Daisuke stood outside his half-brother’s estate somewhere in the Hollywood hills where gated driveways and dense foliage was all that could be seen from the road. Private security were alerted through surveillance systems about any vehicles waiting on the side of the road to warn the occupants of the neighborhood about paparazzi and other opportunists ready to pounce on LA’s elite as soon as they left their private abode.
As much as Daisuke’s half brother, Tadanobu, pretended to be the next big film producer, he was an interloper fritting away his family fortune in failed action movies after selling off his portion of Kaze Motors, which also happened to be the controlling interest. As the first born child, Tadanobu had been groomed from birth to inherit the family business and carry on the legacy of their father.
Tadanobu had been handed jobs his entire life at Kaze in preparation for the transition that came sooner than anyone had expected because of the untimely death of their father. However, despite being handed every advantage in life, Daisuke’s half-brother squandered them all. Daisuke had on more than one occasion, with a presentation here and a spreadsheet there, saved his half-brother from losing face by doing the work his brother was too incompetent to do.
As much as his father had lived in the fantasy world that his first born son would one day be the next car manufacturing mogul to innovate and push the industry forward, Tadanobu was more interested in sleeping with 20-somethings and pretending that he was a filmmaker.
He was a Hollywood exec in name, as he was the executive producer on Karate Street Commandos I-III, all of which were released in the fledgling direct to video market, and available for streaming in one of the more obscure services that most people don’t realize has content. The paparazzi who lurked on the road outside Tadanobu’s house were never there for him, so Daisuke standing in front of a gate in full view of the camera didn’t prompt a response from security.
Daisuke could have used a magic elevator to transport himself into his half-brother’s house. There was a lift for the four stories including a stop to the panic room/bunker in the basement, but Daisuke didn’t want to spook his kin by appearing in the house, especially so close after the death of their father.
The sound of his brother’s voice came through the speaker on the camera mounted on the large gate pointed down at him. “I could have you removed.”
“I’m on public property,” Daisuke said, noting that his feet were on the road rather than the nub of driveway leading up to the gate.
“They don’t take kindly to loiters in this neighborhood.”
“I’m not loitering. I’m family,” Daisuke said with a false grin. The nearest public elevator was in a shopping center a good walk away from his current location. If his brother wanted to be a dick, he could have easily called the police on Daisuke, and he wouldn’t be able to escape in time. However, Daisuke knew that Tadanobu wouldn’t be calling the authorities any time soon.
The beauty of being the outsider among his family was that he knew all the secrets. He never felt included in any of the family functions, but wasn’t thrown out of them either. Daisuke was never treated as a servant, but didn’t exactly have an equal seat at the table either. His non status made him the ghost of the family.
There were advantages to being a ghost. People would tell him things they may not admit elsewhere. For example, Tadanobu bragged about the first actress he had slept with or the time he met his hero, Steven Segaul. Words that came out of Daisuke’s brother’s mouth were tidbits that would be filed away for possible use later.
“I know about Ben-Zhing,” Daisake said casually before his brother could come up with another empty threat.
There was a long silence on the other end, and then the gate opened. Daisuke strolled through the massive entry. It was large enough that two semi’s side-by-side could fit through but probably only had seen the traffic of Kaze’s luxury cars. Despite Tadanobu’s dream of creating the next action movie franchise, he was loyal to his family and only drove Kaze’s despite the fact that he could afford cars that cost more than an average person’s house while Kaze cards were pricey, they weren’t the type of car a person would drive from this neighborhood.
Daisuke had to give him credit for loyalty to the family despite the bungling of family affairs. Tadanobu wasn’t a calculating man, just a meathead who spent too much admiring himself in front of the mirror, which was why Daisuke decided to approach him, not because he was the first born, and the holder of his father’s legacy. Everyone in the family knew who was better suited for that. Daisuke had picked Tadanobu because he was an easy target.
