There was blood all over my new dress.

Dress.

...Do we really have to talk about the dress?

Really, it failed anyway...fine. I shouldn't have mentioned it in the first place.

...sigh...

Look, if you're looking for a person, and they've given you a photo of a young man, saying "that's the guy, that's the one you need to find".

What do you believe occurs when the expected male target is actually dressed like a girl and looks like one?

Yeah, no one recognizes him.

In movies they make you believe spying and dissapearing in crowds depends on the quality of your disguise. How realistic the fake beard is for example.

But it's not. Simple clothes, different from the ones you usually wear is enough. The rest is about confidence.

My face was recognizable, but that didn't matter. No one was gonna look at me. Well a caucasian tomboyish cutie in a long velvet cotton dress was bringing out stares sure. But no one was looking at me.

The dress was of high quality, undeniably feminine. I bought reddish flats of the same color, and a new white scarf was warming my neck.

The whole set nearly cost me 40 000Y. But it helped me create this new me, the new over the top, stylish european tourist me. I walked confidently in the streets of Kyoto, like I owned the world, always looking at a recently acquired phone, looking like I was feeding my ever hungry Instagram or Twitter account. In truth I was transferring my old contacts from the old to the new mobile device.

The perfect disguise. Or so I thought.

What saved me was my instinct. Again.

"Shit..." I looked at my hand, almost completely covered in red.

I thought I was being way too paranoïd.

No, I had not been enough.

Fortunately the cut in my neck stopped oozing blood. There had been a moment where I expected to just bleed out in the dark alley I had been holing up, but the knife didn't go deep enough.

The question "How?" pummeled my mind.

What happened was impossible.

No not impossible I corrected myself.

Just so unbelievably unlikely I'd rather believe in magic.

After a rough night in the love hotel, I immediately went and bought my new outfit, I didn't inspect my body again, I never undressed further than my boxer and T-Shirt. I could feel that things were still changing but my new motto was, "If you don't see it, it doesn't exist". Afterwards, I went and bought an express ticket for the Shinkansen and a new phone.

I decided to wait the rest of the morning in another love hotel, I had two hours to kill before having to go to the train station.

Maybe that was my mistake, maybe I should have waited in a busy cafe, but I was certain I had not been followed, I really believed I was safe. I just wanted to try to get some more sleep.

It was a girl, barely sixteen, classic long black hair and brown eyes. She was pretty and wearing a rather short school uniform.

I eyed her out, not knowing if I found her sexy or sad.

Standing close to a love hotel, what she was doing was obvious.

Enjo-kōsai.

Compensated dating.

She looked at me.

That was strange, with my current appearance I didn't think I was what she was looking for.

Something else was bothering me.

It was 11AM, way too early, or way too late for what I thought she was doing.

But before I could decide what to do about her, she closed the distance. Way too naturally to be natural.

"Do you have a smoke?" She asked me. In a decent English.

Well, a Japanese with good english. Now I was sure something was amiss (Politically incorrect jokes here we gooo!)

One of her hands was hidden behind her back.

I could feel it. The strange, the situation that can't exist.

In that one sentence I knew what she was, what she was here for.

Death. She was there for a kill.

So I reacted the way I had always reacted.

"You understand Sias. What you are. Right?" said the ghost of grand-father.

I smiled. My act pushed to the extreme, I was my persona, adding the trustworthy american accent to my answer without thinking about it.

"My boyfriend's got some if ye can wait a few 'nutes." I said while staring down at her, the meaning obvious: You're too close.

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I am the bitchiest american tourist ever. That's who I am.

Doubt filled her face. She stepped back a bit and opened her phone to check something.

That was when I decided to run.

The moment I tried a flash of silver went to my neck. I could barely take a step back. Too close.

She looked almost as surprised as me.

The knife in her hand barely showed any blood, but it was definitely mine.

"First you react."

She had automatically attacked me when I tried to flee, but could not understand why.

I got her really confused with my act, I made her believe I wasn't her target, and yet she still tried to kill me anyway. She was dangerous.

But as good as she may have been, she could not avoid my foot in her face. Her inadvertence helped but having Hailey Skröskind as your mother has it's perks too.

Lucky for her I hadn't considered heels.

But I had no time to think. No time to check the wound on my neck. I didn't look down at her squirming on the ground, where I could hear grunts of pain.

I just ran.

And that's why I'm in this shithole of a creepy alley, asking myself if the knife was poisoned, or if the blood loss was gonna finish me off.

But my wound was not life threathening, and I needed to plan for my trip to the train station.

I did a quick check up first.

... Well good job me, the velvet dress was a good pick. You can't spot the blood.

The scarf was dead though. I trashed it in a nearby dumpster.

My backpack with most of my possessions and my normal clothes had been spared.

And about my throat, well, I dunno what's weirder, the cut or my recent loss of an adam's apple, but when you face a crazy assassin yakuza teenager, honestly, you could be worse off than that.

Also good news, I'm not crazy! There are mad individuals with large amount of ressources trying to kill me, for no obvious reasons! I'm not paranoiac!

