Sage says you’re supposed to start your biography with your parents and getting born.

Sage is full of advice, most of it good, but I think I’m going to start with the winter I turned eleven, because that’s when my life started getting seriously weird. Not that it was ever exactly normal- I don’t think anyone’s is- but it was a lot more normal before I ever went into that shop on Sakura Street in Chinatown. 'Course, even if I hadn't, things woulda gone topsy-turvy next fall anyway, so I suppose I can't blame it all on that-

Sorry, I'm digressing. I'll try not to do that. No promises, though.

It was a frigid-cold Saturday in November, about a month after my birthday, and I was alone in the apartment. My mother, a global journalist, was off pursuing some story of scandal and corruption in Mexico, and my father, a patent-holding chemist, was at a chemist’s convention in Chicago. This was nothing new or unusual for me; one or both of my parents were often away and the genuinely rare occurrence was when they were both home for more than three days at a time. I knew that wasn’t normal for most kids, but most kids weren’t capable of taking care of themselves, and I was; I had been for quite a while, and if something happened, there was always Mrs. G. Hardy, the landlady of our apartment building. She was eccentric- most people in New York are in some way- but she was cool and she liked me and she was supposed to know about problems in the building anyway, so I never had any problem going to her when something came up that I couldn't deal with.

I remember that day very vividly. My parents were due home Tuesday to get ready for Thanksgiving, and I was feeling very bored and impatient. I’d finished my homework and was kicking around the apartment (not literally, of course) wishing for something to make the time pass quicker. I was making a half-hearted attempt at cleaning my room, having nothing better to do, when I found some money I’d been given for my birthday. (It was on my desk, and once something’s on my desk, it might as well be in Indonesia or under the Arctic seabed. Every now and then I have to excavate, and it’s a little scary, some of the things I find… Anyway.) So, with twenty dollars burning a hole in my pocket, I bundled up, locked up, went down the stairs- the elevator seldom worked properly and we only lived on the sixth floor- and braced myself as I stepped out into the frigid New York wind. There is almost always a wind coming in off the ocean in New York, and it makes life very cold in the winter. That day was no exception, but it was clear and bright and there were tons of people out and about- Christmas shopping, to judge from all the packages and bags being lugged around. I ducked along the sidewalk, dodging people the way you learn to do, and stopping every now and then to look into the decorated windows.

When I reached the large red and gold dragon outside the Chinatown intersection, I decided to cut down that way. I’d often been around Chinatown and several of the shopkeepers knew me on sight, though their stuff was always so expensive that I could never buy much. Still, they might have marked things down a bit for Christmas, and I did need to start thinking about that. Besides, they had great restaurants and the sidewalks were a lot less crowded.

Four blocks later, I hadn't seen much in my price range and was starting to think more about lunch than about Christmas presents. My ears and fingers getting very cold, too, so I went into a shop I was particularly fond of to warm up. It was more or less an Oriental thrift shop, run by a very nice older man named Wong, and he had told me some fascinating stories about the history behind some of his merchandise. To my surprise, though, he wasn’t behind the counter. Instead, there was a taller, thinner, and much older man wearing a very unusual Oriental hat and a dark-blue robe. He turned as I entered and bowed to me; taken off guard, I gave a hesitant half-bow in return. “Good afternoon,” he said gravely. “It is a cold day.”

I returned the greeting, looked around curiously, then asked where Mr. Wong was. The old gentleman explained that Wong-san had been called out of the state for a day or two on business-related issues. I wondered who the man was, but it wouldn’t have been polite to ask, so I didn’t, just wandered around looking at stuff until I warmed up. I remember that nothing really jumped out at me as good candidates for Christmas presents, though there were a few things I wouldn't have minded getting for myself. Especially in the book section. I restrained the urge, though- for a little while.

