"Goodnight, everyone," I said as we laid down for bed. My first month in Tokyo had passed fairly uneventfully, after that action-packed first day. Sure, we'd made some preparations, and sure, I had ended up with a remote job at a logistics company based in Osaka, but overall...
...you weren't really missing much. Well, aside from Matsu's nerdgasm at upgrading her desktop to the brand new top-of-the-line. What the hell and/or fuck she intended to do with something like four terabytes of RAM was beyond me, but she'd started dry-humping the case, and I left the room before Miya could administer the Bonk of Chastity.
"Awww, that's it?" Matsu whined, pouting. "Not even a kiss before bed?"
"Well, if you insist," I said, leaning up and kissing her- I was the only person here who slept on my back, apparently, and Matsu, meanwhile, slept on her front, and also on my front, laying on top of me like I was a mattress and she was a weighted blanket. The phosphor-green glow of her wings flashed briefly, and I glanced to either side, at Akitsu and Musubi. "Anyone else?"
Akitsu nodded sharply, so I leaned in and kissed her first, before rounding out the night with Musubi, who had leaned in halfway and flashed wings of bright pink.
Sleep came quickly, and...
...I found myself lucid dreaming, standing on a rooftop in downtown Tokyo.
"This is new," I said, looking around.
"YOU!" someone yelled behind me, prompting me to finish turning around, and regard-
Ah.
Dammit.
"You- you pervert!" the blonde-haired Sekirei in the white minidress and open-fronted black longcoat yelled. "Lusting after your own sex- I'll never let you violate me!"
"Alright," I said, before walking over to the rooftop and tossing myself over the edge. Hopefully-
I woke up in the middle of the night with a headache, to find Matsu and Musubi also groaning and clutching at their heads, and Akitsu slowly stirring.
"Mistakes were made," I said, not to anyone in particular.
"Ah," Akitsu began, blearily. "Your nose."
I reached up, and rubbed at my nose. My hand came away wet, and- barely visible in the dim moonlight- red.
"Fantastic," I said. "Matsu, I think I need to work on understanding this psychic stuff better."
"My head..." Matsu whined piteously.
"...It can wait, though."
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"Thank you, Akitsu," Matsu said, an ice pack held to the side of her head as she typed at her computer. "Now... Rose. What happened?"
"I had a dream," I said. "Standing on a rooftop... and standing there with me was another Sekirei. One who seemed... really unhappy about it. Also homophobic."
"Hrm..." Matsu said, frowning. "What did she look like?"
"Sekirei Number Zero Nine," I said. "Tsukiumi, the Water Sekirei. Blonde hair, black longcoat, white dress."
"Mmn," Matsu said, typing some things into a search bar. "Ah, there we go. Hrm... According to her bio, she's extremely prideful and antisocial; she claims she wants to be the strongest Sekirei without having an Ashikabi. And... huh. That's weird."
"What is?" I asked.
"Her adjuster left a note," Matsu said. "Tsukiumi might have misconceptions about the winging process?"
"And the adjuster never corrected that misconception?" I asked.
"Minaka wouldn't let them," Matsu said. "I think Tsukiumi is under the impression she has to sleep with you to be winged, rather than just a kiss?"
"Oh my god," I muttered. "Adonai, grant me strength."
"What's wrong with sleeping with Rose?" Musubi asked. "Is she picky about having her own bed?"
"...We'll tell you when you're older," I said dryly.
"Not like that," Matsu said. "More like... you know. Sex."
"Ooooooh, okay," Musubi said, nodding. "Oh! Speaking of sex, can we do that sometime?"
"Miya won't let us," I said, instead of 'you seem dangerously naive to me and I would feel like I was taking advantage of you.' "Anyway, moving past that bit... what do we do to make this problem go away? Because I'm pretty sure none of us want to keep waking up in the middle of the night with headaches."
"We have options," Matsu said. "Option one: wing Tsukiumi."
"Kind of a non-starter, considering she doesn't want me to," I said.
"If you have the same dream tomorrow night, you'll have her as a captive audience," Matsu said. "Talk to her. Clear up her misconceptions. Maybe then she'll be willing to join us."
"Let's explore the other options," I said.
"Well, option two is to wait for someone else to wing her," Matsu said. "MBI's dossiers are showing that there are two major Ashikabi in town with... ahem... aggressive recruiting policies."
"Oh for christ's sake," I muttered.
"They mostly operate in the South and the East of Tokyo," Matsu continued. "The North is seen as a no-man's land, and the West is held by a small but capable coalition led by a biker named Sanada Nishi."
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"...Just to confirm I'm not taking crazy pills: Nishi is the Japanese word for 'west,' right?"
"Mhm!"
"Alright," I said, sighing. "Well... option 3?"
"Wait for her to get terminated," Matsu said. "Either outright killed, or just injured so badly that her core shuts her body down to end the fight."
"Is there any, like... option four, train my psychic powers to the point I can cut the connection and stop getting these dreams?" I asked.
"Nnnnot really," Matsu said. "Well. Maybe? Hrm." She tapped her chin. "Mmn. There's been exactly one instance of an Ashikabi manifesting any real kind of power- Kaoru Seo, who was experimented on by a researcher at MBI, and got the ability to shut off Sekirei powers by touching them. But aside from that..." Matsu shrugged helplessly. "Sekirei haven't really started getting winged until maybe five months ago. We just don't know what can happen next."
