Part 1: The Promised Land of Eternity — 0: Same Bed, Different Dreams
Pale knew at once that he was dreaming.
He knew because his late wife, Sabia, was alive and breathing.
He was slumped over the desk in his study, and Sabia—nightclothes on, a blanket around her shoulders—was shaking him awake, worry written across her face.
"Honey, aren't you pushing yourself too hard?"
"Sorry. I got so absorbed I lost track of time."
As he said it, he nodded at the papers spread across the study desk, covered in a vast magical composition formula.
"Thanks to the hint you gave me, I've made real progress deciphering the Celestial Thunder Dragon's summoning formula. I got excited, and the hours just disappeared on me."
"You never change..."
What lay on the desk was the summoning formula of the Celestial Thunder Dragon, handed down through House Dragonheart for generations.
The formula the dragon itself had bestowed on the founder of the family was so intricate and immense that looking at it was like looking at a work of art. And Pale had not interpreted it alone. The help of his wife, Sabia Dragonheart, had been decisive. With Sabia—a brilliant mage and a scholar of magic—the dragon-summoning formula that had gone unsolved for ages was at last made real, if only imperfectly.
"Hehe. I'm glad I was able to help."
"I mean it. Meeting you was the greatest luck of my life."
Pale said it the way he always did.
He and Sabia had first met in a university library. Even there, Pale was ringed by women, and Sabia never so much as glanced at him. She was lost in a thick book. When she finally spoke, it was not to Pale at all, but to the book he had borrowed.
"If you're not going to read that because you're busy flirting, return it. I need it."
Unlike the other women their age, Sabia was plain to the point of austerity—a woman who wore not a trace of makeup. She was an oddity who cared more for books and magic than for men, cosmetics, or fashion.
I'm going to marry magic.
She said things like that out in the open. She was an exceptional mage and researcher, and one of the very few women who could look Pale in the face and remain unmoved. That, to him, was the appeal. Until then, the only person who had ever shown no interest in him was one rotten friend who happened to be gay.
Pale courted her without rest until at last they were husband and wife, and they swore to love each other forever. A superb scholar of magic, she also gave enormous help in constructing the Celestial Thunder Dragon's summoning formula, the great work of House Dragonheart. The nights the two of them stayed up together, happily picking magic apart, were memories of a deep and uncomplicated happiness.
"Someday, if we succeed in deciphering the formula completely, we might even be able to call the Celestial Thunder Dragon itself."
"I'd like that. And then you'll grant my request too, won't you?"
"Hm? What request?"
"The request to save our child."
Pale flinched and turned his head. His wife was standing where she had been, drenched in blood. She spoke as blood spilled from her mouth.
Pale woke with a shock like a gunshot to the chest.
A hideous nightmare. Sadly, the Sabia who had watched over him was gone. On Blood Christmas, while Pale was away, she had been brutally murdered by Irok Dehaja.
"Sabia... will we meet again someday, in the land of eternity?"
According to the scriptures, the souls of the dead went on to the land of eternity, and there they could meet once more. Pale was no devout follower of the Cross, but he wanted this one teaching, at least, to be true.
The first thing to do upon waking was to escape before my master woke. Dawdle for no reason, and the lust-crazed monster who owned me would rape me before the morning was properly underway. He was soaked in sweat from head to foot, as if caught in some strange nightmare, so I left him there and slipped out quick.
Not that escaping helped. This damned house had nothing fun in it. No game console. No comics. I couldn't begin to understand what my master even lived for.
If someone asked what the most important thing in life was, the answer was pleasure. In this godforsaken world where luck rules everything, if you don't at least grab some enjoyment, what are you living for? Pleasure first. Pleasure second. Pleasure third. The world, regrettably, will not let a person live on pleasure alone, and so the motto of Irok Dehaja was as follows.
Which was why the life of Irok Dehaja had been a freeter's life. I meant to live alone anyway, and this world, surprisingly, doesn't demand all that much money if you're only keeping yourself. A computer that can run the latest games, and the house I inherited—that was enough. Game at home until the savings ran dry, and when the money ran out, pick up a short-term gig or a little day labor and call it done. An easy life with nothing weighing on it. That was how I had lived.