When I got back to the front of the store, the gentleman had his back to me; he had opened a box and was setting things on a shelf. I looked at his hat for a moment, smiling and thinking that it looked more like a shallow basket turned upside-down than a hat, and then I noticed something sitting on the counter that drove the hat right out of my mind. It was a small clear-glass ball about the size of a large marble, with a dark-blue character in the center of it. Afternoon sunlight was coming in through the glass-paneled door, and the little orb was glowing brightly, casting a blue reflection on the wooden counter.

“That means life,” the man remarked quietly, and I looked up to see him watching me- at least, I thought so, but the hat was shading his eyes and most of his face. “The kanji is inochi, which stands for life, and the blue of the kanji represents the great spaces of the sky.”

Intrigued, I moved closer. “Inochi is Japanese,” I remarked curiously.

“Yes, Wong-san gets a few items from Japan. This came in the last delivery.”

I nodded; a lot of trade went on between Japan and China, and there were many similarities between the two countries, a lot of mutual influence. “Blue for the sky?” I asked after a moment. “Not the ocean?”

“Traditionally, water is represented with a lighter blue. This blue represents the night sky, or the darkness seen when one is at a great height. One can go much higher in the sky than one can in the water, for in time the water ends and there is earth. But the sky goes on forever.”

That old gentleman sure knew how to set his hook. I had always been into astronomy and meteorology, always felt my interest stir at the mention of the country where I was born but didn’t remember living in, and this combination of the two was impossible to resist. I heard myself ask, “How much is it?” and the gentleman smiled, picking up a very unusual staff to move it out of his way. Five minutes and three dollars later, I was on my way, bemused at how cheap the thing had been, head ringing with the sound of chimes- the sound of golden metal rings clashing softly against a winged orb at the top of a staff.

It was a while before I noticed anything really unusual about the orb, which I had promptly dubbed Inochi. I don’t usually name my possessions, but this was an exception; it seemed to deserve a name. I had set it on my windowsill so that the afternoon sunlight glowed on it every day, and I often picked it up to hold it and study the blue kanji. I did notice that whenever I was in a low mood or feeling cranky, holding it helped me feel better. But since I don't get down too often, I didn’t think much about it until after I got the flu.

Oh, that was a bad one. That flu started making the rounds in school not long after the New Year, and I got it real bad. I wasn’t the only one, either- seemed like half my school came down with it within a week of each other. Fortunately for me, Dad was home when I couldn’t get up one morning, and he was concerned enough that he didn’t spend more than an hour at a time in his lab without coming to check on me. I felt rotten, but I sure enjoyed the attention. Mom was away, but she got home the next evening, took one look at me, and cancelled everything on her schedule indefinitely, which I really appreciated. As it turned out, indefinitely was a little under a month. I spent two straight weeks in bed and my fever ran so high that my parents considered taking me to the hospital. That turned out not to be necessary, but I was taken in to the doctor (when I would rather have been sleeping) and the result of that was a prescription for antibiotics. The irony of the whole business was that I'd had a flu-shot in October. Once again the flu, sneaky thing, had mutated into a form that the vaccination didn't provide any protection for.

It was during those two weeks that I made my first discovery about the Inochi orb. Whenever I was feeling extra-lousy, I would pick it up and hold it, and soon I would feel a little better. Some of my fatigue would lift, my appetite would perk up a bit, and my fever would drop a degree or two. If it had only happened once or twice, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it- it would have been a clear coincidence, or maybe the antibiotic working- but it happened every single time. I didn’t quite know what to make of that, but I was too sick to give it much thought. I was just grateful to feel better, and started keeping the orb under my pillow so it would be conveniently close.

I finally got up and moving again, more or less, but it was another week before I was back in school. That was on the doctor's orders: apparently a lot of people were pushing themselves back to work and school too soon, and many of them were ending up with bronchitis and pneumonia as a result. So taking things slow and easy- 'rebuilding vitality', as the doctor called it- was recommended. Mom wasn’t so sure, but Dad backed the doctor up and said I could end up with lung problems for the rest of my life if I got pneumonia now. He also pointed out that when you mixed that many half-sick kids together, you were just asking for more mutations, and went on about that for a while- I wasn't really listening, being half asleep at the time. The result was that Mom gave in and arranged for my school to call the apartment every day and tell me what my assignments were. She even made a special trip to collect my books. I thanked her rather sarcastically for the 'favors' and got busy catching up on two weeks of classwork.

