On the fifth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me
five flowing waters
[Title] What Lies Beneath the Streets
[Fandom] Jet Set Radio/Stephen King's It (did anyone ask for this crossover? No, no they did not, but I had a lot of fics to write and fond memories of playing JSR during lockdown, so here we are)
[Rating] PG for language, sense of threat, implied death
[Notes/Summary] The GGs saved the world. But something creepy is lurking in the Tokyo-to sewers.
It starts out as like such a nice day. Warm and mild, just on the beginning of summer, and Mew’s been dashing around Kogane-cho all morning painting tags and being too fast for the Poison Jam to catch her. She’s sitting by the river, in the shade, catching her breath and watching the sunlight sparkle off the water, and then she hears the chuckle from the entrance to the sewers. A gurgling kind of laugh, like Yuh-huh!
She turns to look - Poison Jam usually default to growls, but she wouldn’t put weird laughter past them - and there’s no one there.
“Okay, then,” she says, scrambling to her feet. Shakes a paint can. If it’s Poison Jam attempting to lure, she’ll bite. If it’s kids messing about, she’s pretty sure she can handle them. “Ooh, what could possibly be lurking down here? Gee, so strange...”
The laughter comes again, and this time she sees a colourful flicker of movement further back in the tunnel.
Probably another rudie, then.
“We going to do this?” she says, and dashes forward, splashing through the water.
The laughter comes again, and then - floating over her head, up towards the sunlight - it’s a balloon, of all things. Mew really hopes this isn’t some new gang, with a gimmick of -
Clowns or something -
There’s a channel flowing across the route, and standing on the other side of it, in the doorway, is a clown. Like, a proper clown. Not a guy in skates and face paint, but an actual clown in a baggy outfit with red hair and a ruff, a stark white face and red make-up like tears. Holding another balloon.
Their eyes meet, and he chuckles again. Same sound.
Mew’s faced down police cops and tanks and any number of rival gangs, not to mention that whole saving-the-city-and-maybe-the-world-from-a-giant-fire-breathing-demon thing, so there’s not much this guy can do to her, but the problem is?
She really, really doesn’t like clowns. A couple of bad horror film experiences and a scary story from her cousin and a poorly-drawn circus poster, it all combined to just leave her like she really doesn’t want to hang out anywhere near any stupid clowns.
This one smiles at her, with his buck teeth, and says to her, “Want a balloon?”
“What are you doing in the sewers?” Mew snaps.
“Maybe there’s a whole circus down here.”
“I’ve been down here. There’s nothing but mouldy water and weirdos in fish masks.” He definitely isn’t wearing skates. So not a rival gang. A serial killer, maybe? She shouldn’t have thought that. He doesn’t have a machete or anything in his hand. Just another balloon. Her heart’s going a mile a minute. Which is dumb. She isn’t six years old any more.
“You come down here a lot?” the clown says. “That’s a scary place for a little girl.” He draws out the words, pouts at her like she really is six years old. If anyone else were doing this she’d just get annoyed with them but - it’s hard not to feel he knows she’s freaked out, or that little-kid her is, at any rate, and he thinks it’s funny -
“Yeah,” she says. “It’s our turf, so if you were thinking about moving in on it -”
“Oh, no, no, no,” the clown says, “no, I wouldn’t do that! Don’t need to move in on anybody. Just wanted to play with you. You look like you can go real fast on those skates. We could have a race. Come on. I’ll give you a head start.”
It’s a dumb clown, it’s probably just a homeless guy being weird, or a Kogane delinquent messing about, and he’s in long curl-toed boots, she could outrun him in an instant on her skates, and what GG ever turns down a chance to show off their skills?
The clown chuckles again, and starts to walk towards her.
“Come on,” it says. “I dare you! Tag. You’re it.”
Mew runs for it.
It’s because she was freaked out. Nothing was going to happen. She runs for it, back up the tunnel, out into the sunshine, leaping to wall-ride up the steps, through Kogane-cho apartments, kicking over potted plants. She doesn’t stop until she’s standing on top of a roof with nothing but the sun and the world around her and absolutely no weird clowns.
She’s not going to tell anyone about this. You want your gang members to think you’re cool, and getting freaked out and forfeiting a race with one weird guy is very much not cool. They’d be like, what, you don’t think you could’ve won? He was in clown shoes.
Mew didn’t look back, while she was running, but she feels like he came after her, she feels like she heard him laughing in her ear, like his breath was hot on her neck. Like he was just as fast as her. Like he could be coming up behind any moment -
She whirls round, but there’s nothing there.
Off in the distance, another balloon drifts lazily into the sky.
No. Definitely not anything to tell the others.
***
Gum’s prepared to admit not all of Kogane-cho is a complete dumpster fire - the pollution-orange sunsets are pretty, skating down the rooftops is like running down a hill, the abandoned factory’s got its own shabby-chic charm - but she’s pretty sure she’s never going to love the sewers. Like, they’re sewers. Famously full of, you know, sewage. They’re also permanently cold and damp with chilly air that gets into your bones and every surface is just that little bit slippery. And if you screw up and fall off whatever you were skating on, the landing is going to be wet and smelly and you’re probably going to have to go get medical treatment for coming into contact with that water.
“The only good thing you can say about them,” she says to Garam, as the two of them spray paint at opposite ends of a long wall, “is the cops can’t get helicopters and tanks down here, and now the Rokkaku funding is gone it’s not like that’s even a problem any more.”
“They’re not so bad.” Garam’s focusing on his tag, hopping from foot to foot as he paints. “They’re a pretty neat place to hang out when you’re a kid and you don’t wanna be found. I practically learnt to skate down here.”
Gum pulls a face. “I preferred to do my learning somewhere I wouldn’t drown in filth every time I fell over.”
“Nah, that just makes you work harder not to fall over. And it ain’t that bad, this water. The Poison Jam swim in it -”
Gum shudders, and stretches out of it to put the finishing touches to her tag, and frowns at it as something occurs to her. “Hey… where are those goons, anyway? I was figuring they’d be menacing us about now. It’s not like they can’t have noticed we’re here, what with the echoes this place has.”
Garam turns to look round, at the empty walkways and the murky water stretching away into the dark depths, all of it free of horror-obsessed weirdos in rubber masks. “Maybe they’re… I dunno, asleep? Maybe they found some rare bootleg video nasty and stayed up all night watching it and drinking something they brewed up behind a radiator and they’re hungover.”
Gum’s prepared to admit this isn’t unlikely. But all the same - maybe it’s just the sewers getting to her, but she stands still, turns her staticky radio off, strains to hear, and the only sound is her own breathing and the ever-present running water.
“Maybe we should go look around,” she says. “If we find ‘em napping, we can go to town on their turf. And… you know, if they’ve got kidnapped and mind-controlled again, we should probably know about it.”
“Suits me,” Garam says, shrugging. “I’m not the one who hates this place. And it’s too hot out there, anyway. Bein’ a rudie in summer sucks.”
The GGs have never found where the Poison Jam actually sleep and eat and live their creepy little lives, and Gum and Garam don’t find it this time, but they don’t find much else, either. A few of their own tags. Fewer Poison Jam tags than there should be. They’re leaning against a barred gate, squinting into the darkness, the water here flowing faster, over their skates, when Garam says, “You know what?”
“What?”
“We passed one of my tags a while back. I remember putting that sucker up.”
“Yeah, and?”
