Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ Valley Quest ❯ Valley Quest: 1 ( Chapter 1 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Valley of Love or At Least Legal Marriage

[Tanya][SNAFU][Sakura Quest]

Chapter 1

 

Somewhere West of Sendai, in an interior valley of Honshu, Japan, there is a series of communities loosely affiliated and good at keeping secrets from outsiders. It is South of Akiba prefecture. In the north end on the East side of the valley, there’s a village without good cellphone reception, though it has wifi at several spots, including the temple dedicated to bears and the miko who lives with a tame one. The bears talk. Some can even write, despite lacking a proper thumb. This is not known outside the village.

On the West side of the valley and a few miles south, there’s a failing village with a decent number of active rice farms where the combined elementary and middle school is down to one room, and the teacher is the older sister of the youngest student. Most of the parents in the village are rice farmers and stay pretty busy. It’s a safe place so the kids are allowed to wander around and enjoy the peaceful environment. A local boy recently died after having a heart attack trying to save a girl from what he apparently believed was an oncoming truck-kun but was just a slow moving tractor some distance away. His parents were embarrassed and nobody talked about him. The only business of note is a candy store run by a classmate of the teacher, and the two hang out sometimes and commiserate with each other at the lack of men to marry.

South of this is another agricultural village with a general store at the base of a narrow valley. That valley’s fields are planted in carrots. The single-lane dirt road leads up to a large pond where UFOs are often spotted, a large modern architectural house, and stone steps leading up the mountain to a shrine, often visited by couples seeking fertility or other blessings. The old man who runs the shrine never seems to get any older, and there’s always been an old man running the place. Lately his grandson and several young ladies have moved in and begun helping at the shrine and farming the land. It’s a busy place, though not many of the carrots seem to sell locally. The village at the end of the canyon, on the edge of the valley is busy, and its most famous resident is a boy troubled by frequent accidents, though he’s apparently related to the shrine family, as are most of the villagers. They were able to trace their roots back over 1000 years.

The treasure of the valley was near the only town. It was a bit of a white elephant, a wild and slightly expensive effort to create a commercial tourist draw based on a Mexican folk tale called a Goat Sucking Lizard, or Chupacabra. They had a fantasy castle built from fiberglass and brightly painted, various signs, tours, and a pond where the chupacabra was allegedly sighted “not long ago”. The town had a high school, properly attended, several restaurants, a convenience store, a motorcycle shop, a tractor store, a seed and feed store, and a new German café run by a cheerful and eccentrically wealthy young woman from Chiba with a ridiculously tall ahoge.

At the south end of the valley, thirty miles away, was a larger lake where a genuine tourist attraction floated, an actual flying saucer. After its arrival 20 years earlier it hadn’t moved or tried to contact anyone, or did anything at all. The locals made it a national tourist registered site and UFO fans came and stared at it, or tried to contact it with various radio bands, for a fee to cover “insurance premiums”, which mostly went to sign upkeep and the tourist board wages. Not having done anything all this time, just floating up there a few hundred feet up, it was kind of a boring attraction and there weren’t that many tourists coming to see it these days. The nearby visual telescope observatory was barely operating since the light from the UFO was actually interfering with getting good pictures of the stars, something called Light Pollution. The more interesting bit was the poor JSDF assigned to the Missile Trucks on the mountainside west of the UFO, near this observatory, on standby in case it commits a hostile action. Not that anyone who had ever seen a Gojira movie would expect that to work. Missile trucks are always useless. Everybody knew that.

My arrival here was a result of my efforts through the Gate coming to their inevitable and sudden betrayal, namely unpaid invoices from the Diet funding the invasion of another planet through the gate planted in downtown Tokyo. They “forgot” to pay me, and stole a four hundred carat diamond I’d been lawfully paid by a local tribe for an extermination quest I personally completed… and that was that. They owed me something to the tune of 60 million yen, and counting by interest. So I stopped working for them till they returned my property and paid me back wages. I moved here to this very quiet place with nice people. Around here spies really stand out. My husband and I were also expecting our first child in coming weeks, so I wasn’t fit to fly missions right now, anyway. Niisan continued his work with the JSDF and the diplomats were all up in arms over Itami shooting the crown prince the emperor over in Falmart. Wasn’t it obvious that guy was the hero? Heroes do things like that. It wouldn’t matter that he violated orders. If the Diet had had its way and sufficient warning they would probably have ordered me to allow all those invaders into Tokyo without a shot fired by Japan so they’d have an easier time of drumming up support for “studies” and “diplomatic missions” with the ignorant screwheads on the other side of the Gate, rather than just wipe them out like I had. Thinking about made me angry, and that upset the baby so I pushed it down and got back to roasting coffee beans to the correct darkness by scent and effort. It is an art, and I am good at it, because good coffee matters. After all, its My coffee shop, and my ahoge.

