Categories > Anime/Manga > Death Note > Shinigami: Death of the Old World
“Ryuk?”
Rem had been waiting outside the massive store with the sun beating down on her for nearly ten minutes, and she was starting to worry. She tore the duct tape off her cheek-it didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore- and threw it away as she walked off the searing concrete and through the wall into the air-conditioned ‘Wal-Mart’. The apple display was right in front of her, but there was no sign of Ryuk. She walked up, down and through the aisles, but she didn’t see Ryuk anywhere in the grocery section, and he would be hard to miss, towering over the humans and incredibly black in comparison to the stark whiteness of the walls, ceiling, and floors …
“Ryuk? Ryuk?!” she called, but there was no answer, other than the continued muttering of humans about the freshness of eggs and the price of spaghetti sauce. A small knot of apprehension formed in Rem’s stomach as she ran out of the grocery section…still no sign of him. Rem’s wings shot out, and she flew around the store, scanning as she went…these ‘Wal-Marts’ were huge, and he could be anywhere inside it…at least, she hoped he was still inside it. Rem knew she couldn’t panic now…she had to keep a clear head if she was going to find him…if she were Ryuk, where would she have gone…? Frantically, she looked around as she flew, calling for Ryuk over the dull roar the humans were making...aha.
Rem flew into the electronics section, where several large-screen televisions were set up all over, blasting out sound, and in front of one of them, Ryuk sat laughing hysterically as a muscular man wearing tights hit another muscular man in tights with a chair, before climbing up onto the ropes bordering a square stage and jumping on him.
“Ryuk!”
“Huh? Oh, hey, Rem.”
“What are you doing here?”
“…I’m watching…WWE, apparently,” Ryuk said as a commercial came on.
Rem sighed with a mixture of relief and frustration.
“Don’t do that!” she said.
“Geez, Rem! Why can’t I watch a little TV while I eat my apples?”
“It’s not the TV; it’s you disappearing that I object to!”
“Oh, come on. I was only gone for ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes is more than enough time for the hunters to catch you. If you’re going to wander off, at least tell me beforehand so I don’t have to make myself sick wondering where you are!”
“Sure, ruin my fun,” Ryuk said with a good-natured chuckle. He swallowed the last of his apple as he got up. “Can I at least watch the end of this? The announcer said that the ‘thrilling conclusion’ will be on right after this last commercial break.”
“All right.”
“Wow, you agreed really easily this time.”
“I’ve learned the routine by now. I can either say no and listen to you beg, plead and wheedle until the program is over anyway, or I can not bother and just let you watch.”
“Oh…okay. Thanks.”
The two shinigami stood and watched as the commercial ended, and the wrestlers came back on and continued to beat each other up. There weren’t any discernable rules; so far as Rem could make out…she still didn’t understand what was going on, even as it ended.
“Why did the one in blue win?” she asked.
“Pinfall,” said Ryuk as soon as he was able to stop laughing. “It’s been a while…humans are the same as ever. Okay, I can tell you want to get moving. Let’s go.”
Ryuk followed Rem out of the Wal-Mart, and they both took to the air.
“So, where are you taking us this time?” said Ryuk.
“I don’t know, Ryuk. I’m not even sure where we are now. All that matters is that we keep moving.”
“Really? You have no idea?”
“Well, I know we’re not in Japan. It’s taking far too long to move from one side of this land mass to the other for that, most of the people are speaking English, and I know that the entrance to the human world tends to move. Other than that…it’s hard to tell, looking at the human world while you’re in it as opposed to looking down from a viewing hole…at least you can zoom out that way, and see the general shape of the land mass.”
“Well, according to that sign we just flew over, we’re in San Bernardino…that’s somewhere in North America, isn’t it?”
Rem’s eyebrows seemed to go up underneath the bandage on her forehead.
“What?” Ryuk asked.
“I almost forgot…that one time, when you wrote down fake rules in Light Yagami’s notebook…you can read and write English…”
“…Yeah. So?”
“Most shinigami only have a grasp of human languages to the extent that they can recognize characters in human names…not many can actually understand the humans’ written language, much less write it themselves.”
