The Venetian Chronicles: Yuuko Shirakawa personal log

The Venetian Chronicles: Yuuko Shirakawa personal log-How it all started
(The camera clicks on showing a slender Japanese woman in glasses wearing a black and purple dress, behind her are several very full book shelves, a glass cabinet that contains a collection of plastic figures and a wall of family photos.)
Yuuko: This is Council envoy Yuuko Shirakawa, agent of the dragon, and historian for the archives in Dublin Ireland….No that doesn't sound right for a personal log...I guess there is no right way to start this. I have been meaning to make this for awhile but I have kept putting it off for one reason or another, but I think it's important that I record this so that future generations can better understand the biases that they find in my own interviews. (clearing her throat) Historians are human (or at least they are most of the time), the events we observe and record are colored by our lived experiences and the culture we grew up in, so in order to fully understand any recorded account of history, it's important to know about the historian who recorded it...so here it goes.
    (Taking a deep breath) my name is Yuuko Shirakawa (白川優子), I was born October 13th 1985 to Hiro and Mihoko Shirakawa, in Kyoto Japan. My Father Hiro was regional vice president of human resources for Nintendo LLC from 1993-2017 and my Mother Mihoko was a secretary at the University of Kyoto from 1980-1984, she then retired to become a full time mom. I suppose you would say my childhood was a typical one for people of my disposition, because I was small, awkward and kind of chubby, other children tended to bully me a lot and this caused me to withdraw from socializing with others throughout my primary and secondary education…(shaking her head) I will go over the various ways school scarred me another day. I was admitted to the university of Kyoto in 2004, where I studied European history (with a emphasis on the classical era) and minored in mathematics, I funded my education by working a pair of part time jobs, one as a librarian at Yamaku High School, a local private school for disabled children, the other was as a waitress at a local cafe called the Shanghai, it was there that I discovered my love of baking and refined my social skills a little bit, but all and all my time there was uneventful.
...I guess this is the part where I tell you how I first learned about the secret world, the short answer is I kind of stumbled into it while trying to figure out where my current boyfriend, a man named Connar Green had gone, (Pointing to a picture behind her), that would be him in the black coat. It doesn't make much sense when I describe it that way, given the nature of this log I think the long version is more appropriate. I first met Connar during the spring of 2012, I think it was March, I remember that it was still cold out but I didn't need a big coat. I was on my way back home from the library when I passed a nearby fountain and saw what I thought was a big black dog drinking out of it, across from that was a man in a black trench coat watching a group of children playing in the park, He had this kind of sad and serious look on his face, the kind you get when you think about some who has died, I remember looking into his big blue eyes and thinking that they were the saddest eyes I had ever seen. For some reason (I still don't know why) I thought he might have been lost, so I went over and asked him in my bad English if he needed help...I almost jumped out of my skin when he replied “あなたが望むなら、私達は日本語を話すことができます”, I awkwardly apologized (though in retrospect I don't know why), he looked confused for a few seconds before smiling and inviting me to sit beside him. He then told me he was thinking about his son who passed away. He didn't tell me the specifics, that would come later, we just sat together and watched the children play, I am not sure how much time passed, but our silence was broken when he asked if I was hungry, I said I was and he took me to a nearby restaurant. We spent the next few hours getting to know each other.
I am not sure why I went with him, if you have ever met Connar, he know he can be both imposing and unassuming at the same time, he is tall and lanky, and has this foreboding aurora around him that makes you think you shouldn't talk to him (I have since learned that this aurora is common to all bees). His accent is also really weird, when he is speaking Japanese it's really proper, and his vocabulary is really dated and it has a little bit of that Osaka sound to it. His English is even weirder because it kind of sounds like, he could be an American that speaks really proper English, or could be a British person who speaks casually (please don't tell him I said that), I have since learned that his accent is a result of being born and raised in Dublin and then living in California for 80 years. The way he looks and the way he sounds can be unsettling if you don't know him personally but he also has this mope of long brown beautiful hair, and these big piercing blue eyes that you can get lost in for hours. I have never been an outgoing person, I find small talk really difficult especially with men but for some reason I really opened up too him. He has this way of talking to you where you go on and on about yourself and all he does is sit there and listen and before you know it, you have told him your whole life story. I asked him a few questions about his life, and he told me he was a physicist working as a technical consultant and that he had come to Kyoto on business, he did not say exactly what he was working on only that he was creating predictive models for a client and then he asked me about my work and I continued to tell him about myself.
