Cherry Blossom Girls International

by Harmon Cooper

  “Gideon?” she asked, dropping her cup of tea, fear spreading over her face.

  Her teacup hit the wooden floor and shattered, the others quickly running out of their rooms.

  “No…” Veronique said, coming forward with red energy glowing around her hands. “Where are they?” she asked, true emotion in her voice as she reached me.

  “Just…”

  I bowed my head, feeling their intense stares all at once, the pressure in the room, a sinking feeling in my chest as I realized just how much we had fucked up, how much I had fucked up.

  Dorian flashed into existence next to me, Michelle appearing on my right, both of them going for my arms and helping me over to a small sofa that had been placed against the wall near the elevator.

  “We will get them back,” I said with finality.

  “What happened to them?” asked Ingrid as she came forward, her fists bunched up at her sides. I saw veins popping on her arms, and knew she was trying to control her anger and fear.

  “Relax,” I started to tell her.

  I looked to Chloe and nodded to Ingrid. The sound manipulator immediately turned to her, calming her with a soft vibration.

  Ingrid started breathing slowly again, gathering her wits.

  “Was it Mother? Smiley? Damon? Who was it?” Veronique asked me, working herself up into a rage. “Who? Angel? Damon? Who, dammit?” She was upset, clearly, but it also felt like she was overplaying it some, like she was trying to make herself sound more upset, so she seemed more human.

  And if it hadn’t been for the fact that two of our teammates had been kidnapped, and I was worried to death about them, I would have found this endearing in some way. But I had no time to think about that.

  Now was the time to plan a rescue mission.

  But how?

  “Aren’t you going to say something?” Dorian said. “Gideon, talk to us, or do you need to rest? Are you okay? What happened to you?”

  Dorian was also working herself up into a frenzy, but hers sounded real, more authentic than Veronique’s.

  “Everyone just relax,” Chloe said as she came forward.

  “Gideon, we have to do something, we have to do something!” Michelle said, starting to hyperventilate a bit. She was shaking her hands out now, and her form was flashing, which meant that she was moving back and forth across the small room.

  I had seen her do this before, on the night of Fiona’s death.

  “Chloe, Michelle,” I said, nodding to the young speedster.

  “Everyone, let’s just all sit down,” Chloe said, rising into the air. The intensity on Dorian and Veronique’s faces started to settle some. They exchanged glances, and after staring each other down for a moment, both began to lower themselves to the ground, where they sat with their legs crossed under their bodies.

  Michelle did the same next to Dorian, Dorian wrapping her arm around the young girl and bringing her in close. Ingrid sat on her knees behind Veronique, and finally Chloe sat at the back of the group, a faint energy glowing around her throat.

  I felt better as well, like I could get the words out without stuttering, or fumbling over them. And it was under these conditions that I explained what had happened:

  “We went to the police station to check the information that the police had on foreigners that lived in the area. We were attacked by an invisible force. I think someone that works for Damon Lord has the ability to turn invisible.”

  “I knew it,” Veronique spit.

  “This person beat the living hell out of Grace and Stella, me too, and they would have finished the job too if I hadn’t teleported away. And yes, I should have activated Jules’ power when I was getting my ass kicked, but my mind didn’t connect the dots in that moment.”

  “You teleported?” Dorian asked, her eyes going wide and settling again.

  “Yes. Into the air. And I sort of did that thing that we did when I was training, down and back up again. I got control of it, and saw a rooftop.”

  “And how did you get back here?” Chloe asked.

  “There’s more to the story.”

  I told them about the albino shifter appearing, the same one who attacked us in D.C. I explained how I thought I had killed her by using Jules’ power and shoving her off the roof.

  “That’s brutal of you,” Veronique said, nodding proudly.

  “But she stopped herself before she hit the ground. And then she proceeded to chase me across Setagaya. Even worse, she took your form,” I told Dorian. “She took your form while she chased me, terrorizing the public.”

