Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 982: Welcome to Japan

The wheels of the Circle’s plane touched Japanese ground at midmorning, and Kaiden’s family heard the welcome before they saw any of it.

A long, rolling roar came through the hull while they were still taxiing, dim and directionless, like weather happening somewhere nearby.

Emily’s palms found the window band again. ”Sarah. Sarah!”

”That,” Sarah whistled, ”is a lot of people.”

The hatch swung open, the airstairs locked into place, and the roar arrived at full weight.

At the foot of the stairs, in ceremonial white and silver with a threaded crescent at her collar, stood the High Shrine Maiden of the Moon-Thread Lineage.

Yunohana Tsukikage bowed to Kaiden, ceremonially, and held it while the cameras drank.

”Welcome to Japan,” she said in English, rising. ”Your mother sends her regards. I was advised not to pamper you needlessly.”

Kaiden looked past her at the red carpet, the honor guard holding both its sides, the arch of flowers, and the folded line of white-gloved staff.

”I can see you took the advice to heart.”

”I’m glad we agree,” Yunohana said serenely.

...

In Washington it was nine at night, and the Federal Bureau of Awakened Affairs had stopped pretending to go home.

The Director stood in front of the wall screen in his shirtsleeves, tie hanging open, watching a Japanese airfield glitter in the dark of his own office. His lunch still sat on the credenza where the phone call had found it.

On the broadcast, a woman in ceremonial white bowed to Kaiden Grey, and behind her a nation rolled out everything it had.

”Sir.” An aide leaned in from the doorway. ”State is asking again whether we had any advance-”

”Out.”

Along the bottom of the feed, a network chyron did the day’s work in one line: KAIDEN GREY DEPARTS AMERICA AMID QUESTIONABLE FEDERAL PRESSURE.

An ocean away, on a gravel lot, his audit team was guarding boxes of receipts in an empty building. The coffee, Pratt had reported, was acceptable.

...

The crowd was real, it was far away, and both of those facts were somebody’s careful work.

Security had drawn its line hundreds of meters out, past the far taxiway, and the observation terraces beyond it were packed solid. The noise came off them in long rolling waves that crossed the whole field.

”Signs,” Emily reported from the middle of the group, glued to the view. ”Hundreds of signs. That one says welcome home, Eclipse. We just got here, how is it already home?!”

”Hot Asian babes in cosplay!” Leia had found the terraces’ true payload. ”Horns! Red paint! There’s a whole row of Calypsos! There’s a Bastet section, look at the veils, the accuracy is insane-”

Sarah counted the uniformed line standing between the carpet and the terraces, and understood what she was looking at.

A government had mounted a security operation so that thousands of strangers could stand at a fence and be heard, yet nobody was allowed close enough to pose danger to them. A careful balance.

Near the front of the stands, a cluster of kids had cardboard axes over their shoulders and red paint up to their elbows.

Calypso spotted them, planted her feet, and waved her tail at them in a slow, unmistakable arc.

The terraces went up all at once.

Bastet had assumed the chanting was for Kaiden. It was always for Kaiden, wherever they went, and she begrudged him none of it.

Halfway down the carpet, her ears turned before she did. The syllables coming off the far fence had a shape to them, and the shape was her name.

She stopped walking.

A thousand strangers in gold veils and cat ears were calling for her, in a country that had made her a person before breakfast. The Manifestation of Dominion stood very still on the red carpet and let it reach her.

Then she raised one hand to the terraces, and held it up until the sound doubled.

”They know your name, kitty!”

”Naturally,” Bastet said, and her voice was not entirely level.

...

High in the Awakened Association’s headquarters, the Chairman’s office had one screen lit and two people watching it.

Grace stood with her arms folded tight, her tablet lying dark on the desk behind her. She had found out from the same broadcast as the rest of the planet. That was the part she kept arriving back at.

”We fought for him,” she said. ”You went before the committee. I put my name in his corner on a public platform, with a badge on it. And he boarded a plane and told us nothing.”

The Chairman watched the honor guard present arms to Kaiden’s family and let a long breath out through his nose.

”If he had warned us,” he said, ”what would you have had to do with it?”

Grace opened her mouth, and the answer got there before any argument did. Report it. Route it. Put the departure on a form where the bureau could read it.

”He didn’t distrust me...” It came out worse than the fury had. ”He protected me?”

”...” The Chairman said nothing to that, but his silence was all Grace needed.

”So that I don’t have to choose between our relation and duty...”

Before she had shut the tablet off, the platform’s watch-along had been running with millions in the chat, and her Verified Supporter badge had scrolled past among the rest. The Chairman had seen it. He had said nothing about it.

”What a terrible blunder,” he grumbled instead, to the woman beside him. He was visibly furious with the government’s latest acts himself.

He shook his head. ”Time to enter panic mode.”

On the feed, a red demoness waved her tail at a fence full of children dressed as her.

...

The motorcade nobody had announced came up the service road at a modest speed, and the Circle’s staff straightened half a second before the doors opened.

Even Yunohana turned.

”Oh, you’re kidding,” Sarah breathed. ”That’s the Prime Minister. Of Japan. At the airfield. In person.”

The Prime Minister of Japan came down the carpet with his security detail working hard to look calm, and he was smiling well before the cameras found his angle.

”Mr. Grey.” He offered Kaiden his hand. ”Welcome. Forgive the ambush. Some welcomes should not be delegated.”

”Happy to be ambushed when it’s like this.” Kaiden took the hand with a grin. ”I must admit, this is a real surprise.”

The prime minister... Here to shake his hand upon his landing in his nation?

Kaiden knew he was a big shot, he held no doubts about his value. But as the USA had just displayed, that didn’t mean these old, political bodies were ready to act like that.

Just like his tanned lover, he, too, was impressed by the gestures they extended toward him and his family.

”Haha!” The Prime Minister laughed softly at that. ”Imagine our surprise when you accepted the invitation.”

”Well... I heard the food alone is worth the flight.”

”It is. We know you and your family favor Japanese cuisine from your streams. We hope to not disappoint.”

Kaiden looked around the grand welcome and chuckled. ”I somehow get the notion you won’t.”

The handshake photograph took eleven seconds, and both men smiled through every one of them. The flashes ran the whole length of the carpet.

”That photo is going in textbooks,” Leia whispered. ”And I’m in the back of it.”

...

The Oval Office was dark except for the television.

The President of the United States watched the eleven-second handshake with his jacket still on and nobody left in the room to perform for.

He knew the choreography by heart. The warm grip, the held smile, the angle open to the primary camera bank. He had run the same play at his own signing table, and it had cost him a table, a pen, and a contract Kaiden Grey read at his own pace in front of the world.

The Prime Minister of Japan was running it with a borrowed star, on a stage American paperwork had built for him.

The crowd took up the chant again, and the broadcast microphones carried every syllable of Kaiden’s name into the Oval Office. The President listened to about four seconds of it, then found the remote and put the sound away.

”Get me the routing on the Bureau’s expanded order,” he said to the aide by the door, without turning around. ”Who drafted it, who signed it, who asked for it.”

”Yes, Mr. President.” The aide was already moving.

On the muted screen, the fireworks Japan had saved for the taxiway opened in full daylight, red and gold with no sound at all.

The President of the United States stood in the dark of his own house and watched a foreign country welcome Kaiden Grey on its soil.