Preview #6: Miscellaneous / Something Else (Patreon)

I'm throwing this in mainly as a sample for those who would rather have an option to vote for in the next post other than anything in the other five posts. 

This is a snip from an incomplete crossover fanfiction which I really want to get back to someday- The Mastery of Haruhi Suzumiya. Again, I'd hoped for this to be fresh writing, but I ran out of time.

There are a number of unfinished works I wouldn't mind getting back to- Sexy Amazon Hulk-chan, The Melancholy of Pinkie Pie, the unfinished sci-fi novel Safeharbor, and others. This option is for those, or if you have suggestions, for those too.

As with all the tales of Haruhi Suzumiya, the narrator is Kyon, the one ordinary human being of the SOS Brigade of North High School. There's a substitute teacher at school- Mr. Strame- who has taken a strange interest in the SOS Brigade, and Kyon has just had his second close encounter with the odd Western man... if that's what he is...

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I decided to go home early, since Asahina's tea would not be available and my only companion had exhausted her quota of words for the month in our earlier conversation. All the way down the hill my mind raced around the mystery of Mr. Strame. He scared Yuki and Asahina- the elder Asahina- enough that they tried to avoid his notice. Koizumi had ditched him as soon as he could. Haruhi thought he hung the moon. He acted a bit suspiciously, and his history lecture had been disturbing... 

... but was that enough evidence for anything? I trusted Asahina (big) and Nagato implicitly, but they each had their own agendas. And certainly I didn't have any proof I could put in front of anyone else- especially not in front of Haruhi. 

And if Strame really was a dangerous alien who wished Haruhi ill, what could I do about any of it- me, a human so ordinary that I fell entirely beneath his notice, with my dreary life of boredom and tedium, briefly enlivened by serving as a menial for Suzumiya? 

That was my thinking when I walked up to the station and saw Koizumi standing by the bike racks. Given my preferences I would have ignored him, but he was standing right in front of my bike. Actually, standing isn't the right word. He was hopping back and forth from one leg to another, covering one eye, then the other, looking away, then snapping his head back forward. 

"Is this some new power you've developed?" I asked quietly. "Or do you intend to warn me about Strame using interpretive dance?" 

"I'm sorry, but I can't talk to you just now," he said. "I have to concentrate on not concentrating." 

Why would you want to do yet another impossible thing? Aren't the impossibilities of Suzumiya enough? 

"This may be very important. I have the absolute conviction that there's something right in front of me, but I can't see anything there. My eyes keep wanting to slide away from a certain spot. Something doesn't want anybody to know it's there." 

"Can you point to it?" 

Koizumi's hand went up, but before he could point it seemed to jerk a bit to the right. "Not... not there," he said. He tried to correct his aim, and his arm jerked again over to the left. "And not there. In between... I think." 

"And you can't see it." 

"I'm afraid I can't." 

Neither could I. There wasn't anything there. I walked forward in a straight line through the point where Koizumi had not-aimed, then walked back. "Did I walk a straight line?" I asked. 

"Indeed you did," he said. "So long as I kept my eyes on you, I had no trouble. If I looked at anything else, though, my eyes wandered again. It's most upsetting." 

I was about to say his behavior was even more upsetting when I felt a sudden chill through my blazer. I heard a faint sound, a sort of grinding whoosh, all around me. I stepped forward towards Koizumi and, for a moment, it went away. Then it grew louder, and louder, and louder, until I thought everyone else in the station could hear it. 

"Is there something wrong?" Koizumi asked. 

"Don't you hear it?" 

"Indeed I don't. But the problem with my senses is growing much worse. I can barely look straight at you anymore." Almost as soon as he said it his head twisted as if it had been slapped. 

The grinding sound terminated with a loud thunk, like a door sliding shut. I did a slow turn, looking around me, until I found what I hadn't known I was looking for. 

It had been only a foot behind me- and it hadn't been there two minutes before. 

"Koizumi," I said, "the thing you said you couldn't see?" 

"Do you see it?" 

"I see it," I said. "It's a phone box." 

It seemed like the world, having been bored with my normal and unexceptional life through the first fifteen years of my existence, was tossing all the impossible things it had at me at once. I had just become accustomed to the silent but powerful alien, the shy and clueless time traveler, and the smug, talented part-time esper. Haruhi… well, nobody ever gets used to Haruhi. But this… a phone box Koizumi knows is there before it is there? Which he couldn’t see until I told him what it was? And which was like no phone booth I’d ever seen as a kid, or in the movies, or on television, or anyplace at all?

Yet this dark blue box had the words- in English, even stranger yet- POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX in large plain letters above the doors. It was too small to be anything else other than a phone booth… except, I mused, for the portable toilets they used on construction sites, but this was obviously too ornate and decorative for that. My brain would doubtless have continued to gnaw and worry at the strangeness if the doors hadn’t chosen that instant to open right in my face.

For a moment I had a glimpse of a white interior, of a space much larger than could be accounted for by the box itself. Then my view was obstructed by a large, oddly dressed form stepping into the doorway- much taller than I was, possibly approaching two meters in height, wearing a hodgepodge of overcoat, waistcoat, shirt, slacks, large floppy hat, and an immense scarf that seemed to have an independent life beyond its wearer. 

“See, Sarah?” the man said over his shoulder, speaking loudly enough that for Japan it would be a shout. The man could give Haruhi lessons on confidence. “The chameleon circuit might still be broken, but the perception filter works absolutely perfectly!” Only then did he turn fully forward, which fortunately saved him from stepping straight into me. “Oh,” he said, just barely nonplussed at my presence. “How do you do?”

Now in what world would I ever have been able to give an answer to that?