Paul Holmes stood at the entrance to the hospital, paralysed by a feeling of overwhelming dread. Rationally, circumstances weren’t the same, or so he told himself. But that did little to overcome the emotional storm raging inside his heart.

The last time he’d been in a hospital he was recovering from frostbite after carrying his wife’s body down from the mountain she’d died on. It had taken him several weeks to be well enough to leave, and he’d never been able to bring himself to step back inside one since. Although the few times he’d needed to, there hadn’t been the opportunity.

But, as he’d approached this one, now, that unique, distinctive smell that all hospitals seem to share had come wafting out as the automatic doors opened, and the all-too familiar sense of grief and loss had come crashing down on him like a thick black tsunami of tar, sucking him down with it’s undertow, drowning him in his own personal hell.

“Sir? Excuse me sir.. do you need help?”

Paul blinked, shaking himself almost convulsively, and scrubbed at the tears he hadn’t even realised were sliding down his cheeks. He looked around for the source of the soft, feminine voice he’d heard.

Standing just beside him was a young woman dressed in a doctor’s coat and uniform. Her pale blue eyes were filled with a look of concerned compassion as they peered out from under silver-white bangs.

Paul shook his his head again.

“Ah.. sorry, sorry.. just… bad memories. Someone I lost.”

“My condolences on your loss. I can show you to the garden, if you’d like to sit and recover?”

Paul drew a deep breath, and exhaled slowly, albeit somewhat shakily.

“No… I think I’ll be alright. It caught me by surprise, that’s all.”

The woman slowly nodded, still looking doubtful. Paul noticed her name badge as a thought occurred to him.

“Excuse me, Dr Yukinoko? There is perhaps something else you can help me with though? I’m looking for a patient that was brought in about ten, fifteen minutes ago. Where might I find her?”

“I’m not sure…”

“The young Oni girl with altitude sickness..”

“Oh!”

The doctor looked at Paul, and he could almost see the cogs turning over as he went from ‘potential patient’ to ‘relative’ and then enlightenment as she recognised him, all in the span of a single breath.

There were times when being notorious was a pain in the butt, however, this wasn’t one of them.

“Ah! You’re Inari’s Herald, yes?”

“Paul Holmes, yes.”

Dr Yukinoko bowed, then held out her hand. Paul inwardly smiled at the slightly awkward melange of western and Nipponese traditional greetings, but copied her, shaking her cool, almost cold, hand as he bowed.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance sir, I am the hospital’s senior doctor.”

“Charmed… and thank you for your concern and compassion. I understand hospitals have rules regarding visitors, but I was hoping…”

“Oh, of course! We can certainly make an exception … umm.. shall we call you a visiting consultant? After all, it’s not every day we have an oni as a patient. I was hoping you might share your knowledge?”

Paul smiled wanly.

“Well… I’m hardly an expert, but I’ll gladly share what I know to help out.”

“Thank you! So, this way please, and we can talk on our way. Please, tell me what you know about the patient. Any detail can be a clue…”

Paul nodded, firmly putting aside his feelings for later.

“Well… please bear in mind I am not a medical professional, although I’ve had some training and some rather rough in-the-field experience, but here’s what I’ve observed…”

By the time they reached the third floor room where Yuko was, Paul had laid out what he knew, and his suspicions along with his reasoning. Dr Yukinoko had even outlined some potential tests they could do to confirm or deny those hypothesizes, should it be necessary.

Yuko was lying quietly in the hospital bed, evidently sedated, wearing an oxygen mask. Beside her bed Yuri was sitting on the edge of her chair, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. She stood up as Paul entered the room, relief washing over her strained face.

“Paul-dono! I am glad to see you!”

Paul nodded, and looking at Yuko asked.

“How is she?”

Yuri shrugged.

“She can breath with that mask on, but they gave her something to sleep… they’re talking of doing tests Paul-dono. Please, we need to get her out of here!”

Paul blinked, turning to look at Yuri. He could see she was worried, but she also looked terrified… in fact, she look as scared as when they’d first met, which he’d later learnt was the first time she and her sister had been face-to-face with a human. They’d been fully prepared to die, sacrificing their lives in order to buy the rest of their clan some time.

Paul frowned, it wasn’t just her sisters condition that had Yuri biting her lip hard enough to draw blood. Something else was wrong…

“Yuri… they need to run tests in order to work out how to make your sister better. It’s not like before, I promise.”

Yuri shook her head.

“I...I know Paul-dono… but…”

Paul sighed.

“I understand. I know it’s not the same, but I can’t help remembering being in hospital after my wife died as well. We tell ourselves it’s not the same, but the heart doesn’t listen. You’re scared of what the humans might do to Yuko, even though you now know they’re trying to help.”