Ryuk shrugged. “It was something to do-you can only play so many games of death’s heads before it starts to get dull. It’s kind of interesting, knowing some human code.”
“That’s quite an accomplishment…your friends must be jealous.”
“They don’t know I can do that, but they probably wouldn’t care if they did. Actually, they’d probably make fun of me if they knew…”
“They shouldn’t. It’s not easy.”
“Whatever, Rem. I bet you can do it.”
“No. I can read a few simple English words, and sound out others, but I can’t write it with any proficiency. I’m much better with the spoken languages. They’re much easier to learn through watching humans than written ones, and until about a century ago, most humans weren’t literate in their own languages in the first place. My friends and I used to watch humans all the time…we never really got the appeal of gambling, and there wasn’t much else to do in the realm…”
“Who are your friends, anyway?”
“…Gelus was the last one. About two hundred years ago, it started to be that I’d go to see someone, only to find their abandoned death note down in the human world or in front of a viewing hole… I had no idea what was going on, but once I saw what happened to Gelus when he helped Misa, I figured it out from there. Is it just English you can read and write?”
“…Uh…no,” said Ryuk, looking strangely embarrassed, and avoiding her gaze. “Like you said, there wasn’t much else to do in the shinigami realm…I…I picked up a few more.”
“How many do you know?”
“Look, I know it’s weird. You don’t have to rub it in.”
“I’m not rubbing anything in. How many do you know?”
“…not that many. Just the ones that caught my eye, where some interesting stuff was going on…French, when that twenty-first Louis guy pissed a bunch of people off so they started beheading each other, and German when that Hitler guy tried to take over the world…and I picked up Japanese really quickly when I decided to actually go down to the human world instead of just watching…you know, while I was possessing Light. Really, it’s not that many, and I only did it because gambling for decades on end gets dull…I know it sounds weird and obsessive, but…”
“Not at all. It’s actually quite impressive. I’m surprised you don’t have a higher rank, if you can pick that up all by yourself.”
Ryuk shrugged. “I kinda slacked off whenever the old geezer had us do all that writing practice…,” he said, trying to sound indifferent…but his usual grin was starting to creep back onto his face. “When it’s just for fun, though…heck, I bet I can read and write just as good as a human who’s been doing it all his life.”
“Can you prove that?”
“What? Don’t believe me?”
“I believe that you’re literate. I’ve seen proof of it. But, as for the level you claim to be at…I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know you’re talented at stretching the truth.”
“Fine. I’ll prove it,” Ryuk said as he pulled a book out of the feathers on his shoulders.
“Where’d you get that?” Rem asked.
“Swiped it on the way out.”
“…Somehow, I didn’t picture you as the kind to steal a book…”
“I would’ve rather had a video game, but if took a console, I would’ve had to search around for batteries, and by the time I found them you’d probably just drag me out of there before I could find any decent games. This one looked kind of okay…I grabbed it on a whim, really. I didn’t expect to actually read it, unless I got really bored while we were flying.”
It was a paperback, and the image on the front cover was of a restaurant table with a pristine white tablecloth-the glass of water in the foreground had a drop of blood swirling around in it. Ryuk opened the book; on the back cover, the utensils were utterly disarrayed and the formerly pristine white tablecloth was smeared with blood.
“Which one do you want?” said Ryuk. “It looks like this is a collection of short stories…” *
“Which one do you think the cover is illustrating?”
Ryuk turned the book around to look at the cover, and scanned the paragraph on the back…
“If I had to guess, I’d say Lunch at the Gotham Café...”
Ryuk flipped the book back around, glanced at the first page, and then flipped to a different page near the middle of the book and started to read out loud.
“One day I came home from the brokerage house where I worked and found a letter-more of a note, actually-from my wife on the dining room table. It said she was leaving me…”
Ryuk hadn’t been exaggerating. He really could read…well, in between the laughing fits, at least. He kept going fairly steadily until Steve sat down with his wife and her lawyer to have lunch, but the narrative broke down into a series of “hyuk”s when the maitre d’ thwacked the lawyer in the head with a butcher knife; when Steve fended him off with a pot of boiling rice, a mop, and a squeegee; when Diane kicked Steve from behind instead of pulling out the bolts so they could escape...and that was just a few. Ryuk did just as much laughing as reading, and by the time he finished, he was complaining that his ribs hurt.