“That was a few days ago,” Garam says, “and it’s still here. Whole reason we came down here was to tag this place up again, ‘cause they should’ve covered up what we did. So. They just been goofing off for a while?”
If they’d been above ground, Gum would’ve just been like ha ha, probably, those guys are the worst, or something like that, but they’re in the semi-darkness, with the tunnel yawning out ahead of them, and how do they know there’s not someone looking back at them from deep down inside it?
She starts to say something like this is some weird shit, and -
Something bobs against the toe of her skate.
She looks down and it’s a hand reaching out of the water.
She nudges it away with her foot - okay, she sort of kicks it, she just about manages not to let out a yell - and sees it’s not a hand, it’s a glove. It’s one of those Poison Jam gloves, the ones mocked up to look like a lizardy claw. Which is fine. Which is normal. The Poison Jam are hopeless, probably spend all their time accidentally dropping their stuff in the water. It’s floating away already, and she watches it, she doesn’t wade through the water to pick it up and check it doesn’t have an actual severed hand inside it. That’d be paranoid.
“Okay, I am done with going underground for today,” she says, and her voice sounds almost steady. “They’re clearly not here, so let’s go snoop around outside. I need some fresh air.”
***
Cube was kind of sort of meant to be making her way round Kibogaoka, slapping down tags, keeping an eye out for weird shit that was weirder than Kogane-cho’s usual fare, trying to draw the Poison Jam out of whatever weird Hellraiser dimension they might’ve got themselves trapped in through watching cursed DVDs. GG mission stuff. But… she’s in an empty mood today. Sometimes you just wake up like that and you don’t want to go through the motions of normal, you know?
Okay, she’s missing Coin. Which makes it sound like she should just be sad, but it isn’t like that, it’s feeling flat and tired and mad with the world, and like it’s wrong for her to be out in the sun pulling some sweet moves and covering everything with paint while he’s dead and buried under a pile of rubble and probably never even knew what hit him. Wandering off into the sewers seems overdramatic, like she has to go mope underground, but screw it. She just really wants to be on her own and not in the sun.
No sign that anyone’s been down here since Gum and Garam came back from it the other day. No more Poison Jam tags. Yo-Yo was all, Look, how do we know there isn’t a giant alligator down there? but he was kidding around, and Cube figures as long as she doesn’t fall into the water, she’ll be okay even if there is a giant alligator. Current hypothesis is still that the Poison Jam are holed up in a lair doing an extended Friday the 13th rewatch and forgetting about how if you want to hang on to your turf you have to defend it. Like Gum said, a lost glove doesn’t prove anything.
She’s on one of the walkways painting a tag she never drew before - a mess of black and white - she doesn’t feel like doing one of her old favourites, mourning her dead boyfriend and painting the stuff she used to paint with him and probably crying into the bargain, that all feels like she’s letting it take up too much space in her head. She came down here because she was feeling weird but that doesn’t mean she’s going to… to…
She finishes the tag and she does a little spin, like she’s trying to fake being satisfied, and as she does, she sees a flicker of movement and white on the other side of the sewer, across the water - another rudie, leaping and wall-riding off into the tunnel. Didn’t look like Poison Jam, didn’t look like any of her friends, probably worth checking out. If it’s some gang-less renegade she should send ‘em packing -
Dashing, leaping onto some rusted barrels and then onto another walkway and then over the bridge, it takes her mind off the weird stuff in her head. Silence now, except for the water - and the distant crackle of her radio, she’d turned it down, it was bugging her, and the signal’s messed up anyway, Prof K’s voice is coming at her through a murk of static. Maybe the other person’s got away. You think you’d still hear the echoes, though, wherever they are -
She dashes into the tunnel, leaps, vaults over more barrels blocking the way, and as she lands she sees -
The other person’s standing there, at the corner where the tunnel turns round, dancing to the beats on his earphones, that shambling too-cool-for-school move he always used to do back in the loft in Bantam Street. He’d have put on some remix he’d made, and she’d say, come on, bust some moves, don’t just stand there behind your turntables, and he’d dance like it was a joke -
She’s staring and letting herself roll forward and waiting for it to be someone else and it’s his face, his smile and wink as he spots her, his voice: “Hey, Cube, been waiting a long time for you to show up -”
She’s thinking, I’m going nuts, this is what you get when you start feeling your feelings, they become real, they talk to you, she’s thinking, not a scratch on him, he hasn’t changed, she’s thinking, she’s saying, “You - you could’ve come looked for me, we’ve been making a name for ourselves round here -”
“Didn’t know where I was, for a long time,” he says. Still shifting to the beat. Cube wonders what he’s listening to. She’s still got nothing but static. “Only made it out a little while ago, crawled my way up out of…”
She’s thinking, I should be happy. Like this is everything she wanted, right? She wanted it to have been a mistake. She wanted him to have survived. They came here to find him. She presses her tongue against her teeth, and they feel real, she feels real, she can still smell the air down here and hear the static, how do you know if you’re having a hallucination?
“Come on,” he’s saying. “I’ll show you. Show you where I came up.” Holds out his hand. Ratty skating gloves, pale white fingers. Like he’s just got out of the water.
She feels herself shake her head, say, “Nah, no need. I’ll believe you.” Looks into his face. He’s smiling like they’re both in on a joke. If he’d escaped from a corporate terrorist organisation and then climbed his way out through the freakin’ sewers he should look different, right? He shouldn’t look like he walked straight out of Bantam Street. Except he doesn’t, quite, he looks like - like people sometimes do in dreams, their faces aren’t -
She says, “Seen anyone else down here? The local gang seems to have vanished off the map.”
“That can happen,” he says. He’s still watching her. Beckons, quick finger-flick. “Come on, you could stand to welcome me home, couldn’t you? After you dropped the ball on watching my back to start with.” He says it like it’s a joke. They joked about a lot of stuff, the two of them would be sarcastic as shit to each other and Combo would just listen and occasionally snort with laughter. Just, just that they were in tune with each other then, the jokes were only ever things both of them’d find funny. Not stuff she’s thought about when she can’t sleep, what if I could’ve helped him, what if I could’ve stopped them getting him, what if he’s somewhere getting the shit kicked out of him and hating me for it - Combo had said to her, once, when she’d voiced some of this, stop it, you oughta know that’s bullshit, and now he’s here and just - saying it to her face -
“Hey, no biggie,” he’s saying, watching her face, like he’s trying to get a rise out of her, “we all screw up sometimes. You come see what I’ve found and we can let bygones be bygones.” Moves a little closer. The light’s bad but he still looks pale. Pale, but his smile, widening -
Thing is, if you’re a rudie, you learn to trust your instincts, because your instincts are what say yeah, you can make this jump or those guys are gunning for you or get the hell out of here, now - Cube spends a lot of time making decisions before she realises she needs to. If she’d thought about this one, she’d probably have figured it couldn’t hurt to see what he’d found, or like it might give some useful details on what happened to Poison Jam, or she should go because the last thing she wants is for him to think she meant to hurt him -
But her body’s like No and as he reaches out to grab her arm she is already turning to get away, get the hell away. Rudies are good at planning escape routes they didn’t know they’d need, too. The tunnel off to her left is one that gets you out of here and she dives into it, it slopes up, she’s skating as fast as she’s ever skated in her life, she hears him yell at her to come back, “Come on, you missed me, I know you missed me!” and his voice gets closer, rising up the tunnel behind her, like his skates are rocket-powered or something, he’s laughing and it’s all around her -
She bursts through an archway and into the abandoned factory and doesn’t stop there, keeps running, out into the sunlight, the dusty yard, up over a pile of wrecked cars, skates smashing in windscreens and mirrors and that laughter underneath it all, up the hill, she isn’t going to stop until she gets as far away from the sewers as possible, she isn’t going to stop because when she does she’ll have to feel the feelings again and think about what just happened and her instincts are saying that’ll be the worst thing of all.