Ah, my name is Tanya, or more properly Komachi. I am a thrice reincarnated (that I remember) person, male in my first life, female in the last two. I am married to my sweet husband Taishi who my brother still insists on calling “Bug” out of spite for defiling me in wedlock and filling me with child. Hachiman has always been a sharp tongued and jealous malcontent, but we’re all gifted with something. I doted on my brother when we were kids, and I felt bad for him when he went through his anguish chuuni years, but he eventually found love and had to give up on his unrealistic dreams of becoming a house husband. It’s not like he was a Yakuza in a marriage with a Yukuza princess to prevent a war, even if he looks like one. And acts like one. No, he served in the JSDF, which found itself in an active war and with an opportunity to access a bunch of resources through a somewhat inconvenient dimensional gate that ran from Ginza 6-Chome, outside my favorite bookstore, to another Earthlike planet with various semi-human monster people and run by a human dominated Roman legion empire that considered slavery a convenient way to solve their labor problems for the last 2000 years. Naturally, they were corrupt and evil. This was not helping my calm. I relaxed my mind and completed the roasting process, letting the beans cool and the smell fill my shop.

I struggled with war in my last life, a sort of world war not found in this place. Like the first world war, only with magic added. There were trenches and artillery and enemy flying mages who hunted me. It was not a nice time. I killed a lot of people. Because of that lifetime in Europe, I speak several languages fluently beyond my native Japanese, including German, Polish, Norse, Swedish, English, Latin (very badly), and Etruscan (don’t ask). My Bulgarian is quite terrible, but it’s a hard language to learn.

In this life, once the Gate opened in front of me I found myself slapping around Roman-like people who were completely outclassed and too stubborn to have the sense to capitulate. This required larger and more precise demonstrations of power, but that’s a story for another time.

Here? In this peaceful place? I made coffee. Really good coffee. The kind my brother would dream of if he could ever stop auto-sugaring his into caffeine laced syrup. Max Coffee is his preference, but I find it utterly disgusting. My womb pulsed with a kick from my baby boy from the inside. A few more weeks and he could breathe the free air of a peaceful Japan.

My coffee shop was getting its weekly ladies visit. They jokingly referred themselves as the Orbital Gun Association. I allowed them their preferred display, which I stored on the shelf for them. One of the ladies wore a headband. Another had very long light blue hair and looked about 12. Having fought a war myself, while I was smaller than her, I did not give her a hard time. Another was a spacey looking blonde who carried a wooden stick around tucked into her hair to keep it up. It was always the same stick, so either an ornament she really liked or some other reason. Her husband wore glasses and worked at the pottery on the edge of town, making pots and minding several children. She was currently gravid like me, probably due around the same time.

The last one was a schoolgirl with a frequently serious demeanor, married to a local farmer who ran a side business home canning the local fruits into jams and jellies and preserves, which are not the same thing no matter what you’ve been told. No seriously, they aren’t. He sold them online and mail order, and made decent money.

“Let our meeting come to order,” said Chise, looking young, fragile, and delicate. She and her husband had been trying for children for years now. They refused to give up. The ladies sat with tea or coffee I’d prepared for them and some of the confections I preferred. I had been forced by necessity to become a chocolatier, including the special Ice-9 chocolates required for tempering. They aren’t Ice-9 of course. They do have a different crystal structure which affected their hardness and melting point, however, and that requires this seed chocolate to convert stirred molten chocolate into actual candy making chocolate. It is the step which causes most girls trying to express their love for the boy they like to go wrong. To this day I cannot convince Yui to do this step. It is a good thing my brother can cook for his extremely sweet, but somewhat incompetent at housekeeping, wife. She’s impossible to dislike. She’s just bad at this stuff.