“Oh, man…that was hilarious…I never thought it would be that good, being a book and all…humans are really something, aren’t they? That guy was right about the divorcing couple being crazier than the maitre d’…”
Rem couldn’t help but smile…it was definitely a horror story, and a good one at that-it showed the dark, ugly side of its human characters well. But she had to admit that it had been funny in places, in a gory slapstick kind of way. “Well, you definitely proved that you can read. It’s a good thing you finished when you did…any longer, and it would’ve gotten too dark.”
The sun had set a few minutes ago, and the first stars were just starting to twinkle in the eastern part of the sky.
“Time for a break, you figure?” said Ryuk. “We’ve been flying for hours, and the hunters should be gearing up right about now…”
“Sure, now would be fine.”
They touched down next to a grungy, soot-covered brick building in yet another city, next to a garbage dumpster. This part of the human world was a lot like Japan, in that it never took much flying to find another city, and they tended to flow into each other in a continuous way.
“So, Rem, you still figure the hunters only search for us at night?”
“I hope so. If they work during the day too, it would be…mph!!”
Rem’s scream was muffled by Ryuk’s hand as he jumped on her and pinned her down in the corner between the sidewalk and the building.
“What are you doing? Get off me!” Rem tried to yell, but it came out as a muffled “Wddydn? Gffm!” instead.
“Shhh!” Ryuk hissed, glancing fearfully at the sky before ducking his head and covering both Rem and himself with his wings.
Rem stopped struggling immediately when she glimpsed the bit of sky visible under Ryuk’s wing...Daril and Sidoh were flying right over their heads. For a horrible, heart-stopping second, Rem thought Sidoh was looking at them-but they passed by. Ryuk waited a few seconds after they flew out of sight before getting off Rem and letting her back up.
“Sorry, but they were coming pretty quick, and you stand out like a sore thumb, being all white…”
It took Rem a while to get her vocal cords working again. “…It’s…it’s all right…”
“I didn’t see Kinddara with them, did you? I wonder where she is.”
“I don’t know, and I hope I never find out. Let’s get moving, away from where they’re headed.”
“Gotcha.”
Daril was starting to notice a trend. In the cities they stopped to search in, she’d often find a spot a shinigami had walked through a wall, and that wall almost always belonged to a grocery store…one that sold apples. Ryuk and Rem seemed to be avoiding rural areas…a smart move, really, since there wasn’t as much cover there without the buildings jutting up into the sky…but whenever they did find something in a rural area; it was usually near someplace that had apples. Searching cities was starting to get a lot more efficient, since they only had to check out grocery stores to get a good idea if Ryuk or Rem had been there. Daril and Sidoh landed on top of a larger store than most, and Daril told Sidoh to check the ceiling while she checked the walls. She flew around the store in spirals, running her hand through the wall…nothing yet…
“How are you doing, Sidoh? Finding anything?” she called.
No answer. Funny…
“Sidoh? You all right up there…?”
“Uh…Daril…help…”
Daril shot back up to the roof, and she probably would have been amused in any other circumstance, but since she was supposed to be in charge here, it was more exasperating than anything. Sidoh had cuffed himself with a pair of shackles, and he couldn’t have looked more sheepish.
“Sorry…I got finished checking the roof, and I was curious how these things worked…I didn’t mean to…”
Daril sighed as she grabbed the shackles and inspected the locks.
“Do you have a key for them or something?”
“No, I don’t. Once we catch a shinigami, there’s no reason for us to unlock them…the King probably thought giving me the keys would be redundant.”
Sidoh gulped. “I…I tried kinda sliding out of them, but they’re too small…they keep getting caught at my wrist…”
Yes, they were definitely too small to slide over Sidoh’s wrists. If only they were as skinny as his fingers…
“I might have an idea, Sidoh…put your knife down for a second, okay?”