It wasn't easy to concentrate on my subjects, at first- my brain kept disconnecting and I'd find myself staring sleepily at the wall, not really seeing it. So it took me three days to get caught up. And I think that was when both my parents began to realize that I was smarter than they thought. They already knew I was very intelligent, (not too many kids talk in complete sentences by their first birthday, like I did, though I don’t remember doing that) but I don't think they ever had me tested, since I was always put into the grades normal for my age. With the inevitable result: school bored me silly. When you’ve mastered algebraic equations at age five, you do tend zone out when your teacher explains that five take-away three equals two. I always did my classwork, because I knew I’d get poor scores if I didn’t and I didn't want to get into trouble, but most of my time was spent basically teaching myself higher-grade stuff.

I really didn't think what I did was anything unusual, at first; I assumed it was the same for every kid as it was for me, and that the reason some kids got bad grades was because they were too bored to do the work right. It wasn't till later that I realized the work was actually too hard for them; they didn't understand it. I found it odd, but offered to help some of the kids out, and soon it was one of the best-kept secrets in school that Tommy Hashiba (Tommy was the inevitable nickname for Toma, which is why I started going by Rowen- only to get mistaken for a rowan tree half the time. I just can’t win when it comes to names.) was a certified genius. That is, most of the kids knew it, but none of the teachers did. My school was a good one, but the teacher-kid ratio was about average- twenty to thirty kids per class- and the teachers just didn’t have time to do one-on-one teaching. So no one ever realized that in my case, straight A’s meant something other than extremely good study habits.

The great thing about it was that it meant school required practically no effort on my part. It was all review-work for me, and the only real challenges were essays and reports. There weren’t many of those, so I always finished my homework in probably a quarter the time it would take another student, and had plenty of time for other things. At that point, ‘other things’ usually meant taking a nap, or if I was feeling energetic, playing something on the computer. Mom noticed and hassled me a few times about not getting my work done, until I actually got up and showed her that the assignments were done. After that she left me alone about it, but I caught her looking thoughtfully at my reading material and rather sneakily switched to comic books until she lost interest.

There was a reason for that. The negative aspect to being so smart was- well, not exactly shunning, I was real popular when test-times came around and I did a pretty brisk business tutoring- but I was kept at a distance. Lots of kids were interested in seeing what a genius was like, but nobody really wanted to get too close- sorta as if intelligence were poison ivy or something. Sometimes, when I was last-picked for something or didn’t get invited to someone’s party, I wished I was just ordinary. I wished it even more when test times were over and the crowds of kids wanting help drifted away. I wished I had friends who liked me as me, and not just as a walking, talking supercomputer.

It took a while, but I got my wish, five times over. If I’d known I’d find my true family when I crossed the ocean, I wouldn’t have been nearly so reluctant to make the trip.

Anyway, that was why I didn't clue my parents in. I was afraid that if they knew what the kids at school knew, they’d treat me like the kids at school did. And there was more logic behind that than there seems: Mom and Dad were so often gone that even though they did tell me they loved me, I sometimes wondered if they meant it. I also wondered- especially on lonely nights when they were both away- why they’d even had me, since they didn't seem too interested in raising me. So I didn’t want to change the status quo, didn’t want to upset whatever balance there was and risk giving them another reason to not want to be around me.

You can tell yourself you’re being ridiculous till the sun rises in the south, but it doesn’t stop the feelings. Logic just isn’t good at driving out doubts and insecurities.

