yumemigaoka | MAY(HEM) CATCHALL

[There's a saying that Ango has often heard repeated - give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for the rest of his life - but it leaves out the fact that fishing is fucking boring. Ango dangles his fishing rod (scavenged from the side of the riverbank) into the water, bobbing a leftover piece of fried shrimp into its murky depths, but the fish aren't biting. He can't blame them. Lately, nobody wants what Ango is offering. The Dreamer Union is still "processing his application", his literary agent has stopped pestering him for new material, and he's been kicked out of the local All You Can Chug for exploring the limits of "unlimited" beer and snacks. Even the fish see Ango for what he is: a scruffy-looking man in his late 30s, dressed like a delinquent teen from some old movie, loitering suspiciously during the part of the day when most adults are still at work.]

Just so you know, I don't even LIKE fish! [He shakes his fist menacingly at the water below.] But as soon as I get my hands on one of you, I'm making sashimi!

[Daryl's on his usual strut around town, when he hears someone complaining about fish nearby. Curious, he heads toward the voice to find... some scruffy-looking dude, dressed like a teen, struggling with catching fish.

....Midlife crisis, maybe? Or perhaps he's homeless.

Daryl decides to get a little closer.]

Are you... doing alright, there? You seem to be having a hard time.

[Midlife crisis and temporarily homeless and just a typical Monday for Ango!]

...Eh?

[Preoccupied by his fishing failures, Ango didn't even notice the approaching stranger. Well, that's embarrassing. Or it would be embarrassing, if Ango were still capable of shame.]

Yeah, well, turns out fishing is harder than it looks. This whole "living off the land in harmony with nature" thing is a pain in the ass. I'm about to call it quits and buy some tuna-and-mayo-flavored chips instead.

[Well, that wasn't an answer Daryl was expecting, so that causes him to pause and blink.

He looks at the fishing rod, then back at Ango.]

I can believe it. That it's harder than it looks, I mean. I don't even know what bait would work best around here. But then, I don't think I've lived here that long. And well, the last time I went fishing was with my dad as a little kid.

It's a whooooole lot of just... sitting there. I mostly found it boring. ...Completely found it boring.

[He's not sure if he remembers it being difficult, but childhood is a different time, and memory is a fickle thing. So who knows?

He gives a quirk of a smile.]

But luckily we live in the city, so we don't have to worry too much about living off the land, eh?

Yeah, well, if the Dreamer Union doesn't start paying me soon, I'm gonna run out of cash, so I figured I'd learn how to fish...

[Ango wasn't completely broke, not yet at least, but after spending two weeks in Yumemigaoka waiting to hear back about the DU job, his food budget was coming dangerously close to infringing on his cigarette budget.]

But you're right, damn it. This is even more boring than it looks.

[The Dreamer Union not paying one of their own? This could be a great scoop on what he's looking into. And suddenly the fishing is forgotten. He's much more curious about this little detail.]

The Dreamer Union you say? Do they have... a habit of not paying you? Or others they hire?

I mean teeeeeechnically they haven't hired me yet, but I know they're gonna call any day now! They've got magical high schoolers working there, so their hiring standards can't be much higher than McDonalds...

...But McDonalds won't take me either, so there's that.

Sounds like you're really looking forward to this job. And they hire high schoolers, too? Maybe I should apply.

[He's joking on that last part.

...Actually, he would take it. On the chance that he gets to snoop and see what's really going on behind the scenes.]

Can't say I'm a Dreamer, though. So unless they really do have McDonald's standards, they probably won't take me.

What kind of positions can you apply for at the Dreamer Union? Or, I guess I'm more asking what did you apply for. Do they not let just any Dreamer in?

I'm looking forward to a steady paycheck and being able to work from my bed. Problem is, I've got a liiittle bit of a criminal record for disorderly conduct back in my delinquent youth... But from what I hear, they'll take anybody who has one of these babies!

[He pulls a Sandglass pendant out from inside his shirt. It's made from silver and dotted with little purple gemstones that are probably worth a decent amount of cash, but when he tried selling it at a pawn shop, it somehow reappeared around his neck before the owner had a chance to pay him.]

But you know, I think they've got non-Dreamer jobs, too. Like, unless they've got a magical high schooler whose special skill is IT support, they're gonna need to hire some normies.

Hah, working from your bed. I suppose you would be getting paid to sleep; definitely sounds like a dream.

[Oh, look. A pun. Is it intentional or not? Not even Daryl knows.

Still, the Dreamer Pendant is really enticing to look at.]

I suppose I'll take a look at what they're offering, then. Can you tell me more about your pendant? How did you get it?

[He knows how the records state how to get one. But he'd like to hear it from this guy, who used to be a delinquent, ends up with such a thing and yet how the DU seems to be hesitating on his application thus far. It sounds like a weird way to leave your business card, as far as he's concerned.]

Eh, this thing?

[He dangles the pendant from its chain. There's info about Sandglass pendants on the Dreamer Union website, so he's probably not spilling magical secrets or anything. Not that Ango would care if he was. They're not paying him yet, after all.]

