeks of breast feeding and trying to regain control of my bowels before I worked out I was a girl again, and just as long before my eyes could focus to see details and read things, including text on the TV screen again. It was thin, not a huge CRT, so very modern times. I still had my ahoge. No more hair than that, and it was black at least, but the ahoge was just as huge and ridiculous.

I think, after some weeks pondering, that Entity X was either conceding or making some other point. Instead of making me live through warfare hell, which just made me spiteful about spiritual matters, I was getting to have a nice middle class life while KNOWING that alien god-entities with spiteful intentions actually exist, after all. It promised to be quite disturbing, this life. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

November 1998

At home I learned something important. I have an older brother, just a year older. He toddles around. Like me, his hair sticks up at the front, so the ahoge is familial. His eyes, unlike mine, tend to squint as if the light were always too bright. Our hair is dark, almost black. Very Japanese and typical for us. It seems we live in Chiba, which is outside Tokyo, to the east of the city, across the bay. It is a reasonable commute into the city by the various rail systems. I hardly get to see Daddy, since he’s working hard to cover for the expenses while mom looks after the both of us. She says she wants to go back to work once we’re old enough to care for ourselves for a few hours a day.  

January 2001

Apparently I have Tanya nightmares and cry out in German in my sleep. I caught my brother staring at me once when I was two, asking what “Oh nein, nicht schon wieder” meant. He’s dependably attentive. He might be a good person. I shall have to train him up that way. I know all about training people.

May 2009

I have decided that this body is more energetic than the last one. I am genki, by nature. I didn’t know you could be like that, but nobody is shooting at me, and I don’t suffer from separation anxiety or any of the other trauma you get from being raised by nuns in an orphanage. I know from the nuns that my mother abandoned me and my father had been a soldier, killed in the war. Magic ran in families, and even the peasants with magic were witches or similar, and they got raised by their families, not abandoned to the church.

Here? In this body? I was a cheerful bright girl with a high voice and smothered in affection. This was a completely different experience than the first two times. Before I was as emotional as a brick. Now? Now I laugh and mean it. If I could just stop sputtering in German when I get surprised or have nightmares. I think it worries my brother. I still know the other languages too, what we learned for combat or dealing with the peasants in the occupied countries the Empire took over. Hachiman caught me watching American cartoons with the subtitles turned off. He looked at me really oddly after that. He started reading books about reincarnation.

This was when he and his only friend, Zaimokuza, started shouting about Dark Flame Master and fell into their terrible and embarrassing chuunibyo phase.