***
Kogane-cho looks same as always. Beat doesn’t know what he expected. Blood red sky? Freddie Kreuger lurking behind the takeaway? Zombie Poison Jam?
But it’s just dust and long shadows and people selling stuff out of suitcases on the pavement. So it’s probably fine. So there’s probably nothing to worry about.
Except he kind of doesn’t want to go down into the sewers.
“What do you reckon?” he says to Tab, who’s rolling along behind him, looking as chill-and-slightly-bizarre as he always does.
“Like… how freaked out should we be?”
“Yeah. You know this city better’n I do. And you’re the designated smart one.”
“Don’t know about that,” Tab says. “And I don’t know Kogane-cho super well, either.”
“Yeah, but… weighin’ up the evidence. Poison Jam are off the radar, for sure, even Prof K doesn’t know where they’ve got to. Cube says she saw some weird shit down there the other day. And this city nearly got burnt to the ground by a giant demon rhino not so long ago, so there’s a precedent for strange. Just, how worried you think we ought to be?”
Tab frowns, silent for a few seconds, before he says, “I mean, Cube seems like someone who keeps a cool head. Her boyfriend got kidnapped by crazy gun-toting assassins and she just upped sticks and flew across the Pacific like it was no big deal. We had to tag up the streets while dodging bombs and flamethrowers and sniper rifles and she was like, I’m on it. She coped even when we were fighting a literal demon. And she’s a hardcore death metal fan. So… I figure whatever she saw, it was pretty out-there.”
“Yeah,” Beat says. “That’s… kind of what I was thinking.”
They’ve got to the open shaft that you can climb down to get into the sewers. Normally you hurl yourself into it and cheer as you fall, live for the speed, but today Beat and Tab are standing there eyeing it like it’s a portal to hell. Which, like, it maybe could be?
“We still need to check it out, though,” Beat says. “Like… if there’s something dangerous down there, if it’s… eaten Poison Jam or whatever, no way it’s not gonna target us. Like, rudies in general. No one’s gonna mind if we go missing.”
“We just have to step up and save the city?” Tab says, striking a pose. “Again?”
“I… yeah.” Beat wishes he sounded more confident. Just, it feels like they only saved the city through the skin of their teeth last time. It wasn’t like they gathered any secret intelligence about how you do it.
He takes a deep breath and jumps. He tries to tell himself it’s just like when they ran up a zillion flights of stairs to confront a crazed CEO summoning demons on the roof of a skyscraper. That is, potentially a really bad idea, but something you just have to do. It was way up high last time, so it makes sense it’s underground now. And maybe it will just be a giant alligator and they can make an anonymous call to Pest Control or the city zoo or something.
The sewer walls rush past him, the same smell of funky water, the same splash and ripple echoing through the air. It’d be really good if he shot out into the main tunnel and saw Poison Jam on the walkway doing their stupid Monster Mash dance routine. Then they could have a gang battle and it would turn back into a normal day.
He slows as the tunnel opens up, rolls to a halt and surveys the scene. No Poison Jam. No giant alligator, either. No obvious clues at all.
“Welp,” Tab says from behind him. “Guess we just act natural and see if we run into anything weird?”
“I guess. Like… paint some tags, pull some tricks...”
The tags Gum and Garam left are still on the opposite wall, untouched, which doesn’t make Beat feel any better. Someone should’ve taken them as a challenge.
“Let’s go tag up the staircase,” he says. “I mean, if it is a giant alligator, it’ll probably come through the water?”
“Act as bait. Sounds fun.”
Beat agrees it does not sound fun at all, but as leader he feels he has to go first, so he grinds down the banister and jumps lightly off at the bottom, where the water laps against the concrete. How deep is it, even? Well, he doesn’t intend to jump in and find out. Just slap paint on a wall. Like he does every day. If his hand’s kind of shaky and the resulting tags are more towards the casual vandalism than fancy street art end of the spectrum, doesn’t matter, hopefully it’ll inspire someone to come and cover ‘em up…
The problem with tagging a wall is it requires you to face the wall, which gives things ample opportunity to sneak up on you.
“I’m gonna go… I dunno, catch some air,” he says. “Get some practice in without anyone trying to shoot me.”
“Got it.”
Up on the bridge he starts to regret his decision - being nervous and kind of waiting for something to murder you is only going to throw off your skating game and, here, result in you taking a dive into sewer water - but at least he can see the whole area from up here. Tab painting a large tag, hopping from stair to stair - the main tunnel disappearing into blackness either end - rusted barrels - grimy strip lights -
A balloon floating by above him.
Which, okay, some kid could’ve let their balloon go and it got blown in here, sure, fine, but you’d kind of expect said balloon to look battered and half-deflated, and kids in Kogane don’t really have balloons anyway. This one is bright red and fat and shiny, bobbing along like it’s floating on the summer breeze, which is also weird, because there is no breeze down here -
Beat glances over to yell to Tab to look up and when he looks back there’s like three more balloons.
“Okay,” he hears himself say, “okay, that’s a bit weird.”
(This would make sense, if Cube saw something like this, something totally normal that just shouldn’t be down here -)
He’s watching the balloons and his heart’s pounding way too fast for nothing happening and the blood pulsing in his ears mingles with the gurgling of the water and what sounds like it could be something - something laughing -
Tab’s stopped painting, he’s taking a run-up to dash and get some speed, but the sound of his skates is drowned out by - the high, eerie singing -
It can’t be -
He hears Tab yell, “Holy shit, is that -”
(Like, if you try and describe what went down on the top of the Rokkaku tower, it mostly sounds like a fever dream, or at the very least, it sounds funny, like, oh sure, a giant golden rhino just swooped down and started breathing fire at us, also we were hundreds of feet off the ground, and there was a crazy corporate executive playing a demon record but it was scary as hell when it was happening and Beat’s dreamt he was back there a bunch of times since and woken up in a cold sweat -)
That song is playing, the laughter and the crooning echoing off the sewer walls, and something glows red-hot in the tunnel, and -
The twenty-foot-high rhino demon swoops out, up to the ceiling, its roar making the walls shake, and looks down at Beat, and draws back its head, it’s going to breathe fire, just like it did then, just like it did in his dreams, and he thinks, this is it, after we thought everything was fine, this is how I die -
Tab yells, “Move it!”
Maybe it wasn’t Tab, maybe it was just Beat’s own thoughts, but whatever, it taps into muscle memory or something and he finds himself dashing, leaping for the handrail, landing so hard it jolts his teeth, he feels the billow of heat on his back but he knows this, he knows it, he’s got away from huge angry machines trying to kill him a bunch of times, he’s gaining speed, he’s got this, he’s leaping and landing again and then, and then off the rail, into the nearest tunnel, sprinting for the closest exit. Not looking back.
