Three young men huddled together on the sidewalk outside, their school uniforms tattered and ill-fitting. One them, a tall, gangly kind of guy, more legs than body, flicked a cigarette into the empty street gutter while the rest carried on their conversation in loud, mocking tone.
Shouldn't they be in school? Maybe there was a holidy Shimmerlace the eternal foreigner had missed. Or maybe these boys were playing hookie. It was a shit place to cut school for, this run-down street in the shadow of three and four story concrete apartments, where the paint on the kanji for each store peeled, and the external stairwells were rusted and creaked when tenants walked down them. But then again, nowhere beats home.
As Shimmerlace descended the sidewalk these daytime hooligans, their eyes shifted towards her rose hair and violet costume and lingered. They hushed, and stared, open-jawed.
"Bonjour," said she, hand raised in greeting.
"...Yo." said the tall one, in the guarded tone of one used to being ignored and a preference to remain thus. All three of them squinted. Well, you had to forgive them. It wasn't every day kids got to meet a fairy.
A Fairy
The tall one widened his eyes as if she'd just claimed to have pegged his father, which she might well have done. Up close, he had a wide, kind face, with eyes deep like a black well and spiked, bleached hair. He said nothing, though his friend — a fat young man wearing glasses with a layer of smootz on them — had started to pick his ear with a pinkie. Lovely.
"You see, I'm on a hunt. A search. A quest if you will. I'm here for to find...the wolf man."
A dramatic pause followed this revelation.
"Aaaaaah...woof?" said the fat boy. He looked up at his taller friend and said something indecipherable in Japanese before wiping his hand on his shirt.
"Aye! Woof."
Another pause. The three of them seemed to have somehow backed away from Shimmerlace in the interim without her noticing. She huffed, then pulled an image from her jacket, which she shook in their faces.
"The WOLF MAN. The terror of the nighttime Tokyo streets! My intelligence tells me he hails from this community. A ferocious heavyweight of questionable humanity, ruthless and bloodthirsty! You know—AWHOOOOOOOOOOO!"
"Ooooooh." Now big blonde and dumb over here was getting it. Him and his friends. They nodded, grinning as they understood. "Hai. Hai hai hai."
And then they took her shoulder and led Shimmerlace to the secret mythic beast at the center of this neighborhood.
Lycan himself.
He lived deep in the concrete jungle, it seemed, far from even the humble businesses at the edges of this district. As they walked further into the cramped alleyways, the endless rows of apartments began to look cramped even from the outside. The doors for each new home were packed so tightly together, Shimmerlace found it almost impossible to imagine a full home behind each door. Meanwhile, the smell of the place was rotten—vegetables and fruit left in trashbins but not collected for far too long.
But then, all at once, they were there. The door was like any of the others. Unmarked but for a number on three plastic squares punched into the frame. The boys pointed at the door, grinning and chattering, and Shimmerlace could make out the idea. Here. They'd stopped walking several yards back from the door, and as she approached, they did not follow.
"Thank you verrrrrry much, kiddos. You've been wonderful."
Assuming, of course, that the Beast did indeed dwell behind these doors. Well, but she'd know soon enough, as she stepped foward and knocked three times with her whole fist and shoulder.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
