Eight Decades, Eight Lives, One Left (Nine Lives, Princess Blade, Karma, Akkoro, mention of Braindrain)
“Alright! Are you ready?!” a slim middle-aged Japanese woman in workout attire with a sweatband around her forehead, holding back her dyed blond hair, shouts from inside of the small TV. It’s perched on a small dresser, the centerpiece of a one-room apartment. Two rooms, if you count the toilet. Rustic, blue and white striped wallpaper covers the walls, except in places where it’s peeling. There’s a leak somewhere that drips, and drips. It’s become soothing, like a metronome.
“You bet I am. Give it to me, Emi!” imitating the posture of the woman in the video, the old man hops from one foot to the other. He’s dressed similarly, wearing a blue tracksuit and sweatband.
The workout video kicks off alongside today’s song, displaying direction symbols on the screen as cues, while the host Emi shows off some impressive dance moves. Sentaro follows each move, feeling his old bones and ligaments limber up for the day. Perched on top of the small picture-box, a motion detector produces satisfying sound effects each time Sentaro successfully pulls off one of the dance moves.
As the song draws to its end, Emi leads her viewers through a set of cooldown exercises, light steps back and forth to bring down the acid buildup post-workout. Sentaro puffs, sweat running down his face. “Fitness is the key to a long, healthy life! See you tomorrow, fitfans!” Emi signs off with a peace sign at the camera, before the show transitions into a commercial. It may be old-fashioned, but Sentaro prefers cable television to those on-demand services. Keeps him honest with his daily morning workout.
Throwing his sweatband into a laundry bin across the room, Sentaro leans down and flicks off the television. On his way to the bathroom to clean up for work, he passes a bookshelf full of hefty textbooks. He’d penned them himself. They were a part of his quirk therapy sessions in the Raven’s Nest Prison, down in Nagasaki. It’s a private facility, run by a generational hero family. He’d been lucky that the past two generations of Karasu took the rehabilitation of prisoners seriously, if not softly. Lots of forced labor, mainly farming to reduce the prison’s food costs and ship surplus food to food banks.
Sentaro had become reliant on his quirk in his early life. Funny to think of forty years as early, now. In the absence of legal quirk use upon release, he would lack many basic skills that would be needed to live a civilian life. So he spent those years under the watchful eye of his therapist, Iwai Takeo, using his quirk in an authorized therapeutic setting to record texts of all the knowledge stored dormant inside of him. Then he learned important skills like cooking and doing his taxes. “Never forget the taxes,” Iwai-san always said. “They never forgive the taxes.” Now, the textbooks Sentaro had penned, typed and printed had become the basis from which he built his lesson plans.
In front of the bathroom mirror, Sentaro looks into his face, lined with the long years. Shooting himself a set of finger guns in the mirror, he winks at himself. “Not lookin’ too bad, for an old guy.” After a quick shower, he combs his hair and gets himself presentable. With a towel wrapped around his waist, he sits on the futon that folds out to double as his bed. Grabbing his phone from the nightstand, Sentaro checks his emails.
Mr. Ishizawa,
The Atsushi Adult Hero Education Program regretfully informs you that-
Sentaro stops reading there, letting out a sigh. Denied entry again. It’s no big surprise, even if they saw fit to trust him, he’s a man far past his prime. The attempts to regain legal use of his quirk are all too blatant, like an addict scrabbling for one last taste. All those lives, all that knowledge, the power to flip a switch and see the world through a genius’ eyes, inaccessible. Trapped within his own mediocre mind. While slumping forward, he looks down at the anklet on his leg, a black box with a tiny, blinking blue light. It would read the subtle biorhythm changes that come with using his quirk. A breach of his release conditions would result in going back to prison. Probably for the last days of his life.
Switching to his messaging app, he reads Amahagene-san’s morning check-in.
Princess_Blade: Finished your morning workout?
LastLife: Just finished. You?
Princess_Blade: Yes. Meet at the bus station?
Sentaro responds to the question with a thumbs up.