Sidoh dropped the knife, but he was in such a hurry to do so that he forgot to think about where he was dropping it…
“EEEOW!” he shrieked as it nicked his toe on the way down. “…AARGH! I’m bleeding! I’m bleeding! Am I gonna die? I’m not gonna die, am I?”
“No, Sidoh, you’re not going to die. I’ve had worse. It probably doesn’t even need patching up…”
“But Daril! It’s bleeding!” Sidoh whined.
“Fine,” Daril sighed, rolling her eyes as she took out the roll of silvery ‘duct tape’ she’d found while searching an apple store. She tore a tiny piece off, and Sidoh held out his foot while she stuck it on.
“There. Happy now?”
“Yeah…no, wait! I’m still cuffed!”
“I know. I’m getting to it. Look in the lock, Sidoh…can you see the lever, behind those little curved wall-like things? If you can get your finger in past those and push on the lever hard enough…”
Daril held the cuff steady, while Sidoh poked around inside the lock. It took a few tries, and a lot of squinting on Sidoh’s part, but finally…
“Yay!” Sidoh cheered as the lock sprang open. Daril held the other one, and Sidoh started to poke around inside it.
“Hey, Daril…,” he said.
“What?”
“You think that Cal…Cali…um…that guy we caught’s only going to get a level eight, right?”
“Yeah. He didn’t do anything seriously wrong. Just a misdemeanour.” “So…whaddya think the old man’s going to do to Kinddara?”
“She killed another shinigami, Sidoh. Rem did the same thing, and once we catch her, she’s going to be executed, so...”
“So…?”
“…Think about it a little longer.”
“…No, I still don’t…oh,” said Sidoh, only catching on because of the grim look on Daril’s face.
“Yup.”
“Talkin’ bout me?” a sinister and horribly familiar voice giggled from behind Sidoh…
Sidoh wheeled around, and his mouth dropped open when he saw Kinddara standing there, still looking very much alive…
“Kinddara! What are you doing here?” Daril said.
Kinddara held out a page torn from a death note. “Here,” she said. “Read it.”
Daril stepped forward, took the page, backed up to stand next to Sidoh again…it was the same page she’d torn out of her own death note after chaining Kinddara to a tree and pressing the summoning button. The note she’d written was still there, at the top of the page.
Great King-as you may have witnessed, Kinddara has killed a shinigami. I am sending her back to the shinigami realm under the assumption that you will want to deal her a suitable punishment.
Daril Ghiroza
Underneath her writing, someone else had left a note of their own.
Daril- Due to the importance of capturing Ryuk and Rem, I am granting Kinddara clemency in this instance. You can expect no further trouble from her-I have given her a stern reprimand, and she has sworn to act obediently, with the promise that her knife will be restored after four months of good behaviour. I wish you luck in your continued pursuit. Hopefully, you will catch them in less than four months, making any future problems you may have with Kinddara irrelevant.
Daril re-read the note several times, and Sidoh scanned it over her shoulder.
“Maybe it’s a trick,” he whispered. “Kinddara could have broken out of the chains and written that underneath your note to fool us…”
“Doubt it,” Daril whispered back. “Kinddara’s not smart enough to break out of the shackles on her own, and even if she were, it would be no small feat to imitate the King’s handwriting this well…”
It was obvious to Daril that the note made no sense-it was more of a threat than an actual explanation. Rem and Kinddara had done the exact same thing, yet Kinddara was being pardoned so she could help capture her? Rem’s crime wasn’t any more atrocious…something was missing here, but Daril knew there was nothing she could do about it. Questioning the King’s judgement earned you nothing but a harsh reprimand and the cold shoulder at best, and his orders had been absolute- “Come back to this realm with Ryuk and Rem, or don’t come back at all. I’d better not see you before then.” Flying back to the shinigami realm to ask him about his reasoning or reasons behind the note would cause nothing but trouble.
“What do we do now?” Sidoh whimpered.
“We find Ryuk and Rem, and we find them soon.”
“Daril…I’m scared…”
Daril crumpled up the note and dropped it at her feet, gripping her knife as she did so. “There’s nothing to be scared of. Now that I know what she’s truly capable of, I’m not letting her out of my sight for a second…and if it comes to it, you know I can take her.”
Sidoh gulped anyway.