From there we had what you would call a normal relationship, my first real one, I had awkward interactions in school and one kind of serious relationship at work, but Connar was the first person I could see myself spending the rest of my life with. I tell you this not because, I think my relationship colors my work, but because it will help you understand why made the decisions I made and how it led me to the secret world. The relationship was blissful and It continued that way for about 3 months, it was around the beginning of July when things started to go wrong, He seemed real distant and distracted, he was always talking with someone on his phone, the conversation seemed to get really heated and we stopped spending so much time together. A week later things started to calm back down and it seemed like things had returned to normal and it wasn't until we were…(taking a deep breath)...intimate for the first time that things seem too really fall apart, I began having disturbing dreams, where I was on a train in Tokyo, then something would explode and the floor would begin falling away and I would be falling into the blackness of space and into the mouth of something I couldn't see. I forget how much time passed from the when the dreams started, but it couldn't have been more than a week when I found Connar looking out from the balcony of my apartment. He told me he would have to leave soon, and that he couldn't tell me where he was going or if he would come back...I thought he was leaving me and even though he denied it, I was furious, I felt like he had been toying with me, and that I was stupid for believing that anything like the last 3 month could ever happen to me, and I told him that I never wanted to see him again, he just quietly packed his things and then left….I cried all night after he left.
In the morning it was like he had never been there and life went back to the way it had been before I met him, but things were different now. It is difficult to explain exactly how, but the people around me didn't seem as aware as they use to be, strange things would happen and they would seem to be oblivious to them, I would hear noises in the night that I couldn't identify, I would see people one day and they would disappear the next, and no one would remember them except for me. The things I read online and saw on TV seemed more disingenuous, as if the entire world was trying to hide something, the dreams got worse as the days went on, and then finally the subway attack in Tokyo happened. Everyone said it was a terrorist attack, but the self defense force is never called in for terrorist, I saw all the coverage and knew immediately that it was all a lie, everything they told the public was a lie, this was something bigger than a terrorist a attack but I still wasn't sure what, and that is when the journal appeared.
2 weeks after the attack, someone left an old journal in my mailbox, there was no letter or note with it, no instruction or inscriptions just the journal. It detailed the life of a woman in the Japanese imperial court and her meetings with different people on behalf of a organization called The Dragon. At the time most of it seemed nonsensical to me, she openly talked about meeting with monsters, and paying sorcerers to kill people that got in the Dragon’s way, she talked about doing seemingly inconsequential things and having them results in world changing events. The journal started in the 1610's and ended in the 1890's and I was convinced that it had to be some kind of prank, maybe one of the students at the school making fun of me in that weird roundabout way that teenagers do, but then I got to 1845 and found an entry on her meeting with a man named Connar Green, at this point I was convinced that it was prank but then the photos fell out of the back of the journal, the oldest was a black and white photo of a man in a chair holding a sword, it looked kind of like Connar but it was dated 1850, the next was of the same man in in a coat that was almost identical to Connar’s but it was dated 1905, and another of the same man smiling and posing with soviet troops in Germany dated 1945, the final photo was of Connar and me, sitting on the park bench were we had met. I threw the journal across the room, closed the curtains and hid in the closet for what seemed like hours.