Yuri nodded slowly, drawing in a deep shuddering breath.

“There...there were stories, of what was done to yokai like us. Experiments…terrible things..”

Paul nodded.

“I know… it’s hard for you to trust humans at the best of times, and this is not the best of times.”

“Erm… excuse me…”

Paul glanced to his side at Dr Yukinoko, as Yuri startled slightly, looking at the doctor as if she hadn’t seen her enter. Which, all things considered, might be the case.

Dr Yukinoko closed the hospital room door softly and sighed. Then turning around she took a deep breath in and blew, exhaling though pursed lips as if she was inflating a balloon or blowing out a candle.

Her breath ‘smoked’ forming condensation in the air. The temperature in the room dropped perceptibly, despite the air conditioning, and where she exhaled small snowflakes formed, drifting down to the ground, vanishing before they reached it.

Paul blinked, and then smiled.

“Oh of course… Yuki no ko… snow child. I take it you’re descended from a Yukion'na, a snow woman?”

The doctor nodded.

“My mother. Please miss, I understand your distrust of humans, but can you trust me at least?”

Yuri nodded, a shy smile dawning on her face.

“That helps… knowing that someone sympathetic is in charge.”

Paul nodded.

“Thank you doctor, for sharing your secret with us.”

Dr Yukinoko shrugged, looking at the floor.

“It’s not as much of a secret as it used to be. With all the changes, I… I felt brave enough to tell some of my trusted co-workers. Still…”

“You can trust us. Yokai are free to be open about what and who they are, but that also means they are free to choose as well. If you choose not to go public, then we’ll respect that and say nothing.”

“Thank you. I used to be afraid all the time, that I’d be discovered and lose my job or worse, my licence!”

Paul nodded.

“I understand. Now, there’s laws. Unfair dismissal, discrimination and so on… and probably any number of lawyers just itching for a case like that, so they can make their reputation. It’d be like blood in the water to a lot of very hungry sharks...”

The doctor laughed softly.

“That is… somehow reassuring. Even though it shouldn’t be.”

Paul laughed, nodding.

“I know that feeling, but a pack of ravenous attack lawyers are a good thing, as long as they’re on your side.”

Dr Yukinoko giggled, a soft sound almost like crystalline wind chimes, and nodded. Yuri looked between the pair of them and quietly remarked…

“I used to find humans terrifying… and now I find that the one thing that scares them is other humans?”

Paul chuckled.

“There are worse things than death, and being embroiled in a legal tangle is one of them. The law is deep, twisted and arcane, but lawyers are humans who’ve mastered it and made it their weapon of choice. It’s never wise to challenge them on their own ground, and worse still when they duel in a courtroom. Trust me, the Oni way of resolving disputes is much less painful, and quicker!”

Yuri nodded, once, a faint smile playing around the corners of her mouth.

“I will heed your words of wisdom Paul-dono.”

The doctor, who’d stepped outside for a few moments while Paul and Yuri talked, put her head around the door.

“Yuri? We need to run some … examinations, on your sister? Do we have your consent to do so?”

Yuri blinked, and looked at Paul, who in turn looked at the doctor and inquired.

“What sort of examination?”

“I’m concerned that despite the oxygen her blood saturation levels are not good. I’d like to run a CT scan with contrast and maybe a MRI scan, to see if we can determine if there’s any lung damage.”

Yuri looked helplessly at Paul who nodded.

“The doctor wants to use a couple of machines that can peer inside Yuko’s body without hurting her or opening her up. She’s worried that not enough oxygen is in her blood stream and thinks there might be damage to her lungs. Altitude sickness can sometimes cause blood clots, or rarely a gas bubble to form in the blood, blocking it’s flow.”

Yuri nodded slowly, as she absorbed the information, and then glancing at Yuko nodded again.

“Very well… but.. why ask me? If it is necessary thing?”

Dr Yukinoko sighed.

“If there was no relative or guardian available, and the patient is unable to give consent then yes, we would proceed in the best interests of the patient… but you are here, and as it was necessary to sedate Yuko, you have to make her choices for her. But, we will respect those choices. You can say no, even to something we feel is necessary. Unless her life is in immediate danger in which case we will act to save it, and argue later. That is, unless you explicitly tell us to let her die, and it’s clear that there is no hope for recovery.”

Yuri nodded, indicating her understanding, and then sighed.

“Paul-dono, I may have to ask you to help me understand the things they say… But for now, doctor, I agree to your wishes.”

“Good, then lets get started.”

Several hours later found Paul outside, sitting on the sea wall watching the sun set over the peninsula to his left. The coast here faced North west, towards the mainland. Sheltered as it was by the bulk of the land from the Pacific weather, it made for good fishing, safe harbours and usually tranquil waters.

