Home Sweet Home

After a pleasant afternoon at the cafe, it was time to leave. My mother realized that we had nowhere to go and immediately suggested that we stay at her house. She would have insisted even if we had said we were staying at a hotel. Apparently, the house was just a block away, so it would only take us about two minutes to get there. Still, we talked a lot, although I held back some things so as not to overwhelm her after all the crazy stuff that had only grown up. I still don't think she fully believes I'm her son or the adventures I tell her about.

" All of this is ridiculous."
"Do you really expect me to believe all this?"
"Is she really a goddess?" My mother asked, pointing to Tamamo.

"Yes, it's true."
"I can do whatever I wants with the moon or reality."
"Would you like to see a total eclipse tomorrow?"

"No, thank you," I tried to stop her.
"I don't want the world to suddenly fall into chaos."
"And who knows how many scientists will go crazy when they see the moon moving to cover the sun."

"Alright, we've arrived."
"Here it is, I present to you our new home here in Japan,' my mother said, pointing to the house in front of us.

It was a larger house than the old house we had back at our homeland, certainly by Japanese standards this house must have been a mansion. It had two stories and included a spacious garage, a nice fenced-in front yard that our house didn't have, and a rather large backyard. The house looked quite nice with a touch of oriental flair; you could tell that such a house was not cheap at all.

"What do you think?"
"Quite nice, isn't it?"
"It's newly built, it was just finished two weeks ago."
"It took me a while to get it, but I wanted the house as close to the cafeteria as possible."
"I wanted to have only a short walk from my house to my business."
"When I found out that this place was still owned by the government but abandoned, I made some arrangements and they sold me the property."
"Then it was just a matter of demolishing the old building and building the house."
"The neighbors were quite happy with what I did."

"Wait, did you just say that you destroyed a public building to build your house?"
"Is that legal?"

"It is if you talk to the officials and convince them."
"They owed me some favors, and I just kindly asked them to help me find a place to live if they wanted to stay on good terms with me."

"Wait, again, the government owed you, so they gave you land?"
"What do you do for work now?"
"You're not the head of that international law firm anymore, are you?"

"Isn't this house too big for just one person?" Tamamo asked.

"Well, I think so, but I need space for what I plan to do later."
"But now that you're here, it's a decision I'm glad I made."
"Come in, we'll talk more inside."
"This is your home now, too."

Once inside the house, it was obvious that it was as expected from the outside, a beautiful and modern home, spacious and well furnished. But as I looked closer, I began to notice familiar things. On one of the walls were paintings by Uncle Jose, there were several slightly broken wooden jars, the glass table that I once broke. Even the curtains that Maria burned in a corner while trying to do a magic trick. The whole house was filled with memories of the past, it was like being partially in my old house, I already felt nostalgic for a place that was new but at the same time not really, it reminded me so much of those good moments from the past that I wanted to cry again.

"Why did you bring all this?"
"It must have cost you a lot to bring all this junk here."

"Well, what was I supposed to do with all these things?"
"I thought I'd be here for quite a while, so I thought I'd bring a few things that were important to me."
"I didn't want to see all these things left behind and gathering dust in our other house."
"But go ahead, make yourself comfortable."
"I've prepared the bathroom for both of you."

After Tamamo and I took a bath, we put on the pajamas that Urakaze had given us at the hotel, since it was difficult to find clothes with space for the fox tail here on Earth, where there are only humans. After explaining to Tamamo what a television was and why it wasn't a threat, we realized that she actually enjoyed it, especially when she watched a superhero movie and ate popcorn. My mother sat with me in the dining room to talk some more.

"It's like all this is just a dream; I'm afraid to wake up."
"Right now there's a little girl who claims to be my son or to have his memories.
"And on the other side, there's the Moon Goddess sitting on the couch in the living room watching TV."
"To make it even more ridiculous, you come and tell me that you got married this morning, when you've only known each other for the last two days."
"WAIT A MINUTE!"
"Are you using my hairbrush on your fox tail?"

"Oh, well, is that bad?"

"Do you know how much animal hair you shed? You're filling it up."
"And what's worse, your hair is all white!"
"If I use it and your hair sticks to me, people will think I have old lady gray hair!"

"I'm so sorry."
"It was Tamamo who suggested it, she even gave me the brush."

"You know what, forget it, I'll buy a new one tomorrow."

"I'm very sorry for any trouble Tamamo might cause."
"She's been trapped in a stone for a thousand years, so there are a lot of things she doesn't know, like technology."

"All this surprises me, I can't believe I'm basically talking to people from another race."

"Hey, now that we're finally in a private place, can you tell me what you're doing?"
"Before I had my doubts, but now I'm sure without a doubt, you were the voice I heard while I was trapped, you were the head of the project that tried to use me as a weapon."

"......"
"I'm so sorry, everything that happened was my fault!"
"Because of my immense incompetence, I caused you to suffer a cruel fate."
"No matter how terrible what I did was.
"If I had known that you were the Valkyria Project, I would never have put you through this."
"No matter who it was, it was terrible what they made the person from the project go through."
"It was because of my insistence on saving the I.S.C. lab that you ended up in the battle in Norway."
"Everything that happened is my fault, on my orders, you... you..."

"Everything's fine, it's no big deal, I'm here, alive."
"Just a little different and whiter."
"What happened was something I did to myself.
"I was the one who joined the army without telling anyone.
"There was no way you could have known I was on that aircraft carrier, or that I would even be sent to battle.
"You just did what was necessary to help the Alliance not lose the war."
"In the end, I am solely responsible for what happened to me."
"Let's put all that behind us and instead tell me what your new job is."