Eventually, I got the courage to go back and pick up the journal again. I reexamined the photos and tried to convince myself that this was someone's idea of a joke, the photos probably weren't even real I told myself, but the next day at work I was helping a student research the famine in Ireland, we were going through an online archive of news papers from the year, when I came across an obituary for Connar, Lilly and Jon Green, all 3 had died in a fire and I remembered that when we meet, Connar said he was thinking about his son who had passed away. Later that night I started to search the archives for other Connar Green’s around the world and I found, approximately every 40 years somewhere in the world there was an obituary for Connar Green, he first died in Ireland in 1845, then in the American west in 1880, he had been hung for treason in Ireland in 1919 and died on defending Stalingrad in 1942. Every article describes a man who was physically identical to Connar, but his life was remarkably different each time, sometime he was an immigrant soldier, other times a traveling scholar, but he always seemed to be in the right place at the wrong time. The more I read, the more history as I knew it seemed to fall apart, new books seemed to jump out at me from the stacks, alternative histories from around the world filled with accounts of mythological creatures, lost civilizations and secret societies that controlled the world.
My new found...hobby I guess you would call it was beginning to consume my life, luckily I had already finished school, but the deeper I went and the more I read about this new world, the more my life seemed to fall apart. The owner of the Shanghai retired and sold the cafe, the new owner wanted to bring in her own staff and I was let go. The donations dropped at the school I was working at and they were forced to reduce my hours, and eventually I was let go from my position at the library. I continued my research at the public library while I was searching for work, and that’s when I stumbled on the secret history of the bakuto who called themselves the Korinto-kai. They are a branch of yakuza, of the bakuto tradition, they ran a gambling ring during the 18th century and they were unusual in that I couldn't find any official record of them from any time in Japan's recorded past, but given the nature of the research I was doing that shouldn't have been surprising, the secret history i found came in the form of a rival yakuza boss in Tokyo, who was convinced that leader of the Korinto-kai a man named Ryuu Kiyota had cheated him at a game of Oicho-Kabu, the journal detailed what he uncovered while researching the Korinto-kai. As he suspected he had been cheated, but not with a stacked deck of cards, but with magically altered probability, Korinto-kai were more than simple bakuto they were merchants of fortune, buying and selling luck to build an underworld empire with in the underworld. They used this ability to manipulate fortun and to corner the occult arms market of Tokyo for the better part of a century. I don't know why, but I read everything I could about them and in the process, compiled a fairly complete history of their organization. I was well aware of how crazy I must have seemed to everyone around me, I had just written a detailed history of magical Yakuza, and I wasn't entirely sure I wasn't having some kind of psychotic episode, but then the photos came.
    8 photos over all, of Connar at different places around the world. 3 along a coast line somewhere, 2 in what looked like Egypt, and 3 more, in a place with mountains. A couple showed him shooting someone, and a few more showed him just out of someone's line of sight, the ones that startled me the most were the ones in the mountains. They showed him standing over the body of a werewolf, I had read about these creatures in the journal I found, but this was the first time I had seen them...I think I may have yelped when I saw the picture, but my shock soon gave way to an intense curiosity. I had learned about the secret world, the dragon, and uncovered the existence of immortals, but I knew there was still more to uncover and I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was wrong and I wanted to know what. The last photo had an address written on the back of it, normally I would never go alone to an address I found on a strange letter, had I not been plunged into this weird new world I would have called the police, but something in my head kept pushing me onwards or maybe it was just personal inertia at that point, either way I ended up going to the address. An abandoned train station near the edge of town and that is where Daimon was waiting for me.