I listened with half an ear while cleaning the espresso machine and the various Moka Pots I used for special drinks in my shop. It is not a big place. I only have three tables, and two of them are pushed together to serve this weekly gathering. After the Gate incident, there was weakening of the dimensional fabric and the local Japan, the local Earth, got a reputation for taking in people running from terrible fates. There were even an entire town of glass blowers and a spider tank on the South-East side of the valley, where there was good sandstone. They were making artisan glass, and had a shop down the street, run by a nice older lady. The tank girls mostly played bugles, though trumpets and French horns were becoming a favorite and I suspect that they’d form a band eventually. They wouldn’t be the first. A local boy adopted by a music master of the Shamisen had gone to nationals and took third, behind another local boy. He was good. His mytube videos were getting a lot of attention and ad revenue, to help pay for his upkeep. There would be an album licensed soon. His mother sang two songs on it, and I had no idea Enka could be that impassioned. I was impressed at her Jonkara Onna Bushi. Terrible personality, but great pipes.

The women shared their stories, some of them of war, or personal anger, and what they’d done to avoid reaching for their ultimate orbital weapons platforms.

“I miss the desert sometimes. So I read poetry, to calm myself, find my center,” said the headband woman. She was a former tanker, and had it parked in a barn at her place, where she and her husband raised rice, like so many. She read poetry, and American feminist with a good sense for aesthetics. I stocked her preferred books in my little reader-library and had some used copies for sale. She also had a combine harvester which helped with the farm operations and it ran without a driver, some kind of useful automation trick with voice activation. She called it “Bogie”.

“I like to sing. I’m not afraid of my orbital gun. It was a top 40 in Eurovision final back in 1996,” said the girl who was apparently much older than she looked. I could sense the magic coming off her, and she was strong, like me. “I even got Elvis to make a cameo when we went to visit the Prophet 6-0151.” Now she was just bragging.

“My household is becoming calmer, now the wedding was completed. We still get visits from foreign dignitaries, but most just want to pay respects and perhaps ask for a favor. It’s less chaotic that it used to be, and fewer explosions.” The girl with the light blue pigtails was sporting a wedding ring made of some kind of exotic hardwood and couldn’t stop smiling after a very long engagement. Her husband was a local carrot farmer. She sometimes showed a calm maturity which didn’t fit her small size, but that was not exactly uncommon. In my prior life I’d suffered from malnutrition and never fully developed into the woman I could have been. And then I got killed and ended up here with a much better life and a doting family. I think Being X was trying the opposite from his prior manipulated crises in hopes this would produce some form of faith. I had the idea that young-looking girl was some kind of royalty. She petted a strange cat with really long ears and long rear legs, like a rabbit almost. It was a weird breed, but friendly enough.

“Miaow mah meow, miaow myah meow mah meow!” said the cat-rabbit creature. The women looked at the creature like they were listening intently and then turned to Sasami for translation.

“She says big Sis Ryoko is a lot calmer now so she’s feeling kind of lonely. She follows Tenchi to the fields, but it’s not the same at the house,” explained the girl. Then she giggled at a memory. I could tell. I had days like that too. Newlywed syndrome. To be fair, their engagement was years long.

I finished up the preparations and saw some new customers arrive. A skinny girl with short blue hair the same shade as Sasami, a furious looking brunette with an armband, an awkward and seriously busty but timid woman being led by a guy in a suit which I realized was a school uniform.

“Is this the Orbital Gun Society?” asked the timid one.

“Association. Did you wish to join?” asked Chise, looking them over, eyes looking up and down the three women and the man.

“Would you care to order some coffee? Its fresh roasted,” I suggested. May as well make some money from potential guests, even if they were visitors from out of town.

“Ah… yeah. Kyon, make mine a mocha with caramel.”

“Black,” said the very quiet girl.

“Ah. Something sweet. With milk,” said the timid chesty one. She was even bigger than me, and I’m pregnant.

“A café americano then,” I suggested. She nodded uncertainly.

“Black,” said the young man. Ah. He stood out from the rest. They were all “not from around here”, though he gave off a Local God vibe really strongly, and was linked to the angry one somehow. I quickly ground some of the beans I’d just finished and made coffee and then espresso for their drinks. I poured the young man his coffee and handed him one of our local brochures from the Sakura girls.

