Song 1

	Walking home from school, I sighed quietly. Another day done, another day to go. Life was bleak and bland, the winter snows only reinforcing the enforced monotony of the scene.

	"Hey. You there."

	Turning, I looked for the voice carefully. When I saw her, my jaw dropped. Slight, dressed in a pale kimono, her red eyes peered into mine with a fiery determination. Moving closer, I got a closer look at the silver on white embroidery, she smiled slightly.

	"Hello, Alder." she said, laughing. "I've been looking for you."

	Alright, sanity check. Girl with white hair and red eyes and white kimono, who knows my name, who I've never met, nor has any reasonable reason to be here. Not exactly a good sign.

	"Hello." I replied, nodding at her in a semi-formal nod. First rule of handling crazy; never show your back to live examples of the crazy.

	"Ah? You're not as relecant as the other Alders were." the girl said, before laughing a little while covering her mouth with a hand. "But where are my manners? Please, Alder, call me Nagisa."

	Wait. White hair. Red eyes. Feminine. Knew things with no way of learning them. Given name Nagisa. Other name probably Kawarou.

	This was a trap in *all the ways*.

	"Come, come! Alder, listen to me, this is a happy day! We could even say it's the first day of the rest of your life!"

	Yep. Critical trap threshold passed, goodnight Irene, time to bail on this shit-

	Um. My feet were stuck. This is a problem. Also, Nagisa was walking closer, and she- no, *he* was smiling at me as he stroked my cheek seductively.

	"Tell me, Alder, have you ever seen something so hopeful and pitiful you are torn between weeping for the potential lost, and at the same time enraged at how stupid it all is?"

	Fuck. Alright, running is right out, so time for me to up and handle the crazy like a man. Remember- they can hear you lie.

	"No, Nagisa, I can't say I have."

	"No matter, Alder." he said, shaking his head. "It's just... I've found myself in service to the Winter Queen, and she's sent me on a mission. I must travel the worlds, improving those under her domain and saving what resources I can from those that are crumbling and not of her power. It is a trying task, although I am glad you are here."

	I nodded, trying to move closer. One step forward was all I managed, but progress was progress.

	"So I found you, Alder." he said, smiling. "This world is one of the few self-sustaining points within the Winter Queen's protectorate, so I can claim you and yours for this project! It'll be grand, and even better there's an easy path of worlds to walk to where we need to be going?"

	"Which is?" I asked, glancing at my watch.

	"We are going to a little subdivision of Japan, my good friend. You still call it Japan, right?"

	"Yes."

	"Good! Now, I chose you for a simple reason- I need a hunter and slaughterer. After all, a zombie infestation is no small issue!"

	"Zombies you say?" I asked, interest perked. "What drives them?"

	"Black magic from a diseased wood." was the simple response. "I understand you might be a little... disbelieving of me, shall we say."

	I nodded. "Incredible claims do require incredible evidence, Nagisa."

	Nagisa just nodded, stepping in close and reaching up to give me a kiss on the cheek. "Then I'll provide. Then I'll provide."

---

	The next morning, I woke up with a pounding headache and the need to shoot my alarm clock. Growling, I sat up in bed, going over to turn off the alarm and more importantly go make a pot of coffee. Once that was done, my next objective was a shower. Hygiene was important, and right after hygiene was coffee.

	Post-shower, as I poured my cup of coffee, I wondered what Nagisa's extraordinary evidence was going to be. Shrugging it off, I went to my bedroom to get dressed. Once my pants were on, though, (and about when I forgot where my coffee cup was) I took a moment to notice something in the mirror. Specifically, I now had gray hair and apparently lost something like forty pounds overnight.

	"Goddamnit, Nagisa." I muttered, raking my hand through the slate-gray mane that now apparently went down to my shoulders when still wet. Knowing my luck, it would make an anime-esque spike mess when it dried. Worse, though, was apparently Nagisa turning all my excess body fat into muscle. Before, I had been a hundred and five kilos of guts, muscle, and fat, in about that order as far as percent of body mass. Now I was a hundred and five kilos of muscle, guts, and bones with a side order of shiny red jewel on a chokerI couldn't take off.

	Note to Self- When the Crazy may or may not be smart enough to pick a name with connotations to people of culture, *they may be capable of some of the same bullshit as the source name*.

	Alright Alder, time for another cup of coffee and some thinking. First up, the mission as given by Nagisa, who has been promoted from Crazy to Horrifying Thing. So far, it looked like the plan was go forth and slaughter zombies on some foreign world in their version of Japan. Now, presuming this Japan was at all similar to the Japan of my world, this meant there would be three main issues. One, the issue of guns, alias melee weapons are for suckers and the desperate. Fortunately, I lived in America and had some 'friends' who'd be happy to issue/loan me a chunk of their collections, especially Jim. Hell, if I spun it right, I could probably get Jim to come and bring the whole damn armory. Issue two, language barrier. Here's where the joys of living in Oakland County came in- just grab the majority of the weebs in Japanese class, tell 'em we were going to Japan, do the magic sparkly thing I was reasonably sure was attached to the red gem at my throat, and give them their complimentary Mosins before a-jaunting we would go. Third issue, manpower and transportation. I could, theoretically, do this on my own. Theory and practice were two different beasts, though.

	Way back before the Great War, the English hired a very smart man named Lanchester to help them math out how battles would go. He came up with two items of import- the Linear Law of Warfare and the Exponential Law of Warfare. The linear one was simple- given two equal strength forces of equal tech and skill, the one with more bodies would win and have left over the number of bodies more then they had over the other guy to begin with. In other words, pit kids with spears versus zombies, zombies win because there's a fuckload of zombies. However, the exponential law, alias the square law, said it was not the number of guns that mattered in gun warfare, but the *square* of the number of guns, which meant one gun was worth one bullet while three guns was worth *nine* bullets.