Yaaay... (This is fake enthousiasm, FYI)

Maybe it was naive to think that going to Tokyo would get some of the heat off my back, but I needed to have an objective. I needed to go forward.

In those kind of situations, it's stopping that kills you.

Well that or assassins. But they're weak to kicks so don't worry about them.

 Still, I couldn't feel like I had made a mistake somewhere along the way. But what else could I have done? Give up?

I'll cut the part where I anxiously prepared my walk to the Shinkansen, because when your plan takes into account raptor attacks, it's just getting too ridiculous.

 Maybe I am sightly paranoiac

______

My throat was chilly. I sneezed. The makeshift bandage, slightly red, with the velvet dress was making it seem like I was doing a cosplay, but it wasn't warm enough for the japanese winter.

I checked my phone for any news about mom. Nothing since the latest message an hour ago, which was succinct, to say the least.

"ETA 4h. Narita. Don't make me wait."

How you could find a flight to the other side of the world in less than two hours was beyond me, but I stopped asking questions when it was about the two times woman's fencing gold winner who was my mother.

Even ten years after retiring, she still had contacts with the highest of the high.

Well it's understandable, she doesn't even like fencing swords and still won. Just watch her fight with a classic bastard sword. You'll see her viking ancestry right there and then. All of that made her have a certain following, even now. She got rich just with ads. Without counting the rumours about underground deathmatches.

I tried to resist touching the aching spot at my throat. I failed. The sharp pain made me wince. My aisle neighbors looked at me funny. Well as funny as Japanese dare look at you. It's still like super polite.

Even though they had good reasons to be curious, the red spots I couldn't wash in the bathroom and the obvious cut behind the bandage were pretty strange-looking.

Because yes, if you didn't catch up, here I am, in the Shinkansen, half an hour away from Tokyo.

Plan worked, no problems arised.

Small miracles are always welcome.

I arrived in Narita airport two hours early.

I looked for a bathroom again. I recieved mean looks from the men going out as I was trying to go inside.

Not caring one bit I entered a stall and changed back to my male clothes. As I went out I faced the mirrors and had to find out, with a somber acceptance, that I looked more and more like a female me.

The sight made me dizzy. It could also have been the blood loss.

I decided to find a flight home.

Five minutes later my phone ringed.

My mother had sent me another message.

"I'm bringing you back. Don't worry about it."

"Oh yeah, I forgot you're a psychic..." I said out loud, exasperated. 

She wasn't, at least I'm pretty sure she wasn't.

Well let's find a nice full and busy cafe that begins with S and ends with Tarbucks. I'll watch dumb cat videos, and wait for the viking fleet to pillage the coasts.

I found a nice looking crowded place twenty meters later.

I sat down at a table outside, looking at all the persons running around trying to catch their flights in a hurry.

"Things are gonna be alright." The words escaped my lips.

I immediately regretted saying it out loud. I just brought death flags on the whole operation.

"Sumimasen!" Said a polite voice.

What appeared to be an airport security guard was standing 10m (32 ft) away from me.

He had come to answer the call of the death flag.

I got up.

"Yes?" I answered in my best japanese, trying to become the embodiment of innocence itself.

"Erm... Miss?" He began.

I could not actually stop myself from wincing at that.

He smiled in response.

I fucked up.

Really? In the airport? With thousands of people around?

No way.

But my gut-feeling told me to run.

He drew out a gun from a hidden holster.

A fucking gun, in Japan.

People immediately shouted.

A couple sitting next to me fell of their chair, the husband tried to drag his wife out of the way.

A kid looked at us, puzzled, not grasping what was happening, his mother took him in her arms and fled to the emergency exits.

"React."

Yeah no kidding gramps I thought while running at him, as I was seeing the chaos expanding around me.

Yup, at him. I was in the open, the closest way to safety was to remove the gun from his hands.

I didn't think the chances of that happening were high.

No time to think about chances. The gun was already pointed at me, and his expression had become stone cold.

"You're gonna aim at my chest!" I shouted, with an expression of pure confidence.

A bluff. To destabilize, to gain a few seconds, a few steps forward.

Unknowingly, he changed his aim for my head.

One step.

I did not look at the weapon, only his eyes. I waited for the flicker in them.

I saw it. I sidestepped.

The bang exploded throughout the airport, making the shouts of the crowd intensify exponentially. People were running everywhere.

I took two steps.

In his eyes I just dodged a bullet.

But even though he was surprised, even though that should have made him hesitate, he didn't.

He was just gonna shoot again, I could feel it. And now I was only three meters away. He wouldn't miss.

And I was out of cards to play.

I would have to tank the next bullet.

I still ran towards him, waiting for the sharp pain to arrive.

I saw his neck move before the rest of his body followed. A horrible sounding crack echoed out of him.

The fake guard flew five meters before crashing down like a creepy doll, right on to waiting chairs.

Blue eyes looked at me, anger burning inside them. Same color as mine.

"Amateurs." Almost spitted my mom.