It’s a pact of theirs’. Another way of keeping themselves honest. Amahagene-san’s response is unusually curt this morning, though. Flexing his fingers around the phone, Sentaro wonders if something is wrong. He lies back on his futon, finding his thoughts turning to the past. The day their game of cat and mouse came to an end.
Four Decades Ago…
A middle-aged man, then. So young. Still in his prime, if at the end of it. On his knees, before a sunset-shadowed shrine, Sentaro awaits his own personal Sword of Damocles. His eyes are closed, but he can hear the tapping of her sandals on the stairs of the shrine. “Nine Lives,” the Princess Blade’s voice reaches him, but she stays far enough away his aura could not reach her. When he opens his eyes, he sees her. Tall, then. Imperious. Blades hung in the air to either side, and her face writ with suspicion. “What is your game this time?”
“No games,” the strain in Nine Lives’ voice gives her pause. He lifts his head, his shaggy hair- dark, and only peppered with gray- hanging in front of tear-stained cheeks. The mask of his bodysuit is pulled back, sagging like a hood behind his sweaty head. When he looks at her, it is not the cocksure defiance of an age-old phantom thief, the wry grin of a world-renowned heister. It is the tired frown of a failure. “I’m turning myself in.”
“Why?”
Why.
“In my thirty years in this life,” the tired man states, “I stayed true to one rule.”
Her guard unbroken by his sorry state, the Princess Blade meets his eyes with a stern glare of her own. Never dismissing him as a flight risk, even as she coolly responds, “You started that young?” The dry sarcasm in her town betrays that she knows plenty who started down a dark path younger. Darker paths, even. It was the Chaos Era. Stealing to survive was normal for a street kid.
With a faint smile, Nine Lives looks back to those times. “I lived long enough to get very good at it.” Stole enough lived lives to make a role play of being very good at it, at least.
Nine Lives’ last heist was supposed to be big, a statement. Like any of his other heists, the art of the act itself was the goal more than the treasure. Stealing the constitution of Japan. This time, however, he’d chosen his crew poorly. When things went sour, they ignored his orders, took hostages. And…
He’d tried to stop them. Take back control of the situation. Turns out, losing all of your competence doesn’t have the greatest effect on trigger discipline.
“I made a promise,” he says, after making the Blade sit through his silence. “I made a promise to my daughter, that no one would get hurt while I did my work. And if that ever changed, I would hang up the suit for good.”
Folding her arms, the woman’s eyes soften, for just a moment. But her blades remain steadfastly aimed. “You have a daughter?”
“She lives in Germany.” Thinking about her brings a smile to his face. It’s a matter of pride. For all his faults, Nine Lives had never once taken another lover. No matter the parts that called, the temptresses that he met in his international life of thrill. He may not have been much of a father, and he may not have married that girl, but quiet money through quiet routes made sure his family lived comfortably.
Maybe he would have, someday. Settled down and married her. Now that would never happen, because he could no longer bear to look her in the eye. “I made her a promise. So I’m turning myself in.”
Present Day
The last thoughts of the past flutter out the open window, while Sentaro pulls on his uniform shirt, shutting out the morning air’s chill. Part of him feels the same doubts that other members of the staff had met him with. Majestic most of all. That Sentaro tainted the Shiketsu uniform when he put it on. “You already have my answer,” he tells the empty room.
A cold metal blade slides up against Sentaro’s throat from behind. “That’s too bad,” the chameleon says, the cheer in her voice as cold as the dagger. Her hand shimmers, mimicking the colors of the surrounding room, but the blade is all too visible, all too tangible. “I was a fan, you know! Me and a whole lot of other little heisters grew up on stories of you. I was hoping the going-straight schtick was just that, but you really have lost it.”
“I’m just an old man now,” Sentaro insists, closing his eyes. “An old man like any other. Those lives are gone.”
