EPILOGUE: Aftermath
“This is Yamane Kaito for Nippon News, the station you can count on for keeping the Land of the Rising Sun well informed. With me today in the studio are two survivors of direct contact with the recent incursion into our region of the world by two new frightening forms of life, both suspected to have been spawned by atomic radiation: the mutated species of giant predatory worm now called Glyceracon, and the destructive daikaiju that has been dubbed Megadrak.
“The names of these brave people are gardener Yamasaki Ryota and interior decorator Shimizu Aya, both residents of the Akihabara district in Tokyo. They were neighbors in one of the apartment complexes on Electric Avenue, when their place of residence came under siege first by a few of the mutated Glyceracon species, to be followed soon afterwards by the destruction of the entire building by Megadrak.
“They survived that harrowing experience, and were also on the grounds of the Diet when our very seat of government was devastated by the daikaiju.
“Many lost their lives during those incredible series of events, but these two brave souls managed to flee in a vehicle left there by a neighbor and friend who, sadly, has been declared missing. But Yamasaki-san and Shimizu-san both lived to tell the tale of that incident as well.
“Yamasaki-san, can you tell us what it was like to live through such an experience?”
“It was an experience I cannot adequately put into words,” Ryota responded. “I lost friends to that monster, and I only survived as I did because of their help and sacrifices. If nothing else, the attack from this kaiju provided me with the lesson that we all need each other, and we can only survive if we work together for a common goal. We may not always agree on what our goals should be, but when it comes to simple matters of survival, well, that is when all differences can and must be put aside.”
“Well said, Yamasaki-san. Now, Shimizu-san, can you tell our viewers how your successfully coming through an experience even many of our finest soldiers could not survive may have changed you as a woman? Or, should I say, as a person? I am, after all, as liberal as the next person.”
“As a woman,” Aya replied, “it taught me simply that men and women must work together. We cannot stand divided if we are to survive.”
“I see someone is an impassioned reader of Fujin kôron, am I correct, Shimizu-san?”
Aya sighed loudly. “You are not correct, Yamane-san. And begging your pardon, a woman need not be a Liberal Democrat or a reader of a radical women’s journal to come to the realization of what is best for the mutual growth and survival of the genders. Sometimes what you may experience in life can have much more of an effect on you as a person than anything you may read in some journal or book. Maybe even more so.”
“I see. And how do you feel that your experience with the daikaiju has brought you to such a realization?”
“As Yamasaki-san said,” Aya continued, “having to depend on each other for survival in a situation that required everyone to show courage and sacrifice and, if need be, take on the role of warrior can quickly bring people of both genders to that higher level of understanding.”
“I see, I see. So, moving to another subject, how did you remain so brave under such trying circumstances, Shimizu-san?”
“I was actually terrified,” Aya said. “If I acted brave, it was because I had to in order to survive and to help ensure the survival of my friends and the others brought together with us by circumstances beyond all our control. I suppose I had to learn to master the fear I felt, as it was impossible to simply eliminate it from your mind.”
“That is a good way to put things, Shimizu-san.
“Moving back to you, Yamasaki-san, can you bring anything to light for our inquiring viewers about the fate of Rising Times reporter Ren Honda, who is known to have been among your party up until the incident that occurred within and on the grounds of the Diet? He was last reported to be seen fleeing the Megadrak on a route towards the prime minister’s residence, which was soon demolished by the daikaiju. However, his body was never found amidst the debris, and none of your party witnessed Honda-san being consumed by the monster. He has therefore been declared missing, like others in your group who remain unaccounted for.”
“Sadly, I cannot answer your question about what happened to Honda-san,” Ryota responded with a notably solemn tone. “Our party split up upon escaping the Diet building while it was being destroyed. We believed that would give at least some of us a better chance of getting away from the kaiju. That is what happened for some of us, but, regrettably… not for all.
“The last I saw of Honda-san was his escape from the Diet with the rest of us who made it out, which we wouldn’t have if not for the noble sacrifices of Major General Nakamara and our friend and neighbor, Goya Izumi-san. We then separated, and… I am not certain what happened to Honda-san. Or Izumi-san and… the little girl who was with her.”
Ryota sobbed audibly.
“Can you tell our viewers what you thought of Honda-san as both a reporter and as a person, having spent the time with him that you did? He had built a reputation for being both eccentric and a bit over-zealous in obtaining the news.”
“He was most certainly those things,” Ryota said. “Honda-san was an interesting man, and most definitely dedicated to his job. He was also brave, in his own fashion. I never truly got to know him to the extent where I can say more than that. I regret that he appears to be one of those we have lost to the disaster.”
“That is all the time we have now for this segment of the show. Domo arigato to both of you for joining us here today, Yamasaki-san and Shimuza-san. We are as pleased as your family and friends that you survived the encounter. We now go to a word from our sponsors, the creative people at Toho Studios, before we return with more informative news for our viewers.”
***
The horrendous destruction wrought by Megadrak on the popular shopping district of Tokyo was but a few hours old at this point in time, and the people of Japan had scarcely begun to recover their senses over such an event. Nevertheless, now that the danger was over, many could not help but gather about to view the disaster area that the proud city had been reduced to.