    The first time I met him was kind of surreal, it was at an abandoned train station  a few blocks from my apartment. The sun was setting and he seemed to slide out from behind a old stair way, kind of half dancing and half creeping, he moved really...elegantly, but it still seemed really artificial in a way, like he wasn't really moving but was being moved, the closest thing I can compare it to is one of those full body muppets, it moves like a human because there is a human inside it, but at the same time it moves unnaturally because its trying to be something else that's vaguely humanoid. I don't think that makes a lot of sense, but it's the closest I can get to describing how he moves. The other thing that unnerved me was the way he spoke, he looks like he is around my age, but he speaks like someone my grandfathers age, maybe older and I am not talking about the slang he uses when he is speaking English, when he is speaking Japanese his accent sounds a little he is from Tokyo, but his dialect oscillates between being really formal and really in formal, like he learned to speak Japanese from reading a really old book and then hanging out with a bunch of yakuza in the 30’s, and still there was something else that I couldn't quite put my finger on that unnerved me. He told me that he been keeping tabs on my research and that he had been “directing” my efforts and that he was impressed. He said that his “organization” needed someone of my “talents”, I think he was referring to my skills as a librarian, (but I am not 100% sure) and that if I worked with him, he “clue me in” on what was happening with the secret world, that I would “get to see the big terrible picture” and “maybe, just maybe, I can help you find your lost Mc.” He said he could do all this for me if only I agreed to serve him for a year. At this point the call of the secret world was overwhelming but at the same time, I knew not to trust him. I am not naive, every girl knows how this story about the Yakuza goes, what they do to you if you break your contract, or what happens if they decide your not worth it anymore. I would be lying if I said every alarm bell in my head was not going off and begging me not to do it, but I also kind of felt compelled to agree. I don't know if it was something he was doing or just fate pulling me forward, but I agreed, I would serve the Korinto-kai for one year, and in exchange, I would learn about the secret world.
    The first few months in Kadin were eventful to say the least, it's one thing to read about monsters existing, it's another to see them walking around and something else entirely when they are trying to kill you. The first weeks I spent at Zeroes Wild Pachinko collating my notes into a formal report, though I have no idea where they stored it or what they wanted it for. At the end of the first month was my first field assignment, Daimon sent me to collect a bunch of cell phones scattered around the city. At this point I had seen the infected wandering around the city and I asked if I was going to have a bodyguard, Daimon laughed at the idea and told me just take something from the armory. In retrospect I should have stood up for myself and demanded backup, but I just kind of slunk off to the door near the back of the parlor to look for a gun. Near the back of Zeroes Wild is a room filled with occult weapons, the Korinto-Kai's “merchandise”, I didn't know anything about guns, but I did know that wanted to stay as far away from those things as I could, so I looked for something that I thought would let me do that, and I settled on something that looked like a steampunk sniper rifle, that I would later learn was from the third age. I still use that rifle on field assignments, it's about half a meter taller than I am so its difficult to move around, but I as soon discovered it's really easy to aim, and when you are small it's easy to move around Kadin without being noticed. So I crept from office building to office building, clumsily learning to aim my new rifle and slowly collecting the cell phones, It took me the better part of a day but I did get them all. When I brought them back to Daimon he nonchalantly said, he didn't really need the phones, he just wanted to see if I could do it. When my mouth hung open in shock he laughed again and said he didn't expect a mouse like me to make it, he started referring to me as “mighty mouse” after that. This marked the of long pattern in my work for Daimon he would ask me to do seemly nonsensical things, like stand in the park and hop on one foot, call people and ask them for strange things or go places and bring back seemly meaningless things. This might have been part of some obscure manipulation of the dragons models or he could have just been tormenting me, it's difficult to tell. I made friends with some of the council envoy stationed in Ginpachi Park, they taught me a little more about how to shoot and to safely navigate Kadin. I became pretty good at my job and all the while I was learning about what was happening with Orochi, the Morning Light and Third Sunday, I also learned more about the Templar, the Illuminati and the Dragon and how they had all influenced the world over the years. It wasn't until about 9 months later that bees started appearing in Kadin that my next big brake came.
    I was there for Connar's trial at the council, Daimon said he didn't know where Connar was exactly prior to the incident in Chiba, I am almost certain that was a lie though. The full transcript from the trial is available in the archives so I won't dwell on that too much, Connar didn't know I was there so there wasn't a scene at the Tribunal. Our next point of contact would come during the attack on Greenfield, Daimon had tasked me with putting two collars on a pair of wolves, Wilberforce and the late Boris, both of whom had been recently freed by the events that unfolded in Chiba, again I didn't have direct contact, but by completing this mission, Daimon finley gave me Connars contact information, in particular he pointed me towards his account on twitter. At this point I started to think about what I wanted to say to him after everything I had seen or more accurately I was still trying to process how I felt. He hadn't lied to me about what he was doing or where he was going but at the same time he didn't trust me enough to tell me everything he knew, and I still felt kind of used but I wasn't sure why. like I said before I he was my only real serious relationship up to that point so I didn't have a baseline for what I was feeling. After about an hour of writing down what I wanted to say, I created a twitter account and requested to follow him and in about a hour he approved me, though felt like a eternity. Initially I asked why he didn't tell me about his work and he asked if we could speak in person, so we decided to meet in Ginpachi Park.
