Third Person: The Calm Before the Next Storm
The silence in the interrogation room was a tangible entity. It was heavy, dense, and filled with the secondhand embarrassment emanating from the now-black screen. The academy girls, raised in a world of discipline, honor, and cutting-edge technology, had just received a masterclass on the depravity of the outside world, courtesy of their prisoner's body camera.
Leo held his head in his hands, wishing the white floor would open up and swallow him whole. He had conducted covert operations on three continents. He had lied face-to-face to men who ordered assassinations before breakfast. He had survived firefights, car chases, and federal government bureaucracy. None of that had prepared him for the absolute nakedness of this moment. His life, or at least the chaotic end of it, had been laid bare like a bad teen movie.
Cecilia Alcott fanned herself with her hand, as if the room's air had become impure. "I've never... never in my life seen such a lack of... of everything," she whispered, horrified.
Lingyin, on the other hand, had a strangely analytical expression. "So alcohol in his world has far more potent effects. Or his constitution is incredibly weak. It's fascinating from a physiological standpoint."
Laura Bodewig simply stared at Leo, her previous fury replaced by a deep, cold confusion. She had been trained to fight soldiers, spies, and terrorists. She had no protocol for dealing with a... this. An interdimensional party animal.
It was Chifuyu Orimura who broke the silence. Her voice was as calm and sharp as ever, but for the first time, Leo detected a nuance of weariness, the exasperation of a woman facing a problem that defied all logic.
"That recording," she said, pointing at the screen. "It explains your departure. The way you were ejected from your reality. But it doesn't explain your arrival. There's a gap."
Leo lifted his head. "A gap?"
"The recording ends with your loss of consciousness. The next image we have is of you waking up on our rooftop, hours later," Chifuyu explained. "That time gap is a problem. What happened between Point A, your blackout at that... 'party,' and Point B, your appearance here, remains a mystery."
Leo felt a cold sweat that had nothing to do with the hangover. There were... fragments. Confused memories after the big blackout. A smiling face. The taste of sake. The sound of blaring music. He had assumed they were fever dreams, echoes of the party. But what if they weren't?
"I'm telling you there's nothing else," he lied, though his own conviction wavered. "The device must have shut off."
Chifuyu gave him a look that said she found his lack of imagination almost insulting. "Technician," she said, not taking her eyes off Leo. "Analyze the device. Look for fragmented files, hidden data logs, anything that covers that time gap. Be thorough."
The technician, who had been trying to make himself invisible, nodded nervously and went back to typing at his terminal. Leo felt a pang of genuine panic.
"Wait," he said, his voice a little louder than he intended. "Seriously. I think it's better for everyone if you don't..."
"If we don't what, Mr.... whoever you are?" Chifuyu interrupted. "If we don't discover the full truth? Or if we don't discover more evidence of your incompetence?"
Before Leo could reply, the technician exclaimed, "Ah! Here it is, Orimura-sensei! There's another data log. LOG_02_ARRIVAL_EVENT. It seems the camera restarted upon entering our dimension. The timestamp is from... twelve hours before he was found on the rooftop."
Twelve hours. A lost night.
Leo's heart plummeted to his feet.
"Please," he pleaded, and this time there was no act in his voice. It was the honest plea of a man on the brink of an abyss. "For the sanity of everyone present, for the future of interdimensional relations, don't play that."
His desperation was the only invitation they needed.
"Play it," Chifuyu ordered.
First Person: The Awakening, Take Two
The screen came to life again. And it wasn't the rooftop.
The first-person view was blurry, out of focus. The sound was a high-pitched ringing. I heard my own breathing, a ragged gasp. The camera slowly focused on an unfamiliar ceiling, with a damp stain in one corner and a lazily spinning fan.
Where...?
I pushed myself up in the recording, the abrupt movement accompanied by a groan that echoed in the interrogation room. I was in a hotel room. Or what looked like a low-budget hotel room somewhere in Japan. The room was completely trashed.
Empty sake bottles and Chūhai cans were scattered across the floor. Half-eaten ramen containers formed a small mountain on a table. And in the corner, wearing a lampshade like it was high fashion, was a small cleaning robot with the IS Academy logo.
"That's a Mop-Bot 7!" Ichika exclaimed, recognizing the device. "What's it doing there?"
But I wasn't alone. In the other bed, beneath a pile of what looked like carnival-won stuffed animals, someone else began to stir. A young Japanese man with questionable blond hair and a t-shirt that read "Surfing is my Religion" in broken English sat up, blinking.
"Uoooooh, my head..." the guy in the recording said, with a heavily local accent. "Leo-san, are you still alive?"
Leo. So that was my name here. Great. I didn't even remember introducing myself.
My recording self merely emitted a guttural sound. The guy, Kenji, smiled. "That was an amazing night!"
