Post by GO FUCK YOURSELF NICK on Feb 4, 2015 8:33:41 GMT -6
Following the massive conclave meeting, during which Vivienne had been called out on a number of things she would have preferred keeping to herself, she went with Simon back to his hotel room. Tomorrow, the insipid newlyweds would begin their watch over them, so Vivienne wanted to make sure she had as much information as possible before then. Once they were inside, Vivienne threw her shiny new Ribera jacket into the corner of the room and sat down on one of the beds.
“So, Simon… as you can probably imagine, I’ve got a lot of questions about you based on everything that you said tonight at the steakhouse. I’m hoping that talking more about what you already remember will help shake some more things loose, because I’ll be honest, this is not something I’ve ever dealt with before. I deal with life and death, not… apparent immortality? I mean you’re what, at least two hundred years old and you don’t seem to have aged since you were in your twenties. Which, that’s a hell of a talent in and of itself.”
She gave him a wink as she looked at him, studying him in a way that she never had before.
“Tell me… what’s the earliest thing you can remember?”
Simon was keeping his uber-sweet Ribera jacket ON, thank you very much. Slowly, he sank down to the room’s bed as well. What exactly did he say? Voodoo priestesses were one thing - even if people didn’t believe in the faith, they at least believed people who practiced it existed.
Two-hundred plus year old monks did not exist, and yet, here he was.
“Yeah,” Raines agreed, “I don’t exactly blame you on that front. As for earliest memory...I don’t remember anything about where I was born, only that I can assume it’s probably not Japan, though that makes the question of how I got to Japan to begin with...interesting. But the earliest memory I have is probably sometime in the early 1800s. I arrived at that monastery that Jonathan Collins was mentioning briefly. It’s in the Osaka area. The monks had no idea how I’d gotten there, but they started raising me as one of their own. I was young...I’d guess between five and eight if I had to guess, though.”
“Okay, so early nineteenth century, five to eight years old, which probably puts your actual birth date anywhere from 1790 to 1800. Which means you’re… over two hundred years old, give or take a decade.” Vivienne exhaled through pursed lips, her eyes wide. Not much shocked her anymore, but this sure as hell did.
“Yeah,” Simon agreed, “but what’s a decade between friends?”
Vivienne laughed softly. “I’ll be twenty-two in the beginning of May. So you’re about ten times older than I am. I’ve dealt with my share of older men, but this is new territory for me. Alright, so we’ve got you at the monastery in Osaka from early childhood until… when, do you think? And is this the order that Collins kept bringing up, or was that a different monastery?”
“That’s the strange part,” he admitted. “I know that I was at the one he speaks of. I have memories of being there - but that wasn’t where I was excommunicated from. At least, not the Osaka branch. I ended up in Hokkaido - a lot less hospitable, a lot colder, and a lot more...mountains everywhere. Exactly why they sent me to Hokkaido I don’t know, but if it has anything to do with why I’m two-hundred years old and not aging, that would make sense.”
Vivienne had her phone out and was making notes as they talked, trying to put together a timeline before they started working on the more… supernatural aspects of this development.
“All right. You did mention that you had a… er, relationship, with a daughter of Mara. Which, you know, definitely odd. But makes Strike’s life choices look excellent by comparison. Anyway, is there anything after Hokkaido?”
“The daughter of Mara thing first,” Simon insisted. “I don’t know how much you know about Buddhism, but the order was at least nominally Buddhist. Mara is a demon that in Buddhist scripture tempted Gautama Buddha with his three daughters. Now, in theory, this is a parable, as those three daughters’ names can be roughly translated as craving, boredom, and passion.”
Raines paused for a minute, his shoulders slumping forward.
“Of course, in theory, I don’t exist, either, so you may or may not be surprised to know that Mara very much does have an actual daughter named Tanha - craving, and I slept with her. The monks didn’t even realize that I’d just sort of blasphemed the whole kit and caboodle; they just kicked me out for violating the “no sex” policy.”
Vivienne just blinked at her best friend for the better part of a minute, shaking her head at him.
“And I thought Lady Magdalena was nuts. Also, I’m glad that I was right in my assessment of your life as an extended kung fu movie. I just didn’t realize how extended. Okay, so you get excommunicated for sleeping with Tanha. Do you think the no aging thing came from her or from the monks?”
“Define ‘no aging,’” Simon asked, cocking his head to one side. “In terms of the “how I can be two-hundred years old and not dead” bit, that I have no idea. Why I still look like I’m twenty I can tell you, though. That’s another fun story.”
The look on Simon’s face was somewhere between mortified and “oh, fuck, I’m going to have to tell this to Caleb tomorrow he’s going to want to die.”
“Look, at this point, I’ll take any answers you have. I’m trying to figure out what you know so that I can figure out how to fill in the parts that you don’t. The closest thing I’ve done to this is past-life regression readings, but this isn’t exactly a past life - just a very, very long present one.”
Seeing the expression on his face, Vivienne raised a brow and leaned back a little, her lips curving into an amused grin.
“All right, let’s hear the story of how you stopped aging at twenty.”
“It was a lot later than twenty. Anyway! So, it was probably about...I want to say the early 1930s. Militarism was on the rise in Japan, so I decided it was high time a guy who looked like me got the Hell out of there. As I remember it, I looked like an old man. Not, like, as old as I should have looked, but pretty old. Anyway. With my luck, you won’t be surprised to know that after the boat I was taking got captured by pirates, after a few more trials and travails, I ended up in fascist Italy.”
As Simon continues talking, he realizes just how ridiculous it all sounds, but forces himself to continue.
“I got to talking with this noblewoman, Alessandra...Alessandra something...Giovanni, no, Giovanna, I think…”
He paused, and winced.
“...dear God, please do not let me have slept with one of her descendants…”
After another moment, he forced himself on.
“Anyway! She was fairly well to do, and we got to talking about regrets of times gone by. She knew right away that I was...older than I was supposed to be. Turns out she was a witch. I’m sure you of all people can appreciate that - no broom or spiky black hat, but a witch nonetheless. She wanted to see what I’d looked like back in the day. And, well, after that, she wanted me to look like that instead of what I’d looked like when I came to visit her.”
Raines scratched his chin for a moment, a momentary look of sadness coming over his face.
“I think both of the out-of-wedlock children I had with her are dead by now.”
Vivienne put her arm around his shoulders, leaning in to give him a light kiss on the temple.
“So you can sire children, and they’re mortal. Which points to this whole immortality thing being something that was done to you, rather than a gift you were born with. If you want, I can look into what happened to them.”
And she also thought about looking into Anna’s genealogical history, to see whether or not Simon had in fact slept with a descendant of his former lover.
“She must have been a very powerful witch, to do a spell like that. It’s impressive. I should thank her for it sometime. So for the century or so between your excommunication and your flight to Italy, you… what, just wandered Japan?”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that, but yes,” Simon agreed. “As for me...she had a theory about that. My history is full of entanglements with...less than ‘normal’ entities. From Tanha, to a kitsune and yuki-onna when I was in Japan...to more conventional succubi in the Western world, I have been influenced by magic practically my entire life. She believed that made me more...susceptible to magic, supernatural phenomena, whatever you wish to call them.”
As theories went, it was a fairly interesting one, Simon thought, that explained much.
“And after tonight’s meeting, you being drawn to EXODUS now makes a whole lot more sense, given what’s been going on. It’s true, some people are more susceptible to magical influences than others. Still doesn’t explain the immortality, but I suppose the right entity, with the right ties to the realm of death, could have managed to do something to keep you out of Death’s hands.”