Paul felt anything but tranquil, despite the mild early spring weather.

Tatsuo had been and gone, leaving to collect Jiao from school. Which was not something he was inclined to beg off from as it was her first day. He seemed to blame Yuko’s condition on Paul and Arakune in equal measures. Paul got the impression it was only the fact that they were in a hospital that prevented Tatsuo from fully expressing his displeasure. In the end Yuri had walked her tempestuous clan leader out.

Not that his emotional state was obvious, unless you knew what you were looking at, as Tatsuo was being stiffly formal and stoic about it…outwardly anyway. Inside Paul could tell he was seething with rage and fury, not to mention sick with concern. Paul sighed, it was an odds on certainty that he would at the very least get shouted at by Tatsuo later, for endangering Yuko and Yuri’s lives.

Which was why Paul was basically avoiding going home just yet. As he really did not feel up to the young oni’s blustering fury just yet, no matter how stoically expressed it might be. Emotionally, he was wrecked… he’d put aside the feelings stirred up by all this, and now that particular set of Pterodactyl like chickens had come home to roost.

Despite the beauty spread out before him in shimmering carpet of golden waves and fiery pillars of sunset-lit clouds, Paul’s soul echoed to the high and frozen bleak keening of the mountain wind he remembered all too well. He had only to close his eyes, and he would see the last sunrise he’d shared with Kate, listening as he poured his soul into describing what she could no longer see, her quietly laboured breathing grower ever softer, slower… until she’d slipped away, as he clung to her, desperately trying to hold her soul in her body by sheer force.

Paul took a deep shuddering breath, and exhaled gustily. Yuko is not Kate. She will recover. He told himself forcibly, ignoring the traitorous part of himself that insisted otherwise. Yuko had lung clots, which in time would clear, and the scars would heal. Although she’d need an enriched oxygen supply n the meantime, something he already had an idea how to achieve without her carrying gas cylinders around.

Paul sighed deeply and shook his head. Knowing himself all too well, he decided to go look for something to do, rather than mope on an obscured and isolated part of the seawall at the far end of town. It would be far too easy for him to sink into depression again, and there was far too much that needed doing for him to waste his time indulging his ‘shadow self’ by wallowing in guilt that he knew logically and rationally wasn’t justified. Not that rational logic made any difference about how he felt though right now.

There were times, Paul reflected, when he wished he could punch his sense of duty right in the face. Then boot it and his depression out of his head and let them thrash it out between themselves some place else other than the confines of his skull.

He snorted at the fanciful notion, idly wondering if Inari knew of some magic that would allow him to actually do that… although he guessed probably not. Inari’s magic tended to the pranks and pratfalls end of the spectrum, with illusion being her mainstay. Conjuring up embodiments of elements of a person’s psyche probably wasn’t something she could do… Although he had to admit, it might be. He’d barely begun to scratch the surface of what was, and wasn’t possible, and Inari had been around for thousands of years and probably forgotten more than he’d ever know. So who knew what titbits of arcane lore she had tucked away in the dusty corners of her metaphorical storehouse of memory.

A shadow passed between the setting sun and Paul, too swift to be a cloud, too large to be a bird. He glanced up from his contemplation of the shoreline, and his eyes widened in surprise as a few thousand tons of antique steel glided effortlessly high in the air over the trees and rocks of the peninsula, flying as if gravity was politely ignoring it. Its trajectory curved downwards, flattening out to almost level until her keel kissed the waves sending up glittering sprays of gilded salt spray either side of the long, low, grey sleek shape.

Paul watched as the yokai Battleship Yamato touched down in the bay and began to steer for port, with an indefinable but definite air of smugness about her. He sighed, levering himself to his feet, and remarking to the air and the universe in general.

“Well, I suppose that was bound to happen sooner or later. Some twerps shown Space Battleship Yamato to Katsumi, and now she flies. That’ll piss off both the navy and the air force. How de-bloody-lightful! Oh well, a Herald’s work is never done, I’d better go see if I can smooth things over. Again. Although I swear, if those pair manage to get the hat trick and piss off the army somehow, I bloody well will tell Inari I quit… at least for the weekend. Ha! Come to think of it, Inari might well join me in playing hooky rather that face that mess alone.”

Paul was still grumbling, albeit only in the privacy of his own thoughts, by the time he arrived at the dock where Yamato was tying up. He watched as the gang plank lowered itself, and the trio of JMSDF officers descended, followed by the raven-haired Katsu and the white haired but otherwise identical Katsumi, both clad in superficially identical white Imperial Japanese navy dress uniforms, circa 1940’s … although with non-regulation skirts as the IJN didn’t have women officers back then. Paul frowned as he noticed that Katsu’s skirt was a sensibly modest knee length, whereas her ‘sister’ Herald’s skirt was barely thigh length and slit up both sides.