***
Combo figures after the year he’s had, he should be gettin’ used to weird shit. Like, oh, sure, murderous… thing, possibly return of the rhino demon, in the sewers, cool, we on it. But with the night falling and the GGs watching Beat start mapping out the situation on the floor with a can of paint, he just feels like something’s tickling the back of his neck.
“Okay,” Beat says. “Here’s what we got.” He’s written, Poison Jam - missing?, followed by Rhino demon, followed by ?? Other weird shit?? Balloons??
“I feel like you need a whiteboard or a flip chart or something,” Tab says. “We should’ve scavenged.” He’s chucking a paint can from hand to hand like he can’t stay still.
“I’m making do with what we’ve got,” Beat says. “Which I think is what we’re going to have to do about this situation.”
“What exactly do we think we’re dealing with?” Piranha asks. “Like… you said you heard the same music. Is this another cursed record? Are we dealing with Rokkaku Evil Part 2, Electric Boogaloo?”
“I mean… that seems the most obvious choice,” Beat says. “Music, rhino demon, fire, creeping feeling of horror.”
“But in the sewers, though,” Yo-Yo says, coming to kneel by the painted list. “Why’d you release a demon down there? Whole thing about that demon was it was gonna fly around and rain down fiery death on the city. This one just kind of flew out at you and then… went away again.”
Beat shrugs. Tab glances at him and then says, “Yeah, about that.”
“About that?”
“Like, Beat got his ass out of there - which is fine, leader man, that’s what you do when something tries to set you on fire. I was at the bottom of the steps, and I figured just dashing up ‘em was a great way to get barbecued. So I ran down that corridor next to it, figured the demon was too big to get to it. Ran in and was like… well, tagging up the floor worked the last time we dealt with this thing. So I started doing some sweet art.”
“And?” Mew’s leaning forward, tangling her fingers together. “I mean, you didn’t get set on fire, so...”
“So remember how much I hate frogs?” Tab says. “Gum, Beat, you remember. The Poison Jam filled this place with ‘em that time and I had to go get some fresh air. So - so, it all goes quiet out there, I’m wondering if the demon thinks we both left and it’s… gone off to do whatever demons do when they’re not incinerating innocent vandals - and then… and then.”
“And then… Frogmageddon?” Gum says.
“Dozens of ‘em.” Tab swallows. “Not… not a good moment, I can tell you. I think if I hadn’t already been in apocalypse survival mode from the rhino demon I’d have had a frickin’ breakdown, but as it was I was like, paint the goddamn tags and try not to think about Satan’s amphibians.”
Combo ain’t got no beef with frogs, but the thought of standing ankle-deep in something you hate, trying to spray paint like normal, makes him shudder. “Then?”
“Then, I painted the most glorious pieces of street art I have ever created, making sure I kept moving closer to the door,” Tab says. He’s pale, even under the hat. “The fuckers jumped on me and more of ‘em just kept coming. I was seriously wondering if I might drown in ‘em. The radio was still static - which is another thing, always used to be able to get it even down in those tunnels - so I started singing to stop myself throwing up. Like Oh, I can hear ‘em running ‘bout the town, I can hear them all daaaaay, dah dah dah dah dah -”
Normally someone would’ve said something about his overenthusiastic singing voice, but now they just all stared at him. After a moment, Beat added ?? frogs?? to the bottom of his list.
“Yeah, I ain’t never seen that before in the sewers,” Garam said. “Poison Jam could get a bunch of frogs together but they didn’t just… swarm like that.”
“The thing is,” Tab says, “the thing is I swear to god, I looked back when I was making a dash for it - still singing like I was in the shower - and they… it seemed like they’d gone. I… this might have been panicked hallucinations, but I thought I saw, like… a clown?”
Mew twitches, and gives a little squeak. Combo looks over at her - the girl likes cute things but normally she’s no more fazed by scary shit than the rest of them. “You okay, kat?”
“I saw it,” Mew says. “Um. This sounds so stupid. I saw a clown in the sewers. A while back now. He - it challenged me to a race and I - because I hate clowns, I got freaked out and - I thought it was just some weirdo but -”
Cube’s not said anything. Combo’s been trying not to stare at her - whatever she saw, she’ll talk about it when she wants to, he ain’t gonna make her mad by picking at her - but whatever it was she saw, he’s long been wanting to go punch it, she looked like she wanted to cry when she got back.
“Did you see a clown too?” Yo-Yo asks her, though, because tact ain’t his strong suit.
Cube takes a deep breath, presses a hand to her mouth. Shakes her head. “I saw… I think...” Another deep breath. “Okay, Beat, I think I get what’s going on here.” She gets up, grabs another can of paint, rolls over to him, and starts to add to the list. They all cluster round to watch.
Poison Jam - missing?
Rhino demon <= Beat
?? Other weird shit?? Balloons?? Clown <= Mew
?? frogs?? <= Tab
And finally, she writes:
Coin <= Cube
Piranha says, at last, “You saw...”
Combo knows he should join in, but he feels like something just hit him in the chest.
“It wasn’t him,” Cube says. “Combo, I… I’m sure it wasn’t him. He was… he was the same, he wasn’t hurt at all, and he… he was laughing at me. He was trying to freak me out and then he was glad when it worked. Coin wouldn’t… he goofed around but… this thing was - it was mean.”
Gum says, “So it… so it’s something that… can shapeshift or whatever? Into whatever will get to us most? Like, Tab and frogs, and I know Beat was all like if that rhino demon kills us it’s my fault, and Cube sees her boyfriend trying to -”
“Trying to make me think it was all my fault he’d got caught,” Cube says. She swallows. “Which is what I’ve been tryin’ not to think but...”
Combo’s not going to lose it right here and now, not in the middle of a council of war, but that settles it, he is going to go find this thing and make it pay.
Slate, who’s been leaning on the pinball machine watching the discussion, clears his throat.
“So, I don’t got any anecdotes about clowns to add,” he says, “but Garam and me made some enquiries around Kogane-cho and… the word on that particular street is, yeah, people have been going missing. Not just the Poison Jam. Homeless dudes who’ve suddenly upped sticks. And kids. Only the usual Kogane-cho kids that the cops are figuring’ve run away, but… yeah.”
“I mean,” Tab says, after a few moments of worried silence, “that suggests it ain’t just we’re all going mad. So… that’s good.”
“What’s not good,” Slate says, “is I get the feeling our fearless leader is gearing up to marshal us to go save the world again. Or at least Kogane-cho.”
“Well, what else are we going to do?” Beat says. “This thing’s after people like us, people the cops won’t bother to look for if we go missing. If it had got any of you lot I somehow don’t think Onishima would bother to do anything but throw a party.”
“Plus,” Gum says, “Kogane-cho is our turf now, and if it’s not ours, then it’s Poison Jam’s. It’s not some, some murder clown’s. Fuck that. No.”
“And I mean -” Tab’s up on his feet. “Like, if it’s trying to scare us, then… we’re good at not getting scared under pressure. And I think that helped, with the - the frogmageddon. Singin’ and paintin’.”
“And, like, maybe it’ll get confused,” Mew says. “If there’s a bunch of us. It can turn into a clown and it’ll freak me out, but Cube can just punch it in the face, and then I’ll do the same to her undead boyfriend.”
“Okay,” Slate says, sighing. “These are all good points. I still don’t love this, as a life choice, but I get it.”