“Honestly,” Simon replied, “I think the immortality predates the monastery. It predates everything I can remember. Why the Hell else would a pale white kid like me end up in a Japanese monastery, thousands of miles away from where he was probably born? I’ve done research - there were probably fifty non-Dutch white people in the entire country when I arrived there, and there’s no Dutch blood in me. Something really fucked up happened when I was little. That’s the theory I was operating under before I ended up losing my memory.”
“Are you entirely sure you’re not Dutch? But I mean, having less than fifty non-Dutch white people in the country at the time should make finding your parents fairly easy, depending on how good the record keeping was and how well it’s survived.”
“Cthulhu Jones, apparently,” Simon remembered, “has my birth certificate.”
“Mr. Jones has a lot of things. Might do you some good to ask him for it. I think finding the names, tracing the history back to wherever the hell they came from, might give us some more insight. Might even find out what happened to them and how you ended up in a Japanese monastery. So I guess the final piece of the timeline is, how and when did you lose your memories? And… you’ve mentioned your parents before. How do they fit into this whole equation?”
“That part’s actually a lot easier than I thought it would be,” Raines admitted. “The first thing I saw when I realized what had happened was the last thing that had happened to me before I woke up on the doorstep of a US base in Okinawa - jump flying crescent kick hitting me in the head and knocking me head first into the pillar of this old-ass temple on the outskirts of Nara. Pissed me off, too. That was the first fight I’d lost in like...fifty-three years.”
As he saw Vivienne staring at him again, Simon suddenly realized that this sounded perhaps odd, and decided to explain.
“Baaasically, after World War II, I started competing in these no holds barred fights for various royalty and important people all over Asia to keep myself in money,” Simon offered, chuckling. “You’re speaking to the Khmer Rouge Champion of Martial Art, though given how things went with Pol Pot, I’m not particularly proud of that one. But all that fighting’s one of the reasons I need to go see if I can find my old bank info. I got paid in gold most of the time.”
“...Pol Pot? Holy shit on a stick, Simon. Okay, so your parents basically adopted an amnesiac and raised you as their own until now. So I guess that worked out okay for you. You’ve got some history, Simon. And this is going to be really, really interesting. What are the gaps in your memory that you want to have filled in first?”
Taking a deep breath, Vivienne took a moment to let everything that he’d told her sink in. The story of Simon Raines was a wild ride from start to finish, and though he’d told her a lot, there were still a lot of unanswered questions.
“I have an idea of how I can at least shake a few more cobwebs loose, but you’re going to need to trust me. It won’t hurt, I can promise you that. It’s a modified h-healing spell, which should get in there and start unlocking some more of your history.”
This had been quite the adventure already, and Simon was fairly sure he was missing quite a bit as it was. As he listened to Vivienne carefully, he formulated the list of what he wanted to know.
“My time in the monasteries in both Osaka and Hokkaido is a blur,” he admitted, “but before we delve too deeply into that, I need to speak with Mr. Collins in greater detail. Probably Eve, as well. This whole Perfect Evil thing is something I hear about largely in rumors and conjecture. If I can get information from them...it might actually mean I have something useful for them when we go back to that time period.”
Eve fascinated him and frightened him at the same time - similar to current company, actually, the more he thought about it.
“The obvious, of course, is pre-monastery,” Simon said. “That may be more complicated, and require us to go through Cthulhu. If we can figure that out, though, it might let us start really getting to the bottom of this. That Tyler woman might be able to help if we’re looking for older documents and evidence - once we know where the Hell we’re supposed to be looking.”
Vivienne nodded, kicking off her shoes and bringing her knees up to her chest.
“Yeah, go through whatever channels you need to in order to compile the information. Ruby and Mr. Jones should be able to give you the help you need, and Collins already has them looking for your money caches.”
“That’s good,” Simon agreed. “If you want to come with me when we get out of here, I might be able to pick up one of those caches. It’s here in Tokyo, and I think I might actually be able to prove to them that I’m the Simon that holds the account.”
“All right, I think that’d be pretty interesting, actually. As for all the Perfect Evil stuff, you’re on your own with that. What I gathered during my relatively short tenure with Daisuke is that despite the insane levels of power, it’s a gigantic clusterfuck. I’ll stick with my gods, thank you very much.”
Simon nodded in agreement. “Besides, by now it’s like eight in the morning and lord knows I can’t sleep anyway. Once we’re done with the Collins-appointed session of “Question the Highlander-Alike” though, I’ve got a bunch of my own questions for you. I do really wish he wasn’t having Caleb sit in on that whole thing, though. Kid’s normal, I really don’t want him knowing I’m old enough to be one of his more ancient ancestors.”
Vivienne shrugged her shoulders. “Ask me whatever you like. As I’ve told the rest of them, my life is more or less an open book.”
“That’s good to know,” Simon admitted. “So tomorrow - actually, fuck, we need to figure out what to do about tomorrow, now. Because I don’t think Collins thought we’d end up back here and I’d just be able to rattle off this much.”
“Collins has a lot on his plate besides just us. We have the time now, away from the prying eyes of his simpering sycophants. Might as well make the most of it. And then we can pick and choose what we reveal in front of the newlyweds. Most of this, at least with the timeline, Ginny will know anyway. Your talents and abilities, though… I get the feeling your ability to dodge is just the tip of the iceberg.”
“At least,” Simon grinned, “he actually does have his eyes on you and your Allmother. I was beginning to think the only people around here actually worried about that were me and that RPG guy. Which is...probably really bad for everyone else if what Almasy worries about happens, but not really my problem anymore, I have enough of my own.”
As Simon nodded, he remembered the rest of what Vivi had said. His eyebrows raised, and he looked at her, mock-offended.
“Are you suggesting that we hide information from Jonathan and the newlyweds, Vivienne Robichaud,” he asked, clucking his tongue. “No wonder he’s got his eye on you, young lady.”
After a beat, Simon blanched, and sighed.
“You know, that would be much funnier if I couldn’t actually legitimately call you young lady. As for the powers, well, that’d be fun, wouldn’t it? It seems like everyone else has them!”
“Jonathan Collins should be keeping his eyes more on his sister than on me, and I think he will. The Allmother provides an excellent… not quite distraction, but she’s certainly making a bigger splash with the Daughters and the Stranger and the Supernova than I am. There is also the blood feud she has going with Collins’ wife.”
Vivienne shrugged her shoulders.
“I came here because Daisuke paid me to. Now I’m sort of working alongside mara, but again, I’m not terribly sure what it is that I’m supposed to be doing here anymore besides the actual wrestling. Collins killed my sense of purpose at the Autumn Effect and I’ve been twisting in the wind ever since. So he’ll have to forgive me coming up with other ideas.”
“Like making an army of manservants consisting of a ridiculously ripped Adonis and our other best friend,” Simon asked, smirking at her. “Well, not a bad plan, really. At least it lets you enjoy passing the time while you figure out what to do around here. As for me...I intend to help Jonathan and the Round Table as best I can...at the same time? Given the way allegiances seem to shift around here? I don’t know how interested I am in them knowing everything, everything.”
Everything was also more complicated than Simon could have imagined. He’d never been around so many different sorts of entities before. He needed time to process it all and add it all to the growing Notebook of Crazy he’d started practically from Day One in RW when he’d realized he was very much not in Kansas anymore.
“I wouldn’t trust any of them, personally. Not even techie girl and Captain America. And now none of them are going to trust me, thanks to you telling them about my involvement with Daisuke Iwakuma. If that hadn’t gotten out, I might’ve been able to fly under the radar for awhile longer. But yeah, if you want to know something about me, just ask.”
