Chapter Twenty-Six – So That Is How It Feels

Chapter Twenty-Six – So That Is How It Feels

“The problem with tiddy bars and clubs isn’t that no one loves tiddies. Everyone loves tiddies. The problem is that they’re a product of a repressed society. You go there to see something that’s magical and spectacular and cool.

But what’s the point when I can stream live 4K mommy milkers in every shape and colour and bounciness right into my retinas?”

–Economist Buck Downs on the collapse of the sports bar, 2038

***

I slipped out of the class, very aware of the samurai slinking along a step behind me. Nya was being quiet, which was an excellent time to look up what I was dealing with. A browser opened in my augs, and I typed in Nya… which wasn’t helpful. ‘Nya the Japanese Samurai’ did bring up a lot more.

There was this one ancient site, built like, twenty years before I was born, called Samuwiki. It was one of those editable wiki-forums, partially online and partially embedded on the mesh. It was also a hot mess of old forum rivalries, stupid mod power plays, and the usual old-internet shitfuckery.

Nya had a page.

I opened a second tab, then looked at my own page. It was… surprisingly sparse? Like, there were a few pictures, and a rough time-line of the stuff I’d done as a samurai, but other than a subsection about shooting the mayor, and what I’d done in Burlington and with the Big Gun, there really wasn’t much.

Those internet nerds needed to get their crap together and populate my page a little more.

Or… maybe not. It might be for the best that there wasn’t too much stuff online about me.

Nya’s page was way, way longer. There were sections with a small marker indicating that they’d been translated from their original Japanese, which made sense. Even ignoring those, she had a long track record. I looked for an estimated time since she became a samurai and didn’t find anything exact, just a rough guess from the people on the forum that placed her debut at around 2051.

That was six years back.

Her record was pretty good past that. Lots of appearances in incursions around South-East Asia, not just Japan, and she had a bit of a cult following spreading the joy of… cat ownership. That being people that claimed that they were owned by their cats, which was weird but probably harmless?

“So, uh, you’ve been a samurai for a while?” I asked.

Nya’s face lit up as I actually addressed her. That was kind of weird. She was in the business for way longer, and was probably at the ‘orbital bombardment is easy’ stage of shit. She didn’t need to get excited on seeing me.

“N’yeah!” she said. “I’ve been one for a long, long time now! It’s tough, but it’s also a satisfying job.”

I nodded. “And… why are you here? Yeah, I know, to make friends, but really? People don’t fly around the globe to just poke in and chat. I’m sure there’s a dozen newbie samurai around Japan that could use some help.”

“Fewer than you might think, actually,” she said. “But yeah, there’s a number of them. But do you know how many have links to the Sunwatchers?”

“The… the Sunwatchers?” I asked. I glanced down at my arm, the metal-y one. It was from my Sunwatcher Technologies catalogue. One of the only Catalogues that I’d tiered-up. “The weird aliens?”

“Weird!” Nya exclaimed with a gasp so theatrical it had to be fake. “They are majestic beings! Big and strong, and very fuzzy-looking!”

“I can genuinely not tell if you’re messing with me, or if this is going to eventually lead to something serious,” I said.

Nya shook her head. “Nope! Nothing serious. I just like Sunwatcher stuff. Did you know that you can buy videos of their plays? Even with really good translations, they don’t make any sense.”

“They have plays?” I asked.

“They don’t have TV!”

“Really?” I asked. It struck me as weird that an advanced alien race that could pop out massive warmechs and top-end prosthetics didn’t have TV. “Not even movies? Do they have like, books?”

“Sorta!” she said. “They’re like scrolls, and they come in little wooden boxes with a twisty handle on the side to scroll through.”

“That sounds stupid,” I said.

“It’s cute!”

I blinked, then eyed Nya from the corner of my eye. “So… did you really come all the way here just to gush over aliens that we both happen to be tangentially connected to?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Nya grinned, and I knew then that she was full of shit. “Do you know how to play any instruments?” she asked. “Or sing?”

“No?” I said.

“Do you want to learn?” she asked.

“Also no. What’s that about?” I asked.

Nya waved her arms around, then made motion as if… playing a guitar. “I play! And sing pretty nice too! There’s a Colombian ronin called Panterra who has a panther theme. He’s a drummer, and there’s a ronin from East Timor called Kitty Civet who plays the babadok and the flute, at the same time!”