“Right,” Beat says. “Then, tomorrow, let’s do it. Let’s go kill a clown.”
five flowing waters
[Title] What Lies Beneath the Streets
[Fandom] Jet Set Radio/Stephen King's It (did anyone ask for this crossover? No, no they did not, but I had a lot of fics to write and fond memories of playing JSR during lockdown, so here we are)
[Rating] PG for language, sense of threat, implied death
[Notes/Summary] The GGs saved the world. But something creepy is lurking in the Tokyo-to sewers.
It starts out as like such a nice day. Warm and mild, just on the beginning of summer, and Mew’s been dashing around Kogane-cho all morning painting tags and being too fast for the Poison Jam to catch her. She’s sitting by the river, in the shade, catching her breath and watching the sunlight sparkle off the water, and then she hears the chuckle from the entrance to the sewers. A gurgling kind of laugh, like Yuh-huh!
She turns to look - Poison Jam usually default to growls, but she wouldn’t put weird laughter past them - and there’s no one there.
“Okay, then,” she says, scrambling to her feet. Shakes a paint can. If it’s Poison Jam attempting to lure, she’ll bite. If it’s kids messing about, she’s pretty sure she can handle them. “Ooh, what could possibly be lurking down here? Gee, so strange...”
The laughter comes again, and this time she sees a colourful flicker of movement further back in the tunnel.
Probably another rudie, then.
“We going to do this?” she says, and dashes forward, splashing through the water.
The laughter comes again, and then - floating over her head, up towards the sunlight - it’s a balloon, of all things. Mew really hopes this isn’t some new gang, with a gimmick of -
Clowns or something -
There’s a channel flowing across the route, and standing on the other side of it, in the doorway, is a clown. Like, a proper clown. Not a guy in skates and face paint, but an actual clown in a baggy outfit with red hair and a ruff, a stark white face and red make-up like tears. Holding another balloon.
Their eyes meet, and he chuckles again. Same sound.
Mew’s faced down police cops and tanks and any number of rival gangs, not to mention that whole saving-the-city-and-maybe-the-world-from-a-giant-fire-breathing-demon thing, so there’s not much this guy can do to her, but the problem is?
She really, really doesn’t like clowns. A couple of bad horror film experiences and a scary story from her cousin and a poorly-drawn circus poster, it all combined to just leave her like she really doesn’t want to hang out anywhere near any stupid clowns.
This one smiles at her, with his buck teeth, and says to her, “Want a balloon?”
“What are you doing in the sewers?” Mew snaps.
“Maybe there’s a whole circus down here.”
“I’ve been down here. There’s nothing but mouldy water and weirdos in fish masks.” He definitely isn’t wearing skates. So not a rival gang. A serial killer, maybe? She shouldn’t have thought that. He doesn’t have a machete or anything in his hand. Just another balloon. Her heart’s going a mile a minute. Which is dumb. She isn’t six years old any more.
“You come down here a lot?” the clown says. “That’s a scary place for a little girl.” He draws out the words, pouts at her like she really is six years old. If anyone else were doing this she’d just get annoyed with them but - it’s hard not to feel he knows she’s freaked out, or that little-kid her is, at any rate, and he thinks it’s funny -
“Yeah,” she says. “It’s our turf, so if you were thinking about moving in on it -”
“Oh, no, no, no,” the clown says, “no, I wouldn’t do that! Don’t need to move in on anybody. Just wanted to play with you. You look like you can go real fast on those skates. We could have a race. Come on. I’ll give you a head start.”
It’s a dumb clown, it’s probably just a homeless guy being weird, or a Kogane delinquent messing about, and he’s in long curl-toed boots, she could outrun him in an instant on her skates, and what GG ever turns down a chance to show off their skills?
The clown chuckles again, and starts to walk towards her.
“Come on,” it says. “I dare you! Tag. You’re it.”
Mew runs for it.
It’s because she was freaked out. Nothing was going to happen. She runs for it, back up the tunnel, out into the sunshine, leaping to wall-ride up the steps, through Kogane-cho apartments, kicking over potted plants. She doesn’t stop until she’s standing on top of a roof with nothing but the sun and the world around her and absolutely no weird clowns.
She’s not going to tell anyone about this. You want your gang members to think you’re cool, and getting freaked out and forfeiting a race with one weird guy is very much not cool. They’d be like, what, you don’t think you could’ve won? He was in clown shoes.
Mew didn’t look back, while she was running, but she feels like he came after her, she feels like she heard him laughing in her ear, like his breath was hot on her neck. Like he was just as fast as her. Like he could be coming up behind any moment -
She whirls round, but there’s nothing there.
Off in the distance, another balloon drifts lazily into the sky.
No. Definitely not anything to tell the others.
***
Gum’s prepared to admit not all of Kogane-cho is a complete dumpster fire - the pollution-orange sunsets are pretty, skating down the rooftops is like running down a hill, the abandoned factory’s got its own shabby-chic charm - but she’s pretty sure she’s never going to love the sewers. Like, they’re sewers. Famously full of, you know, sewage. They’re also permanently cold and damp with chilly air that gets into your bones and every surface is just that little bit slippery. And if you screw up and fall off whatever you were skating on, the landing is going to be wet and smelly and you’re probably going to have to go get medical treatment for coming into contact with that water.
“The only good thing you can say about them,” she says to Garam, as the two of them spray paint at opposite ends of a long wall, “is the cops can’t get helicopters and tanks down here, and now the Rokkaku funding is gone it’s not like that’s even a problem any more.”
“They’re not so bad.” Garam’s focusing on his tag, hopping from foot to foot as he paints. “They’re a pretty neat place to hang out when you’re a kid and you don’t wanna be found. I practically learnt to skate down here.”
Gum pulls a face. “I preferred to do my learning somewhere I wouldn’t drown in filth every time I fell over.”
“Nah, that just makes you work harder not to fall over. And it ain’t that bad, this water. The Poison Jam swim in it -”
Gum shudders, and stretches out of it to put the finishing touches to her tag, and frowns at it as something occurs to her. “Hey… where are those goons, anyway? I was figuring they’d be menacing us about now. It’s not like they can’t have noticed we’re here, what with the echoes this place has.”
Garam turns to look round, at the empty walkways and the murky water stretching away into the dark depths, all of it free of horror-obsessed weirdos in rubber masks. “Maybe they’re… I dunno, asleep? Maybe they found some rare bootleg video nasty and stayed up all night watching it and drinking something they brewed up behind a radiator and they’re hungover.”
Gum’s prepared to admit this isn’t unlikely. But all the same - maybe it’s just the sewers getting to her, but she stands still, turns her staticky radio off, strains to hear, and the only sound is her own breathing and the ever-present running water.
“Maybe we should go look around,” she says. “If we find ‘em napping, we can go to town on their turf. And… you know, if they’ve got kidnapped and mind-controlled again, we should probably know about it.”
“Suits me,” Garam says, shrugging. “I’m not the one who hates this place. And it’s too hot out there, anyway. Bein’ a rudie in summer sucks.”
The GGs have never found where the Poison Jam actually sleep and eat and live their creepy little lives, and Gum and Garam don’t find it this time, but they don’t find much else, either. A few of their own tags. Fewer Poison Jam tags than there should be. They’re leaning against a barred gate, squinting into the darkness, the water here flowing faster, over their skates, when Garam says, “You know what?”
“What?”
“We passed one of my tags a while back. I remember putting that sucker up.”
“Yeah, and?”