“...sorry about that,” Simon said, shoulders slumping a bit. “If it helps, I’ll do my best to keep him off your back. It does me no good to be swimming in waters over my head without my best friend here. Damon’s a good guy, but he’s a little beholden to Elizabeth right now. Kind of reminds me of how I was with Devan, actually…”
Vivienne nodded in agreement. “I’m disappointed I couldn’t hold onto him. We’re still friends, of course, but Elizabeth wields a much greater influence over him than I do these days. And you can do your best with Collins, but now that he knows about my connection to Daisuke, I doubt there’ll be much you can do to restore his trust in me. For what it’s worth though, I don’t intend on going anywhere. And I will help you figure all this out. I remember when I was first coming into my abilities, how confusing it was. I was lucky that I had my family to help me through it. But in lieu of that, I suppose a best friend will have to do.”
She smiled at him then, her eyes on his.
“When we get back from… wherever it is that we need to go to get your money, I’ll answer any questions you have about me and what I can do.”
“If Collins didn’t have it written down from when you admitted it on Twitter months ago,” Simon replied, “I’ll be very, very disappointed in him. Dude seems like one of those chessmaster types - which, I think, isn’t going to be easy, because about half that room does, too. Something’s gonna go down. Just want to make sure I’m on the right side of it when I do. It’s been two-hundred plus years, but I’ve never met anyone like that guy. Little disconcerting. Little thrilling, too.”
Simon was starting to seriously wonder just what on Earth he’d gotten himself into - but he wouldn’t turn back for anything. EXODUS was his home, and if these sorts of machinations were part of what lurked beneath the surface, he could handle that.
“And thank you, Vivienne,” he continued. “I...have not had a great deal of close confidantes over the years. Being somewhat solitary and occasionally ascetic has its downsides. But I will return the favor as best I can. And if you want to hit me for all of this, you can - I won’t dodge. I probably deserve it.”
He smiled - well, about as much as someone who was willing to let someone as potentially dangerous as Vivienne Robichaud hit him could smile.
“I have many questions for you,” Raines said, getting up from the bed, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “But, for now, let’s go have a chat with my people, and see if I can’t get a couple more questions out of you, first?”
Standing up, Vivienne slipped her shoes back on and grabbed her purse. This had been a truly weird introduction to Japan, and she had a feeling it was only going to get stranger as time went on. These next six weeks were going to make or break her career with EXODUS, she was sure of that. And trying to out-maneuver Jonathan Collins was going to be her greatest challenge yet. But first, she had to focus on the task at hand - figuring out the truth of the man now known as Simon Raines.
“Told you I’d get them to let me through,” Simon told his companion with no small amount of joy as the pair worked their way through a labyrinthine series of corridors in the bowels of a building nominally known as a bank. “I didn’t realize they’d evolved this place into something that looks like Gringotts from Harry Potter, but I suppose you’ve got to expand when you get more customers. That and, well, I bet they didn’t think I’d be coming back any time soon when you don’t for about thirty plus years.”
Vivienne had expected to be taken to some cave in the mountains or to be digging in a sewer or something, so to be in an actual bank was a rather refreshing surprise. However, as they were led down into the bowels of the building, she was starting to wonder if this was, in fact, a good idea.
“You do remember where we’re supposed to be going, right? Because just a week ago, you thought you were any other twenty-year-old guy. Though they did seem oddly unsurprised by the fact that you showed up looking exactly like you did thirty years ago… maybe the Gringotts analogy is closer than you think.”
“This place deals with a lot of dignitaries. And the yakuza are among them. When you deal with the Yamaguchi-gumi, you learn really quickly to not ask questions lest you end up minus body parts, loved ones, or valued possessions.”
Simon knew this, if only in large part because he had acquaintances in the Japanese mafia, and they’d (somehow) been one of the few large organizations he’d managed to avoid pissing off at one point of another in his long existence.
“Should almost be there judging by what nice Teller-san told us,” Simon announced, as he turned a quick right, and began scanning the small vaults built into the wall. After a moment, he found a larger one, almost locker size, vertically as tall as the entire bay of vaults.
“This is it,” Raines said, reaching into his pocket to pull out the key. “I’m almost excited. I know I have some winnings from tournaments in here, but I’m curious if there’s anything else that might be interesting.”
He extended the key to Vivienne.
“You want to turn the key,” he asked. “We’ll open it together.”
“...There is a lot more you haven’t told me about your life, isn’t there? But I mean, that’s a good tactic. I should think about that. But I do rather like the whole thing I have going for me right now.”
Looking up at the vault, Vivienne’s eyes widened, but she took the key from Simon and inserted it into the lock. The key was a little hard to turn, but she soon heard the tumblers click and the door opened. Giving it a tug, the inside of the vault was revealed and Vivienne’s jaw dropped.
Several shelves had been built into the top half of the locker. These contained sacks filled with...something, but Raines found himself more concerned with one of the numerous objects below those sacks. Simon carefully reached inside, and unearthed what looked to be a Japanese sword.
Pulling it out slowly, Simon unsheathed just a bit of the blade, looking at it carefully for a moment, before his jaw dropped.
“Oh, fuck,” he whispered. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. I totally forgot I owned this thing!”
He continued to poke around in the locker, finding what appeared to be a backpack. He removed that carefully as well, placing it down on the floor next to the locker.
“We’ll check those sacks up there soon,” he told his companion, “but what I hold in my hands right now is something that I don’t know how the Hell I’m going to smuggle out of Japan. This is the Honjo Masamune. It’s an official Japanese national treasure as of 1939. Once upon a time, it was passed down by Japanese shoguns through the Edo period. It officially disappeared from history around 1946 - and was, if I remember right, put up as a prize in a highly illegal underground fighting tournament on Okinawa in 1967.”
As the memories came flowing back, Raines couldn’t help but smile.
“That was the evening I became known as the Godkiller. How the Hell am I going to get this thing back to my apartment, though?”
Vivienne simply stared at her best friend in amazement, reaching out to brush her fingers against the sheath.
“Holy shit… are you serious? Godkiller, lost Japanese samurai swords… come on, I want to see what else you’ve got in here. This is amazing. I mean, I’ve got a few trinkets here and there, family heirlooms, bone dolls for invoking my ancestors, that kind of thing. But oh my God…”
A grin spread over her face as she looked back into the vault, eager to see what else might be inside. She couldn’t reach the top of it, but she was definitely hooked on the idea of finding out what other treasures the vault held.
Simon put the sword back in the vault, carefully. “I’ll come back for this thing once I’ve decided what I’m doing with it,” he vowed, then reached up and grabbed hold of one of the sacks. It probably weighed about ten pounds or so, and he handed it to Vivi. “Let me know what’s inside,” he asked. “There are two others up here, but they look like they’re probably the same thing. I’m going to see if I can figure out what all of these random possessions down here are.”
Vivienne took the bag from him, surprised by the weight of it. She opened it up and nearly dropped it in shock. Balancing it in the palm of her hand, Vivienne reached into the bag and pulled out what looked like…
“Gold coins. Genuine article, from what I can tell… holy shit. There’s easily thousands here, if the other two bags are full of the same. And that’s not even counting the prices for the artifacts if you put them up for auction. Or sold them on the black market, depending on the legality. You’re basically a millionaire, you know that right?”
“I’d suspected, yes,” he admitted. “I looked up the price of gold before we came here. An ounce is a shade under $1300, so you can do the math. If nothing else, I can go buy a better place to live than my shitty apartment just off what I have here. I know I have more elsewhere, too, but it’s going to take a while to figure out just how much. Alessandra left me a large portion of her estate as well - well, at least what she could hide from her husband and legitimate children, too, so I’ll probably have to go to Italy and figure that whole mess out at some point, too…”
His voice trailed off as he reached into the locker, coming up with an old photograph. It depicted Simon, looking much the same as he does now (with equally terrible fashion sense) standing alongside a pretty noblewoman with flowing, curly hair. The two’s hands were clasped, and Simon swallowed hard, his eyes wide.