After I got over the flu and was back in school, things went on pretty much in their usual way. Mom was sometimes home, sometimes not. She won several awards for her articles and attended a couple of ceremonies- she actually asked me if I wanted to come to one in D.C., but I decided not to; I knew she’d enjoy it more if she didn’t have to keep me in mind the whole time. I told her I’d tape it on TV and tell everyone at school that my mother was famous, and that pleased her very much. Mom’s shrewd in pursuit of a story, but she’s...well, she’s kinda air-headed at times. I guess it's not nice to suggest that your mother is a ditz, but some mothers are. And frankly, there are far worse things to be than that.

While Mom was being honored for her exposé’s, Dad was being lauded for several ground-breaking patents in his chemical work. He’d been working on a formula to neutralize oil-spills, particularly on ways to remove it from local wildlife without harming the ecology, and had made several very important steps in the process. Ironically, Mom got to write him up for the well-known Geographic magazine, which amused them both very much. He ended up in quite a few science journals, traveled around to a number of teaching seminars, and attended several fund-raising dinners in his honor.

In the end, it was Dad’s work that uprooted us, but that comes a bit later.

While the two parental units were off here, there and everywhere, I stayed quietly- well, that’s not the best word for New York- I stayed at home, did my schoolwork, talked to Mom and/or Dad over the phone most nights, and waited for winter to pass. What was significant is that I started carrying the Inochi orb around with me. I still don’t know why I did that, except that I didn’t seem to feel quite right unless I could put my hand in my pocket and touch it. (Yes, I know how that sounds. Just get your mind out of the gutter, okay?) I’d gotten used to having Inochi conveniently nearby while I was sick and it had become a habit to keep it with me. Besides, even though I’d gotten over being actively sick, I still wasn’t completely recovered from the flu. I got tired very easily and I still didn’t have much appetite, which is always a bad sign, with me. The orb helped me feel better. And that was how I discovered that there was a lot more to that Inochi ball than just a fascinating kanji-character in the center of it.

It was March fourth and I was walking home from school, feeling tired and grumpy. The wind was whipping up something ferocious, like it always does when spring is lurking around the corner but refusing to come out and warm things up. The wind chill was something around twenty degrees, and the gusts were hitting me straight in the face, which I really wasn’t appreciating. My hands were in my pockets, my schoolbag hanging off my right wrist, and without even thinking much about it, I wrapped my numbing fingers around Inochi. I suppose I thought it might warm my hand up a little, but that was not what happened. What happened was that as the next gust of wind struck me, I suddenly felt a little more energetic. I put it down to adrenaline and kept walking, but another wind-blast resulted in another little surge…and the next one…and the next.

You just can’t ignore a pattern like that, even if you want to.

I stopped walking and thought for a moment, putting pieces together. I felt better than I had in weeks, but I couldn't account for it. It seemed to be tied in with the gusty wind, but I'd gotten most of the way home before it happened. The change had come when I put my hand on Inochi...which had helped me feel better when I was sick. The old man who'd sold it to me had said the blue represented air, sky, and there was plenty of air available right then. The only conclusion I could see was that the orb must be tapping energy from the air around me and somehow putting that energy inside me. I stood a moment more, seriously spooked- I'm not sure what spooked me more, having such a crazy idea or thinking that it might actually be true- but finally my curiosity got the better of me and I slowly pulled my right hand out of my pocket.

The Inochi-symbol was glowing a soft, deep blue, as if to confirm my hypothesis. I wasn't altogether surprised, but I was alarmed. I quickly shoved my hand back into my pocket, released the orb, and took off running for my apartment. I tried not to think how long it had been since I had the energy to run that fast, tried not to wonder what was going on, tried very hard not to think at all.

That never works! The brain really ought to come with an off switch…

When I got home, I was severely winded- er, way out of breath- and shivering. I dropped my book bag in the foyer, kicked off my shoes, hauled off my coat, and made for my room. Flopping down on my bed, I pulled Inochi out of my pocket and set it on the windowsill with a shaking hand. I could still see a faint glow around the kanji, and shuddered at the sight. “What?!” I demanded out loud. “What is going on? And why is it happening?” I pulled my gaze away from the orb and turned over on my back, staring up at the ceiling. “What the hell have I gotten myself into now? Magic? I don’t believe in magic, so how could it happen to me?”