“That was a few days ago,” Garam says, “and it’s still here. Whole reason we came down here was to tag this place up again, ‘cause they should’ve covered up what we did. So. They just been goofing off for a while?”
If they’d been above ground, Gum would’ve just been like ha ha, probably, those guys are the worst, or something like that, but they’re in the semi-darkness, with the tunnel yawning out ahead of them, and how do they know there’s not someone looking back at them from deep down inside it?
She starts to say something like this is some weird shit, and -
Something bobs against the toe of her skate.
She looks down and it’s a hand reaching out of the water.
She nudges it away with her foot - okay, she sort of kicks it, she just about manages not to let out a yell - and sees it’s not a hand, it’s a glove. It’s one of those Poison Jam gloves, the ones mocked up to look like a lizardy claw. Which is fine. Which is normal. The Poison Jam are hopeless, probably spend all their time accidentally dropping their stuff in the water. It’s floating away already, and she watches it, she doesn’t wade through the water to pick it up and check it doesn’t have an actual severed hand inside it. That’d be paranoid.
“Okay, I am done with going underground for today,” she says, and her voice sounds almost steady. “They’re clearly not here, so let’s go snoop around outside. I need some fresh air.”
***
Cube was kind of sort of meant to be making her way round Kibogaoka, slapping down tags, keeping an eye out for weird shit that was weirder than Kogane-cho’s usual fare, trying to draw the Poison Jam out of whatever weird Hellraiser dimension they might’ve got themselves trapped in through watching cursed DVDs. GG mission stuff. But… she’s in an empty mood today. Sometimes you just wake up like that and you don’t want to go through the motions of normal, you know?
Okay, she’s missing Coin. Which makes it sound like she should just be sad, but it isn’t like that, it’s feeling flat and tired and mad with the world, and like it’s wrong for her to be out in the sun pulling some sweet moves and covering everything with paint while he’s dead and buried under a pile of rubble and probably never even knew what hit him. Wandering off into the sewers seems overdramatic, like she has to go mope underground, but screw it. She just really wants to be on her own and not in the sun.
No sign that anyone’s been down here since Gum and Garam came back from it the other day. No more Poison Jam tags. Yo-Yo was all, Look, how do we know there isn’t a giant alligator down there? but he was kidding around, and Cube figures as long as she doesn’t fall into the water, she’ll be okay even if there is a giant alligator. Current hypothesis is still that the Poison Jam are holed up in a lair doing an extended Friday the 13th rewatch and forgetting about how if you want to hang on to your turf you have to defend it. Like Gum said, a lost glove doesn’t prove anything.
She’s on one of the walkways painting a tag she never drew before - a mess of black and white - she doesn’t feel like doing one of her old favourites, mourning her dead boyfriend and painting the stuff she used to paint with him and probably crying into the bargain, that all feels like she’s letting it take up too much space in her head. She came down here because she was feeling weird but that doesn’t mean she’s going to… to…
She finishes the tag and she does a little spin, like she’s trying to fake being satisfied, and as she does, she sees a flicker of movement and white on the other side of the sewer, across the water - another rudie, leaping and wall-riding off into the tunnel. Didn’t look like Poison Jam, didn’t look like any of her friends, probably worth checking out. If it’s some gang-less renegade she should send ‘em packing -
Dashing, leaping onto some rusted barrels and then onto another walkway and then over the bridge, it takes her mind off the weird stuff in her head. Silence now, except for the water - and the distant crackle of her radio, she’d turned it down, it was bugging her, and the signal’s messed up anyway, Prof K’s voice is coming at her through a murk of static. Maybe the other person’s got away. You think you’d still hear the echoes, though, wherever they are -
She dashes into the tunnel, leaps, vaults over more barrels blocking the way, and as she lands she sees -
The other person’s standing there, at the corner where the tunnel turns round, dancing to the beats on his earphones, that shambling too-cool-for-school move he always used to do back in the loft in Bantam Street. He’d have put on some remix he’d made, and she’d say, come on, bust some moves, don’t just stand there behind your turntables, and he’d dance like it was a joke -
She’s staring and letting herself roll forward and waiting for it to be someone else and it’s his face, his smile and wink as he spots her, his voice: “Hey, Cube, been waiting a long time for you to show up -”
She’s thinking, I’m going nuts, this is what you get when you start feeling your feelings, they become real, they talk to you, she’s thinking, not a scratch on him, he hasn’t changed, she’s thinking, she’s saying, “You - you could’ve come looked for me, we’ve been making a name for ourselves round here -”
“Didn’t know where I was, for a long time,” he says. Still shifting to the beat. Cube wonders what he’s listening to. She’s still got nothing but static. “Only made it out a little while ago, crawled my way up out of…”
She’s thinking, I should be happy. Like this is everything she wanted, right? She wanted it to have been a mistake. She wanted him to have survived. They came here to find him. She presses her tongue against her teeth, and they feel real, she feels real, she can still smell the air down here and hear the static, how do you know if you’re having a hallucination?
“Come on,” he’s saying. “I’ll show you. Show you where I came up.” Holds out his hand. Ratty skating gloves, pale white fingers. Like he’s just got out of the water.
She feels herself shake her head, say, “Nah, no need. I’ll believe you.” Looks into his face. He’s smiling like they’re both in on a joke. If he’d escaped from a corporate terrorist organisation and then climbed his way out through the freakin’ sewers he should look different, right? He shouldn’t look like he walked straight out of Bantam Street. Except he doesn’t, quite, he looks like - like people sometimes do in dreams, their faces aren’t -
She says, “Seen anyone else down here? The local gang seems to have vanished off the map.”
“That can happen,” he says. He’s still watching her. Beckons, quick finger-flick. “Come on, you could stand to welcome me home, couldn’t you? After you dropped the ball on watching my back to start with.” He says it like it’s a joke. They joked about a lot of stuff, the two of them would be sarcastic as shit to each other and Combo would just listen and occasionally snort with laughter. Just, just that they were in tune with each other then, the jokes were only ever things both of them’d find funny. Not stuff she’s thought about when she can’t sleep, what if I could’ve helped him, what if I could’ve stopped them getting him, what if he’s somewhere getting the shit kicked out of him and hating me for it - Combo had said to her, once, when she’d voiced some of this, stop it, you oughta know that’s bullshit, and now he’s here and just - saying it to her face -
“Hey, no biggie,” he’s saying, watching her face, like he’s trying to get a rise out of her, “we all screw up sometimes. You come see what I’ve found and we can let bygones be bygones.” Moves a little closer. The light’s bad but he still looks pale. Pale, but his smile, widening -
Thing is, if you’re a rudie, you learn to trust your instincts, because your instincts are what say yeah, you can make this jump or those guys are gunning for you or get the hell out of here, now - Cube spends a lot of time making decisions before she realises she needs to. If she’d thought about this one, she’d probably have figured it couldn’t hurt to see what he’d found, or like it might give some useful details on what happened to Poison Jam, or she should go because the last thing she wants is for him to think she meant to hurt him -
But her body’s like No and as he reaches out to grab her arm she is already turning to get away, get the hell away. Rudies are good at planning escape routes they didn’t know they’d need, too. The tunnel off to her left is one that gets you out of here and she dives into it, it slopes up, she’s skating as fast as she’s ever skated in her life, she hears him yell at her to come back, “Come on, you missed me, I know you missed me!” and his voice gets closer, rising up the tunnel behind her, like his skates are rocket-powered or something, he’s laughing and it’s all around her -
She bursts through an archway and into the abandoned factory and doesn’t stop there, keeps running, out into the sunlight, the dusty yard, up over a pile of wrecked cars, skates smashing in windscreens and mirrors and that laughter underneath it all, up the hill, she isn’t going to stop until she gets as far away from the sewers as possible, she isn’t going to stop because when she does she’ll have to feel the feelings again and think about what just happened and her instincts are saying that’ll be the worst thing of all.