“Alessandra,” he whispered, handing the picture over to Vivienne. “You know, I think you two would have gotten along pretty well.”
Vivienne took the photograph from him, studying it. It had faded with age, and it jarred her to see Simon unchanged now from a photo taken eighty years ago. The woman in the photo bore passing resemblance to Anna, but that might have been just a coincidence. Pressing the photo between her palms, Vivienne closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
There were very few images, but plenty of emotional impressions. She wasn’t sure what else she had been looking for - a way to unlock his memories using objects, perhaps. Opening her eyes, Vivienne took her top hand off the photo and exhaled, putting her guard back up.
“She loved you, very much. And for what it’s worth, I think I would have gotten along well with her, too. She was good at her craft... clearly, since you still look like that. Why did it end between you and her? What I got from the photo was a very deep connection between you two, a lot of genuine love and affection for one another. Was it that she didn’t want to leave her husband, or something else?”
Simon had watched, silently - it was perhaps fair, after all, since she’d seen a bit of what he could do earlier in the day. His ‘power,’ though, as far as he could tell, was simply years of training (more than most people could ever have) and God given reflexes. What Vivi did was fascinating - no matter how many supernatural beings he’d interacted with over two centuries.
“And I her,” Simon said, quietly. “She was. Too good, in fact. Her husband found out. Not about me, even. But that she dabbled in the dark arts. He...did not take it particularly well. I...hope that I don’t have to go into any further detail about what that means, Vivienne.”
His shoulders slumped, and his eyes squinched up tight. It had been years - decades, even, and for the past eight or nine, he hadn’t even remembered her. There were many people that he hadn’t remembered, people only just now coming to the fore of his mind.
All friends of his. A few lovers. Acquaintances, rivals, teachers.
All had one thing in common.
All were dead and gone, and yet Simon Raines was alive.
The pain of immortality was etched on his face. People craved it, but only because they did not see the price. Setting the photograph back inside the vault, Vivienne moved closer and put her arms around his neck, hugging him close.
“You don’t have to go into detail. I can fill them in on my own. I’m sorry for what happened to her, Simon.”
Briefly, she considered offering to do one of her rituals, to summon Alessandra so that the two of them could speak, but she didn’t think that now was the right time or place for that, and she was concerned that it would just bring him more pain. Releasing him, Vivienne stepped back and once again looked into the vault.
“So, what else is in here?”
It took a moment for his arms to wrap around her in turn, a bit awkwardly. This was more than he’d meant to show her - show anyone, really. At least this soon. Being as old as he was came with a variety of obvious problems, but it had taken him this long since his memories had come back to really, truly think about them again.
“My only regret is that I wasn’t the one to kill him. The authorities caught him before I could.” The look in Simon’s eyes was harsher than anything she or anyone else had likely seen out of the usually happy-go-lucky Raines, and he shook his head.
“Nothing much else of particular interest, I don’t think. That knapsack I found is likely just random keepsakes of mine. This locker for the most part seems to cover roughly the 1950s through the early 1990s of my life, so fairly recent in the grand scheme of things. I can look through and see if there’s anything of relevance when we get back.”
Simon picked up the sack of gold coins, and made sure that everything else except it and the knapsack were in the locker before closing it securely.
“I’m going to go take this upstairs and see if they’ll let me exchange it for something a bit more liquid. Around this place, that shouldn’t be too hard. One-hundred something thousand should be more than enough to hold me for the rest of the tour, I think.”
“A hundred something thousand? Shit, that should last you till the end of the year at least.”
Vivienne watched as he closed the vault locker and followed him back through the labyrinthine corridors beneath the bank, hoping that he remembered the way out, because she certainly didn’t.
“Look, I know after… what happened in the conclave, there’s not a whole lot of reason for anyone in this company to trust me. So thanks for doing that this morning.”
Simon was content to lead the way back through the maze of corridors. “Probably now, at least how I’m living as Simon. Depending how much of my assets we can find, though, I’ll upgrade. Futon I’m sleeping on isn’t great after a hard day’s training.”
The conversation, though, had gotten serious. Simon had been more serious lately than he’d been in an exceedingly long time. Turning to face her, he nodded.
“I would wager the contents of this sack that I’m carrying that every member of that Conclave has skeletons in their closets the size of a brontosaurus,” Raines said, “the techie included. Collins ESPECIALLY included. Lasiewicz didn’t show up, but just from listening to him talk sometimes it wouldn’t surprise me if he was older than I was. They can judge you and your objectives all they want. You’re my best friend. I trust Jonathan when it comes to a lot of things. When it comes to my best friend, I’d *like* to think that I’ll be able to figure out when you’re getting me to do your bidding.”
Simon smiled at her, a deep grin, and shrugged.
“I might be willing, most of the time. Or maybe not. In other words, exactly as things have been this whole time. A lot may have changed, Vivienne Robichaud, but a lot has not, and will not.”
She smiled back at him.
“Of course they all have skeletons. Everyone does. But because I’m more interested in protecting my own neck than their company, that’s not going to win me any points. If they’d made it worth my while, maybe I’d reconsider.”
Vivienne shrugged, marveling at the amount of trust he had in her. She wasn’t accustomed to it, but she thought that perhaps it would be useful to have someone in this company with whom she could talk freely. Naiser had many good qualities, but she wasn’t certain how honest she could be with him about her abilities. Simon, though, was part of the inner circle now,
“Anyway, look, the offer still stands. Once we’re back at the hotel… go ahead and delve into my own personal history, if that’s what you want. There’s considerably less of it, but since I’ve been prying into your business, might as well extend you the same courtesy.”
“Honestly? I’d wager they’re all more interested in saving their own necks than the company too,” Raines replied. “Collins excepted, but EXODUS is an extension of himself, and his wife competes for it. His friends are in it. They just don’t vocalize it, but every last one of them in that room knows full well what they’d do if the shit goes down and everyone has to panic. That Aiken Frost guy does not fill my heart with the warm and fuzzies, either. Never mind Chris Strike, who has me-quality life choices and a zodiac symbol tattooed on him that lets him do god only knows what.”
It all sounded absurd, but Simon Raines’ life was nothing if not living proof of the Latin phrase credo quia absurdum.
“And I appreciate it, Vivi. I believed in you from the beginning for a lot of reasons, probably the biggest of which being latent understanding that there is more to the world than 99% of humanity believes. Even more so now, because if I exist? Everything you believe in has to. I’m a Hell of lot more ridiculous than almost anything any faith can teach. I’ll have a few questions, but otherwise?”
He paused on their path, the door leading to the main floor in sight.
“Otherwise, I think we just follow this road and see where it goes. I may be two-hundred plus, but I’m still very largely the man you’ve come to know over the past few months, for better or for worse. Tomorrow’s going to start a very long and potentially very dangerous road. I don’t know what’s coming, but I do know that I don’t think either of us have any choice but to make the journey. And, if we’re on a trip like this, Baron knows I could use the company.”
Vivienne nodded in agreement, reaching for his hand.
“You and me. We’ll handle it, whatever gets thrown at us. And I’ll try to figure out a way to work around this. Collins is a grandmaster at this stuff, but I’m no slouch either. But hey, at least he did me a favor at this meeting. He gave me a purpose again. So maybe I’ll stick around long enough to figure out the mystery of my two hundred year old best friend, at least.”
She grinned back at him, confident and fearless.
“Hope you don’t get too sick of me before this trip is over.”
Raines took her hand, holding it for a moment and squeezing it tightly.
