394 Chapter five, 2017, leverage: 4

Noriko shivered as she took a few steps and found herself a seat beside Urufu.

Adults played ugly games. He'd said as much outside the Stockholm Haven café a little earlier. Just how ugly she slowly began to understand.

She could do math faster than him, but sitting here right now, feeling the need for him to protect her, she realised she couldn't do people faster than him, if at all. People couldn't be calculated. You had to go by gut feeling, and that wasn't her way of coming to conclusions.

Still, the part about 'our own people' shocked her. It implied they'd still have unsuspecting people transit downstream into the unknown as long as those people weren't 'our own'.

'Will I become like them when I grow up?' She hoped not. Her mother hadn't, and her father at least not very much.

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"Christmas," Urufu said. "We don't care any more. The pig's gone by Christmas or we'll act."

"Do you have any idea..." the scary old man began.

"Not enough," Urufu interrupted. "Christmas or I'll call in a favour each from Christina and her grandfather. You really, really, really don't want to mess with them."

"Now you arrogant little..."

"You really don't want to mess with me neither. I'll blow your cover to Nathan Cooper. He got his daughter raped. He'll believe anything I say about science fiction style dark operations if I make it convincing enough."

"Mister Hammargren, you can't," Nakagawa-sensei said. "We play dirty, but the Americans would use direct violence."

"You want to test that theory?"

"You little..." the scary man tried to edge in.

"Shut the bloody hell up! My girlfriend and my best friend here are the only decent persons in this room. I'm not. Push me and you'll find out just exactly how low I'm prepared to go."

Noriko watched he ping pong match of words in fascination. Urufu's words reminded her he wasn't just her boyfriend but also a man with a lifetime's experience of power games.

When silence suddenly swept the entire room in an uncomfortable blanket of angry thoughts Noriko decided she needed to voice her own opinion.

"Christmas. We need to. We're the ones hurting, not you."

From out of nowhere Urufu's hand found hers and she felt his grip harden. He'd been there and saved her once. He knew. She squeezed back.

An unexpected giggle reached her from Nakagawa-sensei. When she looked at him the expression she got in return was one of satisfaction rather than irritation.

"Well gentlemen, seems we got ourselves a deadline," he said, still smiling.

The scary man turned and glared at Nakagawa-sensei. "You really expect us to blindly do what a couple of kids tell us to do?"

Their former principal dressed his face in a harder expression. "The arrivals aren't really kids, and as for the kids in question, they have a right to expect us adults to protect them."

"Look, Nakagawa-san, we had no part in your allowing things to degenerate like this in the first place."

"You do now," he said. "Since the moment you suggested we stall you became involved."

"I fail to..."

"You failed to tell us you knew abut the Hitler Jugend central in the other world."

"Hitler Jugend?" Urufu asked, and Noriko felt his grip harden until it almost hurt.

Nakagawa-sensei met Urufu's eyes. "In your old world Red Rose is still very much operative, and it seems their version basically bought Himekaizen and merged the two high schools into one disgusting right wing power base rather thinly disguised as a place for education."

Urufu gasped and Noriko stared at his face. A thin line had replaced his earlier arrogant smirk. "I see," he said.

"You know something?" Nakagawa-sensei asked.

Urufu shook his head. "Not really know. It's just a feeling. This world, or at least this Japan seems a little less nationalistic than the one I remember. Just a feeling."

The scary man nodded. "The runner said the same thing. According to him there is a trend towards a higher degree of openness."

"How many," Noriko began, "times has he transited?"

"He says he can't remember."

That stunned her. "Not even a guess?" she tried.

"Hundreds of times."

"Hundreds of… how old is he?"

"We don't know," Ai's father replied. "Things get strange with a runner. You transit late June and arrive early April the same year. It's like a short jump backwards in time, well apart from transiting from one world to another."

"You mean he could have spent several years reliving spring 2017?"

Ai's father nodded. "He probably did as well. At least he spent many decades in the twenty first century. Maybe a hundred years in total."

"When was he born?"

She got a genuine smile in return. "I waited for you to ask that question. 1937 in a world very different from this one. No world war two among other things."

This time she shuddered. The very thought of being disconnected from reality scared her more than she would have thought. Every deviation, every single one experienced by someone who transited meant that reality was no longer what it was supposed to be.

Somehow she had learned to accept the small changes Urufu and Kuri told her about, and a few not so small ones, but a reality where the most important event of the last century had never occurred made that reality entirely alien.

"I feel sorry for him," she finally said. "There's no longer a home for him."

"There never was," the scary man said. "He was probably mentally unstable long before he transited the first time. The ancient boy waiting to transit in Sweden is no longer sane in any sense of the world."

"What do you mean?"

"He's mentally broken. I wouldn't consider him a functioning human. He's a repository of memories with a manic need to transit to the next world."

Noriko wanted to throw up, but with the support from Urufu's firm grip on her hand she managed by merely shuddering once again.