It didn’t occur to me to check for hidden strings or batteries or any other kind of trickery like that. What kind of hoax could possibly result in the feeling I’d had? Whatever that orb was doing, however it was doing it, it wasn’t anything normal or natural, and that scared me; what’s fascinating and desirable in a fairy tale can turn out to be pretty damn creepy when it happens in real life. I wanted to know why and how it was happening, but more than that, I wanted to know what kind of strings were attached. You don’t get something for nothing, there’s always a price- ironically enough, there’s usually a heavier price in fairy tales than there is in life. Sometimes it’s your life, sometimes your soul, sometimes your home or people you love. And since this was real life, I didn’t think I’d qualify for the ‘happily ever after’ ending.

“’Course, since it’s real life, it shouldn’t be happening, period,” I grumbled after a moment, suddenly aware of the inconsistency. “And what is the price?” I snapped, sitting up. “What’s going to happen to me? Maybe I’ll grow another head, maybe I’ll turn into some freaky monster- or get killed by some freaky monster! Or maybe it won’t be so bad, maybe I’ll turn invisible, like the wind…hell. Maybe I’ll just go nuts and sit around talking to inanimate objects,” I concluded grimly, glaring at that innocuous-looking little glass ball. “Well, whatever the deal is, forget it. I’m not buying,” I declared. Sweeping the orb up, I turned to drop it into the trash can…and paused. Having gotten my hands on something obviously unnatural, the wise thing was to figure out what it was before trying to get rid of it. Supernatural things follow their own rules, and I didn’t want whatever was behind this orb coming after me, offended by my treatment of it. For that matter, if someone or something did come looking for this thing, it would be a very awkward scene if I had to tell them (or it), ‘Um, I threw it in the trash, it’s probably in one of the dumps by now.’

That started a whole new line of thought. What if more than one entity showed up looking for the thing? It wasn’t hard to imagine any number of peculiar beings fighting over it, wanting to use it for different purposes. How would I know who to turn it over to, unless I knew what it was for? And worse than that- “Wonderful, just wonderful.” I looked down at the orb. “Look here. If someone shows up wanting me to hand you over, you better let me know if it’s the right person or not. And if it isn’t the right person, you better be willing to protect me when I refuse and they get pissed at me.”

Nothing happened. Feeling like an idiot, I sighed and turned to put Inochi away in my dresser drawer. No sense leaving it out in plain sight on the windowsill, I reasoned. That pretty much invited a smash-and-grab. Then I went downstairs to find a snack before starting on my homework, shaking my head to try and clear out some of the surreal feeling I was experiencing.

That never works, either.

I spent a lot of time that spring doing research, and it was just as well that no one- or maybe I mean nothing- did come looking for Inochi, because I didn’t make any progress at all.

The first thing I did was to go back to Chinatown and casually ask a couple of shopkeepers what they could tell me about it, and mainly what I learned was what the thing wasn’t: it was neither very valuable nor very unusual. The glass was high-quality, the kanji clearly defined and accurately done, and the process of coloring it was no different than what was done for the average American paperweight, just on a smaller scale. I even went back to Wong’s shop to ask him what he thought, and got exactly the same answer: it was a nice little good-luck piece, but nothing out of the ordinary.

I didn’t quite have the nerve to correct that statement, though I was tempted.

The other thing I learned from Wong-san was that the older man who’d sold Inochi to me- who I suspected was Japanese himself- had returned home after having an unpleasant experience with a neighbor in the apartment he was renting. So the one person who had given me some useful information was totally out of touch, and that bothered me in an odd way.

Since I wasn’t getting anywhere talking to people, I decided to try the scholarly approach and started visiting libraries all over the city. That was completely futile, because I had no idea what I was trying to look up- there’s just no entry anywhere in any given index about orbs that glow. I tried all sorts of topics, hoping to get lucky: healing, luck, orbs, keepsakes- then moved to broader topics like mysticism, religious artifacts, cultural objects of interest, shrines…and got nowhere. In fact, I didn’t learn much, culturally speaking, that I hadn’t already known anyway. I had been born in Osaka of Japanese parents, and even though we lived in New York, they had taught me the cultures and customs of my native country. We actually spoke Japanese at home most of the time.