“I don’t think it’s possible to get sick of you, Miss Robichaud,” Simon grinned, as the pair walked up the steps and into what would be a very interesting series of days.
Or weeks.
Or months, or even years.
One of the things Simon had learned over two-hundred of those was that things tended to go in the exact opposite way one believed they might.
“So, Simon… as you can probably imagine, I’ve got a lot of questions about you based on everything that you said tonight at the steakhouse. I’m hoping that talking more about what you already remember will help shake some more things loose, because I’ll be honest, this is not something I’ve ever dealt with before. I deal with life and death, not… apparent immortality? I mean you’re what, at least two hundred years old and you don’t seem to have aged since you were in your twenties. Which, that’s a hell of a talent in and of itself.”
She gave him a wink as she looked at him, studying him in a way that she never had before.
“Tell me… what’s the earliest thing you can remember?”
Simon was keeping his uber-sweet Ribera jacket ON, thank you very much. Slowly, he sank down to the room’s bed as well. What exactly did he say? Voodoo priestesses were one thing - even if people didn’t believe in the faith, they at least believed people who practiced it existed.
Two-hundred plus year old monks did not exist, and yet, here he was.
“Yeah,” Raines agreed, “I don’t exactly blame you on that front. As for earliest memory...I don’t remember anything about where I was born, only that I can assume it’s probably not Japan, though that makes the question of how I got to Japan to begin with...interesting. But the earliest memory I have is probably sometime in the early 1800s. I arrived at that monastery that Jonathan Collins was mentioning briefly. It’s in the Osaka area. The monks had no idea how I’d gotten there, but they started raising me as one of their own. I was young...I’d guess between five and eight if I had to guess, though.”
“Okay, so early nineteenth century, five to eight years old, which probably puts your actual birth date anywhere from 1790 to 1800. Which means you’re… over two hundred years old, give or take a decade.” Vivienne exhaled through pursed lips, her eyes wide. Not much shocked her anymore, but this sure as hell did.
“Yeah,” Simon agreed, “but what’s a decade between friends?”
Vivienne laughed softly. “I’ll be twenty-two in the beginning of May. So you’re about ten times older than I am. I’ve dealt with my share of older men, but this is new territory for me. Alright, so we’ve got you at the monastery in Osaka from early childhood until… when, do you think? And is this the order that Collins kept bringing up, or was that a different monastery?”
“That’s the strange part,” he admitted. “I know that I was at the one he speaks of. I have memories of being there - but that wasn’t where I was excommunicated from. At least, not the Osaka branch. I ended up in Hokkaido - a lot less hospitable, a lot colder, and a lot more...mountains everywhere. Exactly why they sent me to Hokkaido I don’t know, but if it has anything to do with why I’m two-hundred years old and not aging, that would make sense.”
Vivienne had her phone out and was making notes as they talked, trying to put together a timeline before they started working on the more… supernatural aspects of this development.
“All right. You did mention that you had a… er, relationship, with a daughter of Mara. Which, you know, definitely odd. But makes Strike’s life choices look excellent by comparison. Anyway, is there anything after Hokkaido?”
“The daughter of Mara thing first,” Simon insisted. “I don’t know how much you know about Buddhism, but the order was at least nominally Buddhist. Mara is a demon that in Buddhist scripture tempted Gautama Buddha with his three daughters. Now, in theory, this is a parable, as those three daughters’ names can be roughly translated as craving, boredom, and passion.”
Raines paused for a minute, his shoulders slumping forward.
“Of course, in theory, I don’t exist, either, so you may or may not be surprised to know that Mara very much does have an actual daughter named Tanha - craving, and I slept with her. The monks didn’t even realize that I’d just sort of blasphemed the whole kit and caboodle; they just kicked me out for violating the “no sex” policy.”
Vivienne just blinked at her best friend for the better part of a minute, shaking her head at him.
“And I thought Lady Magdalena was nuts. Also, I’m glad that I was right in my assessment of your life as an extended kung fu movie. I just didn’t realize how extended. Okay, so you get excommunicated for sleeping with Tanha. Do you think the no aging thing came from her or from the monks?”
“Define ‘no aging,’” Simon asked, cocking his head to one side. “In terms of the “how I can be two-hundred years old and not dead” bit, that I have no idea. Why I still look like I’m twenty I can tell you, though. That’s another fun story.”
The look on Simon’s face was somewhere between mortified and “oh, fuck, I’m going to have to tell this to Caleb tomorrow he’s going to want to die.”
“Look, at this point, I’ll take any answers you have. I’m trying to figure out what you know so that I can figure out how to fill in the parts that you don’t. The closest thing I’ve done to this is past-life regression readings, but this isn’t exactly a past life - just a very, very long present one.”
Seeing the expression on his face, Vivienne raised a brow and leaned back a little, her lips curving into an amused grin.
“All right, let’s hear the story of how you stopped aging at twenty.”
“It was a lot later than twenty. Anyway! So, it was probably about...I want to say the early 1930s. Militarism was on the rise in Japan, so I decided it was high time a guy who looked like me got the Hell out of there. As I remember it, I looked like an old man. Not, like, as old as I should have looked, but pretty old. Anyway. With my luck, you won’t be surprised to know that after the boat I was taking got captured by pirates, after a few more trials and travails, I ended up in fascist Italy.”
As Simon continues talking, he realizes just how ridiculous it all sounds, but forces himself to continue.
“I got to talking with this noblewoman, Alessandra...Alessandra something...Giovanni, no, Giovanna, I think…”
He paused, and winced.
“...dear God, please do not let me have slept with one of her descendants…”
After another moment, he forced himself on.
“Anyway! She was fairly well to do, and we got to talking about regrets of times gone by. She knew right away that I was...older than I was supposed to be. Turns out she was a witch. I’m sure you of all people can appreciate that - no broom or spiky black hat, but a witch nonetheless. She wanted to see what I’d looked like back in the day. And, well, after that, she wanted me to look like that instead of what I’d looked like when I came to visit her.”
Raines scratched his chin for a moment, a momentary look of sadness coming over his face.
“I think both of the out-of-wedlock children I had with her are dead by now.”
Vivienne put her arm around his shoulders, leaning in to give him a light kiss on the temple.
“So you can sire children, and they’re mortal. Which points to this whole immortality thing being something that was done to you, rather than a gift you were born with. If you want, I can look into what happened to them.”
And she also thought about looking into Anna’s genealogical history, to see whether or not Simon had in fact slept with a descendant of his former lover.
“She must have been a very powerful witch, to do a spell like that. It’s impressive. I should thank her for it sometime. So for the century or so between your excommunication and your flight to Italy, you… what, just wandered Japan?”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that, but yes,” Simon agreed. “As for me...she had a theory about that. My history is full of entanglements with...less than ‘normal’ entities. From Tanha, to a kitsune and yuki-onna when I was in Japan...to more conventional succubi in the Western world, I have been influenced by magic practically my entire life. She believed that made me more...susceptible to magic, supernatural phenomena, whatever you wish to call them.”
As theories went, it was a fairly interesting one, Simon thought, that explained much.
“And after tonight’s meeting, you being drawn to EXODUS now makes a whole lot more sense, given what’s been going on. It’s true, some people are more susceptible to magical influences than others. Still doesn’t explain the immortality, but I suppose the right entity, with the right ties to the realm of death, could have managed to do something to keep you out of Death’s hands.”
“Honestly,” Simon replied, “I think the immortality predates the monastery. It predates everything I can remember. Why the Hell else would a pale white kid like me end up in a Japanese monastery, thousands of miles away from where he was probably born? I’ve done research - there were probably fifty non-Dutch white people in the entire country when I arrived there, and there’s no Dutch blood in me. Something really fucked up happened when I was little. That’s the theory I was operating under before I ended up losing my memory.”
