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                          ALIEN FIGHTER ALPHA
                  Chapter 4 - "Calm before the storm"
                
                           by Steven Scougall
                     Original concept by Vidstudent
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The shopping district where the alien Deathmachine had first arrived 
was called the White Tiger Village.  Which was really quite a strange 
name.  For when Roger came to think about it, there wasn't much that 
was village-y about it.  It looked like any other shopping district 
he'd seen before.  Not that he'd seen many in his life, mainly growing 
up in the care of Master Tatou out in the middle of nowhere, but he had 
seen some on occasional trips to Tokyo, and they all looked the same.

So, his thoughts went, why call this one a village?  Purely for the 
alliterative pun of "Byakko Bireji" that it offered?  If it was, then 
there were some truly sad people in charge of naming shopping 
districts.

All this just goes to show how the human mind can find other things to 
concentrate on when what's happened is simply too much for it.  It's 
quite a handy self-defence mechanism - were Roger to think properly 
about everything that had happened, with Melissa being horribly killed, 
his suspicions of Mehtou, and him nearly getting killed by the alien 
deathmachine, then he would have gibbered quietly, crawled under the 
covers, and not come out for a week.

As he looked around, he saw that his friends Conrad and Chuck looked 
similarly shaken, and Mehtou and Tatou both looked grave.  Cherry was 
the only one who looked cheerful at all.

"What I want to know is," started Chuck, looking at the ground in front 
of him disconsolately, "is why do they call this area a village?"

"OW!" he continued as his met with Tatou's amazingly sharp elbow.

"Ignore him, father," said Tatou.  "He's just a boy."

"I'm almost TWENTY!" shouted Chuck.

"It's a weird name that I myself have always wondered about," Mehtou 
said.  "So never mind."

With the onus of being sensible quite clearly left to him alone, 
Conrad's face became grim.  Well, grimmer than it had been, which was 
no mean feat.  "Excuse me, everyone," he started, "but I think there 
are more important things to concentrate on than just why this area is 
called a village.  Like the alien threat for instance.  A funeral for 
Melissa.  All sorts of things.  So can we please just shut up about the 
stupid name of this stupid shopping centre?"

At the mention of Melissa, the six turned to look at the mortal remains 
that were all that remained of her.  It was a sobering, horrifying 
sight, and a powerful reminder of their own mortality.

"I'm going to make those bastards pay," said Roger quietly.

"We're ALL going to make them pay," said Conrad, his eyes burning with 
an intensity they never had before.

                 *                 *                 *

It was later the same day, and the three young men had just gotten back 
to their lavish lodgings.  On the TV in the corner, the introduction to 
the Playstation version of Street Fighter Zero 3 was playing, turned to 
Stupidly High Volume.

Far from inspiring feelings of 'have to play now', the sight reminded 
them of how they'd been before they dashed out to deal with the arrival 
of the alien ship.  A time when Melissa had still been with them.

The only one the videogame introduction had the proper effect on was 
Cherry, who wasn't supposed to be there but had just happened to look 
around them into the room.  Seeing the TV, she squealed out a high 
pitched "COOL!  You've got this already!" and dashed over to the TV.  
"I wonder if they've unlocked all the secret stuff yet?" she continued, 
as she sat down in front of the TV.

The three just stood there, watching with bafflement, amazement, 
glumness, and in Conrad's case, growing anger.

"Cherry," he said, as he strode across the room, "HOW can you sit down 
and play this, after everything that's just happened?"

She looked up at him.  "Is there a problem with it, Conrad?"

"For God's sake, YES!  We've just lost one of our team and our best 
friend and... er..." he felt that now was not the time to mention any 
secret feelings of lust, and faltered for a moment, then rallied.  "And 
we had this on just before we left and it reminds us of her and we're 
in no mood for it!"  And so saying, he leaned down and switched the 
machine off.

Chuck and Roger were speechless.  Before, Conrad would have been the 
one complaining because people wanted him to get off the machine at, 
say, 3 am in the morning.  Now he was the one giving a lecture and 
turning it off.

"You were there!  I don't know HOW you can -"

"Actually," said Roger, "I might be able to help there."

"WHAT?" shouted Conrad.  He'd just been getting into the swing of an 
angry lecture and didn't like the interruption.

"When I said she's sort of Mehtou's daughter, I wasn't being COMPLETELY 
correct, you see."

"You were lying, then?"

"Actually, Conrad," said Chuck, "think about it, she's too young to be 
his daughter.  Unless he's been active in his old age."