My next thought was to ask my parents about it, but I hesitated for a couple reasons. First, there just weren’t that many opportunities to ask them much of anything. Second, I (again) didn’t want them to realize that there was something different going on with me; I was too afraid of the possible consequences. If something as basic and uncontrollable as my intelligence wasn’t entirely acceptable, how much less so was being the recipient of seemingly-magical artifact? No one else had a strange orb that made them stronger when it glowed blue; I shouldn’t either. The third reason I kept quiet was that I was worried about my parents' safety. If something should happen, I didn’t want them to get involved in it and maybe get hurt. I actually had a couple of bad dreams about some malicious creature holding my parents hostage and demanding Inochi in return for their lives. So I said nothing about it, but continued to visit libraries and research centers. I also ran some Internet searches, and even left a few cautious questions in Japanese-oriented areas of the Net- all without results. By the time June arrived, I was seriously frustrated. I had nothing to show for all my checking; I had felt that troubling ‘strengthening’ sensation again several times when it was windy; and I couldn’t seem to stop carrying Inochi with me wherever I went. The habit had become too strong and I often forgot it was with me until I put my hand in my pocket and found it there.

The one thing that eased my sense of futility somewhat was my new hobby: Archery. I had a brief lesson on bows and arrows in gym class and gotten pretty intrigued with the sport- but not for the usual reasons. All my concern about safety and potential unwanted visitors had made me start thinking about weapons, just in case Inochi wasn't inclined to protect me and I had to defend myself- or someone else. Archery seemed like the best answer to the problem. Knives and swords took a lot of training to use, spears and pikes were completely out of the question, and even if I could have gotten my hands on a gun, I didn't want to. You can explain why there's a bow and arrows in your closet, or even sword or a knife if necessary, but you can't explain a gun and you sure can't carry one without getting into way too much trouble. So I went looking for shooting galleries and after some initial confusion over whether I meant bullets, arrows, or pictures, I found one: there was a small and seldom-used archery center just two blocks from my apartment. That might have been a first class coincidence, but I took it as a sign and started spending a lot of after-school time there. And I had plenty of it, since I had about given up on glowing-orb research completely.

I had just decided that I was going to have to let my parents in on my secret after all- the next time they came home- when hurricane season hit and I got a really awful scare.

New York doesn’t generally get much in the way of hurricanes- it’s too far north- but the first storm of the year decided to come up the coast instead of making the Floridians miserable again. The storm was a category two when it came ashore in the middle of the night, somewhere in New Jersey, and by dawn we’d been having tropical-storm force winds for several hours. School was cancelled, of course, and the power kept going out, which was making life rather exasperating for me. Seemed like every time I turned on the TV or computer, the power would deliberately flux out again.

Maybe it was deliberate! I dunno…but weird things do happen- I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, after having the power shut down all systems for about the sixth time, I gave up and got a book, sitting near my bedroom window to take advantage of the gray, stormy light. I’d gotten through most of a chapter when I heard a tremendous clanging and banging outside, right under the window. I put down the book with a growl and peered out, but it was impossible to see what was going on with all the rain pouring down. I debated going downstairs to take a better look, and had just decided I'd let someone else handle whatever it was when the noise came again, even louder. My curiosity got the better of me; I sighed, got up, went downstairs, and poked my head out the entry door. Rain flew straight into my face and I put my arm up to ward it off- and saw Inochi in my hand. I remember rolling my eyes at myself, and I stuck the obnoxious orb in my pocket before I carefully stepped outside.

