Foreword: The entire story does not take place in first person; the original prelude was formatted in the same way and I’ve decided that it works for the story. This time, Akikawa will get a word in, as well.

(Prelude)

Chikara:

Kyoto,

23rd of February, 2084

When I was eleven years old, I was abducted by other-worldly creatures who changed my name to Sixty-Four. What became of the sixty-three before me, I didn’t know; but then, I had never been the investigative sort.

For ten years, my captors put me through hell; my days were spent in a laboratory in which they conducted experiments on humans and specimens they had obtained from zoos. Every now and then, they would inject me with serum collected from a malnourished tiger they kept in a cell adjacent to the lab. The changes were slow, and I wasn't sure what they were trying to accomplish; but eventually, my hair changed from black to a wiry orange, and my dark eyes turned green as I began to see the world through a cat’s eyes.

One would think that these changes didn’t hurt, but they did. My heart raced so much that it hurt to breathe, and I often felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach. But the transformation was painful in more ways than one; I developed claws in place of fingernails and had a habit of catching my skin on them, given that they weren’t retractable. I tried filing them down for a while, but when the time came for my weekly physical, the examiner shook his head and confiscated my file.

Before all of this, my name was Rashmi, but I hadn’t heard anyone use it since I lost my mother as a toddler. Before I was born, she made the trip from India to Japan in an effort to follow my father. The doctors told her that the trip had left us both in a vulnerable state and that the complications had affected her gravely. She died a few years later.

I don’t remember her very well; I only know what people have told me over the years. My uncle said that she was sick most of the time as it was, and so the added difficulty with me was her undoing. My uncle was not a nice man. But seeing as he was my only living relative, he had been obliged to take me in until child services deemed him unfit to raise me. And after two failed attempts at finding me a foster family, one of the social workers decided to put me to work so that I could help pay the rent for his apartment. We lived together for a few months before he caught me dipping my hand into his wallet one evening. I was out on the street the very next day.

For six months, I got by on my adaptability; years of living with my estranged uncle had given me the knack for stealing more than enough provisions to keep me alive. It was around then that the Organization found me, a prime, versatile specimen that nobody would miss should I be removed from the picture.

So after years of rigorous training, I debuted as the Organization’s newest and consequentially favorite spy. A decades’ worth of training and experimentation had prepared me for all that was to come; I was finally allowed to step outside and breathe in real air, as opposed to the stale, processed smog I had grown used to.

My first objective was to infiltrate the headquarters of the company that would ultimately become my arch-nemesis. Wakiasei Enterprises was a building designed to put the Kyoto Tower to shame. At the time, it was shy of its crowning jewel – the security department’s two-hundred meter watchtower – but this was because they didn’t have me to worry about before.

The mission flew by like a dream; everything went according to my masters’ plans, and the blueprints they wanted were secured without my so much as having to bat an eyelash. This was all too boring for me. After stuffing the blueprints for Wakiasei’s famous sentinel into my waistband, I slunk over to a guard standing near the front doors of the office. “Hello, there,” I said.

The guard, an Austrian giant of at least eight feet, peered down at me with a menacing glare. “No visitors after hours,” he told me. “Officials only.”

“Oh,” I said coyly, “But I am official.” This was certainly true, after all.

The guard narrowed his eyes at me and felt around for his radio. He seemed rather relieved to find it nestled safely on his chest.“Where’s your ID?” he asked gruffly.

“I must have left it in my purse,” I told him, slipping my hand into the front pocket of my coat. “But I do have something else for you."

The guard was wise to my ploy and had already set his hand to the gun at his waist; but I was too quick for him. The shock of the taser ran its course throughout his massive body, and he was subdued before I could say “Gotcha”.

As I stepped out into the warm night air, I felt a sense of release rising within me. For the first time in my life, I was acting without having to worry about the consequences, without rules or bars to fence me in. With this thought in mind, I climbed up to Wakiasei’s roof and leaped across the threshold to the next, and then the next, until I had reached the edge of the city. With every jump, I was becoming something new, something powerful.

By the end of the night, the Organization had given me a new name: Chikara.