Katsumi was turning out to the polar opposite of Katsu in many ways, including being a shockingly forward flirt!… although harmlessly good natured so far at least. Paul suppressed the urge to shudder at the the idea of a yandere Katsumi!

Paul found himself frowning as he studied the faces of the navy officers. They had a certain look about them that he recognised. That of someone who has seen things he now wishes he could forget, but knows that he will not ever unsee. Wordlessly they passed him, heading for the shore-side contingent of naval brass, headed up by a full admiral. Paul had a brief desire to be a fly on the wall during that debriefing, but wisely decided to leave them to it.

Instead he buttoned the stone-faced Katsu and the ebullient Katsumi, and with a nod, waved them over.

Both girls stopped in front of him, and saluted almost professionally, causing Paul to blink and reflexively return the salute, although using the Royal Navy version. He scowled.

“Alright, enough tomfoolerly, none of us are actual naval officers so cut it out.”

Katsu shook her head.

“Forgive me Paul-dono, but you are incorrect. I was given a temporary commission at sea in order to lead task force one, and it has not yet been rescinded. I am still accorded the rank of Captain, and thus Katsumi is my X.O. and therefore Commander.”

“And I bet that caused nightmares for the admiral, fitting a Goddess into the chain of command. Anyway, how did the exercises go?”

Katsu nodded fractionally.

“I would say they went well, although there still points we need to improve upon.”

Paul raised an eyebrow.

“Then why did your observers look like they’d sailed through hell and back? Surely you didn’t freak them out that much by flying?”

Katsumi grinned, almost bouncing on her toes.

“You saw that Paul-san! That was glorious! Such freedom! Why had no-one ever told me of this Space Battleship show before?!”

“Probably because they knew you’d do that… so if it wasn’t defying the laws of gravity, what happened. Katsu?”

Katsu in unconscious mimicry had taken up a parade-ground stance, her arms crossed behind her back, feet firmly planted apart.

“Sir.. the exercise proceeded as planned until the first engagement. Upon sounding battle stations an unexpected phenomenon occurred, causing some considerable consternation among the observers.”

Paul sighed.

“Stop ducking the question Katsu, what happened? In plain terms please and dropping the military act.”

Katsu looked sheepish, ducking her head slightly.

“Sorry, two weeks worth of being immersed in their world has rubbed off...which was the point I suppose. Um… to put it simply. When we went to battle stations, the crew showed up.”

“What?!”

“Ghosts of the former crew of the Battleship Yamato manifested themselves. They came right out of the walls! I… I met my grandfather!”

“Ok, I say again.. what?! Katsumi did you…”

Katsumi was already shaking her head in denial before Paul finished his sentence.

“It wasn’t me! They just… answered the call. It felt weird, but somehow I acted as a gateway for them to return from the Land of the Dead! I didn’t even know I could do that. Actually, I still don’t know how. I mean, they just heard the alert, and came!”

Paul stood and stared at the pair of young girls for a moment, even the normally stoic Katsu looked a bit wild eyed at the recollection. He had no idea how that must have been for the trio of officers suddenly dropped into the midst of a ghost story.

“Okayyy… well that would explain the haunted looks. Um.. what did they appear like? Not all...ghastly?”

Katsu shook her head.

“No, they were somewhat translucent as they appeared, but that lasted a moment only. Afterwards they just looked...normal. Alive. They even had the ships mess up and running… I think it was that normality that was so unnerving to the observers. As if anyone could be a ghost and you’d never know walking past them… The crew seemed to know in general that the war had ended, and that they were dead. But as Grandfather said, there was nothing in their Oath to the Emperor that said their sworn duty ended, ever. So, when we sounded quarters, they took up their posts again. I.. I was glad of my Grandfather’s instruction. When they left, he said they would return whenever they were needed. He… seemed to look forward to it.”

Paul nodded slowly…

“Ok… that sort of makes sense. The oath anchored their spirits, so they couldn’t move on. Sort of like binding them to their duty. Hm.. I think the current Self Defence Force might want to review the oath of service, otherwise this could happen again with more modern spirits. Which would be something of an ethical nightmare. Come to think of it, work contracts might need rewording too. I mean, if you die on the job, it’s a bit much to make you report for work the next day, no?

Katsu’s eyes widened at the implications.”

“That… couldn’t happen, could it?”

Paul shrugged.

“Who knows… we’re in uncharted waters here. But there are enough abusive companies out there that would jump at the idea of forcing their staff to turn up for work despite being dead! I’d rather not find out it’s possible the hard way. The idea of zombies striking for workers rights is just too weird… and likely to end badly for everyone maybe.”