*Everything’s Eventual, by Stephen King
Rem had been waiting outside the massive store with the sun beating down on her for nearly ten minutes, and she was starting to worry. She tore the duct tape off her cheek-it didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore- and threw it away as she walked off the searing concrete and through the wall into the air-conditioned ‘Wal-Mart’. The apple display was right in front of her, but there was no sign of Ryuk. She walked up, down and through the aisles, but she didn’t see Ryuk anywhere in the grocery section, and he would be hard to miss, towering over the humans and incredibly black in comparison to the stark whiteness of the walls, ceiling, and floors …
“Ryuk? Ryuk?!” she called, but there was no answer, other than the continued muttering of humans about the freshness of eggs and the price of spaghetti sauce. A small knot of apprehension formed in Rem’s stomach as she ran out of the grocery section…still no sign of him. Rem’s wings shot out, and she flew around the store, scanning as she went…these ‘Wal-Marts’ were huge, and he could be anywhere inside it…at least, she hoped he was still inside it. Rem knew she couldn’t panic now…she had to keep a clear head if she was going to find him…if she were Ryuk, where would she have gone…? Frantically, she looked around as she flew, calling for Ryuk over the dull roar the humans were making...aha.
Rem flew into the electronics section, where several large-screen televisions were set up all over, blasting out sound, and in front of one of them, Ryuk sat laughing hysterically as a muscular man wearing tights hit another muscular man in tights with a chair, before climbing up onto the ropes bordering a square stage and jumping on him.
“Ryuk!”
“Huh? Oh, hey, Rem.”
“What are you doing here?”
“…I’m watching…WWE, apparently,” Ryuk said as a commercial came on.
Rem sighed with a mixture of relief and frustration.
“Don’t do that!” she said.
“Geez, Rem! Why can’t I watch a little TV while I eat my apples?”
“It’s not the TV; it’s you disappearing that I object to!”
“Oh, come on. I was only gone for ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes is more than enough time for the hunters to catch you. If you’re going to wander off, at least tell me beforehand so I don’t have to make myself sick wondering where you are!”
“Sure, ruin my fun,” Ryuk said with a good-natured chuckle. He swallowed the last of his apple as he got up. “Can I at least watch the end of this? The announcer said that the ‘thrilling conclusion’ will be on right after this last commercial break.”
“All right.”
“Wow, you agreed really easily this time.”
“I’ve learned the routine by now. I can either say no and listen to you beg, plead and wheedle until the program is over anyway, or I can not bother and just let you watch.”
“Oh…okay. Thanks.”
The two shinigami stood and watched as the commercial ended, and the wrestlers came back on and continued to beat each other up. There weren’t any discernable rules; so far as Rem could make out…she still didn’t understand what was going on, even as it ended.
“Why did the one in blue win?” she asked.
“Pinfall,” said Ryuk as soon as he was able to stop laughing. “It’s been a while…humans are the same as ever. Okay, I can tell you want to get moving. Let’s go.”
Ryuk followed Rem out of the Wal-Mart, and they both took to the air.
“So, where are you taking us this time?” said Ryuk.
“I don’t know, Ryuk. I’m not even sure where we are now. All that matters is that we keep moving.”
“Really? You have no idea?”
“Well, I know we’re not in Japan. It’s taking far too long to move from one side of this land mass to the other for that, most of the people are speaking English, and I know that the entrance to the human world tends to move. Other than that…it’s hard to tell, looking at the human world while you’re in it as opposed to looking down from a viewing hole…at least you can zoom out that way, and see the general shape of the land mass.”
“Well, according to that sign we just flew over, we’re in San Bernardino…that’s somewhere in North America, isn’t it?”
Rem’s eyebrows seemed to go up underneath the bandage on her forehead.
“What?” Ryuk asked.
“I almost forgot…that one time, when you wrote down fake rules in Light Yagami’s notebook…you can read and write English…”
“…Yeah. So?”
“Most shinigami only have a grasp of human languages to the extent that they can recognize characters in human names…not many can actually understand the humans’ written language, much less write it themselves.”