"I see," I said, nodding. "And... what about the Jinki you stole? That sorta... alien artifact thingy. Would it help?"
"Well," Matsu said with a shrug. "You can try it. Let me just..."
She turned and crawled over to a corner of her room, where a rat's nest of tangled cables lived- I'd make a joke about how 'oh no my techy girlfriend sucks at cable management' but honestly so did I, so that would really just be mean for no reason. She pulled out a little block of wood, and then crawled across the room to the opposite corner, where a big ol' chest of drawers sat, and pressed the wooden block against the bottom edge, where there weren't any drawers... at least, not any visible drawers. It popped open, and Matsu pulled out a weird-looking crystal.
It was long and thin, and perfectly clear and colorless, and inside was seated a pitch black sphere, perfectly round and featureless. The only identifying mark on this thing was a slight engraving on the crystal, marking it as #08.
"Alright," Matsu said, crawling back over with the Jinki. "Now... you need to enter a meditative trance."
"Shit," I said. "I have... never successfully done that."
"I can induce one," Matsu assured me.
"...You're talking about hypnosis, aren't you," I said flatly.
"Maybe," Matsu said.
"Akitsu, if Matsu tries to implant any suggestions of a sexual nature, please freeze her mouth closed," I said.
"Hai," Akitsu said, nodding.
"Aww, I never get to have any fun," Matsu whined. "Alright... close your eyes and take a deep breath. Relax your arms."
"Oh hey, the Dave Elman," I said. "I recognize this one."
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The next thing I remembered, I was lying on my back, with my head in Akitsu's lap.
"Did it work?" I asked.
"Do you remember anything?" Matsu asked.
"...no," I said. "Last thing I remember was saying I recognized the induction you were using. What'd you do?"
"I tried to get you to link up with the Jinki," Matsu said. "But that... didn't work, I don't think. Oh, I also gave you a hypnotic trigger for dropping into a trance on your own, without needing me to induce it first."
"Fuck," I said. "Well, we tried."
"What now?" Musubi asked. "Do we go and look for Tsukiumi?"
"We'll consider it," I said, as an admission of defeat. "But... not now."
"Nearly all Sekirei have implanted GPS trackers," Matsu said. "We can find her right now if we wanted."
"Oh son of a bitch," I said. "How many other people have that capability?"
"Hrm..." Matsu went back to her computer, and did some more jiggery-pokery. "Matsu is one of... five Brain-type Sekirei. All of which have Ashikabi, now."
"So, that's four other Ashikabi who can do this," I said.
"Including both the Ashikabis of the East and South," Matsu confirmed.
"Alright, well," I said, sighing. "We... can't really do anything about this tonight, so... let's just... go back to sleep, and we'll deal with it in the morning."
"And wake up with another headache?" Matsu asked.
"I'm pretty sure if I stay awake, then we won't have that problem," I said. "I don't actually need to sleep, so it should be fine."
"If you say so..."
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So, all night, I meditated instead, using the trigger Matsu gave me. When I was using it, I was... more aware of what I was doing, than when Matsu had first hypnotized me. I was, also, more focused than I usually was, which led me to suspect that I wasn't in a hypnotic trance at all, and Matsu really had found a way to use hypnosis to put me into a different sort of trance.
I couldn't tell how long I'd spent meditating, though, trying to connect with the Jinki. All I could tell was that, at some point... it worked. I found a way to connect with it.
"Warning: data has been corrupted. Some functions are unavailable."
And it was on that discouraging note that I was shaken out of my trance, and realized it was well past dawn.
"Breakfast is ready," Musubi told me.
"Got it," I said. "I'll be down in a minute. Let me get dressed first."
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"So, Matsu," I said over our telepathic link. It was easier, now, for me to initiate contact with her, probably because I'd just spent the last six hours practicing contacting things with my slowly-becoming-less-latent psychic abilities. "I managed to connect to the Jinki, telepathically."
"What happened?" she asked, as she ate breakfast.
"I got an error message," I said, also eating breakfast. Really, there wasn't that much point in doing this conversation via telepathy, but I didn't want to wait until after we ate to tell her, and I also didn't feel like involving the peanut gallery in this conversation, so... yaaaay, non-optimal decision-making. "Warning me that there had been some data corruption, and some of the functions were unavailable."
Matsu replied with a mental 'huh' as she continued eating.
"Interesting," Matsu said. "Hrm... There's eight Jinki, total. Maybe the others didn't suffer data corruption? Or had differently-corrupted data? Maybe if we get another one, we can repair the one we have... What functions were available?"
"No idea," I said. "I finally connected to it, like, two minutes ago. I got the error message, then suddenly Musubi was shaking my shoulder, telling me breakfast was ready."
"Ah."
I finished my breakfast- I hadn't expected to enjoy natto, and... well, to be honest, I didn't enjoy it, but I found myself not hating it as much as I feared when I'd been handed a bowl of warm rice and cold, slimy soybeans. Mix the natto in with the rice, add some soy sauce, and that handles the texture and flavor issues well enough.
After breakfast, I helped Miya clear the table, and began rolling up my sleeves to start washing the dishes before being shooed out of her kitchen, leaving me free and clear to resume playing with that fancy artifact.
This time, I sat down to meditate in Matsu's room, along with Musubi and Akitsu. I reconnected to the Jinki quickly, and received the same error message once more. But... no prompt.
"List available functions," I commanded it.
"Available functions," its reply began, before pausing. "One available function: Remove winging bond."
...Huh.