***
Kogane-cho looks same as always. Beat doesn’t know what he expected. Blood red sky? Freddie Kreuger lurking behind the takeaway? Zombie Poison Jam?
But it’s just dust and long shadows and people selling stuff out of suitcases on the pavement. So it’s probably fine. So there’s probably nothing to worry about.
Except he kind of doesn’t want to go down into the sewers.
“What do you reckon?” he says to Tab, who’s rolling along behind him, looking as chill-and-slightly-bizarre as he always does.
“Like… how freaked out should we be?”
“Yeah. You know this city better’n I do. And you’re the designated smart one.”
“Don’t know about that,” Tab says. “And I don’t know Kogane-cho super well, either.”
“Yeah, but… weighin’ up the evidence. Poison Jam are off the radar, for sure, even Prof K doesn’t know where they’ve got to. Cube says she saw some weird shit down there the other day. And this city nearly got burnt to the ground by a giant demon rhino not so long ago, so there’s a precedent for strange. Just, how worried you think we ought to be?”
Tab frowns, silent for a few seconds, before he says, “I mean, Cube seems like someone who keeps a cool head. Her boyfriend got kidnapped by crazy gun-toting assassins and she just upped sticks and flew across the Pacific like it was no big deal. We had to tag up the streets while dodging bombs and flamethrowers and sniper rifles and she was like, I’m on it. She coped even when we were fighting a literal demon. And she’s a hardcore death metal fan. So… I figure whatever she saw, it was pretty out-there.”
“Yeah,” Beat says. “That’s… kind of what I was thinking.”
They’ve got to the open shaft that you can climb down to get into the sewers. Normally you hurl yourself into it and cheer as you fall, live for the speed, but today Beat and Tab are standing there eyeing it like it’s a portal to hell. Which, like, it maybe could be?
“We still need to check it out, though,” Beat says. “Like… if there’s something dangerous down there, if it’s… eaten Poison Jam or whatever, no way it’s not gonna target us. Like, rudies in general. No one’s gonna mind if we go missing.”
“We just have to step up and save the city?” Tab says, striking a pose. “Again?”
“I… yeah.” Beat wishes he sounded more confident. Just, it feels like they only saved the city through the skin of their teeth last time. It wasn’t like they gathered any secret intelligence about how you do it.
He takes a deep breath and jumps. He tries to tell himself it’s just like when they ran up a zillion flights of stairs to confront a crazed CEO summoning demons on the roof of a skyscraper. That is, potentially a really bad idea, but something you just have to do. It was way up high last time, so it makes sense it’s underground now. And maybe it will just be a giant alligator and they can make an anonymous call to Pest Control or the city zoo or something.
The sewer walls rush past him, the same smell of funky water, the same splash and ripple echoing through the air. It’d be really good if he shot out into the main tunnel and saw Poison Jam on the walkway doing their stupid Monster Mash dance routine. Then they could have a gang battle and it would turn back into a normal day.
He slows as the tunnel opens up, rolls to a halt and surveys the scene. No Poison Jam. No giant alligator, either. No obvious clues at all.
“Welp,” Tab says from behind him. “Guess we just act natural and see if we run into anything weird?”
“I guess. Like… paint some tags, pull some tricks...”
The tags Gum and Garam left are still on the opposite wall, untouched, which doesn’t make Beat feel any better. Someone should’ve taken them as a challenge.
“Let’s go tag up the staircase,” he says. “I mean, if it is a giant alligator, it’ll probably come through the water?”
“Act as bait. Sounds fun.”
Beat agrees it does not sound fun at all, but as leader he feels he has to go first, so he grinds down the banister and jumps lightly off at the bottom, where the water laps against the concrete. How deep is it, even? Well, he doesn’t intend to jump in and find out. Just slap paint on a wall. Like he does every day. If his hand’s kind of shaky and the resulting tags are more towards the casual vandalism than fancy street art end of the spectrum, doesn’t matter, hopefully it’ll inspire someone to come and cover ‘em up…
The problem with tagging a wall is it requires you to face the wall, which gives things ample opportunity to sneak up on you.
“I’m gonna go… I dunno, catch some air,” he says. “Get some practice in without anyone trying to shoot me.”
“Got it.”
Up on the bridge he starts to regret his decision - being nervous and kind of waiting for something to murder you is only going to throw off your skating game and, here, result in you taking a dive into sewer water - but at least he can see the whole area from up here. Tab painting a large tag, hopping from stair to stair - the main tunnel disappearing into blackness either end - rusted barrels - grimy strip lights -
A balloon floating by above him.
Which, okay, some kid could’ve let their balloon go and it got blown in here, sure, fine, but you’d kind of expect said balloon to look battered and half-deflated, and kids in Kogane don’t really have balloons anyway. This one is bright red and fat and shiny, bobbing along like it’s floating on the summer breeze, which is also weird, because there is no breeze down here -
Beat glances over to yell to Tab to look up and when he looks back there’s like three more balloons.
“Okay,” he hears himself say, “okay, that’s a bit weird.”
(This would make sense, if Cube saw something like this, something totally normal that just shouldn’t be down here -)
He’s watching the balloons and his heart’s pounding way too fast for nothing happening and the blood pulsing in his ears mingles with the gurgling of the water and what sounds like it could be something - something laughing -
Tab’s stopped painting, he’s taking a run-up to dash and get some speed, but the sound of his skates is drowned out by - the high, eerie singing -
It can’t be -
He hears Tab yell, “Holy shit, is that -”
(Like, if you try and describe what went down on the top of the Rokkaku tower, it mostly sounds like a fever dream, or at the very least, it sounds funny, like, oh sure, a giant golden rhino just swooped down and started breathing fire at us, also we were hundreds of feet off the ground, and there was a crazy corporate executive playing a demon record but it was scary as hell when it was happening and Beat’s dreamt he was back there a bunch of times since and woken up in a cold sweat -)
That song is playing, the laughter and the crooning echoing off the sewer walls, and something glows red-hot in the tunnel, and -
The twenty-foot-high rhino demon swoops out, up to the ceiling, its roar making the walls shake, and looks down at Beat, and draws back its head, it’s going to breathe fire, just like it did then, just like it did in his dreams, and he thinks, this is it, after we thought everything was fine, this is how I die -
Tab yells, “Move it!”
Maybe it wasn’t Tab, maybe it was just Beat’s own thoughts, but whatever, it taps into muscle memory or something and he finds himself dashing, leaping for the handrail, landing so hard it jolts his teeth, he feels the billow of heat on his back but he knows this, he knows it, he’s got away from huge angry machines trying to kill him a bunch of times, he’s gaining speed, he’s got this, he’s leaping and landing again and then, and then off the rail, into the nearest tunnel, sprinting for the closest exit. Not looking back.