All four shared a certain mental image of Mehtou.  "Bleah," they said 
in unison.

"Alright, Roger," said Chuck, "you know about her, you tell us."

"She's not human," he said.  "That's what."

"I'm not?" asked Cherry, confused.

                 *                 *                 *

Mehtou sat amongst the ruins of the deeeeep undergound lab, where the 
alien captive had been held for so long.  Now that it was quite 
definitely dead and the lab was qutie severely trashed, there wasn't 
really much point in coming here.  But long held habits are hard to 
break and this was where Mehtou always came when he wanted to brood 
about the mysterious alien threat.

So he sat upon the chair and looked glumly at the devastation in his 
lab, and despaired.  The very first encounter with the aliens, and 
they'd already lost one of their fighters, and he'd had to play his 
trump card already.  The alien ship was still up there - who knew what 
it was going to do next.  With the death of the third member, they 
shouldn't be able to send any more of those deathmachines.  But they 
would be able to send their hideous robots, the Tsukurimono, and who 
knew how many of them they had on that ship.

And then something wrong about the scene caught his eye.  He shook 
himself out of his stupor, looked around the lab, trying to work what 
the wrongness was.  It had been something bright, hadn't it?

And then he looked up and saw the indicator above the elevator and that 
the elevator was now well below the normal lowest level.  He frowned - 
nobody was scheduled to come down here at this time.  He spun around on 
the chair, looked at the monitor that hooked up to the video camera 
inside the elevator, and saw that his three new samurai and his 
'daughter' were in the elevator, and that they all looked annoyed.

He sighed.  It really was too much to expect that they were headed for 
another of the deeply undergound floors.  It was certainly much more 
likely that they were after him and had decided to look here, and asked 
Cherry to input the codes to get them down this far.

He wondered idly why Cherry was also looking annoyed.

Oh well, the elevator had almost arrived.  He really should have put in 
another access route, he mused, so that he could get away in times like 
this.  Not that that would be a very mature thing to do, really -

And the doors swished open.

"Alright, 'father', we'd like a word with you."

Oh shit, he thought, that idiot Roger told her what she was.

Cherry strode in righteous anger across the room towards him.  "What am 
I to you?  Just an experiment?  A tool that can be handily switched off 
when it becomes too much trouble?"

"Er... Cherry... I... that is..."  He trailed off, and cleared his 
throat nervously.  Come on, he told himself, he'd faced down the Board 
of Directors of Samsui, given rallying talks to the shareholders when 
Samsui had been in the doldrums, and here he couldn't face down his 
daughter.  Well, technically not his daughter but his effective one 
nonetheless.

She stood there, glowering at him, tapping her foot impatiently.  
"What?  Me, you, that is, what?  Come on, now, spill it!"

"Well..." he started, then decided to go with the truth.  It shouldn't 
tell them anything they weren't supposed to know, and if they didn't 
like it there wasn't much they could do about it.  "While the alien 
emissary was here, we learnt many new things from it, and their 
Tsukurimono technology was one of them.  After the accident and we 
realised it had activated a homing beacon, we set up the school to 
train warriors to deal with their Tsukurimono, as you three are well 
aware."  Looking at the upcoming sentence, he started to sweat 
nervously.  This was the bad bit.  "Um...  In addition, just in case 
you wouldn't be good enough, we initiated a back-up plan - Tsukurimono 
of our own."

"Is THAT all I am to you?  A back-up plan?"

Mehtou quickly went through the possible merits of going through a 
cheesy speech all about the joys of parenthood and how blood ties 
weren't actually necessary, but decided that the ridiculous cheesiness 
far outweighed any possible gains.  So all he said was "Er."

"Right, that's it," she said.  And things might have gone very bad for 
Mehtou if Roger hadn't stepped in and interrupted.

"Cherry," he said, "we can beat him up later, after our other 
questions."

"Other questions?" asked Mehtou.

In response, Conrad pulled a rolled up piece of paper from his pocket 
and started unrolling it.  It was a very long piece of paper.   The 
further it unrolled, the further Mehtou's heart sank.  Tatou had tried 
to discourage them from questioning things too much during their 
upbringing, but he obviously hadn't done enough.

"Alright," he started, "question one.  What was this 'accident'?"

"Er... that's extremely classified..."

"We'll come back to it later.  Question Two.  Why were only four people 
chosen, and considering that Samsui is based in Japan, why were those 
four all American?"

Conrad cleared his throat pointedly.

"Alright," said Roger with hardly a pause, "three Americans and one 
Nordic."

"Better," said Conrad.