  “Shit…”

  “Shit is right, but I have a plan, an idea of how we can make this work. I will get to that later, but it will take a little strategy once we’re moving around. I should also say that we’re already on the Japanese media, you and me,” I told Dorian. “But there’s nothing we can do about that now. They’re going to try to figure out how we got here. There weren’t any pictures taken of us in Customs at the airport, but eventually, they will look through enough video to find us. But we will deal with that in a bit when it arises. To finish the story, I got to the station, and I somehow made it onto the train even though she was chasing me.”

  “Oh shit,” Michelle said, shaking her head. “This is a crazy story!”

  “Language. I made it to Shibuya, and I bought this clothing to cover myself up so I could get here. I got really lucky that the trains moved so quickly, and that my picture wasn’t on the TV until the time I arrived at Ueno Station. But back to what I was just saying: we are going to have to keep an extra low profile now. All of us. There are some ways we will be able to do it, for example, going out at night, wearing hats—for Dorian, we will get you a hijab.”

  “What’s that?” Michelle asked.

  “It’s a headscarf that Muslim women wear. It will at least cover up Dorian’s hair and make it a bit harder to recognize your true features.”

  “And you can wear one too?”

  I smiled at her. “Unfortunately, that would draw more attention. But I can wear a hat, sunglasses, a scarf. I can shave, try to look a little different. All of us should try to look different. Big sunglasses, hats, beanies, hoods over our heads. We will have to face the fact that we will need to go out in public to figure out Grace and Stella’s location. We can’t do it from the shadows.”

  “And we can’t just tear through Setagaya looking for them?” Veronique asked.

  “No. It’s a really large district, and who knows where that portal took them. It was Bae, by the way, he’s the only portal guy I know of.”

  “Did you actually see him?” Chloe asked.

  “I…” I looked curiously at Chloe for a second. “I can’t remember now. But let’s operate under the assumption he was there. We’re going to have to get more clever. Maybe I will talk to Father and see what he can come up with. We also need to make sure the lady downstairs doesn’t call the cops. Chloe, I need you to do that now.”

  “On it,” Chloe said as she made her way to the elevator.

  “We will get out of this, and we will get out with Grace and Stella. Just give me a little time to wrap my head around all this, to try to figure out the pieces. The clock is ticking.”

  Once Chloe handled the old woman at the front desk, I took the elevator down with her to the sauna and shower room in the basement. There was one man there, an older guy who was staying on a different floor, and Chloe quickly cleared him out using her power.

  Rather than do anything that was quasi-telepathic, she simply emitted a noise that made the man uncomfortable enough that he wanted to leave.

  With this guy gone, we had the place to ourselves.

  I undressed, and washed the blood off, Chloe standing barefoot nearby, the sound manipulator in a skirt and top she had picked up during our shopping spree the previous day.

  “I just can’t believe…” I said, turning away from her, my hand on to the wall as I bent forward, the water washing away the blood, creating a fruit punch
-like liquid at my feet.

  “You are lucky I calmed Veronique’s nerves,” Chloe told me. “She may have actually given you a pretty good draining.”

  “I get it, I get it, this was my fault.”

  “No, I don’t think it’s that; I think she was just super angry and needed to take out her aggression on something. You are our leader, oddly enough at times, so anything good or bad is going to be your fault. You can’t beat yourself up over these decisions. And if you look at it a different way, the fact that you did split the group allowed for you to have a place to run back to. Imagine if we had all been there and had scattered? Or they took more of us.”

  “If everyone was there, we would have won.”

  “I still don’t think you’ve grasped the element of surprise in combat yet, and how powerful it is,” Chloe said as she came toward me and sat on a dry wooden bench near the shower.

  “What if…” I tried to steady my breathing. “What if they do something to them?”