“Real estate is really affordable here, and the rates for leasing a shopfront are quite reasonable,” I said to him without being asked. 

“Oh?” said the angry one, transformed into a wide smile. That was some amazing enthusiasm.

“Lots of people come here to look around and see if their unconventional lifestyles will work here. We’re very accepting of strangeness.”

“We saw the UFO on the way up. Is that real? Not a hologram?” asked the excited girl.

“It’s real, but it never does anything. There’s some girl in the village there who yells at it, says ‘I hate you, space ship!’ really loud every couple days. The police say she’s harmless, but don’t engage just to be safe.”  

“That sounds like good advice,” agreed the lad. Apparently his name was Kyon. Like the song.

“Resting. Long trip,” said the really quiet one, sipping her coffee. She had picked up a book and was reading the novel in her hands. Looks like I would make a sale today.

“Ah, well you would know. Thanks Yuki,” he said, turning back to me. The girl blushed behind him at the informal use of her name. What a sweetheart.

I finished mixing the Americano and placed it on the bar in front of the timid brunette. She carefully picked up and sipped, making a pleased sound which made Kyon blush this time, eyeing her with evident appetite. Yeah, I could see that.

“There’s also motels in town. All of them are good. And some boarding houses for those who want a longer stay, though they can be picky about what customers they accept. Spooky Side is that way,” I said pointing at a nearby manor house with a traditional open courtyard. I handed them a couple brochures for accommodation. I finished producing the caramel mocho for the genki girl, who proceeded to gleefully pronounce it delicious. The Orbital Gun Association waited, watching these newcomers and eventually the guy moved the table over and I helped bring some chairs to place around it, boosting my strength with magic so I wouldn’t strain myself.

“Have I see you somewhere before?” asked Kyon.

“I just have one of those kinds of faces,” I said and turned back to my counter, leaving the junior god staring at my back.

“So, introductions,” said Chise. She introduced herself as a wandering veteran of foreign wars, which was literally true. She also ended them. Her husband doted on her, which was quite endearing. Sasami called herself a housewife, which was technically true. I’d visited their family shrine. Illusion magic wasn’t hard to see through, and it wasn’t hostile so I let things be. I spent the first week here investigating the rumors and the sites and found things very safe, what I’d been looking for on this side of the Gate.

“I’m an alien remote. Biological, but connected to a galaxy spanning consciousness,” said the quiet one.

“I’m god,” said the genki one. Kyon gave her a look, but it wasn’t a denial. Sasami raised an eyebrow.

“I’m a time traveler. And I have a beam weapon in my eye. If I forget to disable it, I shoot holes in things, like my ceiling, and my wall, and other things. I have to wear an eyepatch if I get tired because my control slips,” she said, on the verge of tears. Kyon hugged the busty girl. The goddess looked annoyed again.

“What about you?” asked Chise of Kyon.

“Oh, I’m nobody special. I’m just friends with everyone,” he said, completely oblivious to all the dropped jaws in the room, including mine. One of THOSE.

“Right. Well, you can sit in,” said Chise icily.

I shut my mouth and got back to cleaning. I topped up coffees for the ladies and brought out more chocolates, which the new girls enjoyed and even Kyon froze at the taste. I’m pretty good at making chocolate truffles. I have high standards. The ones back in Germany were excellent. The ones here were better. Hachiman may have his 108 skills, but I spent my time being a better cook.

My shop phone rang. I picked up.

“Café Germania,” I answered. Brand name is important. “Ah may I speak to Komachi Kawasaki?” asked an American voice in badly accented Japanese.

“Speaking. Would you like to order some coffees and pastries to go?” I asked.

“Could we speak at your shop?” asked the obvious spy.

“I’m sorry sir, but we’re at full capacity so take-out orders only. I have a special on Café Americano, one liter box, tray of 4 paper cups with lids, Okinawan sugar and local cows milk. Just $6.99,” I said in clear English. I had lots of practice with that language.

“Uh. Yeah. Sure. You take dollars?” he said, uncertainly.