Lately, that way of living had stopped working. The biggest problem was that dying under a false charge hadn't been the end of it. I had become Capra, a magical puppet. Since becoming Capra I couldn't play a single game I loved, my master raped me, and there was no end of getting my body thrown around. Meeting a dragon for the first time in my life had been fairly entertaining. Being roasted well-done, head to toe, by a dragon's breath had not.
"Ah... and I still have so many games I never finished..."
There were so many games that they, at least, had given me a reason to keep going in this joyless world. But if I thought about it, what had been more fun than any game was ordinary life in a far-off past. Back when my family was still alive. Back when I was nothing but a shy boy, and days that amounted to nothing in particular had been the greatest pleasure of all.
But in this world, luck is everything. My family was not chosen by fortune, and they all died. A stupid car accident. A tragedy—but in this country alone, a hundred people are struck and killed by cars every day. Unluckily, my family had simply been among that day's hundred. That was the whole of the story.
If they were alive, what would they say, seeing me as I am now? The dead, regrettably, cannot speak, and I don't believe in any afterlife, land of eternity or otherwise. The dead vanish. Only the living go on, shameless, through this world.
Before anyone quite noticed, three months had passed since the Blood Christmas wrought by Irok Dehaja, and a full spring had come to Fullerene. Fullerene, even so, had not yet washed the scars of Blood Christmas clean. Turn on the television and current-affairs programs were still looking back on that day; out in the city, at regular intervals, a chime sounded, and people paused to pray for the repose of the dead.
What a rotten bastard... this Irok Dehaja...
By sheer coincidence, a perfect namesake—from the name itself all the way down to the family register. A truly bizarre coincidence, and nothing more.
Three months had passed all the same, and my relationship with my master was unchanged. No. If anything, it felt worse. These days he no longer opened his mouth and beat me until his own fists bled. An improvement, then? It wasn't that I was a masochist. It was more that lately he looked at me like something he didn't even want to touch. Like a cockroach. Something you didn't want to go near at all.
We had rolled along the line between life and death together and even brought down a dragon, so I didn't understand why he had suddenly come to hate me more.
If you're going to hate me, at least stop climbing on me at night... What a strange man.
If he was going to hate me, I wished he would hate me cleanly. Or did he truly see me as nothing but a walking tool for getting off?
At any rate, we were at a photography set downtown. What had he called it? We had come to shoot the photograph that would serve as the new sign for the Dragonheart Office. The office, shuttered in all but name for a long time after Blood Christmas, was going back to work. I had no idea what wind had blown him into that choice. Maybe felling a dragon had given him back some pride as a mage.
A man stood before a pure-white backdrop struck by lights from every angle, and several people with cameras were shooting him in a frenzy. I watched from a rear corner the light didn't reach, body tucked away, perfectly still. Shy by nature, I wanted to melt into the dark and catch no one's eye, and even so quite a few glances flicked my way. Well, I understood them. An ordinary person can live a whole life and almost never see a magical puppet.
The man posing hard at the center of the lights and lenses was my master, Pale Dragonheart. Even before his skill in magic, my master had been considerably famous for his looks. That face had been famous since he was a boy, and when he came of age and it did not sour but bloomed further, the entertainment world, so the legend went, buried him in offers. A face hazardous to minors. A face even a dragon would take and leave the rest uneaten. Praise of that kind had always followed him around.
Now, after professionals had done his makeup and he had dressed to the nines and stood as a model, the women around him looked ready to die of delight. And he, for his part, seemed to quietly enjoy the way people reacted to his face. He winked in their direction, and the female staff shrieked and squealed, loud and undignified, forgetting their ages entirely.
"Haa. When is this going to end."
I, meanwhile, couldn't have cared less about my master's face or any of the rest of it. I wanted to go home and rest. I had never much liked crowded places. If I wasn't alone, I couldn't feel at ease. Which was why, since becoming my master's magical puppet, I had not once felt truly comfortable. Small wonder. I always had to be at his side, and at night, especially, I had to sleep with him. Personally, not being able to sleep alone stressed me far more than being forced into sex with him every night.
When the shoot ended, he came straight over to me.