“Pathetic,” the steel presses threateningly against his throat, then pulls away. Karma shoves him forward to his knees, and Sentaro does his best not to look like he caught himself too smoothly. “And after I put in a good word for you with the boss… oh well.” The faint outline of her shape walks towards the open window, hips and tail swaying behind her. “Stealing Nine Lives’ last life… I thought it might make a great story if you had some backbone left in you. But there’s no glory in putting down a sad old man.”
In a moment, she’s gone. Rubbing his neck, Sentaro stands and goes to the window, closing it behind her. The Night Parade. As if he would deign to dirty his name associating with those killers. A thief with a body count is nothing but a failure.
He’s smart enough to keep those thoughts to himself, though.
Taking his bag, Sentaro exits his apartment and locks it behind him, descending to the front door. Another shape fades into view from his right, camouflaged against the wall. Akkoro falls into step next to him. She’d been assigned to check on him regularly and make sure he was following the rules. “Looks like you had a fun morning,” she leans forward, eyeing the faint line along his neck.
“Cut myself shaving. Good morning, Akkoro-san.”
“Mhm… good morning,” straightening her back, the woman looks around with disinterest while she escorts him out the door. It’s a windy morning, and she frowns while smoothing down her hair. “Well, just here for your usual reminder. There’s a lot of press riding on you staying shaped up, Ishizawa.”
“I’m aware.”
“Good! Have fun at school,” she pats Sentaro on the shoulder in a way that doesn’t feel at all friendly, and when he looks back, she’s gone. He’s surrounded by more psychopathic invisible women now than he ever had been as a professional thief.
As usual, Sentaro makes his way to the bus stop across from the Happibaga. It’s still a crumpled mess, but the bus route to Shiketsu runs like clockwork intact stop or no. He’s always sure to be a few minutes early. When it pulls up and the door hisses open, he steps up the clanking stairs and turns down the aisle. Near the back, a small woman who looks the opposite of her age raises a hand to invite him over. Sentaro sits in his usual spot, across the aisle from her. The Princess Blade’s surly granddaughter used to ride with them, arms folded at the back of the bus and staring daggers through the back of his head, but now he’s spared the psychic stabbing by her moving into the dorms.
“Are you alright?” Sentaro asks.
Amahagene-san laughs softly under her breath. “Don’t waste time, do you?”
“You seemed off today.”
The tiny woman sighs and sinks back into her seat. She speaks softly, as if afraid that the few other morning passengers will overhear. “Just starting to… really feel my age. I don’t know how many more morning exercises I have in me.”
Looking out the window at the passing buildings, a smattering of mismatched eras, Sentaro nods his head. “Me too,” he lies.
“Fibber,” she always could see through him. The only day he pulled the wool over her eyes was the day he stopped, and she could scarcely believe it. In a somber voice she asks, “Any news? It’s been a few days now…”
“No new information,” Sentaro answers grimly. In Germany, Rosemary is in the hospital with pneumonia, an epidemic hitting West Germany. The antibiotics haven’t been successful. It doesn’t look good, and with his near-global flight ban, Sentaro wouldn’t be able to go see her. Even if he could afford the flight. Even if flights weren’t under quarantine. The poor woman is all alone, her daughter- his granddaughter- missing for more than a decade now. Sentaro wonders if Zyra, wherever she is, knows what state Rosemary is in.
Right now, Sentaro is waiting on a response from the hospital about a video call.
Shiketsu comes up ahead. Sentaro steps down from the bus first, and he helps Amahagene-san over the gap to the curb. “Have a good day,” they exchange cordially, parting ways as Sentaro heads for the Support Course building.
One of the most modern-looking buildings on campus, with tall and long glass windows making it open and bright inside. But there’s a sterile quality to it, that comes with the sciences. Sentaro enters the main lecture hall, rows of student seating climbing towards the back wall. The three years of C-class have a single homeroom and attendance call, followed by splitting off to their varied, individual programs, often in specialized facilities.
Picking up the attendance sheet, Sentaro looks out to see if anyone is still trickling in. “Good morning, Shiketsu. Let’s see, do we have an Akiyama…”