“Are you entirely sure you’re not Dutch? But I mean, having less than fifty non-Dutch white people in the country at the time should make finding your parents fairly easy, depending on how good the record keeping was and how well it’s survived.”
“Cthulhu Jones, apparently,” Simon remembered, “has my birth certificate.”
“Mr. Jones has a lot of things. Might do you some good to ask him for it. I think finding the names, tracing the history back to wherever the hell they came from, might give us some more insight. Might even find out what happened to them and how you ended up in a Japanese monastery. So I guess the final piece of the timeline is, how and when did you lose your memories? And… you’ve mentioned your parents before. How do they fit into this whole equation?”
“That part’s actually a lot easier than I thought it would be,” Raines admitted. “The first thing I saw when I realized what had happened was the last thing that had happened to me before I woke up on the doorstep of a US base in Okinawa - jump flying crescent kick hitting me in the head and knocking me head first into the pillar of this old-ass temple on the outskirts of Nara. Pissed me off, too. That was the first fight I’d lost in like...fifty-three years.”
As he saw Vivienne staring at him again, Simon suddenly realized that this sounded perhaps odd, and decided to explain.
“Baaasically, after World War II, I started competing in these no holds barred fights for various royalty and important people all over Asia to keep myself in money,” Simon offered, chuckling. “You’re speaking to the Khmer Rouge Champion of Martial Art, though given how things went with Pol Pot, I’m not particularly proud of that one. But all that fighting’s one of the reasons I need to go see if I can find my old bank info. I got paid in gold most of the time.”
“...Pol Pot? Holy shit on a stick, Simon. Okay, so your parents basically adopted an amnesiac and raised you as their own until now. So I guess that worked out okay for you. You’ve got some history, Simon. And this is going to be really, really interesting. What are the gaps in your memory that you want to have filled in first?”
Taking a deep breath, Vivienne took a moment to let everything that he’d told her sink in. The story of Simon Raines was a wild ride from start to finish, and though he’d told her a lot, there were still a lot of unanswered questions.
“I have an idea of how I can at least shake a few more cobwebs loose, but you’re going to need to trust me. It won’t hurt, I can promise you that. It’s a modified h-healing spell, which should get in there and start unlocking some more of your history.”
This had been quite the adventure already, and Simon was fairly sure he was missing quite a bit as it was. As he listened to Vivienne carefully, he formulated the list of what he wanted to know.
“My time in the monasteries in both Osaka and Hokkaido is a blur,” he admitted, “but before we delve too deeply into that, I need to speak with Mr. Collins in greater detail. Probably Eve, as well. This whole Perfect Evil thing is something I hear about largely in rumors and conjecture. If I can get information from them...it might actually mean I have something useful for them when we go back to that time period.”
Eve fascinated him and frightened him at the same time - similar to current company, actually, the more he thought about it.
“The obvious, of course, is pre-monastery,” Simon said. “That may be more complicated, and require us to go through Cthulhu. If we can figure that out, though, it might let us start really getting to the bottom of this. That Tyler woman might be able to help if we’re looking for older documents and evidence - once we know where the Hell we’re supposed to be looking.”
Vivienne nodded, kicking off her shoes and bringing her knees up to her chest.
“Yeah, go through whatever channels you need to in order to compile the information. Ruby and Mr. Jones should be able to give you the help you need, and Collins already has them looking for your money caches.”
“That’s good,” Simon agreed. “If you want to come with me when we get out of here, I might be able to pick up one of those caches. It’s here in Tokyo, and I think I might actually be able to prove to them that I’m the Simon that holds the account.”
“All right, I think that’d be pretty interesting, actually. As for all the Perfect Evil stuff, you’re on your own with that. What I gathered during my relatively short tenure with Daisuke is that despite the insane levels of power, it’s a gigantic clusterfuck. I’ll stick with my gods, thank you very much.”
Simon nodded in agreement. “Besides, by now it’s like eight in the morning and lord knows I can’t sleep anyway. Once we’re done with the Collins-appointed session of “Question the Highlander-Alike” though, I’ve got a bunch of my own questions for you. I do really wish he wasn’t having Caleb sit in on that whole thing, though. Kid’s normal, I really don’t want him knowing I’m old enough to be one of his more ancient ancestors.”
Vivienne shrugged her shoulders. “Ask me whatever you like. As I’ve told the rest of them, my life is more or less an open book.”
“That’s good to know,” Simon admitted. “So tomorrow - actually, fuck, we need to figure out what to do about tomorrow, now. Because I don’t think Collins thought we’d end up back here and I’d just be able to rattle off this much.”
“Collins has a lot on his plate besides just us. We have the time now, away from the prying eyes of his simpering sycophants. Might as well make the most of it. And then we can pick and choose what we reveal in front of the newlyweds. Most of this, at least with the timeline, Ginny will know anyway. Your talents and abilities, though… I get the feeling your ability to dodge is just the tip of the iceberg.”
“At least,” Simon grinned, “he actually does have his eyes on you and your Allmother. I was beginning to think the only people around here actually worried about that were me and that RPG guy. Which is...probably really bad for everyone else if what Almasy worries about happens, but not really my problem anymore, I have enough of my own.”
As Simon nodded, he remembered the rest of what Vivi had said. His eyebrows raised, and he looked at her, mock-offended.
“Are you suggesting that we hide information from Jonathan and the newlyweds, Vivienne Robichaud,” he asked, clucking his tongue. “No wonder he’s got his eye on you, young lady.”
After a beat, Simon blanched, and sighed.
“You know, that would be much funnier if I couldn’t actually legitimately call you young lady. As for the powers, well, that’d be fun, wouldn’t it? It seems like everyone else has them!”
“Jonathan Collins should be keeping his eyes more on his sister than on me, and I think he will. The Allmother provides an excellent… not quite distraction, but she’s certainly making a bigger splash with the Daughters and the Stranger and the Supernova than I am. There is also the blood feud she has going with Collins’ wife.”
Vivienne shrugged her shoulders.
“I came here because Daisuke paid me to. Now I’m sort of working alongside mara, but again, I’m not terribly sure what it is that I’m supposed to be doing here anymore besides the actual wrestling. Collins killed my sense of purpose at the Autumn Effect and I’ve been twisting in the wind ever since. So he’ll have to forgive me coming up with other ideas.”
“Like making an army of manservants consisting of a ridiculously ripped Adonis and our other best friend,” Simon asked, smirking at her. “Well, not a bad plan, really. At least it lets you enjoy passing the time while you figure out what to do around here. As for me...I intend to help Jonathan and the Round Table as best I can...at the same time? Given the way allegiances seem to shift around here? I don’t know how interested I am in them knowing everything, everything.”
Everything was also more complicated than Simon could have imagined. He’d never been around so many different sorts of entities before. He needed time to process it all and add it all to the growing Notebook of Crazy he’d started practically from Day One in RW when he’d realized he was very much not in Kansas anymore.
“I wouldn’t trust any of them, personally. Not even techie girl and Captain America. And now none of them are going to trust me, thanks to you telling them about my involvement with Daisuke Iwakuma. If that hadn’t gotten out, I might’ve been able to fly under the radar for awhile longer. But yeah, if you want to know something about me, just ask.”
“...sorry about that,” Simon said, shoulders slumping a bit. “If it helps, I’ll do my best to keep him off your back. It does me no good to be swimming in waters over my head without my best friend here. Damon’s a good guy, but he’s a little beholden to Elizabeth right now. Kind of reminds me of how I was with Devan, actually…”
Vivienne nodded in agreement. “I’m disappointed I couldn’t hold onto him. We’re still friends, of course, but Elizabeth wields a much greater influence over him than I do these days. And you can do your best with Collins, but now that he knows about my connection to Daisuke, I doubt there’ll be much you can do to restore his trust in me. For what it’s worth though, I don’t intend on going anywhere. And I will help you figure all this out. I remember when I was first coming into my abilities, how confusing it was. I was lucky that I had my family to help me through it. But in lieu of that, I suppose a best friend will have to do.”