"How was it?"
"How was what?"
"My photos. Do you think they came out well?"
My master said it with a smile. I tilted my head.
"Why are you asking me something like that?"
"Is there some reason I shouldn't?"
"You never used to ask me for opinions."
Lately, my master had been strange. He acted, on the surface, as if he meant to treat me well, and yet he was a poor liar, so I could feel that it was an act. A disgust and a fear he couldn't hide showed in the way he moved and in his eyes. Honestly, it felt bad. I would much rather have had the old master, the one who got angry out in the open and beat the hell out of me.
"You've been acting strange lately, Master."
"Have I..."
He scratched his head and gave an awkward smile. I could not understand, for the life of me, why he was like this.
As Capra had expected, Pale's feelings toward her had changed considerably—from blind rage to a fear he could not name.
To Pale, Capra, Irok Dehaja, had been the enemy of his family and his comrades, a sinner who deserved to be torn apart. Now he only looked like a monster whose nature could not be known. It was because of Sabia's last words: that the whereabouts of their lost child were tied to Irok Dehaja. There is a saying that when a child comes, the mother grows brave and the father grows afraid. It suited Pale now.
He no longer had the confidence to treat Capra carelessly, because his child's whereabouts hung on her. His comrades were all dead, and he had had nothing left to lose; now there was a child, and something that could be lost. If Capra took offense and killed the child of Pale and Sabia, Pale would be unable to keep his promise to his wife.
I have to coax this little monster slowly... and find out where the child is, no matter what...
That was what Pale thought. Unfortunately, there was nothing in Capra's head about the whereabouts of Pale's child. Capra did not even know what Pale's wife had looked like. There was no world in which her child was sitting in that memory.
Until now, whatever Capra said, Pale had let it in one ear and out the other, or beaten her mouth shut if it annoyed him. He decided he could not keep doing that.
One utterly useless sentence out of Capra might hold a clue about the child. From now on I need to have a proper, patient talk with that thing.
Nothing was as convenient as drink for drawing out what a person really felt. That night Pale brought out an expensive wine and poured for Capra.
"Do you care for drink?"
"I don't much like spirits that smell of nothing but alcohol. Beer and wine, I drink those fine. They taste good."
Capra drained the wine Pale had poured in rude, greedy gulps, emptying the glass at a whim. Watching, Pale spoke as if he could not believe it.
"Do you not know the first thing about manners with drink?"
"Regrettably, no one ever taught me."
"Isn't that usually a parent's place?"
"My family all died in an accident before I was even grown, so."
Capra shrugged. Only then did Pale recall what he had learned while looking into Capra's circumstances—more precisely, into Irok Dehaja's. The family.
"A traffic accident, wasn't it?"
"Bad luck. We had the misfortune of running into a man with no common sense, someone who put away three bottles in broad daylight and then took the wheel of a heavy truck."
Capra turned the empty wineglass round and round as she spoke.
"That day the whole family was supposed to go on a picnic. The light at the crosswalk turned green, and I ran on ahead to wait for them. Then—bang. Out of nowhere, a heavy truck came down on them."
"...... Regrettable."
"Well, it was more than ten years ago anyway. It doesn't matter anymore."
Capra held out the glass, and Pale refilled it. She drank it down again in gulps.
"In the end it's a matter of luck. Did you know? In the Azurik Free Federation alone, nearly a hundred people die in traffic accidents every day. My family just happened to be among them that day."
"You were about thirteen then?"
"Yes. That's right."
"Then after your family died, where did you grow up?"
"Oh, I just got passed from one relative's house to another."
"Relatives... Now that you mention it, there was something about that."
At Capra's words Pale took a sip of his own wine and spoke as if the thought had only just surfaced.
"I saw an article somewhere. Some of the people who lost family to Irok Dehaja burned with revenge and murdered Irok's relatives."
"Ah... that happened?"
Even hearing that his relatives had been killed, Capra's reaction was flat.
"If that's true, then... those people wasted their effort. I wasn't on particularly good terms with my relatives. Staying in their houses was misery, honestly. I was a thorn in their side."
"So you feel no guilt at all over their deaths?"