As Daisuke walked up the driveway to the mansion beyond, he was only more firm in his belief. From the manicured bushes and hedges to the gaudy gold plated statues his brother had custom made to resemble MMA fighters locked in combat, the entire place screamed of overcompensation.
Daisuke knew it wouldn’t last, once he burned through the money of selling off his share of his father’s companies failing to create the next hit action movie series, Tadanobu would be just another rich brat using his connections to buy out ownership in a gym, or perhaps make rounds on the reality television circuit.
He’d be a fraction of what he was worth, but would make it sound like he had made the choice to live the simpler life. Despite monarchy and feudalism teaching humanity again and again that heirs will eventually topple the houses due to their own ineptitude, people still did it anyway.
Everyone in Daisuke’s family knew who should have been in charge of all the wealth and power except his father was the one who decided where everything went. Now they’d see the vast empire crumble with bad investment there, a failed film project there.
Just like Rome was taken away piece by piece with each Visigoth raid. Powers moved their wealth to Constantinople, eroding the empire further. Countless other events eventually turned the powerfulest city in the world to a ruin, so would his father’s empire. Piece by piece, it would eventually be engulfed and distributed in the world economy, and his father would be nothing more than a footnote in a history text.
Daisuke made it to the large double doors with gold handles and custom martial forms burnt into the woodwork. He didn’t bother knocking or ringing any sort of doorbell. His half-brother was probably covering his torso in oil and water to make it look like he had just been doing a hard workout.
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Sure enough, Tadanobu opened the door shirtless with black athletic pants. His muscles glistened, and he was dripping with sweat or an oil water combination to approximate sweat. The man had grown a mustache and wore a red headband on his shoulder length wavy hair.
“Oh hey, Daisuke, I was just getting my reps in,” he said casually, like he was expecting a conversation about workout routines and protein powder to follow.
Daisuke let himself in and started towards the office where the movie posters for the three disasters were proudly displayed. Daisuke said over his shoulder, “I need 5 million in cash.”
“So soon after father’s death?” Tadanobu shut the door to the estate and jogged to keep up with Daisuke’s pace.
“You know he gave me nothing,” Daisuke said, and they entered a room not far from the main hall. The three posters of his films were framed as if they were precious artwork. Each featured a grizzled wannabe Chuck Norris on the front holding a different well endowed action movie fantasy woman on each who Tadanobu cast because he thought hair color constituted character development. The rest of the decor screamed rich kid who thinks he knows what a movie producer’s office should look like.
Daisuke sat down on a large old fashioned chair across from the massive desk that probably had little to do with script development, and more for attempting to woo young starlets and intimidate underlings. Daisuke was neither intimidated nor impressed with anything his half-brother could toss around as a status symbol.
Tadanobu sat in his overstuffed leather chair that probably ended the life of two sheep and one cow for his half-brother’s sitting pleasure. He tented his hands like he was a super villain considering sending Daisuke down a chute into a shark tank, when he said, “No.”
“I wasn’t asking,” Daisuke said calmly.
“If you want 5 million dollars. I know another member of the family you can kill, and you’ll get every penny when you do.”
Daisuke’s blade was out of its sheath, and to his half-brother’s throat before the man could reach the panic button under the desk. Daisuke glared down at his sibling, and said. “The next time you threaten my mother. I won’t hesitate.”
He lowered his sword and put it away. It disappeared into his invisible scabbard. There was a tense moment where his brother stared at Daisuke. He couldn’t tell if his half-brother was roiling with fear or bursting with anger. The family was good at hiding emotions.
Daisuke’s mother was the most expressive one in the family, and part of her entertainment military academy included acting lessons, so she knew how to fake emotions. Not that his family necessarily faked emotions. It was almost as if they didn’t have them.
Father was serious all the time, and was as emotionally accessible as a can of dried paint. The others were equally grim with expression, and closed off. Even after their father died, there were no expressions of grief, just a funeral where most didn’t talk and mostly glared at Daisuke for daring to attend.