She smiled at him then, her eyes on his.
“When we get back from… wherever it is that we need to go to get your money, I’ll answer any questions you have about me and what I can do.”
“If Collins didn’t have it written down from when you admitted it on Twitter months ago,” Simon replied, “I’ll be very, very disappointed in him. Dude seems like one of those chessmaster types - which, I think, isn’t going to be easy, because about half that room does, too. Something’s gonna go down. Just want to make sure I’m on the right side of it when I do. It’s been two-hundred plus years, but I’ve never met anyone like that guy. Little disconcerting. Little thrilling, too.”
Simon was starting to seriously wonder just what on Earth he’d gotten himself into - but he wouldn’t turn back for anything. EXODUS was his home, and if these sorts of machinations were part of what lurked beneath the surface, he could handle that.
“And thank you, Vivienne,” he continued. “I...have not had a great deal of close confidantes over the years. Being somewhat solitary and occasionally ascetic has its downsides. But I will return the favor as best I can. And if you want to hit me for all of this, you can - I won’t dodge. I probably deserve it.”
He smiled - well, about as much as someone who was willing to let someone as potentially dangerous as Vivienne Robichaud hit him could smile.
“I have many questions for you,” Raines said, getting up from the bed, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “But, for now, let’s go have a chat with my people, and see if I can’t get a couple more questions out of you, first?”
Standing up, Vivienne slipped her shoes back on and grabbed her purse. This had been a truly weird introduction to Japan, and she had a feeling it was only going to get stranger as time went on. These next six weeks were going to make or break her career with EXODUS, she was sure of that. And trying to out-maneuver Jonathan Collins was going to be her greatest challenge yet. But first, she had to focus on the task at hand - figuring out the truth of the man now known as Simon Raines.
======================================
“Told you I’d get them to let me through,” Simon told his companion with no small amount of joy as the pair worked their way through a labyrinthine series of corridors in the bowels of a building nominally known as a bank. “I didn’t realize they’d evolved this place into something that looks like Gringotts from Harry Potter, but I suppose you’ve got to expand when you get more customers. That and, well, I bet they didn’t think I’d be coming back any time soon when you don’t for about thirty plus years.”
Vivienne had expected to be taken to some cave in the mountains or to be digging in a sewer or something, so to be in an actual bank was a rather refreshing surprise. However, as they were led down into the bowels of the building, she was starting to wonder if this was, in fact, a good idea.
“You do remember where we’re supposed to be going, right? Because just a week ago, you thought you were any other twenty-year-old guy. Though they did seem oddly unsurprised by the fact that you showed up looking exactly like you did thirty years ago… maybe the Gringotts analogy is closer than you think.”
“This place deals with a lot of dignitaries. And the yakuza are among them. When you deal with the Yamaguchi-gumi, you learn really quickly to not ask questions lest you end up minus body parts, loved ones, or valued possessions.”
Simon knew this, if only in large part because he had acquaintances in the Japanese mafia, and they’d (somehow) been one of the few large organizations he’d managed to avoid pissing off at one point of another in his long existence.
“Should almost be there judging by what nice Teller-san told us,” Simon announced, as he turned a quick right, and began scanning the small vaults built into the wall. After a moment, he found a larger one, almost locker size, vertically as tall as the entire bay of vaults.
“This is it,” Raines said, reaching into his pocket to pull out the key. “I’m almost excited. I know I have some winnings from tournaments in here, but I’m curious if there’s anything else that might be interesting.”
He extended the key to Vivienne.
“You want to turn the key,” he asked. “We’ll open it together.”
“...There is a lot more you haven’t told me about your life, isn’t there? But I mean, that’s a good tactic. I should think about that. But I do rather like the whole thing I have going for me right now.”
Looking up at the vault, Vivienne’s eyes widened, but she took the key from Simon and inserted it into the lock. The key was a little hard to turn, but she soon heard the tumblers click and the door opened. Giving it a tug, the inside of the vault was revealed and Vivienne’s jaw dropped.
Several shelves had been built into the top half of the locker. These contained sacks filled with...something, but Raines found himself more concerned with one of the numerous objects below those sacks. Simon carefully reached inside, and unearthed what looked to be a Japanese sword.
Pulling it out slowly, Simon unsheathed just a bit of the blade, looking at it carefully for a moment, before his jaw dropped.
“Oh, fuck,” he whispered. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. I totally forgot I owned this thing!”
He continued to poke around in the locker, finding what appeared to be a backpack. He removed that carefully as well, placing it down on the floor next to the locker.
“We’ll check those sacks up there soon,” he told his companion, “but what I hold in my hands right now is something that I don’t know how the Hell I’m going to smuggle out of Japan. This is the Honjo Masamune. It’s an official Japanese national treasure as of 1939. Once upon a time, it was passed down by Japanese shoguns through the Edo period. It officially disappeared from history around 1946 - and was, if I remember right, put up as a prize in a highly illegal underground fighting tournament on Okinawa in 1967.”
As the memories came flowing back, Raines couldn’t help but smile.
“That was the evening I became known as the Godkiller. How the Hell am I going to get this thing back to my apartment, though?”
Vivienne simply stared at her best friend in amazement, reaching out to brush her fingers against the sheath.
“Holy shit… are you serious? Godkiller, lost Japanese samurai swords… come on, I want to see what else you’ve got in here. This is amazing. I mean, I’ve got a few trinkets here and there, family heirlooms, bone dolls for invoking my ancestors, that kind of thing. But oh my God…”
A grin spread over her face as she looked back into the vault, eager to see what else might be inside. She couldn’t reach the top of it, but she was definitely hooked on the idea of finding out what other treasures the vault held.
Simon put the sword back in the vault, carefully. “I’ll come back for this thing once I’ve decided what I’m doing with it,” he vowed, then reached up and grabbed hold of one of the sacks. It probably weighed about ten pounds or so, and he handed it to Vivi. “Let me know what’s inside,” he asked. “There are two others up here, but they look like they’re probably the same thing. I’m going to see if I can figure out what all of these random possessions down here are.”
Vivienne took the bag from him, surprised by the weight of it. She opened it up and nearly dropped it in shock. Balancing it in the palm of her hand, Vivienne reached into the bag and pulled out what looked like…
“Gold coins. Genuine article, from what I can tell… holy shit. There’s easily thousands here, if the other two bags are full of the same. And that’s not even counting the prices for the artifacts if you put them up for auction. Or sold them on the black market, depending on the legality. You’re basically a millionaire, you know that right?”
“I’d suspected, yes,” he admitted. “I looked up the price of gold before we came here. An ounce is a shade under $1300, so you can do the math. If nothing else, I can go buy a better place to live than my shitty apartment just off what I have here. I know I have more elsewhere, too, but it’s going to take a while to figure out just how much. Alessandra left me a large portion of her estate as well - well, at least what she could hide from her husband and legitimate children, too, so I’ll probably have to go to Italy and figure that whole mess out at some point, too…”
His voice trailed off as he reached into the locker, coming up with an old photograph. It depicted Simon, looking much the same as he does now (with equally terrible fashion sense) standing alongside a pretty noblewoman with flowing, curly hair. The two’s hands were clasped, and Simon swallowed hard, his eyes wide.
“Alessandra,” he whispered, handing the picture over to Vivienne. “You know, I think you two would have gotten along pretty well.”