 I had rehearsed what I wanted to say about a thousand times, while I was waiting for him but when he arrived something weird happened. We just kind of stared at each other in silence for a few moments and then I could feel my face getting hot, my eyes were starting to water, and then I started crying, I ran over to him, pushed him back against the tree and wrapped my arms around him, everything I wanted to say was gone and all I could do was weep. I wasn't sure if I was angry at him for leaving or angry at him for not telling me what he did, or if I was relieved to see him again. I guess I just felt overwhelmed, and it looked like he was overwhelmed by it too, because he started trying to say something but then just let me cry, our reunion though was short lived, second later he pushed me behind him reached into his coat and pulled out his gun and started firing into the water, the infected deep ones near the temple were emerging from the water. First it was just a few, but the more he killed the more seemed to come out of the water and I started covering him out of habit, picking off deep ones that got with in 10 meters of us. Eventually we both ran out of ammo and as Connar drew his sword and wadded into the pack (or would it be school) of deep ones, I grabbed by rifle by the barrel, followed him in the pack and started clubbing anything that was slimy. Then for some reason time started slowing down and I started think about my life, I don't know if this was the result of a sudden adrenaline rush or it was my life flashing before my eyes, but it suddenly dawned on me how absurd it was for me to be there next Connar. Before I had met him, I would cross the street if I saw group of teenage girls, I would take a whistle with me if I had to take the trash out at night and I was worried people judged me for being awkward. But here I was centimeters from the most infectious substance in all of reality, beating a fish man with a magical sniper rifle, like I had been doing it all my life. I wondered what the past me would have said if she could have seen me, in this situation, fish people and magic aside, would she have ever believed that I wouldn't have hesitated to put my own life at risk for someone who I was still mad at?
Eventually the deep ones stopped coming out of the sea, and the zero point pathogen started disappearing and Connar looked back at me with the saddest look I had ever seen on someone, and he said “I am sorry, I didn't mean to drag you into this. Maybe if I told you the truth, you’d have thought I was crazy and then you never would have come looking for me and then you wouldn't be here standing here at the end of the world in the cross hairs of evil. The world I dragged you into is a cruel one, I have seen it eat good people for no reason other then they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I loved those people more than anything and I let them down, and I felt the same way about you...and I wanted to spare you that fate, because you deserve better then to be eaten by the indifferent monsters that rule this universe or their asshole servants, you deserve peace and happiness and to die surrounded by family at 110 after experiencing everything wonderful that this world has to offer. You deserve to look up at the stars and not think about the horrors that lie beyond them. You deserve all of that and more, because people like you are treasures that make this world worth fighting for. If I had told you the truth, I might have done that but, I had to be a selfish asshole and try to hid all of this and now your here standing at the end of the world and for that I am so sorry.” I slapped him across the face for that and then threw my arms around him, I didn't regret meeting him and I don't think I ever could, because if I had never met him, I would never had known I could do the things I did to find him. I wouldn't know that I could uncover ancient mysteries or strike deals with Yakuza, or slay monsters. He showed me I could be brave (sniffles), I told him I could never regret meeting him and that I wanted to stay with him forever.
Three months later my contract with Daimon was up. I joined Connar, Kenzie, Blaise, and Kate in finishing the fight against Third Sunday, I almost lost Connar that day and I guess I got a little taste of what he felt when the deep ones attacked us, but I guess we can call that one even. A few months after that I joined the council as a archivist and moved to Greenfield. That is how I found out about the secret world and how I got involved with the dragon, not bad for a human I guess. I think we have covered enough for now.  Council envoy Yuuko Shirakawa, signing off.
(End of  file)