***
Combo figures after the year he’s had, he should be gettin’ used to weird shit. Like, oh, sure, murderous… thing, possibly return of the rhino demon, in the sewers, cool, we on it. But with the night falling and the GGs watching Beat start mapping out the situation on the floor with a can of paint, he just feels like something’s tickling the back of his neck.
“Okay,” Beat says. “Here’s what we got.” He’s written, Poison Jam - missing?, followed by Rhino demon, followed by ?? Other weird shit?? Balloons??
“I feel like you need a whiteboard or a flip chart or something,” Tab says. “We should’ve scavenged.” He’s chucking a paint can from hand to hand like he can’t stay still.
“I’m making do with what we’ve got,” Beat says. “Which I think is what we’re going to have to do about this situation.”
“What exactly do we think we’re dealing with?” Piranha asks. “Like… you said you heard the same music. Is this another cursed record? Are we dealing with Rokkaku Evil Part 2, Electric Boogaloo?”
“I mean… that seems the most obvious choice,” Beat says. “Music, rhino demon, fire, creeping feeling of horror.”
“But in the sewers, though,” Yo-Yo says, coming to kneel by the painted list. “Why’d you release a demon down there? Whole thing about that demon was it was gonna fly around and rain down fiery death on the city. This one just kind of flew out at you and then… went away again.”
Beat shrugs. Tab glances at him and then says, “Yeah, about that.”
“About that?”
“Like, Beat got his ass out of there - which is fine, leader man, that’s what you do when something tries to set you on fire. I was at the bottom of the steps, and I figured just dashing up ‘em was a great way to get barbecued. So I ran down that corridor next to it, figured the demon was too big to get to it. Ran in and was like… well, tagging up the floor worked the last time we dealt with this thing. So I started doing some sweet art.”
“And?” Mew’s leaning forward, tangling her fingers together. “I mean, you didn’t get set on fire, so...”
“So remember how much I hate frogs?” Tab says. “Gum, Beat, you remember. The Poison Jam filled this place with ‘em that time and I had to go get some fresh air. So - so, it all goes quiet out there, I’m wondering if the demon thinks we both left and it’s… gone off to do whatever demons do when they’re not incinerating innocent vandals - and then… and then.”
“And then… Frogmageddon?” Gum says.
“Dozens of ‘em.” Tab swallows. “Not… not a good moment, I can tell you. I think if I hadn’t already been in apocalypse survival mode from the rhino demon I’d have had a frickin’ breakdown, but as it was I was like, paint the goddamn tags and try not to think about Satan’s amphibians.”
Combo ain’t got no beef with frogs, but the thought of standing ankle-deep in something you hate, trying to spray paint like normal, makes him shudder. “Then?”
“Then, I painted the most glorious pieces of street art I have ever created, making sure I kept moving closer to the door,” Tab says. He’s pale, even under the hat. “The fuckers jumped on me and more of ‘em just kept coming. I was seriously wondering if I might drown in ‘em. The radio was still static - which is another thing, always used to be able to get it even down in those tunnels - so I started singing to stop myself throwing up. Like Oh, I can hear ‘em running ‘bout the town, I can hear them all daaaaay, dah dah dah dah dah -”
Normally someone would’ve said something about his overenthusiastic singing voice, but now they just all stared at him. After a moment, Beat added ?? frogs?? to the bottom of his list.
“Yeah, I ain’t never seen that before in the sewers,” Garam said. “Poison Jam could get a bunch of frogs together but they didn’t just… swarm like that.”
“The thing is,” Tab says, “the thing is I swear to god, I looked back when I was making a dash for it - still singing like I was in the shower - and they… it seemed like they’d gone. I… this might have been panicked hallucinations, but I thought I saw, like… a clown?”
Mew twitches, and gives a little squeak. Combo looks over at her - the girl likes cute things but normally she’s no more fazed by scary shit than the rest of them. “You okay, kat?”
“I saw it,” Mew says. “Um. This sounds so stupid. I saw a clown in the sewers. A while back now. He - it challenged me to a race and I - because I hate clowns, I got freaked out and - I thought it was just some weirdo but -”
Cube’s not said anything. Combo’s been trying not to stare at her - whatever she saw, she’ll talk about it when she wants to, he ain’t gonna make her mad by picking at her - but whatever it was she saw, he’s long been wanting to go punch it, she looked like she wanted to cry when she got back.
“Did you see a clown too?” Yo-Yo asks her, though, because tact ain’t his strong suit.
Cube takes a deep breath, presses a hand to her mouth. Shakes her head. “I saw… I think...” Another deep breath. “Okay, Beat, I think I get what’s going on here.” She gets up, grabs another can of paint, rolls over to him, and starts to add to the list. They all cluster round to watch.
Poison Jam - missing?
Rhino demon <= Beat
?? Other weird shit?? Balloons?? Clown <= Mew
?? frogs?? <= Tab
And finally, she writes:
Coin <= Cube
Piranha says, at last, “You saw...”
Combo knows he should join in, but he feels like something just hit him in the chest.
“It wasn’t him,” Cube says. “Combo, I… I’m sure it wasn’t him. He was… he was the same, he wasn’t hurt at all, and he… he was laughing at me. He was trying to freak me out and then he was glad when it worked. Coin wouldn’t… he goofed around but… this thing was - it was mean.”
Gum says, “So it… so it’s something that… can shapeshift or whatever? Into whatever will get to us most? Like, Tab and frogs, and I know Beat was all like if that rhino demon kills us it’s my fault, and Cube sees her boyfriend trying to -”
“Trying to make me think it was all my fault he’d got caught,” Cube says. She swallows. “Which is what I’ve been tryin’ not to think but...”
Combo’s not going to lose it right here and now, not in the middle of a council of war, but that settles it, he is going to go find this thing and make it pay.
Slate, who’s been leaning on the pinball machine watching the discussion, clears his throat.
“So, I don’t got any anecdotes about clowns to add,” he says, “but Garam and me made some enquiries around Kogane-cho and… the word on that particular street is, yeah, people have been going missing. Not just the Poison Jam. Homeless dudes who’ve suddenly upped sticks. And kids. Only the usual Kogane-cho kids that the cops are figuring’ve run away, but… yeah.”
“I mean,” Tab says, after a few moments of worried silence, “that suggests it ain’t just we’re all going mad. So… that’s good.”
“What’s not good,” Slate says, “is I get the feeling our fearless leader is gearing up to marshal us to go save the world again. Or at least Kogane-cho.”
“Well, what else are we going to do?” Beat says. “This thing’s after people like us, people the cops won’t bother to look for if we go missing. If it had got any of you lot I somehow don’t think Onishima would bother to do anything but throw a party.”
“Plus,” Gum says, “Kogane-cho is our turf now, and if it’s not ours, then it’s Poison Jam’s. It’s not some, some murder clown’s. Fuck that. No.”
“And I mean -” Tab’s up on his feet. “Like, if it’s trying to scare us, then… we’re good at not getting scared under pressure. And I think that helped, with the - the frogmageddon. Singin’ and paintin’.”
“And, like, maybe it’ll get confused,” Mew says. “If there’s a bunch of us. It can turn into a clown and it’ll freak me out, but Cube can just punch it in the face, and then I’ll do the same to her undead boyfriend.”
“Okay,” Slate says, sighing. “These are all good points. I still don’t love this, as a life choice, but I get it.”
“Right,” Beat says. “Then, tomorrow, let’s do it. Let’s go kill a clown.”