Vivienne took the photograph from him, studying it. It had faded with age, and it jarred her to see Simon unchanged now from a photo taken eighty years ago. The woman in the photo bore passing resemblance to Anna, but that might have been just a coincidence. Pressing the photo between her palms, Vivienne closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
There were very few images, but plenty of emotional impressions. She wasn’t sure what else she had been looking for - a way to unlock his memories using objects, perhaps. Opening her eyes, Vivienne took her top hand off the photo and exhaled, putting her guard back up.
“She loved you, very much. And for what it’s worth, I think I would have gotten along well with her, too. She was good at her craft... clearly, since you still look like that. Why did it end between you and her? What I got from the photo was a very deep connection between you two, a lot of genuine love and affection for one another. Was it that she didn’t want to leave her husband, or something else?”
Simon had watched, silently - it was perhaps fair, after all, since she’d seen a bit of what he could do earlier in the day. His ‘power,’ though, as far as he could tell, was simply years of training (more than most people could ever have) and God given reflexes. What Vivi did was fascinating - no matter how many supernatural beings he’d interacted with over two centuries.
“And I her,” Simon said, quietly. “She was. Too good, in fact. Her husband found out. Not about me, even. But that she dabbled in the dark arts. He...did not take it particularly well. I...hope that I don’t have to go into any further detail about what that means, Vivienne.”
His shoulders slumped, and his eyes squinched up tight. It had been years - decades, even, and for the past eight or nine, he hadn’t even remembered her. There were many people that he hadn’t remembered, people only just now coming to the fore of his mind.
All friends of his. A few lovers. Acquaintances, rivals, teachers.
All had one thing in common.
All were dead and gone, and yet Simon Raines was alive.
The pain of immortality was etched on his face. People craved it, but only because they did not see the price. Setting the photograph back inside the vault, Vivienne moved closer and put her arms around his neck, hugging him close.
“You don’t have to go into detail. I can fill them in on my own. I’m sorry for what happened to her, Simon.”
Briefly, she considered offering to do one of her rituals, to summon Alessandra so that the two of them could speak, but she didn’t think that now was the right time or place for that, and she was concerned that it would just bring him more pain. Releasing him, Vivienne stepped back and once again looked into the vault.
“So, what else is in here?”
It took a moment for his arms to wrap around her in turn, a bit awkwardly. This was more than he’d meant to show her - show anyone, really. At least this soon. Being as old as he was came with a variety of obvious problems, but it had taken him this long since his memories had come back to really, truly think about them again.
“My only regret is that I wasn’t the one to kill him. The authorities caught him before I could.” The look in Simon’s eyes was harsher than anything she or anyone else had likely seen out of the usually happy-go-lucky Raines, and he shook his head.
“Nothing much else of particular interest, I don’t think. That knapsack I found is likely just random keepsakes of mine. This locker for the most part seems to cover roughly the 1950s through the early 1990s of my life, so fairly recent in the grand scheme of things. I can look through and see if there’s anything of relevance when we get back.”
Simon picked up the sack of gold coins, and made sure that everything else except it and the knapsack were in the locker before closing it securely.
“I’m going to go take this upstairs and see if they’ll let me exchange it for something a bit more liquid. Around this place, that shouldn’t be too hard. One-hundred something thousand should be more than enough to hold me for the rest of the tour, I think.”
“A hundred something thousand? Shit, that should last you till the end of the year at least.”
Vivienne watched as he closed the vault locker and followed him back through the labyrinthine corridors beneath the bank, hoping that he remembered the way out, because she certainly didn’t.
“Look, I know after… what happened in the conclave, there’s not a whole lot of reason for anyone in this company to trust me. So thanks for doing that this morning.”
Simon was content to lead the way back through the maze of corridors. “Probably now, at least how I’m living as Simon. Depending how much of my assets we can find, though, I’ll upgrade. Futon I’m sleeping on isn’t great after a hard day’s training.”
The conversation, though, had gotten serious. Simon had been more serious lately than he’d been in an exceedingly long time. Turning to face her, he nodded.
“I would wager the contents of this sack that I’m carrying that every member of that Conclave has skeletons in their closets the size of a brontosaurus,” Raines said, “the techie included. Collins ESPECIALLY included. Lasiewicz didn’t show up, but just from listening to him talk sometimes it wouldn’t surprise me if he was older than I was. They can judge you and your objectives all they want. You’re my best friend. I trust Jonathan when it comes to a lot of things. When it comes to my best friend, I’d *like* to think that I’ll be able to figure out when you’re getting me to do your bidding.”
Simon smiled at her, a deep grin, and shrugged.
“I might be willing, most of the time. Or maybe not. In other words, exactly as things have been this whole time. A lot may have changed, Vivienne Robichaud, but a lot has not, and will not.”
She smiled back at him.
“Of course they all have skeletons. Everyone does. But because I’m more interested in protecting my own neck than their company, that’s not going to win me any points. If they’d made it worth my while, maybe I’d reconsider.”
Vivienne shrugged, marveling at the amount of trust he had in her. She wasn’t accustomed to it, but she thought that perhaps it would be useful to have someone in this company with whom she could talk freely. Naiser had many good qualities, but she wasn’t certain how honest she could be with him about her abilities. Simon, though, was part of the inner circle now,
“Anyway, look, the offer still stands. Once we’re back at the hotel… go ahead and delve into my own personal history, if that’s what you want. There’s considerably less of it, but since I’ve been prying into your business, might as well extend you the same courtesy.”
“Honestly? I’d wager they’re all more interested in saving their own necks than the company too,” Raines replied. “Collins excepted, but EXODUS is an extension of himself, and his wife competes for it. His friends are in it. They just don’t vocalize it, but every last one of them in that room knows full well what they’d do if the shit goes down and everyone has to panic. That Aiken Frost guy does not fill my heart with the warm and fuzzies, either. Never mind Chris Strike, who has me-quality life choices and a zodiac symbol tattooed on him that lets him do god only knows what.”
It all sounded absurd, but Simon Raines’ life was nothing if not living proof of the Latin phrase credo quia absurdum.
“And I appreciate it, Vivi. I believed in you from the beginning for a lot of reasons, probably the biggest of which being latent understanding that there is more to the world than 99% of humanity believes. Even more so now, because if I exist? Everything you believe in has to. I’m a Hell of lot more ridiculous than almost anything any faith can teach. I’ll have a few questions, but otherwise?”
He paused on their path, the door leading to the main floor in sight.
“Otherwise, I think we just follow this road and see where it goes. I may be two-hundred plus, but I’m still very largely the man you’ve come to know over the past few months, for better or for worse. Tomorrow’s going to start a very long and potentially very dangerous road. I don’t know what’s coming, but I do know that I don’t think either of us have any choice but to make the journey. And, if we’re on a trip like this, Baron knows I could use the company.”
Vivienne nodded in agreement, reaching for his hand.
“You and me. We’ll handle it, whatever gets thrown at us. And I’ll try to figure out a way to work around this. Collins is a grandmaster at this stuff, but I’m no slouch either. But hey, at least he did me a favor at this meeting. He gave me a purpose again. So maybe I’ll stick around long enough to figure out the mystery of my two hundred year old best friend, at least.”
She grinned back at him, confident and fearless.
“Hope you don’t get too sick of me before this trip is over.”
Raines took her hand, holding it for a moment and squeezing it tightly.
“I don’t think it’s possible to get sick of you, Miss Robichaud,” Simon grinned, as the pair walked up the steps and into what would be a very interesting series of days.
Or weeks.
Or months, or even years.
One of the things Simon had learned over two-hundred of those was that things tended to go in the exact opposite way one believed they might.