“Of course. We’re international here,” I said in my chirpy voice. I waved my hands around with The Signal. I hung up the phone and started another pot of Americano, then laid out the bills for each lady. They insisted on paying for themselves, and didn’t quibble over the price of my chocolates. We’re a small town. Only a few hundred people here, and we’re twice as big as before I moved here. The Orbital Gun Association did not like dealing with foreign spies, and some tended to find it strained their tempers. Sasami opted to stay and keep the new visitors company while Chise and Honoka left. Honoka had apparently been though a lot of lives and the Gate opening up had really forced her to practice a lot of anger management. Some of her prior lives were really really angry women.

“Thank you as always, Mrs Kawasaki,” said the well spoken woman. The headband was glowing in an oval shape where a third eye would be.

“Please, have a restful day,” I urged her, meaning it. Her weapons platform came with her when she moved to this Earth. It was huge, even bigger than Luna’s, and visible with the naked eye on a cloudless night.

She left, a man and woman in black catching the door, staring at the woman.

“Sorry. Are we interrupting?” said the American Spy. The Japanese spy beside him, obviously an escort, face palmed at this obvious idiocy. The god and goddess, alien, and time traveler looked the two up and down. So did the princess. I figure her for a princess rather than a duchess or viscountess.

The door bell dinged as it swung open again. A Japanese man with a pleasant athletic build entered, holding the hand of a woman who should be called frumpy wearing baggy red sweats but made my nipples go erect and my eyebrows raise. I cranked up my mental defenses and could see she was not able to control her effect. Ah. A Demi human. A local one rather than through the Gate. The Japanese spy sighed loudly.

“Ah… I’m sorry about this. The real estate office was closed. The sign had your number and a map to this address.” That explained a lot, and removed some of the potential implications. Chise was the local real estate agent. That was her office.

“She’s just gone back to her office a few minutes ago. You just missed her. Did you want some coffee?” I asked. “We have available seating.”

The spies looked around while the oblivious lovers mostly just looked at each other. Ah, wedding rings. A married succubus. They’d want something a little away from other people to keep down the unwanted visitors, but still close enough to enjoy the town and local shopping. So many stores were opening, a real boon for the town promotion girls. They tried so hard. Even had a Queen outfit for Chupacabraland.

I picked up my phone and rang Chise’s office. She picked up after the second ring, breathless.

“Trouble?” she asked after I identified myself.

“Not exactly. Business for you. They need a real estate agent. It’s an interesting couple.”

Chise showed up with her big Mitsubishi SUV, with the reinforced frame to handle her weight. She got a special chair here too. She weighed quite a lot. She was all smiles and greetings for the couple who were largely oblivious to the relieved spies.

“Ah, great. Thank you. Can you handle the rest, Agent Dee?” asked the woman.

“I’ll take it from here, Agent Smith.” They shook hands and she exited, dialing her phone quickly and purposefully heading back to the train station.

“Well, thank you for your assistance. Did you have that coffee?” he asked, holding up an American ten dollar bill. I made change for him from my leftover collection. We got a lot of interesting currency here. Not all from the same Earth.

I placed his order and some croissants baked down the street this morning in a waxed paper bag for him. It was humid and would make them go limp if it were regular paper. He thanked me, poured some coffee, tasted it and relaxed at last.

“So, this couple rates that much attention?” I asked. He looked at me, recognized me and harrumphed a little before answering.

“It doesn’t hurt to tell YOU,” he said in English. “She’s one of the more friendly non-hostile semi-demonic beings, and he’s managed to establish friendly relations with several species representatives at the school where they work. Unfortunately, their marriage has gotten her power out of control and they’ve been forced to resign and look for lodgings where her ability won’t cause as much disruption. Avoiding panics or crowds for the newlyweds was considered a priority till we could smuggle them out of the city and to here.”

“Wouldn’t a car have been easier?” I asked, eyebrow raised.

“Not exactly. She’s not well controlled. We had to reserve them an entire train car and lock the doors and stand guard with the air vents disconnected to the outside. We still got chased until we left Tokyo. They’re hoping that a house in the country would let them live properly and enjoy their new marriage. I had to take special pills for a week before I could get this assignment. It’s a great honor.”

I had to agree she was really strong. Kyon didn’t even notice multiple hexagonal shields protecting his table from the interloping couple who just left. Damn. They didn’t buy my coffee. Maybe next time.