Dunno, it just kinda appeared after a really rough night. I was so tired of dealing with nightmares that I guess I wanted to give them a metaphorical punch in the face... or an actual punch in the face, whatever. Anyway, it ain't really my style so I tried to pawn it for cig money, but it just keeps coming right back. Spooky, huh? But I'm taking it as like, a sign that it wants me to do something.

[The saddest thing about the Dream Sphere, apart from the general sense of loneliness that pervades every last corner of the place, is just how many Figments seem locked into their day jobs even while they dream. The Slumbering City is inhabited by the scintillating fractal ghosts of sleeping people living their mundane lives. They wait at bus stops for buses that never come, they man the neighborhood police stations, they type away at computers in the downtown business district, and they stand dutifully behind the the cash registers of local stops. Ango slips past one indistinct Figment, still clad in a pastel-toned version of her Tomoe-24 uniform, to get to the display of cigarettes behind the convenience store's counter. The Figment makes no attempt to stop him when he grabs a pack, and continues to stare blankly as he pulls out a cigarette and lights it indoors. The "Smoking Prohibited" sign on the wall beside her blurs and shifts until it reads "Smoking Highly Encouraged." Nice.

Ango could get used to this place. No rules, no responsibilities... at least until he's officially a member of the Dreamer Union. Then he'll probably have to work, ugh. But for now he's free to explore the near-empty city.]

The worst part of any day, in Ango's opinion, was coming home to an empty apartment. Back in Tokyo, he had often crashed on a different friend's couch every night of the week to avoid going home... but here in Yumemigaoka, he'd finally found true freedom. Liberated from the confines of four walls and a roof, he'd become one with nature (which was to say that Ango was currently sleeping under a footbridge in a public park, surrounded by empty takeout containers and discarded cans).

The second worst part of any day was morning.

The first rays of the sun pierced through the lingering pre-dawn fog, harsh and unforgiving. Birds twittered mating calls like hustlers outside a Kabukichou nightclub. Ango's mouth tasted like ash, his head was pounding, and the hard concrete under his back painfully reminded him that he'd be 40 in a couple of years. As if to add insult to injury, some asshole was running laps across his bridge. Every few minutes, a mechanically precise thump thump thump echoed over his head as the asshole completed another circuit of the jogging loop. Morning people were the worst part of the second-worst part of the day.

"For fuck's sake," Ango growled, crawling out from under his bridge onto the muddy bank of a small stream. He stood, dusted off his jeans, and squinted upwards through his sunglasses. "Oi! Some of us are still trying to sleep! Nobody in their right mind runs at this time of day unless they're being chased by the cops, and I don't hear any fucking sirens!"

"If I was being chased by cops I wouldn't be running in circles and I'd be going a lot faster," was the incredibly polite reply. Ford had paused and was leaning a little over the side of the bridge. Given his height he still gave the distinct impression that he was looking down his nose at the other man, which wasn't intentional but probably also not wrong. For once in his life he was wearing just a plain tee shirt as opposed to a thick turtleneck and coat. The tattoos on his arms and neck were therefore visible: crystals, mushrooms. One that looked like it might be a unicorn skull. A mermaid, but backwards, fish on top and high heeled women's legs on bottom. It sure did communicate a brand, if nothing else.

"A park is an awful place to try and lose pursuers, anyway. Too open."

"You'd know a thing or two about running from cops, I'll bet." Ango muttered under his breath as the jogger came into view. The guy was huge, and covered in almost as many tats as the yakuza Ango had associated with back in his Tokyo days. (He'd been writing a novel set in the city's dark underworld, so his frequent visits to seedy nightclubs were obviously for wholly legitimate research purposes.) "And here I thought Yumemigaoka was the wholesome, goody-two-shoes kind of town." Ango drew himself up to his full un-slouched height, but the sketchy jogger still had a good 10cm on him... and a significant amount of muscle, too, despite being at least a couple of decades older. Ango had the physique of a chain-smoking novelist who subsisted primarily on Cup Noodles.

"Nice ink. Reverse mermaid? I mean, if I had to be trapped on a deserted island with that or a regular mermaid, I'd definitely pick the reverse mermaid too."

"They both have their merits," is the incredibly normal response. "A regular mermaid would actually be more helpful in a situation where one is marooned. She would be both a better conversationalist and a better swimmer, provided you wanted to gamble on whether or not she's the sort of mermaid who drowns and eats people."

This is a totally normal train of thought to pursue and absolutely a good reason to interrupt his morning routine! Sometimes you just have to have a little thought experiment with a stranger in a park at ass o' clock in the morning.

"Don't believe the Disney propaganda - in the old fairy tales, they're all the kind that drown and eat people. But the one that tries to run around on a beach wearing high heels and stockings is gonna be lot easier to make into sashimi."

While Japan had its share of lore featuring man-eating fish creatures, most of the local mermaid stories involved humans who had consumed the flesh of a mermaid... and been cursed with immortality for their transgression. Ango didn't think immortality sounded so bad, though. Sure, it would suck to live forever while your loved ones died, but most of the people he cared about were already dead, so... if he ever met Ariel and friends, he'd fire up the grill.