The wind was incredible. The few trees on my block were bent nearly double, the traffic lights swayed violently on their wires, and bits of leaves and debris were being hurled every-which-way. I was drenched within a minute, but I didn’t really notice; I was too fascinated by the storm. Then I saw what had made the noise: the ‘yield’ part of a yield sign had been torn off its post and carried by the wind into a cluster of metal garbage cans, which were now rolling loose all over the sidewalk and street. So I did the neighborly thing and went to pick them up.

It was as I was putting the last one back that I suddenly noticed how strong I felt, and groaned; Inochi was doing it to me again! What else could I expect, though? Taking an air orb out in a hurricane was bound to have a significant effect on it. I turned my back on the wind- sort of, since it really was coming from all directions at once- and hurried back towards the apartment steps, suddenly aware of the cold and discomfort of being totally soaked. A sudden gust blasted me from the side and I staggered a little, but another surge of strength went through me and I reached the steps without any more problems…

Until something hit me in the back, sending me stumbling into the railing. And that was when several very strange things happened at once.

The first weird thing was that it didn’t hurt. Not even a little bit. No pain in my back, no ache in my ribs where the iron railing had hit.

The second, weirder thing was the noise. Whatever hit me clanged, and when I bounced off the rail, there was a loud clank. I’m human; when something hits me, I don’t clank. Usually, I thump.

Then I looked down- and saw the third thing.

Metal.

I was covered from my toes to my neck, including my arms and hands, in white and dark-blue metal that looked like body-armor. Rain was bouncing off it, and it seemed to be glowing a soft, dark blue. From the knees down it was blue; there was a sort of vest-like chest-abdomen guard that was also blue; the backs of my wrists were blue, and there was something rather like a pair of blue shorts- if armor had shorts- below the abdomen. The rest was white, and even in my daze of shock and fear, I noticed the joints in the armor that let me move easily.

Well, that’s misleading: I couldn’t help but notice, because my initial reaction- after about ten seconds of frozen fear- was to run inside and up the stairs to my room, and despite the gear, I had no trouble moving. I did have some trouble screaming, though- I was trying to, but between hyperventilating in terror and running as fast as I could, it didn’t work at all. I sank down beside my bed with a clatter, buried my face in the edge of the blanket, and huddled there, shaking and panting for breath. After a while, I realized I was muttering ‘go away, go away,’ over and over, but I didn’t register the fabric under my hands for quite a while.

It took a long time for me to calm down, and I went through the rest of the day in a sort of haze of astonishment and fear. It wasn't until about midnight that I started to see the whole thing as anything but terrifying and threatening. It had been creepy and bizarre, but I had not been hurt- and maybe that had been the whole point. I could easily have been injured by whatever it was that had hit me in the back; perhaps Inochi was simply protecting me. Granted, it had picked a pretty shocking way to do it, but after musing for a while, I had to admit that armor- tangible and solid- was a better option than some kind of weird force-field. Better something I had a chance of understanding than something completely supernatural. And it did give me another point for research; I could look up armor in a number of places with the certainty of finding information on it. Maybe Inochi wasn't just protecting me; maybe it was also trying to help me, so I could be prepared for whatever would come next.

I went to sleep feeling a little better about the whole thing and it wasn't until the next afternoon, while I was looking up 'body armor' in the local library, that I wondered if Inochi had shown me what sort of protection I would have because I would soon be needing it. That was not a nice thought.

Unfortunately, it was an accurate one- well, I guess that depends on how you define 'soon'.

At that point, the only thing that happened 'soon' was that school let out for the year, and that wasn't nearly soon enough for me. I spent my vacation looking up varieties of armor (though I didn't get very far), went to the local pool to swim, spent some time shooting, got on a Little League baseball team, read a lot, saw some awesome movies- the usual vacation stuff, all in the stifling heat of New York's summer. Mom came home five or six times and took me clothes-shopping twice; Dad came home three or four times and took me to a major league baseball game once. On the whole, I think I preferred the ball game! I seldom pay much attention to clothes; you can't, in New York, if you want to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.

And then the virtually unheard-of happened: in the middle of August, Mom and Dad came home together, and I got bombshelled.