Thanatos

Chapter 28

"How many times have I told you, Tanaka?" Kei pushed past him to get in. "My name's Kei. Not Keiko. Just Kei."

"Well, "Just Kei", it's quite the surprise to see you again," he returned with a little chuckle. "I mean, I never thought you'd return to this place after the last time, and with..." He trailed off again as he seemed to take a good look at the two at the door now.

"Wait a frigging minute!" His eyes widened in excitement to the point that it seemed that they would fall out of their sockets any time soon. "These are Megan and Ricardo, aren't they?"

He pushed past the duo to get outside, looking left and right eagerly like a child after the ice cream truck. "Where are Jay and Adolf?" He returned to ask, practically bouncing on his feet at this point. "Did they come to Tokyo too? Is this a part of an ongoing Olympus mission or are guys already concluded?"

"You told him about Olympus?!" Megan pushed Tanaka aside to face Kei. "I mean, what happened to the "Never speak about the covert" philosophy you were all about?" What she really wanted to ask was, "What happened to you in this place?" Period.

Kei dismissed the query with a wave. "Tanaka's cool, Meg," she said, pushing a bunch of manga books to the floor to make space for herself to lie down on the lone sofa in the now revealed to be tiny one bedroom apartment. "Trust me, telling him stuff is like shouting your secret inside of a crypt. It's never going to get out."

Megan took a second look at the boy nodding eagerly behind her. How in the world did she get mixed up with him? She wondered.

Tanaka didn't look any older than twenty. Thin – he was only a little above the average height and without any striking physique so she couldn't think of him as slim or lanky – average Japanese face, bushy eyebrows sitting on top of black eyes, stubbled jaw to complement the unkempt hair.

One word: unmemorable, Megan remarked in her head, wondering again what could have drawn Kei to connect with him so deeply that she was willing to tell him things, even things about Olympus which she held so dear.

She looked around his room with a quick glance – not very hard given the size – and another word came to her: dirty.

Or maybe not, she corrected herself almost immediately.

Thing is, while the occupant looked like he was in dire need of a specialist's grooming, his room was remarkably devoid of dirt. What she had termed "dirty" was actually untidy, but even that wasn't really so. The objects themselves were in a predetermined arrangement which pattern were hard to figure out at first glance - she did get a sense of it after a few minutes - and the size of the room didn't help the number of stuffs in it seemly filled to the brim.

Jack of all trades, Megan noted again, inspecting the array of equipment in the room ranging from electrical repairs, to mechanical repairs, something like an abandoned robot schematic, an actual architectural building design; all packed around what appeared to be a homemade workstation assembled from various old school electronic appliances, a bunch of Japanese words flashing on its screen on standby.

This kid is one pretty interesting individual, she thought and smiled, the look in her eyes now including respect when she turned to face him again.

The excitement seemed to have bubbled out of Tanaka by then and he went to take a seat in a revolving chair by a small work table, pick up a soldering iron to resume repairs on a piece of motherboard he had presumably been working on before the knock on the door.

"I'm guessing this isn't simply a social call," he said as he worked. "So, what is it?"

Yeah, that, the thought returned to Megan and she turned to face Kei with a look that seconded Tanaka's question.