	Considering the fact that the zombies wouldn't have firearms, this was the crux of the plan I was slowly sketching out. I needed shooters, translators, and quartermasters. Once I had my force assembled with their gear and what I was mentally thinking of as the Lend-Lease gear assembled, we'd roll hot through the gate, get to the objective, and then grab everyone we could with whatever transportation we could, and get them to a safe-ish place we could fortify the shit out of until Nagisa came in to play cavalry and evacuate us.

	Good thing today was Saturday. I had a lot of phone calls to make.

---

	Looking around the bar, I smiled slightly. Out of something like three hundred phone calls I'd made, I'd say two-thirds of them showed up with their buddies. Muldoon's was packed to the rafters, and at my table the big four of my plan were seated.

	Jim had been the first one to arrive, and the most important one for this adventure. A seventy year old Doctor of Mechanical Engineering, he had "retired" after a teaching and gunsmithing career that ended him up with patents in five countries and pensions with everyone from Fabrique National to Holland and Holland. Nowadays he ran a custom gun shop and did the dealer's circuit, trading his custom pieces in exchange for mountains of absolute shit 'in order to get it out of circulation' to quote the man. Said mountains of guns were the base of our Lend-Lease stockpile, along with the million-odd rounds he kept in caches around the state in his hunting lodges. I'd tapped him for this adventure for another reason, though- he was practically a grandfather to me, and I knew I could trust him with this.

	Alejandro was next. An angel child hailing from Pontiac, he was an amazing driver and part-time long haul trucker. More importantly, he knew a huge mess of homeless veterans and other groups I could tap to get people who knew things. Quartermasters, shooters, drivers- all of them would be filtering through him, our designated personal man. The only downside was these weren't exactly quality people he was finding- most of them were out of work for a reason, and that was drugs, alcohol, or some other issue that made them a little dysfunctional. Fortunately, I could handle a little dysfunctional, and if I couldn't then I knew where to start making cuts on my hiring list.

	Moldova coughed, grinning at me. The lanky immigrant daughter of a pair of Russians fresh off the plane, she had been a nurse, daughter of nurses, granddaughter of nurses, quite probably stretching back to when some idiot Czar of Russia fell off his horse hunting bear and called for the local peasants to aid him. Either way, I had decided early on we needed a medical staff, and she knew enough depressed pre-med and med school students who were running out of cash to dragoon into this joyous enterprise. Currently, since I was looking at about a two-company ToE for my direct forces plus a lot of support units, I had decided a medical section was a must.

	Caleb sipped his lager, looking around the table awkwardly. A translation group was needed, and that meant dragooning every weeaboo I could find into the issue. Since I wasn't going to go around nerd-wrangling, though, I had to instead go find their Chief, and get the whole tribe that way. To be fair to him, though, it was okay to be nervous- especially when sitting at a table with a man who remembered the Civil Rights movement personally, a potential gangster, someone who's parents had fled the mob, and another person who'd had an anime transformation all his own.

	"Alright, let's get this meeting started." I said, throwing around a stack of briefs on the issue. By "brief" I meant a cover sheet, my planned ToE, everyone's role, and the general plan of action. It was enough to take notes on. "First up, everyone's roughly clear on the plan here?"

	"Go in, kill zombies in Japan." Jim said, sipping a tall Corona. "I bring the guns and probably a few apprentices."

	"Go in, rescue a few busloads of people who don't know what the hell's happening, shepard them out a portal." Alejandro emoted, shrugging. "I bring the technical specialists, and probably a few trucks and trailers to haul everything in."

	"Go in, keep everyone from dying." Moldova grunted. "I bring the medics."

	"Go in, snap the Prime Directive over our knee, and try not to let everyone die horribly." Caleb said, finishing off his drink. "I bring translators and hopefully find us our local info."

	"Glad that's straight." I chuckled. "Now, we've got roughly five hundred people ready to go, and three-quarters of them are bringing their own trucks and guns. We're gonna need about three weeks of food, so..."

	"Call it two semis for food." Alejandro stepped in, smiling. "I'll get ten so we can use prefab kitchens and a shop for the Doctor."

	Moldova raised an eyebrow. "Which doctor?"

	"Both doctors."

	I grinned. "So, ten semis, plus what looks like three-fifty trucks, plus another forty trucks and trailers for incidentals and fast supplies... can we get a bus on short notice?"

	"No, but I can look into a dozen vans." opined Alejandro.

	"Good. We need a noncombatant transport. Speaking of, Caleb, how many translators you got us?"

	"Forty five so far, but the call's still going around. What's our meetup?"

	"I've got a field rented. We meet up there, get everything settled the night before, and roll hot in though the Gate next day."

	"Alright..."

---

	As everyone was walking out of the bar, I heaved a sigh of relief, right up until I felt a dainty hand entwine with mine.

	"You heard everything, Nagisa." I said, groaning quietly.

	"Yes. Might I say it so far seems to be an excellent plan?"

	"Well, glad to know my supernatural patron approves. Do you have the data you're gonna need to make this work?"

	"Yes. You actually picked a good place for this thing, by the way. I didn't expect my gift to give you demagoguery, though."

	I shrugged. "I didn't either."

	Nagisa laughed. "Well, that's that. You've got a week to finish your preparations, so good luck."