"The only blood that was precious to me was my family's. And I didn't kill the relatives myself, so there's even less for my conscience to chew on."
Capra had already lost interest in the subject and was looking out the window. Pale studied her with sharp eyes and got nothing particular for it. He only let out a sigh.
"You said you have no memory of December 25th of last year."
"Right. Not the 25th, and not the 24th either."
"So in the end you only remember up through December 23rd."
"That's right. And aren't you tired of this conversation? I think we've already had it about five times."
Capra shot him a sidelong glare. Whether she did or not, Pale pressed stubbornly on with his questions.
"Enough of that. Then tell me everything you remember from December 23rd of last year. Whatever comes."
"Hmm... You're digging quite a bit harder this time."
"Quiet. Quickly."
At Pale's urging, Capra frowned as if her head hurt and began groping back through her memory as far as she could.
"I had work that day."
"What work?"
"A factory part-time job. Making parts."
"From what hour to what hour?"
"Nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. I don't take hard gigs."
Even if the pay was poor, do work that was easy on body and mind—that was Irok Dehaja's motto. Living alone, there weren't many places for money to go, so he didn't need much of it.
"I'd already decided not to go in on the 24th, so after I got off I gamed all night. Looked at that way, I suppose I do have memories of the 24th. At least of the early hours."
"You gamed all night... What did you play?"
"Uh... that..."
Capra, who had been talking without a hitch, suddenly stalled. Unlike before, she avoided her master's eyes, and a cold sweat broke out on her head.
"I mean—do you really need to know which game? The important part is just that I was up all night playing."
"Suspicious... You don't trail off like that."
"Let's call it a request that my privacy be respected..."
"Shut up and speak."
It was the first time Pale had seen Capra try to hide something from him, and he was genuinely curious what that something was. All the more so now, when finding his child meant grasping at straws: he was desperate to know whatever she was concealing.
It might be something to do with my child.
What came out of Capra's mouth was an unexpected word.
"A TRPG."
"TRPG? What's that?"
"A tabletop role-playing game. You've never heard of it?"
"Hmm... I feel as if I have, somewhere..."
Pale knew, as knowledge, that a TRPG was the sort of game in which several people gathered and built a story together. He had never played one. TRPGs were a hobby for shut-ins; for a man like Pale, who had spent his life at the center of every room, it was already a wonder he knew even that much.
"Then why was that so hard to say? It's not as if you were hiding anything."
"Well, that's true, but..."
"Wait. If you played a TRPG, who did you play it with?"
"......"
Capra's mouth stopped again. Pale pressed, as if cornering her.
"I asked who you played the game with."
"Nobody. There wasn't anyone."
"What?"
"I mean... I did it alone."
As she said it, the white nape of her neck flushed red. Pale tilted his head.
"...... A TRPG is something you can do by yourself?"
A TRPG was a kind of role-play. Several people sat at a table, made their characters, committed to playing those roles, and built a story onward. By nature it was something done with others, and to do it properly you needed at least three.
"W-well, it wasn't completely alone. These days AI is advanced enough that you can have it play the roles instead of people."
"AI? So you played a TRPG with a computer."
"Something like that."
"...... So the night before Christmas Eve, you sat alone and played make-believe."
"I told you I wasn't alone."
Capra knew it was embarrassing; by now her whole face had gone red.
Seeing this unfamiliar side of her, Pale thought there was a fairly cute aspect to it—then immediately shook his head and drove the thought out.
Don't get attached. The one in front of you is that Irok Dehaja.
Once again he had gained nothing that mattered. Pale could only sigh.
That night, for the first time in a long while, Capra dreamed a dream from life—a dream as Irok Dehaja. It was of the time he first configured an AI for a TRPG.
"I want to play a TRPG. Make me three AIs that can play with me decently, and a game master."
The computer began its calculations, and before long put up a line in a cheerful tone.
Then, all at once, the AI's tone began to change.
Capra thought, all over again, that the thing was hopelessly childish, from the scenario down to the setting. At the time, though, changing the detailed parameters had been too much trouble, so he had decided to leave it as it was, and the story began.
Come to think of it, what was the scenario's title?
Until he woke, he could not remember it.