Akikawa:

Kyoto,

23rd of February, 2004

The saying that no man is an island is preposterous. In fact, I like to think of myself as a contradiction to the saying; I am as solitary as they come. Sokumi may come along every now and again to try and pry me out of this shell, but her efforts are always for naught. I am a man of science, and men of science need no companions; as long as we have the tools we need, we will go on inventing until the end of our days. I tell her this, but she never accepts it.

Sokumi tosses her hair and shakes her finger at me, the way my mother used to. “But Aki,” she says, “You’ll shrivel up if you stay indoors all the time - just like a mushroom!” I instantly picture a mushroom, spoiled black and wrinkled on my kitchen counter. This probably shouldn't make me hungry.

Nevertheless, I wave off the notion and continue making a few adjustments to some wires. “Then you can auction off my inventions and use the proceeds to pay for my funeral,” I tell her.

Sokumi pouts. “But what would Maiko say?” she says, invoking the name of my older sister as a last resort.

I freeze and hear her stiffen up behind me. For a moment, we stand in an awkward silence, fidgeting quietly and shuffling our feet. Neither of us wants to bring up Maiko’s condition. Finally, after a long and uncomfortable moment, Sokumi clears her throat and moves toward the door. “I’ll just see you tomorrow, then,” she mumbles. “But you are going to be there on karaoke night, aren’t you?”

“We’ll see,” I say coldly.

Sokumi tosses her hair again and stamps her feet in the doorway; she isn't giving up, today. “Come on, Aki; I need a real answer, here!”

“I said ‘We’ll see.’”

Sokumi rolls her eyes at me before adjusting her scarf and leaving. “Yeah, yeah.” She will undoubtedly call to remind me later.

As soon as Sokumi is gone, I turn back to my desk and scribble a series of notes into my notebook. If my theory is correct, I should be able to complete the Time-Alter tonight. If it works, I can finally start sending checks to my parents and not have it be the other way around. I’ll secure a patent for the world’s first time machine and be set for the rest of my life; it’s fail-proof. This has been my dream ever since I can remember: To be a world-famous inventor, and to gain the respect of scientific leaders the world over. I’ll be Seiyou Akikawa, the youngest man ever to win the Nobel Prize.

I had a professor that I grew close to while attending the university; I told him about my idea and received plenty of stern reprimands for the notion. “Man was never meant to hold the key to time, be it history or whatever lies ahead,” he told me, angrily. “If you ever so much as contemplate this again, I’ll revoke all of your licenses and you won’t be able to so much as breathe in a lab ever again.”

He went on to explain that such a device had properties that would make it simple to rip the fabric of an inter-dimension, and in such a situation, anything was liable to happen. I took this into consideration for a good deal of time until I stumbled across something in my grandfather’s storage room.

A trunk had been lying in the middle of the floor, something he had been going through shortly before his death. I was given the task of cleaning out his belongings and had thus tripped over it on my way in. Inside, I found the remnants of a stack of papers dating all the way back to the edo period. It was difficult to decipher, but one of our ancestors had written about wanting to be able to go back in time as a result of spilling tea on a high-ranking businessman the day before.

To me, this seemed like a sign from above, a nod to go ahead with my research and everything time travel entailed. For nearly two years, I pored over textbooks and tinkered with theories of relativity in my lab; eventually, I managed to piece together a sound structure that was able to control a fraction of space-time.

After several failed attempts to send an apple forward in time to an hour later, I finally managed to send it five minutes into the future. Within the past month, I have made the proper adjustments and tonight, I plan to put the finishing touches to the wiring.

In regards to my now estranged professor, I leave the room mumbling under my breath:

“Whatever happens, happens.”

---

Author’s notes: Science is not my forte, I will admit that openly; but I did do my homework on the theories of Time Travel, specifically for Aki’s monologue there. I suffered a decent sized headache for it, too.

The reason his portion is in present-tense, by the way, is a nod to his being in the ‘present’ day. In the reality of the series, 2084 is the real present and Akikawa’s time is actually in the past. I mean, obviously, it’s not 2004, but that’s the general idea.

I had planned for some kind of epic battle between Chikara and Mei Lin to take place in the beginning, but I decided that those would be better suited for later on.