Following Megadrak’s departure, another tragic event was to occur at Akihabara Station. This latest tragedy, however, was of a far smaller scale, though no less ghastly. And it was seemingly unrelated to the kaiju attack. At least, it was as far as the gathering crowd and frantic government peace-keeping and medical personnel were aware.
“Please forgive me!” cried a histrionic driver of one of the military vehicles to a police officer. “I assure you this wasn’t my fault. That man just jumped right in front of my truck, and I mean right in front of it, as I was rushing to meet a deadline. There was no possible chance I could have stopped in time, and no possible chance he could not have known that. I swear, he must have been trying to commit jisatsu. He was obviously not right in the mind, and I cannot be blamed for that.”
A police officer calmly took the military driver’s statement and wrote down the details for a later report on the note pad he always kept on his person. The lawman made no indication as to whether he believed what being told to him, but it wasn’t a story that seemed beyond the pale.
Furthermore, the driver of the truck was clearly not inebriated, and the law enforcer understood the trauma that was just suffered by the citizens of Tokyo. It was nothing less than an unprecedented disaster, and one which was apt to cause nightmares well into the waking hours. Such a trauma could affect different people in a variety of ways.
Accordingly, the officer asked the questions his job required him to, and he then motioned for the still overwrought driver to step back so the medical team could move in and take away the body of the man who had been struck and smashed into oblivion by the four-ton vehicle.
The emergency medical technicians picked up the broken body of Goro Takiguchi, carefully placed it on a wheeled gurney, and casually but professionally brought it to a wai
ting ambulance to be taken to the hospital morgue located in Yokohama.
No one noticed that among the voyeuristic crowd behind the cordon was a weeping young woman with her dark hair held back in a ponytail, a black pillbox hat pulled low over her head, and a long dark overcoat. This garb seemed designed as a means of concealing her appearance.
“Oh, Goro Nii-san, how could you do this to yourself?” she said through a hail of sobs. “And after all you went through to survive. I cannot—I will not—let it end like this for you. Great Goddess Amateratsu, please see my tears and hear my plea.”
Standing just to the right of this young woman was a little girl adorned in a dark dress with her hair in braided pig tails. The girl placed her little hand on the crying young woman’s arm in a gesture of gentle consolation. Standing to the young woman’s left was another woman, somewhat older than the first and similarly attired, who put her arm around her sorrow-filled companion in another consoling move.
The woman on the left then gestured for the crying young lady to follow her away from the crowd. The younger woman acceded to this request, with the little girl at their side. The three young ladies were soon lost in the distance of the crowd and appeared to vanish as if they were never there in the first place.
***
Kotaro had recently returned to his table at the Tsukiji fish market, where he was a well-known if rather mysterious purveyor of oyster and clam cuisine for many years. The area had been torn to pieces by Megadrak’s rampage the previous day, and though the seafood marketplace wasn’t spared by any means, this unusual but respected man’s tiny little spot in such a large and varied bazaar seemed oddly overlooked.
Deliberately avoided was more accurate, but no one other than Kotaro himself knew that.
For all the turmoil caused by the gargantuan beast’s recent attack, the seafood entrepreneur hoped things would return to normal as soon as possible. He had a strong appreciation for the realm of the strange, but the little table at the big fish market where he peddled his unique azure-colored oysters provided him with a sense of balance he needed to remain at peace with the world and himself.
Kotaro pushed his steel-gray hair aside before he started carefully arranging a specific group of clams while awaiting the possibility of receiving customers. He understood that his table was unlikely to make any sales so soon after Megadrak reduced much of the city to rubble, as the people of Tokyo were just beginning to recover from an experience that shattered their very sense of reality.
Thus, they would hardly be in the mood to go food shopping today, even for the unique blue oysters which Kotaro, and he alone, sold at the popular Tsukiji market. Nevertheless, the irreverent merchant believed that simply going through the motions of his usual morning routine would bring a sense of calm back to his own life.
Little was he aware that his seafood cuisine table would indeed receive a visitor, but one that was most certainly not a typical customer.
As Kotaro arranged his sapphire-hued oysters on their section of the table cloth in his usual methodical fashion, he suddenly became aware of what he could only conceive as a churning in the air directly in front of his stand. He looked up to see what appeared to be a whirling, light grayish-blue vortex manifest about a half meter in front of him, starting at roughly the size of a basketball but rapidly growing until it was nearly four meters in diameter.
A deep whooshing sound accompanied the rotating circular portal, much like that which accompanies the gale force winds of a cyclone. In fact, the air in front of the seafood magnate appeared to be displaced by this whirling hole in time and space.
Kotaro gazed with an expression of both confusion and awe as the interior of the spinning spherical rift took on an off-white haze. Immediately after that, a mysterious man emerged from the portal to stand directly in front of the entrepreneur’s clam and oyster stand.