  “There is no doubt that Damon Lord will do something to them. But if anyone in our group is capable of surviving, it is Grace and Stella.” Her expression darkened. “Of course, if they do something that’s fatal, like they did to Fiona, there’s nothing that any of us can do. And I’m just saying that so it’s out there, so that we are aware of it.”

  “So how do we get them then?” I asked, turning back to her. I realized in that moment I was standing naked in front of the woman, but sex was the last thing on my mind. For all I knew, I didn’t even have a dick in that moment.

  “I’ve been thinking about that a little, but I really haven’t had enough time to come up with a good idea,” Chloe said. “You literally just arrived thirty minutes ago.”

  “Do you need a towel?” Michelle asked, appearing at the entrance.

  “Michelle, what did we tell you about…” I turned away from her, showing the young speedster my white ass.

  “Michelle, you’re not supposed to be in here,” Chloe said in a motherly way.

  “I was just worried. Sorry!”

  With that, she was gone, a stack of towels dropping to the ground.

  “Did she use the elevator, or did she use the stairs?”

  “Stairs,” Chloe said with a wry smile.

  “Anyway, I don’t even know where to begin going after them.”

  “And if we are going to go after them, we have to realize that they will use their full force against us,” she said as she crossed one leg over the other.

  “And they must be working with Natalie,” I said, “I just fucking know it. There was a portal there, and I didn’t see Bae, but it looked like the other portals he generated. Then again, maybe Damon Lord has other portal users that work for him.”

  “Can you check something like that?”

  “Yes, I can check on the app that Dr. Kim gave me. Well, not Damon’s creations, but at least other ones that AEFL has created. I haven’t used the app in a while, but it at least lets me check the database. But that will only tell us if there are others, not if they are alive or dead, or anything like that.”

  “It’s a place to start,” Chloe said.

  “You aren’t wrong there.”

  “And you still need to heal some. You look pretty bruised up. Why don’t you hop into the sauna for a minute, and just relax? I know this isn’t the time to relax, that it’s the time to make a plan, but we literally have no idea where to look for them aside from this neighborhood, and if we go there now, not only will they be waiting for us, but the police will be out. And Japan may have brought in their military too. I have no idea how that would work here.”

  “Yeah, we really have no idea.” I turned off the shower and made my way over to the bubbling hot water.

  Looking back at Chloe, I saw that she was getting undressed as well, her clothes nicely folded on the wooden bench. She got in the sauna across from me, sticking her feet out and resting them on the underwater bench. She lightly touched the sides of my thighs with her feet, the beautiful brunette getting comfortable.

  “I need to relax too,” she finally said. “It’s not easy to put a halt to the amount of nervous energy that was moving between everyone up there.”

  “I can imagine. I still feel like shit, though. We’re sitting here in the hot tub while Stella and Grace…”

  “We have to have a plan, Gideon, we can’t just go kicking over stones and hoping to find something. That’s Veronique’s style of thinking. Let’s use the resources that we have. You can look through your app, try to get in touch with Father, see if we can find something on the Internet. I don’t know. We will figure it out. And quickly.”

  “You seem so confident about this.”

  “Haven’t you figured it out yet? I have been projecting positive vibes in your direction ever since we got down here.” She smiled as she dipped her hand under the water and brought it up to her face, wiping her forehead. “It doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “I did notice I was feeling a bit lightheaded…”

  “You really are something else, Gideon,” she said as she moved closer to me. “After we finish up down here, let’s also grab something to eat.”

  “I don’t know if we should leave,” I told her.

  “Your ideas from earlier sounded like they would work. We just have to keep our disguises, and we’ll need more clothing. There are all sorts of clothing stores just across the street from us. It shouldn’t take long for us to come up with ways to cover ourselves. Plus, it’s almost dinner time.”

  “We can just order pizza,” I said.

  “For the others, yes, but at least you and I, and probably Veronique, because she’s not letting you out of her sight, need to go out there to get clothing. You mentioned a hijab for Dorian. Will that work with the Manchester Missions angle?”