Ryuk shrugged. “It was something to do-you can only play so many games of death’s heads before it starts to get dull. It’s kind of interesting, knowing some human code.”
“That’s quite an accomplishment…your friends must be jealous.”
“They don’t know I can do that, but they probably wouldn’t care if they did. Actually, they’d probably make fun of me if they knew…”
“They shouldn’t. It’s not easy.”
“Whatever, Rem. I bet you can do it.”
“No. I can read a few simple English words, and sound out others, but I can’t write it with any proficiency. I’m much better with the spoken languages. They’re much easier to learn through watching humans than written ones, and until about a century ago, most humans weren’t literate in their own languages in the first place. My friends and I used to watch humans all the time…we never really got the appeal of gambling, and there wasn’t much else to do in the realm…”
“Who are your friends, anyway?”
“…Gelus was the last one. About two hundred years ago, it started to be that I’d go to see someone, only to find their abandoned death note down in the human world or in front of a viewing hole… I had no idea what was going on, but once I saw what happened to Gelus when he helped Misa, I figured it out from there. Is it just English you can read and write?”
“…Uh…no,” said Ryuk, looking strangely embarrassed, and avoiding her gaze. “Like you said, there wasn’t much else to do in the shinigami realm…I…I picked up a few more.”
“How many do you know?”
“Look, I know it’s weird. You don’t have to rub it in.”
“I’m not rubbing anything in. How many do you know?”
“…not that many. Just the ones that caught my eye, where some interesting stuff was going on…French, when that twenty-first Louis guy pissed a bunch of people off so they started beheading each other, and German when that Hitler guy tried to take over the world…and I picked up Japanese really quickly when I decided to actually go down to the human world instead of just watching…you know, while I was possessing Light. Really, it’s not that many, and I only did it because gambling for decades on end gets dull…I know it sounds weird and obsessive, but…”
“Not at all. It’s actually quite impressive. I’m surprised you don’t have a higher rank, if you can pick that up all by yourself.”
Ryuk shrugged. “I kinda slacked off whenever the old geezer had us do all that writing practice…,” he said, trying to sound indifferent…but his usual grin was starting to creep back onto his face. “When it’s just for fun, though…heck, I bet I can read and write just as good as a human who’s been doing it all his life.”
“Can you prove that?”
“What? Don’t believe me?”
“I believe that you’re literate. I’ve seen proof of it. But, as for the level you claim to be at…I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know you’re talented at stretching the truth.”
“Fine. I’ll prove it,” Ryuk said as he pulled a book out of the feathers on his shoulders.
“Where’d you get that?” Rem asked.
“Swiped it on the way out.”
“…Somehow, I didn’t picture you as the kind to steal a book…”
“I would’ve rather had a video game, but if took a console, I would’ve had to search around for batteries, and by the time I found them you’d probably just drag me out of there before I could find any decent games. This one looked kind of okay…I grabbed it on a whim, really. I didn’t expect to actually read it, unless I got really bored while we were flying.”
It was a paperback, and the image on the front cover was of a restaurant table with a pristine white tablecloth-the glass of water in the foreground had a drop of blood swirling around in it. Ryuk opened the book; on the back cover, the utensils were utterly disarrayed and the formerly pristine white tablecloth was smeared with blood.
“Which one do you want?” said Ryuk. “It looks like this is a collection of short stories…” *
“Which one do you think the cover is illustrating?”
Ryuk turned the book around to look at the cover, and scanned the paragraph on the back…
“If I had to guess, I’d say Lunch at the Gotham Café...”
Ryuk flipped the book back around, glanced at the first page, and then flipped to a different page near the middle of the book and started to read out loud.
“One day I came home from the brokerage house where I worked and found a letter-more of a note, actually-from my wife on the dining room table. It said she was leaving me…”
Ryuk hadn’t been exaggerating. He really could read…well, in between the laughing fits, at least. He kept going fairly steadily until Steve sat down with his wife and her lawyer to have lunch, but the narrative broke down into a series of “hyuk”s when the maitre d’ thwacked the lawyer in the head with a butcher knife; when Steve fended him off with a pot of boiling rice, a mop, and a squeegee; when Diane kicked Steve from behind instead of pulling out the bolts so they could escape...and that was just a few. Ryuk did just as much laughing as reading, and by the time he finished, he was complaining that his ribs hurt.