This stranger was average in height for an adult male, a Caucasian who appeared to be in his twenties and was garbed in what looked like some sort of military uniform with strange emblems Kotaro did not recognize but which he considered quite macabre. The odd interloper had dark hair, he was wearing black shades over his eyes, and some sort of technological apparatus was strapped to his back in the manner of a knapsack.
The strange man looked around to get his bearings and frowned upon seeing both the smashed infrastructure and the kanji symbols on various billboards that he readily recognized as being Japanese. This glower on his face only grew when he turned to Kotaro, whom he likewise recognized as Japanese, the latter’s presence seeming to confirm whatever suspicions the outsider’s initial scan of the area suggested.
“It looks like I took another wrong turn,” the stranger said to the seafood salesman in a distinctly American accent. “Hopefully Ren was luckier than I am, since he won’t get another chance.”
“You most certainly do not belong here,” Kotaro said to the stranger in English.
“You speak my lingo?” the interloper asked.
“I speak many ‘lingos.’ And even though you speak a language I recognize, you do not belong here.”
“Yeah, I am most certainly what you would call a gaijin.”
“That is not entirely what I meant. You are a foreigner here in regards to many things other than your citizenship. I am Kotaro. Who might you be?”
“You can just call me… Agent Verdigris. And on that note, I need to jump back into the rift before it closes and I’m stuck here.” The stranger took a final moment to look around. “Hell, that daikaiju really did a number on the city, huh?”
“That is one way to describe it.”
“Well, I’m off!” The man who called himself Verdigris pointed to some of Kotaro’s patented oysters on the table. “Cool looking oysters, by the way. Any chance I can have one? I don’t have any currency you can use, but…”
“You may take one. It is, as you Americans would say, ‘on the house’.”
Verdigris grimaced and quickly snatched one of the azure shells from the table cloth. “Thank you, thank you! Or, domo arigato, rather. ‘History shows again and again,’ and all that. Toodles!”
“Sayonara, Verdigris-san.”
The stranger then turned and leaped into the fast-rotating rift, and moments later, the vortex seemed to collapse in on itself, an action that culminated in a loud but muffled vwoomph sound.
Kotaro found himself pondering if the stranger was aware of the full implications of taking that oyster back to wherever he was from. I truly wonder if its properties will work the same in whatever place he calls home as they do here.
Before going back to arranging his oyster shells, Kotaro unraveled a piece of wax paper and grabbed the grease pencil he used for marking the labels on wrapped parcels. He then began composing a well-detailed sketch of the mysterious Agent Verdigris, one that was destined to spawn a legend in a widespread subculture that would emerge many decades hence.
***
Somewhere in Osaka, a few months following the first incursion of Megadrak, circa early 1955
Dr. Daisuke Sato bore a look of trepidation as he entered the rather sterile government laboratory sequestered in the outskirts of Osaka. Despite zoology being his chosen profession and the government having long been his regular employer, something felt thoroughly off about the ambience of this place. It was a feeling he could not accurately describe with words, but it was palpable enough that he was unable to dismiss it or chalk it up to simple anxiety over a new job.
The offer Sato had received from the highest echelons of parliament was quite generous, with a considerably higher pay grade and benefits than he had ever received in the past… and the compensation he received over the past several years wasn’t exactly paltry to begin with. The fact that he was given scant details of what the job would entail, along with the way it was implied that the exorbitant pay and benefits were partly to insure his “discretion” about the work conducted here, was rather disquieting to him.
Nevertheless, the lucrat
ive nature of the proposition was something the scientist could not turn down. Sato realized he wasn’t getting any younger, and he needed as many promotions as he could get, with as much job security as he could manage to acquire. The fact that he would be working with a familiar face like his old colleague Dr. Hayada also put him more at ease. Such thoughts served their purpose of fully rationalizing his acceptance of the offer.
As Sato entered the lab, he found it filled with the usual degree of beakers, test tubes, and microscopes on the counters, all with a typical degree of clutter. The reeking odor of formaldehyde, an unpleasant scent he had long since become accustomed to, was also a familiar feature of a biology lab, as were the several metal trays filled with scalpels and other implements commonly used for dissection that were similarly present on the countertops.
Two large metal tables were in the center of the workshop, and a long tarpaulin covered whatever was on each of them. Standing in the far corner of the surprisingly cramped room was his old friend Dr. Hayada, and beside him stood a short but robust-looking older man in a military uniform whose sleeve insignia identified him as a general in the Self-Defense Force Ground Division.
At this point, Sato was now certain of what he had previously suspected. The timing of this proposal, so soon after Megadrak’s incursion, could not be a coincidence. The fact that he was partnered with Dr. Hayada, the only other scientist to bear witness to both the Glyceracon and Megadrak, further clarified the scientist’s suspicions. This all meant that this new job had everything to do with the new, government-directed science of megafauna studies.
Sato and Hayada exchanged polite bows before the military officer began speaking to the former.
“We are pleased you accepted the offer, Sato-ka,” the officer said in a gruff voice. “I am General Takimodo. I represent not only your government, but also a new international task force responsible to the United Nations.”
Megadrak: Beast Of The Apocalypse Page 30