P.E. going to top a groaning, heaving, dying luxury department store waiting for the storm that might actually end the Taishomei Jidai.
Takashimayanruins.
15 stories to the top and nothing going on. Perfectly groomed clerks all putting on appearances and polishing the brass. Trying to look busy; maintaining appearances. Outnumbered by mannequins in dramatically priced Prado and Salvatore Bellomo. But few pilgrim/cusotmers here only browsing on the sale sections on the 13th floor before perching themselves on the restaurants floors to eat and eat food that they’ve brought and prepared in advance.
Meanwhile, only a few feet above the world of nothing happening, the clouds gather around the neo-NTT building nearby, low rumbling thunder-knuckle cracks signifying the damage weather is going to do, all part of neo-G.O.D.’s massive conspiratorial plans to fuck up yet another one of P.E.’s seemingly aimless trips to Tokyo2.
So what exactly IS P.E. doing here? Superficially, he’s merely hungry and looking for something to eat (It’s all been timed in advance to coincide with the feast of Easter), but he can’t resist taking a slow escalator ride up and down again trying to capture the feeling, to have to sink inside.
Lingering. Hanging on. Lots of it. The goka na jyu-pun senso was just that: a gorgeous and decisive ten minute war. But the uncertainty of aftermath and the impossibility of resolution 7+ long years now.
Youna Youna is still gone: so far off any radar as to never have existed at all before. P.E. still half expects her to show up in times of crisis dramatic rescue, but the battle is mostly internal now, so even if he/she did arrive waving a toy gun in a dress made out of gold and silver luxury belts, there wouldn’t be much to do anyways. Sometimes, there are rumors of he/she appearing in the streets near Sakura-dori for only minutes at a time, but P.E. is OK with not even trying to search for her anymore. It would probably just be awkward anyways. And he’d prefer to be alone now because someone always wants something, needs something done. Surviving the jyu-pun senso only paid out in more responsibility.
Part of him knows how Col. Baldwin feels now. The never-ending search for the mystery frequency is P.E.’s now. Which means, when he’s back in fortress America, he will take the occasional sub-legal (but effective) mind-bender. Col. Baldwin famously discovered the Overtones that way, which lead to the creation of the Espionage Rejects, but for P.E. the recent effect was not nearly as revolutionary. Total sensory distortion expanded his mind and field of vision, but only in the physical sense; an aspect ratio that jumped from 4:3 to 16:9 mid-frame, but still playing the same old film. The fear is now that there is nothing but never-ending bio-chemical process and high signal to noise ratio out there. P.E. forever a spectator.
But the lack of revelation could be tip-off in itself. Col. Baldwin discovered that the mystery frequency was closely related to ill-defied concepts related to “love”, but what comes next will require a spectrum far wider and more demanding, prone to self-delusions and loss of control:
Emotions.
And then P.E. finds something to eat on the roof garden.
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