“Oh, man…that was hilarious…I never thought it would be that good, being a book and all…humans are really something, aren’t they? That guy was right about the divorcing couple being crazier than the maitre d’…”
Rem couldn’t help but smile…it was definitely a horror story, and a good one at that-it showed the dark, ugly side of its human characters well. But she had to admit that it had been funny in places, in a gory slapstick kind of way. “Well, you definitely proved that you can read. It’s a good thing you finished when you did…any longer, and it would’ve gotten too dark.”
The sun had set a few minutes ago, and the first stars were just starting to twinkle in the eastern part of the sky.
“Time for a break, you figure?” said Ryuk. “We’ve been flying for hours, and the hunters should be gearing up right about now…”
“Sure, now would be fine.”
They touched down next to a grungy, soot-covered brick building in yet another city, next to a garbage dumpster. This part of the human world was a lot like Japan, in that it never took much flying to find another city, and they tended to flow into each other in a continuous way.
“So, Rem, you still figure the hunters only search for us at night?”
“I hope so. If they work during the day too, it would be…mph!!”
Rem’s scream was muffled by Ryuk’s hand as he jumped on her and pinned her down in the corner between the sidewalk and the building.
“What are you doing? Get off me!” Rem tried to yell, but it came out as a muffled “Wddydn? Gffm!” instead.
“Shhh!” Ryuk hissed, glancing fearfully at the sky before ducking his head and covering both Rem and himself with his wings.
Rem stopped struggling immediately when she glimpsed the bit of sky visible under Ryuk’s wing...Daril and Sidoh were flying right over their heads. For a horrible, heart-stopping second, Rem thought Sidoh was looking at them-but they passed by. Ryuk waited a few seconds after they flew out of sight before getting off Rem and letting her back up.
“Sorry, but they were coming pretty quick, and you stand out like a sore thumb, being all white…”
It took Rem a while to get her vocal cords working again. “…It’s…it’s all right…”
“I didn’t see Kinddara with them, did you? I wonder where she is.”
“I don’t know, and I hope I never find out. Let’s get moving, away from where they’re headed.”
“Gotcha.”
Daril was starting to notice a trend. In the cities they stopped to search in, she’d often find a spot a shinigami had walked through a wall, and that wall almost always belonged to a grocery store…one that sold apples. Ryuk and Rem seemed to be avoiding rural areas…a smart move, really, since there wasn’t as much cover there without the buildings jutting up into the sky…but whenever they did find something in a rural area; it was usually near someplace that had apples. Searching cities was starting to get a lot more efficient, since they only had to check out grocery stores to get a good idea if Ryuk or Rem had been there. Daril and Sidoh landed on top of a larger store than most, and Daril told Sidoh to check the ceiling while she checked the walls. She flew around the store in spirals, running her hand through the wall…nothing yet…
“How are you doing, Sidoh? Finding anything?” she called.
No answer. Funny…
“Sidoh? You all right up there…?”
“Uh…Daril…help…”
Daril shot back up to the roof, and she probably would have been amused in any other circumstance, but since she was supposed to be in charge here, it was more exasperating than anything. Sidoh had cuffed himself with a pair of shackles, and he couldn’t have looked more sheepish.
“Sorry…I got finished checking the roof, and I was curious how these things worked…I didn’t mean to…”
Daril sighed as she grabbed the shackles and inspected the locks.
“Do you have a key for them or something?”
“No, I don’t. Once we catch a shinigami, there’s no reason for us to unlock them…the King probably thought giving me the keys would be redundant.”
Sidoh gulped. “I…I tried kinda sliding out of them, but they’re too small…they keep getting caught at my wrist…”
Yes, they were definitely too small to slide over Sidoh’s wrists. If only they were as skinny as his fingers…
“I might have an idea, Sidoh…put your knife down for a second, okay?”
Sidoh dropped the knife, but he was in such a hurry to do so that he forgot to think about where he was dropping it…
“EEEOW!” he shrieked as it nicked his toe on the way down. “…AARGH! I’m bleeding! I’m bleeding! Am I gonna die? I’m not gonna die, am I?”