"Now I'm the General Coordinator of the Alliance High Command."

"Excuse me? What the hell is that?"
"Isn't that a very important position?"
"Why are you in such a position? How did you get from being a secretary to basically being the secretary of the United Nations?"
"Didn't the Continental War just end?"
"Shouldn't you be in Vienna negotiating a peace treaty or something complicated like that?"
"What are you doing here?"

"Come on, the title is just a fancy way of saying that I'm nothing more than a secretary among presidents."
"All I do is remind important people to call other important people, schedule an occasional meeting once a year, prepare budgets for this and that, listen to a few complaints, nothing out of the ordinary that I haven't done before."
"I don't like being famous, so I avoid appearing on the news or in newspapers, so not many people know me outside of a few generals, defense secretaries, or presidents."
"As for how I got this job..."
"After you left home after Dad's death, even though you kept sending money, it still wasn't enough to take care of your sister Maria."
"So I thought about working a little more seriously to get a better paying job."
"I started helping out with some cases at the law firm, meeting some people here and there."
"If someone had a problem that needed someone else's help, I would act as a middleman to sort it out."
"As time went on, more people showed up, paid more money, needed my services, so I was hired in England to assist in a small position with the Alliance during the war."
"One thing led to another, and some generals started calling me for extra support or supplies during the war."
"It seems that I was doing such a good job that the top leaders of the Alliance contacted me soon after."
"They just wanted me to keep doing the same thing, mediate between problems and try to get support for those who needed it, oversee some weapons projects."
"Obvious things like increasing the number of anti-aircraft missiles to France for their defense system, sending more tanks than usual to Germany to help them regain their territory."
"I still don't see what's so surprising about that."
"Even though the war is over, it's just the same as before."
"It seems they really appreciate my work in some way."
"But I only took this job to keep paying for Maria's medical treatment."
"The work in the Alliance never really interested me."
"The truth is, I just want to leave it all behind and quit my job."
"I'm sure they can manage for a while without someone hovering over them all the time."
"The only reason I haven't quit yet is because I still have work to do for what I wanted to accomplish here in Japan."
"The reason I'm here is because of more personal, more family problems, but I'll tell you about them later."
"Actually, right now I'm working on finally fulfilling my dream of having my own cafe!"
"Although it's nothing more than a hobby or a side job to keep myself entertained."

"Were you involved in any other strange projects like mine during the war?

"No, yours was the only one with oddities."
"It's not that I particularly liked it either, it's just that other important people were fighting over it, and in the end I decided to keep it for myself to use as a little more bargaining leverage."
"Some idiots tried to steal the project from me, but luckily a friend of mine, who goes by the name Major Zero, managed to warn me in time."
"Now I think they're sending him to work in mines in Botswana, Southern Africa."
"All the other projects were normal things: new tank models, a new air-to-air missile for fighter planes, development of reconnaissance drones, things like that."
"Things like what the I.S.C. was doing were somebody else's responsibility."
"I only looked into your project because I managed to steal it from Damien Raven by threatening to shut down the company he and his wife had started."
"But other than that, I don't have much idea what they were up to."

"I'm sorry to interrupt your family talk."
"But it's getting late, and I want to sleep, but I have no idea where," Tamamo, who had been silent the whole time, finally spoke.

"She's right, look at the time!"
"It's better to go to sleep now, we'll talk more tomorrow, right?"
"You're not going to disappear like ghosts while I'm asleep, are you?"

"No, of course not, I have no other place or reason to go."
"Don't worry, we'll still be here tomorrow, Mom."

"Many.... many thanks."
"I will take you to an empty room that you can use as your bedroom."

After that she took us to one of the rooms upstairs, it was one that was literally empty. There were just a couple of windows facing the street and a smaller one on one side.

"This will be the room for you two."
"Sorry it's not furnished yet"
"I just never thought I would need a room so soon."
"The good thing is that I have several of those Japanese floor mattresses called futons, and they are very handy for moments like this."
"Tomorrow I'll get them for both of you and a real bed".
"Cesar, come down for a moment and help me take them out."

I went down with her to a small closet that was in another room. But on my way back, my mother stopped me for a moment and spoke to me.

"According to what you told me, you haven't had your honeymoon yet."
"Besides, I don't think you'll do anything you'll regret later, the way things are now."
"But please remember that I also live in this house, and I would like to be able to sleep without noise from time to time."

"What do you mean by that?"
"I don't understand."

"I know a couple has their needs."
"But if you are both girls, it means you have more work than usual."
"Please remember that others want to sleep peacefully every night without lewd noises, but I think it's okay from time to time."
"I won't say anything about what happens between you two in your room."

"Are you really talking about that?"

"I'm not forbidding you anything."
"In fact, I'm proud that you finally found a girl for yourself and introduced her to me."
"I just want to tell you that I support you in your relationship, but please don't let it be every day."

"And I thought you wanted to talk about something important."

"But of course it is important!"
"It's important that you satisfy your wife!"
"Your younger brother has been married for three years!"
"He already has a child!"
"You must recover and try to reach him!"

"You know it's impossible for me to have children with Tamamo, right? We're both girls"

"It's not about having children, it's about determination!"

"Stop it!"
"Please stop, don't make this more complicated"

Knowing that arguing with her would lead nowhere, I decided to retreat. After putting in the futons, Tamamo and I fell asleep, tired of being woken up so late for two days in a row.