It seemed father’s business associates had more to say than the family. The family wouldn’t express what they felt. However, that didn’t mean that they didn’t feel. When they were children, Daisuke was stripped naked and left in one of the shadier parts of Tokyo to get home on his own when he had embarrassed Tadanobu.
His half-sister, Arisu, had left his school project in the rain when it was clear that he was going to outperform her in school. Even his mom would direct all the emotions she could express on him. He was the recipient of all of her love, all her frustration, and even all her anger. What she couldn’t do with father was taken out on him.
Daisuke had been the good son through it all. He wanted to please his mother, and even gain approval from his father. By the time he realized that approval from his dad had more to do with birthright than accomplishment, and that for better or worse, he was the only solid, dependable part of his mother’s life, he had taken a job in New York.
It was an advertising firm, and he was a copywriter. Nothing of his ever made to print, commercial, or even the text on an online product page, he was still paid to think of ideas that were always rejected, and the most he had ever even touched an ad that came to print was when he was asked to grammar check copy.
He was the lowest member of the creative team, and so used to rejection from his father that grinding away for years to maybe see one line he had written appear in a commercial overplayed on a third rate gaming app seemed appealing to him. At least working as the bottom tier employee paid him where he got shit from his family for free.
Being in the dredges of the company had probably saved his life. An outbreak of killer office supplies murdered most of the senior partners, a few clients, and some of the top creative folks when pens, pencils, rulers, staplers, and anything that could bludgeon, pierce, or slice began tearing through the floor where he worked.
He was quick to slam his supply drawer shut when the wave of death reached his office and barked out to his fellow serfs to do the same. The few pencils that did make it out, he was able to catch and snap in half. He ordered his fellow copyright goons to barricade the door, and they waited until a bunch of trenchcoat, fedora wearing mafia burst into the building and made all the supplies drop harmlessly to the grown with a swish of their hand.
The next day, there seemed to be a collective amnesia about what happened. The news reported that a disgruntled employee shot up the place and killed everyone in the meeting. His coworkers seemed to agree with the assessment, and even his cubicle mates that he had saved with his quick thinking seem to think it was a shooter.
Daisuke thought he had been delusional himself when he remembered one of the first responders who checked a wound in his arm caused by a letter opener had said, “Looks like the bullet only grazed your arm. You’re lucky to be alive.”
A part of him wanted to believe that it was a mass shooter. They were regrettably a common enough occurrence in the United States that he could almost imagine it, being grazed by a bullet, barricading the door to his part of the office, and waiting for the police… no the men and women in fedoras.
He had known, deep down inside, that the story people were telling themselves was wrong. Daisuke began to poke further, looking at the deep recesses of the internet where the government was nothing but lizard people and moon landing was Gene Roddenberry’s crowning achievement in his film career. However, none of the conspiracy theories, alternate facts, or fantastical tales fit his lived experience.
It wasn’t till he trailed a woman with a trenchcoat and a fedora and lost her in an elevator when he got a note at his door to his apartment. It was an invitation to find out the truth. Of course, the nature of reality was far more than he could possibly imagine, and probably even more than he knew.
But if there was one fact of the world he could count on, it was that money greased the wheels of progress. If he wanted to accomplish anything with what could possibly be a short brutal life, he needed funds. Thus, a visit to a human being, he’d rather never see again in his life.
“5 million,” His half brother broke the silence between them.
Daisuke didn’t blink, didn’t move a finger, just stared.
“Okay, 5 million it is. But that’s it. I’m not an ATM.”
“Never said you were,” Daisuke stood and headed toward the door.
As he was about to pass the threshold, Tadanobu yelled, “I’ll kill you the next time I see you. This is it. You are done. You hear me? DONE!”
Daisuke smiled as he shut the door behind him. That was one less problem to have to worry about. A quest appeared in his field of vision: IT BUSINESS. Instead of the front door, he headed towards his brother’s elevator.