Chapter Text
“Dad, you left the stove unattended again!”
“Yes, yes, not to worry.” BB waved a hand in the air dismissively. “This is important.” He tapped away at his laptop computer, a message application connecting him with Mei Kamino and Yun Arikawa while the opposite window contained a scrolling series of graphs. The charts reviewed the data collected during the near-Catastrophe that had transpired a week prior, when the world had nearly come to an end.
“Not burning the house down is important too, you know,” Leena said, turning away and crossing her arms dramatically. BB smiled. He knew his daughter didn’t actually expect him to get up and that, in fact, the stove was probably not on at all. She was just giving him a hard time for not being attentive enough to the basics. She wasn’t wrong to do so, and BB couldn’t deny that he felt a little bit guilty about being so useless around the house, even now. But there was just so much going on, and…
“That’s true, but it’s even more important that we ensure the Catastrophe isn’t just going to pop up again out of nowhere and erase us all.”
“Isn’t Godzilla gone, though?” Leena’s voice was slightly louder now, with less echo. She’d turned back toward her father.
“So it seems,” BB replied. “But then, we thought the Catastrophe wasn’t going to happen for another few centuries, but now…”
“Now it’s not going to happen, ever!” Leena half-shouted. “You’re chasing ghosts and skeletons, dad!”
“Ghosts and skeletons – is that right?” BB stopped typing, frowned, and looked over at Leena. “What makes you say that?”
“I just think you’re obsessed with Godzilla, and anything to do with Godzilla. So obsessed, in fact, that you’ll set the house on fire because you were too busy –“
“You’ll set the house on fire,” BB interrupted, with a wry grin. “Hey, didn’t you say you were going out for a drive around this time anyway?”
“Yeah, and you said you’d come with me.”
BB turned back to his laptop and quickly fired off a message to Mei and Yun:
Mei: But if the singular point is defunct, shouldn’t that mean any materials reliant upon its effects should no longer function?
Yun: Right. Like the red dust. But that piece of Archetype you’ve got is still refracting photons in a temporal direction.
Mei: Right. Stage Three.
Yun: That shouldn’t be possible.
Yun: <thoughtful sticker>
Yun: BB, can you take us into the SHIVA basement again, or is that too risky for your superiors?
BB: Later. I have to go out for a bit.
He abruptly closed the laptop’s lid and stood up, turning to Leena. “Okay, kid – let’s go for a drive. I’ll tell you all about ghosts and skeletons.”
“Right!” Leena said with a grin, jumping up from where she stood and turning to march toward the door. She stopped in the doorway’s threshold, turned back to BB. “Oh but don’t forget to turn the stove off!” And then she was through the hall, opening the front door to the outside, and shouting over her shoulder “I’ll be waiting in the driver’s seat!”
BB groaned. “You can’t be serious. Did she seriously leave the stove on after scolding me…?”
He almost bolted to get to the kitchen. As he made his way there he could almost feel the heat rising in the air, dreading what he would see when he turned to look at the kitchen of his beloved home. What kind of sound did a fire make when it was consuming kitchen appliances and cooking utensils? Would it crackle. BB thought he could hear the crackling in his ears, and he turned and –
The stove was turned off. There was a small sticky note stuck to the range hood: CHECK THE KNOBS DAD!!!!!
BB laughed and rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “Well, I suppose that’s to be expected. The answer was right in front of me from the very beginning. I said as much, didn’t I?”
Riding in the passenger seat of his daughter’s truck, BB looked out at the field of destruction wrought by the Red Dust. The cleanup still wasn’t complete, even though the monster’s corpse had been removed. Spikes of the dust, brought into being by the Orthogonal Diagonalizer, made a treacherous maze that one would have to be insane or an extremely good driver to attempt to traverse.
It was a good thing, BB thought, that his daughter happened to be both instead of just one.
“I thought this stuff was supposed to go away really quickly!” Leena called out as they made their way rapidly between the spikes. Though they were in adjacent seats, Leena seemed to feel the need to shout. The vehicle was loud, but not that loud, BB thought.
“Well,” he said, raising his voice only a little. “The dust appears to have stabilized at around the time that Godzilla was defeated. None of us are really sure why it did so but perhaps when the Archetype material loses its properties, truly loses them, it becomes stable instead of just disappearing as we thought it would.”
“But then what about the red dust? That was all over the air and the ocean and… well, everything. And it just went away?”
“That’s an inherently unstable structure,” BB said. “That form of the molecule simply can’t continue to exist without constant input from outside, whereas the crystalline form is at least stable enough to remain as a solid object once it is no longer active. That’s my theory, anyway, but there’s really no confirming any of this until we can figure out just how we’d go about testing these hypotheses, and that’s on another level of –“ he didn’t get to finish his sentence, because Leena interrupted him again.
“So you said you were going to tell me all about ghosts and skeletons?” Leena shouted over the crunching of sand and dirt and dust as she took another hard left turn that made BB clutch the door for dear life.
“Oh yes, ghosts and skeletons,” BB said, trying to ensure he wouldn’t hit his head on the door. “Well, there’s something I thought you might want to know – SHIVA has been doing something strange and even though I’m involved I feel like they’re going over my head here. After Godzilla was defeated, SHIVA collected the bones. And I had to make sure they were securely contained.”
“What?” Leena slammed on the brakes, and BB held out his hands, bracing against the windshield to avoid hurting himself from the whiplash. “You have the bones? Down in the facility?”
“Yeah,” BB said. “And I don’t know why.”
“The song?”
“It’s gone. The bones aren’t broadcasting anymore.”
“Well, that’s good. Doesn’t that mean that the singular point’s really gone?”
Leena reached out and pressed the power button on the car’s radio system.
RauUpala
Prithvi Akash
Kirana hi kirana
Agni Utkarsh
Alapu Upala
Dvarapala
Leena turned to look at BB as fading dust from the Archetype spikes around them began to fall to the ground, never quite reaching the earth.