In the interrogation room, silence was absolute. The girls stared at the screen, their brains trying to process this new, confusing information. I didn't land on the rooftop. I landed in a nearby city. And I befriended a fake surfer.
"This makes no sense," Cecilia stated.
My recording self got up and stumbled towards the bathroom. The camera caught my reflection in the mirror. I had something written on my forehead in permanent marker. One word: "Cat." And in the sink, meticulously washing its paws, was a real calico cat wearing a tiny samurai hat.
No one in the interrogation room knew what to say.
"We need to reconstruct the night," my voice said in the recording. "Let's check our pockets."
The next part of the recording was a frantic montage. Kenji and I emptying our pockets onto the bed, finding a heap of tickets, receipts, and strange objects. Each object triggered a blurry flashback, the camera shaking as the memory returned.
The first flashback: A karaoke club ticket. The recording cut to a noisy scene. Kenji and I were on a small stage, horribly singing a duet of some anime ballad, completely off-key. In front of us, a group of men in flashy suits and visible tattoos—low-level yakuza, no doubt—applauded us with tears in their eyes. On the way out, in our drunken state, we grabbed their "mascot": the little Mop-Bot we mistook for a rolling ashtray.
The second flashback: A takoyaki stand receipt. The scene shifted to a neon-lit street. We were in an eating contest against a burly chef who looked like he could use our skulls as bowls. We won. In our celebration, my recording self tried to high-five the chef, but instead, stumbled and knocked over the man's entire stack of ingredients. The rest of the memory was a shaky view of us running down an alley as the chef chased us, wielding a spatula the size of a machete.
In the room, Lingyin let out a choked giggle before covering her mouth, embarrassed.
The third flashback: An arcade card. The memory showed us hiding from the furious chef. But instead of laying low, we found ourselves in front of a dance machine. What followed was an epic dance-off against two local girls. We won, and the recording showed a crowd of Japanese teenagers cheering us on as they showered us with prizes: the pile of stuffed animals from the hotel bed.
By now, the atmosphere in the interrogation room had shifted from tension to pure, unadulterated bewilderment. They were watching the film of the stupidest, most irresponsible night in history, starring the man they had chained to a chair.
And then, the end came. The piece that connected everything.
Third Person: The Most Idiotic Motive in History
The recording showed the final scene. Leo and Kenji, standing on a hill overlooking the city. They were exhausted, drunk, and laden with stuffed animals. The Mop-Bot hummed at their feet, still wearing the lampshade.
The camera rose, focusing on a building complex in the distance. A place of elegant, futuristic architecture, lit up against the night sky. The IS Academy.
The camera's audio captured their conversation, words slurred by alcohol but unmistakably clear.
Kenji: "Uoooooh... Look at that, Leo-san. Must be the most incredible nightclub in all of Japan. It looks like it's from the future!"
Leo (in the voice of someone who has had too much sake): "I bet... I bet I can make it to that rooftop. I'm... I'm like a cat. A tactical cat with specialized covert ops training."
Kenji: "Hahaha! No way!"
There was a pause. In the interrogation room, everyone leaned forward.
Leo's voice in the recording dropped an octave, full of a false, drunken gravity.
"No way, huh?" he repeated. "Hold my stuffed octopus."
The recording dissolved into a chaos of shaky movement. It showed a stumbling run towards the academy, the scaling of a perimeter fence (disabling an alarm he mistook for an "ambient noise machine"), the ascent up a maintenance ladder, and finally, the view from the rooftop.
"I... I made it..." the recording Leo gasped. Then, he crumpled onto the concrete, and the camera recorded his vision going black as he passed out for the second time in twenty-four hours.
The log ended. The screen went black.
The silence that followed was different from the previous one. It wasn't one of shock. It was the silence of total, absolute disbelief. The silence of a group of military geniuses and elite pilots who had just discovered that the biggest security breach in their academy's history wasn't caused by an act of espionage, terrorism, or war.
It was caused by a drunken dare.
No one moved. The girls' jaws were, figuratively and almost literally, on the floor. They had gone from fearing a mysterious intruder, to despising an interdimensional party animal, and finally to facing the crushing truth: their prisoner was a complete and utter idiot. An agent of chaos with the decision-making capabilities of a lemming on a cliff.
Leo kept his face in his hands, feeling everyone's gazes like physical burns.
Finally, Chifuyu Orimura moved. She walked over to him. He didn't dare look up. She stopped in front of his chair. He waited for the scream, the sentence, the execution order.
Instead, he only heard a long, deep, weary sigh. The sigh of a woman who is paid far too little to deal with this level of cosmic stupidity.
She closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose with two fingers, as if trying to ward off an existential migraine.
She opened her eyes. She looked at him. And in her gaze, he saw no anger. He saw something far worse. He saw the resignation of someone realizing she didn't have a prisoner, but a natural disaster in human form.
"I don't know if I should lock you up for life," she said, her voice dangerously quiet, "or put you on a petri dish and study you."