The four youngsters looked at Mehtou, awaiting his response.

"Um...  You three and Melissa seemed to have the most promise out of 
everybody we looked at..."

"Cherry?" asked Roger.  "You've lived with him a long time.  He lying 
or not?"

"Probably.  His cheek twitches like that when he's lying."

One of these days, thought Mehtou, he'd do something about that damn 
twitch.

"Next question.  Why only four?  You'd think to find many many more 
than just four people to train as your 'samurai'.  Even given that 
Tatou-sensei can fight and so could Cherry as a last resort, that's 
only six.  Out of a world population of six billion, it seems a 
ridiculously small number of people to choose as an anti-alien-invasion 
army."  Roger looked at Mehtou's nervous face, and idly noticed a drop 
of sweat rolling down the older man's forehead.

"Oh screw this, guys, we're wasting our time.  He's not going to tell 
us anything.  At least we know we're asking the right questions."

"But who can we ask?" asked Chuck.  "He's the only one that probably 
knows everything."

"Chuck," said Conrad, "there are ways and ways.  However," and here he 
looked at Mehtou, "we're not going to discuss them in front of him."

Whereupon they turned away, entered the lift, and left.  Quite what 
he'd have to do to stop them finding out extremely sensitive 
information he wasn't sure.  He really hoped he wouldn't have to kill 
any of them - they'd already lost one.  They couldn't afford to lose 
anymore.

He turned back to the monitor hooked up to the camera inside the lift, 
and turned on the audio button.  Just as he thought, they were staying 
silent.  Oh well, he thought, so much for that idea.

                 *                 *                 *

The alien ship hung motionless against the sky above Tokyo, belying the 
flurry of activity and discussion inside the massive vessel.

The creatures did not communicate via speech.  Perhaps they had, long 
ago.  Since then, however, their speices had evolved telepathy, which 
was how they formed the Triumvirate.  So in their discussion, their 
ship did not echo with primitive shouts and exclamations.  Rather, 
their thoughts and mental words roiled throughout the ship and barely 
had one ended when another was hot on its heels.

Passing human telepaths would have got a massive headache if they'd 
coincidentally passed by the ship.

The Earth-bound one of the Triumvirate had died, ran the discussions.  
There were others aboard the ship who could become one of the 
Triumvirate, but that was not the point.  If all of the Triumvirate 
were on the vessel, so far away from the target, then their power and 
control would be greatly diminished.  Additionally, without the Earth-
bound one, the Triumvirate's knowledge of the surface and geography 
would be greatly diminished.  On top of all that, none of the others on 
the ship were experienced enough in the workings of a Triumvirate.

They could send the Tsukurimono.  The Earth-creatures had demonstrated 
that they had advanced enough to be able to hurt the Tsukurimono, which 
was a worry.  However, that had only been one out of six, who had 
presumably been the best on offer.

One was worried that there may be many more such capable Earth-
creatures hidden in secret.  For the initial reports from the one who 
became the captive had said the Earth-creatures were devious and had 
many secrets.  Just as their foray was a test, the Earth-creature's 
response could have been a similar test.

It had been clear that they were decimating the Earth-creatures in the 
battle.  One had been destroyed, and the others could not even affect 
the Tsukurimono.  The Earth-bound one of the Triumvirate had died, but 
through the use of large untransportable technology.

Finally a conclusion was reached.  The Earth-creatures were not much of 
a threat, and they could do much as they wished.

The next problem was of course what to do next.  The original mission 
had been to recover one of their own from captivity.  Now that the 
captive one had died, that mission was a failure.

The captive had died at the hands of the Earth-creatues.  Despite their 
initial overtures of peace, these Earth-creatures were demonstrating to 
be remarkably vicious and warmongering.

So their thoughts ran.

Eventually a conclusion was reached.

                 *                 *                 *

(To be continued... by someone else.)

So what did the aliens conclude to do next?  What were the rest of the 
four fighters' questions?  And when will the next fight crop up?  Well, 
that's for the next writer to answer, whoever that writer may be.

I've tried to clear up a couple of glaring inconsistencies, and I know 
that this particular chapter is a lot less comic and action oriented 
than the other three - well there's not really much I can do about it, 
what with one of the leads already dead and Mehtou's actions and 
explanations being rather suspicious.  Hopefully the next writer, 
whoever that writer may be, can throw in some more comedy and action.

And finally, I hope that the wait for the next chapter won't be as long 
as the wait for this chapter was.  ^_^

-- 
Steven Scougall
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Flats/7196/