avalononline | text | un: Helios

Little bit. The Dark Hour was a hell of a thing.

What's that?

Gone, for one thing, and good fucking riddance. [Shinji leaves it at that for a few moments, contemplating whether he wants a refill.

In the end, he just gets himself some water. Gotta walk home after this and all.]

It was... the end result of people fucking around with shit better left alone, it wasn't even what they were trying to do and it was the better result than what they were trying to do. Dipshits added an extra hour to the day - that's where the monsters we were dealin' with came in. And why there was nothing legal to do about Ken's mom. Most people didn't even know it was happening.

Extra hour a day... [Lol.] Japan hasn't even joined Europe on using hours yet, by my time.

Wait, were they trying to do?

[Don't let Mitsuhide around, he might stop Nobunaga from drinking too much, but he might also spike Shinji's drink in replacement for lack of Masamune!] Ahhhhh explain how Ken's Mom tied in for me?

Part of the sect? Organization? What do you call it?

You wanna trade with everybody else, you gotta play by some of their rules. Including knowing what time anyone's showing up.

[Well, the good thing about water is that any tampering would be real fucking obvious as soon as he tasted it.]

No, she wasn't involved at all. For the most part the monsters stayed put, but every now and then they didn't. We were chasin' one down. [And things went bad, but he already mentioned that part.]

As for the dipshits, they were trying to end the fucking world.

Damn right! [Did Shinji know that Oda was trying so desperately hard to unify Japan SO they could trade better with the outside world?]

[And good, at least Shinji wouldn't be tricked. Masamune drank it anyway, because he fails. Although be wary of vodka.]

Let me guess, they thought they would be reborn as gods or some other idiotic nonsense?

[How else is he supposed to get his sugar fix? Not really a surprise.]

At least one of 'em apparently did. Not that I know what he thought he was gonna rule over, or how he thought he wouldn't fucking die like everyone else.

Most of 'em died when the experiment derailed. The guy I mentioned? Didn't, and thought it'd be funny to tell us how to revive the experiment by callin' it what we needed to do to end the problem. I stayed outta things for most of that time and was kinda unconscious after I got shot, so I mostly know about it from my friends, but... never did trust him. Figured it was a mix of his stupid fucking jokes and just - I've met one person who actually earned their authority and didn't just insist on it for being older.

[Needless to say, that was not Ikutsuki.]

[SEE? Shinji gets it!]

Fucking cults.

[That's all he's going to say. If you want to know about how Oda deals with them, ask, but the answer is fire.]

God, right. [He doesn't really need to ask. Cults are trouble. End of story.]

At least we know the fire at the orphanage wasn't related. That was before the Dark Hour was even a thing.

[Waves a hand.]

Cults don't set fires. They abduct or acquire children to brainwash them into their way of thinking and reinforce their dogma in perpetuity.

[Way too speaking from experience.]

[Cults don't set fires, they deserve to be set on fire.]

Sorry I couldn't get rid of all of them forever. Seems like something deeply ingrained in humanity. You stopped them the second time?

Oh, you mean like creating the fuckface who shot me? Because they did that, too. [And the devil of it is that Shinji knows he and Aki were damn lucky not to be grabbed for the Strega experiment.

Doesn't mean he has any sympathy for Takaya. He saves that for Chidori, who was always pretty all right on her own, and maybe a little for Jin (but he had that weird codependent thing going with Takaya, so only a little). The situation he was put in sucked, but Takaya chose to make it suck more.]

Eventually. Barely. And not me personally, I was still out of commission.

Exactly. That's all cults do. Kidnap, brainwash, and tell people not to pay taxes. [One of these things is not like the others...]

Kanpai then. Any chance of fixing the extra hour?

[Shinji snorts. It may be a weird set of priorities, but it's not like he's wrong.]

That cleared up when my friends took care of the whole 'end of the world' thing.

I thought it might. That's how the fake gods and demons always works. The minute you take care of the cultists and would-be lords faking that shit, suddenly all the demon problems and monsters clear up.

Pretty sure the god part was the real shit. [But as noted, he was unconscious for all those discussions. All he has is his friends' word, and he doesn't think they'd lie to him about it.

Still, Nobunaga can believe that, or don't.]

I don't doubt that.

My lover here is a kitsune princess. I'm beginning to think humans in my world are just longing for what happens in other realms, or that my world is itself a bit tricked on purpose.

What d'you mean tricked?

Masamune is older in my timeline and able to help me more directly.

I still don't think magic and kitsune run rampant through my world, but if they were able to better utilize wormholes and whatever else, making things seem like magic would be easy enough. If someone had access to even a tenth of the information from the future, it would be nothing to manipulate things and clean up evidence.

The ways to catch that kinda shit have improved too. [The Dark Hour was more of a special case than anything.]

No, I don't doubt it was a god in your world.

There's different versions of me too. And different versions of Earth. I don't know why some things stay the same, but the time of the late 1900s, things get vastly different. Whether humanity begins gaining superpowers, or towards paths with other planets.

And it stands to reason wormholes might cause travel or items from one world to another version of the same.

And should other instances like this world exist where time and memories aren't interchangeable, then people wouldn't truly know the reasons behind anything, correct?

...Really not sure it's worth thinkin' that hard about the timeline bullshit. [There is timeline bullshit, especially in places like this one. Shinji's more or less made his peace with that fact and doesn't feel a need to worry about it otherwise.]

I'm not.

Outside of the fires at Honno-Ji. [The rest is a distraction, because he doesn't want to think about those fires.]

I survived them, and they weren't set by Mitsuhide, but... [Closes his eyes, shakes his head, and drinks.]

Nobody gets outta shit like that unscathed. Even if they think they do.

[Maybe especially if they think they do.]

[Rubs the back of his neck.]

It would be justice though, wouldn't it?

Not that I want to be dead.

Mitsuhide has always been good with fire actually. And practically everything else.

What's justice have to do with it? Trauma's trauma. It doesn't give a fuck.

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konpeito_aji - 2021-05-18 05:27 (UTC) - Expand