  I looked at her curiously for a moment. It was weird to know people that had absolutely no knowledge of the religions of our shared world.

  “I’m assuming by the way you’re looking at me that this isn’t the case.”

  “No, that won’t work,” I said. “We are going to have to scrap that idea anyway. Keep your shirt though, just in case we get out of this. It would be nice to have as a keepsake.”

  Chloe scooted up next to me, and eventually, transferred to my lap. Again, no movement downstairs, even though there was a nude woman sitting on me. In that moment I just wanted the comfort of someone that I was close to, someone that understood how dire the situation had become.

  It was comfort that I got.

  After another thirty minutes or so, maybe longer, we headed upstairs and I got changed, going with one of my backup pairs of glasses with the strap so I wouldn’t lose it. I hated to throw a pair of glasses away, but the lens was shattered, so what could I do?

  Luckily, the scarf I had picked up in the subway shop was dark, so it didn’t show some of the blood that was on it. I tightened it around my neck, bringing it up to cover my chin some. Touching my face, I realized I should probably shave as well, to make myself look a little bit different.

  Better safe than sorry.

  Veronique got my glasses out of the trashcan and pressed the lenses out, putting the glasses on her face.

  “A disguise,” she told me.

  And I was about to say that no one wore glasses without lenses, but I’d actually seen someone doing this yesterday, so apparently it was a thing here in Tokyo.

  “I can’t believe you three are going out,” said Dorian, a nervous look on her face.

  “We aren’t going far; and we’re bringing back clothing to disguise everyone,” I reminded her. “We will bring food as well.”

  “Can’t you smell that? The lady that runs the hotel has already started making us food. It’s in the eating area,” she said, pointing to a paper wall that shielded the breakfast nook from the other rooms on the floor.

  “I was wondering what that smell was. Okay, so eat, and we will eat as well, and come back with clothing. Okay?”

&nbs
p; “Nothing will happen to us,” Veronique told Dorian. “We will stay close, and we will be fast.”

  Chloe let her hair down, and then started braiding it like Stella’s. She had borrowed Dorian’s tight black jacket, and zipped it all the way up. “We will only be an hour,” she assured the punk rock teleporter.

  Ingrid stepped out of the eating area with a troubled look on her face. Michelle joined her, sort of hiding behind Ingrid, peeking over her shoulder.

  “Don’t leave us here,” the young speedster finally said.

  “We’re coming back,” I started to say.

  Ingrid frowned. “That’s exactly what Grace and Stella said…”

  “I’ll handle this.” Chloe came forward and brought her hands in front of her chest, clasping her fingers together. “Everyone just relax. This won’t be very long, and Stella and Grace are okay. We just have to have a solid plan to rescue them.”

  “You know, your powers are kind of like cheating,” Veronique told her once we stepped into the elevator.

  “What do you mean?”

  The elevator door shut, and Veronique looked at Chloe through the mirrored surface of the stainless steel. “You know exactly what I mean.” The metal vampire then focused on me. “We get some food, we get some clothing, and we get back to the hotel. Nothing else.”

  “Trust us, that was the plan,” I said.

  “Maybe we should get some money as well. Just in case we need some. I don’t know why we would, but it’s always helpful.”

  “We will get money too,” Chloe assured her. “Now relax, Veronique, but stay on guard,” she said, her throat starting to glow. “Positive vibes.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Shopping for Dreams

  The food was good. It didn’t stop my worrying, but having an actual sandwich was definitely comforting.

  There just so happened to be a cafe around the corner from our hotel, and not just any cafe, a McStarbucks cafe, which served French pastries, soup, and fancy sandwiches along with lattes and other McStarbucks staples.

  I got a little bit of everything, and Chloe did the same. Veronique got an Americano, four shots of espresso, the metal vampire down to get caffeinated once she finished her first quad Americano and went for another.