"Disney was only further defanging Andersen's overwrought romantic tragedy," Ford pointed out. "Though you could argue the mermaids' tendency toward murder is something that was unfairly passed to them by their siren cousins as translations and narrative drift conflated the two. Mermaids tend to be morally neutral; sirens are purposefully nasty. Or you have the case of the Irish merrow, where the females of the species are perfectly demure and personable but the males are aggressive and monstrous. In that case you can hardly blame them for seeking human husbands."

Personally he didn't quite get it, but he did think Creature From The Black Lagoon was a romcom. To a fish woman a human man was probably as interesting as a fish man was to Ford Pines.

"Japan's got its own stories about fishy women chasing after human men, and it usually doesn't turn out so well for the guy... just ask that poor sap Urashima Tarou how things went with the sea dragon's daughter. But even that one legend went through plenty of narrative permutations between the 8th century oral traditions and the racy 19th century parodies, even being adapted into a moral tale by Buddhist priests during the Muromachi Period..."

Well, this wasn't a conversation he was expecting to have before breakfast, but at least it was an interesting conversation. Ango graduated from a Buddhist university, and the comparative mythology classes were always some of his favorites. He couldn't stand the sort of writers who filled their books with highbrow literary allusions like they were trying for the top spot on an exam, but mythological references were different. Mythology tapped into some deep, dark part of the human unconscious that transcended culture and time period - a part of the human unconscious that said the ocean is fucking scary, man.

"So what are you, some kind of professor?"

"Twelve doctors, actually. So theoretically I could teach, but being stuck in a classroom is..." He lifted a hand and wiggled it descriptively. "Not my speed."

He leaned a little on the side of the bridge, apparently settling in for this conversation. After all, it wasn't that he disliked human interaction, he was just convinced he was bad at it. A conversation immediately taking a left turn into the finer details of mermaid mythology was one of the surest ways to get him past that hurdle. Small talk about the weather and your job and what kind of food you like? Absolutely impossible. Esoteric nitpickery? Ideal topic.

"Personally my favorite Japanese mermaid is the ningen. It's a modern internet-born cryptid; it only entered popular culture in the early 2000s. Supposedly it's a whale-sized vaguely-humanoid creature that lives in the sub-Antarctic oceans. Almost certainly a complete fabrication, but if you suspend your disbelief a little it's easy to imagine something very large living for hundreds of years down in the deep water where humans have very rarely ventured."

After all. That happened for real. Huge things in the deep ocean can go a very long time without eating and live even longer. It was theoretically possible, which was the best kind of possible.

"Shit, man, as deep as the ocean is, I wouldn't be surprised if they found Cthulhu down there," Angro replied with a shrug. As a devoted fan of trash media, he enjoyed binge-watching cryptozoology "documentaries" on YouTube in the dead hours of the night. "You never know - kraken were thought to be legendary monsters until a giant squid washed up on the beach back in the 1800s. Maybe the ningen will turn out to be some really ugly dolphin."

He paused, looking up at the older man. "...Do you seriously have a doctorate in cryptozoology? Well, whatever, I can't blame you for not wanting to teach. I can't stand being in the classroom, either. Went back to my old alma mater for a dumb book signing event once and they almost retroactively expelled me. Sorry, suckers, you had your chance back when I was a student!"

He snorted. "Oh, please. No reputable place of learning would offer a doctorate in cryptozoology. If someone tells you that's what their degree is in, ask which website they paid for it and get one yourself. No, cryptozoology is more of an extracurricular hobby."

He did not offer clarification on what his PhD was in, because he'd found listing off all twelve tended to make people check out of the conversation. People didn't like that for some reason? Thought it was braggy? Whatever. If one is relevant he brings it up.

"In my experience schools are thrilled to be able to have alumni to parade around as examples of how good their programs are and they don't like giving that up. What did you do? So far I've been banned from two campuses for climbing the architecture. If they didn't want people climbing it they would take down all the convenient gargoyles."

Ango had to admit that the old guy made a good point. "I know, right? If they didn't want people swimming in the fountains, they oughta take down all the convenient fountains!" But now that he was forced to think back to the incident that had gotten him kicked out of his old university, he sobered somewhat.

"It wasn't swimming that time, though. I kinda got into a fistfight with the guest of honor - a big-name literary critic and professor from Tokyo U, real pompous chode of a guy. I didn't care what that jackass said about me, but he panned my friend's novel so hard that he refused to write anything for a year. Couldn't even touch a pen without having a breakdown. I hate teachers like that, you know? It's like they've gotta squeeze every last drop of creativity out of students..."

"...So yeah, anyway, fuck school. I think I'll take your advice and pad my resume with a print-at-home cryptozoology degree. It's probably more marketable than my philosophy degree."

MAY(HEM) CATCHALL

Asagiri Riverbank, Asagi, May 1 - Open!

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The Slumbering City, Dream Sphere, May 2 - Open!

Kihada Public Park, Kihada, May 3 - Closed to Ford

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