“No, Sidoh, you’re not going to die. I’ve had worse. It probably doesn’t even need patching up…”
“But Daril! It’s bleeding!” Sidoh whined.
“Fine,” Daril sighed, rolling her eyes as she took out the roll of silvery ‘duct tape’ she’d found while searching an apple store. She tore a tiny piece off, and Sidoh held out his foot while she stuck it on.
“There. Happy now?”
“Yeah…no, wait! I’m still cuffed!”
“I know. I’m getting to it. Look in the lock, Sidoh…can you see the lever, behind those little curved wall-like things? If you can get your finger in past those and push on the lever hard enough…”
Daril held the cuff steady, while Sidoh poked around inside the lock. It took a few tries, and a lot of squinting on Sidoh’s part, but finally…
“Yay!” Sidoh cheered as the lock sprang open. Daril held the other one, and Sidoh started to poke around inside it.
“Hey, Daril…,” he said.
“What?”
“You think that Cal…Cali…um…that guy we caught’s only going to get a level eight, right?”
“Yeah. He didn’t do anything seriously wrong. Just a misdemeanour.” “So…whaddya think the old man’s going to do to Kinddara?”
“She killed another shinigami, Sidoh. Rem did the same thing, and once we catch her, she’s going to be executed, so...”
“So…?”
“…Think about it a little longer.”
“…No, I still don’t…oh,” said Sidoh, only catching on because of the grim look on Daril’s face.
“Yup.”
“Talkin’ bout me?” a sinister and horribly familiar voice giggled from behind Sidoh…
Sidoh wheeled around, and his mouth dropped open when he saw Kinddara standing there, still looking very much alive…
“Kinddara! What are you doing here?” Daril said.
Kinddara held out a page torn from a death note. “Here,” she said. “Read it.”
Daril stepped forward, took the page, backed up to stand next to Sidoh again…it was the same page she’d torn out of her own death note after chaining Kinddara to a tree and pressing the summoning button. The note she’d written was still there, at the top of the page.
Great King-as you may have witnessed, Kinddara has killed a shinigami. I am sending her back to the shinigami realm under the assumption that you will want to deal her a suitable punishment.
Daril Ghiroza
Underneath her writing, someone else had left a note of their own.
Daril- Due to the importance of capturing Ryuk and Rem, I am granting Kinddara clemency in this instance. You can expect no further trouble from her-I have given her a stern reprimand, and she has sworn to act obediently, with the promise that her knife will be restored after four months of good behaviour. I wish you luck in your continued pursuit. Hopefully, you will catch them in less than four months, making any future problems you may have with Kinddara irrelevant.
Daril re-read the note several times, and Sidoh scanned it over her shoulder.
“Maybe it’s a trick,” he whispered. “Kinddara could have broken out of the chains and written that underneath your note to fool us…”
“Doubt it,” Daril whispered back. “Kinddara’s not smart enough to break out of the shackles on her own, and even if she were, it would be no small feat to imitate the King’s handwriting this well…”
It was obvious to Daril that the note made no sense-it was more of a threat than an actual explanation. Rem and Kinddara had done the exact same thing, yet Kinddara was being pardoned so she could help capture her? Rem’s crime wasn’t any more atrocious…something was missing here, but Daril knew there was nothing she could do about it. Questioning the King’s judgement earned you nothing but a harsh reprimand and the cold shoulder at best, and his orders had been absolute- “Come back to this realm with Ryuk and Rem, or don’t come back at all. I’d better not see you before then.” Flying back to the shinigami realm to ask him about his reasoning or reasons behind the note would cause nothing but trouble.
“What do we do now?” Sidoh whimpered.
“We find Ryuk and Rem, and we find them soon.”
“Daril…I’m scared…”
Daril crumpled up the note and dropped it at her feet, gripping her knife as she did so. “There’s nothing to be scared of. Now that I know what she’s truly capable of, I’m not letting her out of my sight for a second…and if it comes to it, you know I can take her.”
Sidoh gulped anyway.
*Everything’s Eventual, by Stephen King
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