#42: Fic: Interesting Times
Title: Interesting Times
Fandom: Arashi
Summary: Superpowers. Jun is the first to find that something is wrong.
Notes: Written for the melody lingers on, an Arashi fiction quest. Inspired by Ellie Goulding - Lights (Messed Remix)
Earlier this afternoon, four members of Johnny’s Entertainment group Arashi were involved in an accident while filming a segment for a variety show.
While on location at Tohoku University, Ohno Satoshi, Sakurai Sho, Aiba Masaki and Matsumoto Jun were introducing a revolutionary new reactor when the machine malfunctioned and imploded upon itself, causing a minor tremor that was felt throughout the entire university campus.
All six of the people inside the reactor room at that time were unconscious when the rescue team arrived, but were otherwise unhurt. Investigations are under way, but the police are still puzzling over the nature of this accident, especially since all camera footage appears to have been destroyed in the explosion.
0.
Nino doesn’t make it to the location shoot because it clashes with a press conference for part two of Gantz. His manager calls it ‘the best thing that’s ever happened to him’.
The others emerge from the accident uninjured apart from bad headaches that last for a couple of days.
“I’m just glad the ordeal is over,” is what Sho is quoted as saying when they are discharged from the hospital in Sendai.
They return to work the next day.
1.
Jun is the first to find that something is wrong.
It happens on a Saturday evening. He’s fumbling with a power plug while installing a new Blu-Ray player in his living room when his hand slips and he touches a pin by accident.
He regains consciousness four hours later, to the sound of Aiba frantically banging at his front door. The first thing he notices is that the apartment has been plunged into pitch darkness. The second thing he notices is that he’s feeling extremely feverish.
“I took the stairs,” says Aiba, when Jun finally answers the door after the tremendous effort that is walking over to the entranceway. “The security guards told me that the entire building has shorted out.”
Jun takes the trouble to notice a third thing before he passes out again - Aiba has run up twenty-one stories without even breaking a sweat.
2.
Aiba’s filming a drama about a sushi deliveryman in the sixties who overcomes all odds to become a doctor. It’s tough work, with plenty of hurrying up steep hills and down winding pathways with baskets of sushi.
The director takes him aside before the day’s shoot to ask if he’s all right. Aiba assures her that he is.
“I’ll give nothing less than a hundred and twenty per cent,” he tells her, determined to make up for the week and a half that they lost because of the accident.
Today, his character is supposed to deliver a box of lovingly made onigiri to the sushi master’s estranged daughter before she leaves for Tokyo. As she vanishes down the road in a bus to the train station, Aiba chases after her with the box in hand, imploring her to return for the sake of her father.
Aiba is not supposed to outrun the bus.
The crew laugh it off at first, calling it “something for the DVD box set”. It’s only after Aiba does it twice more that they begin to look worried.
“I’m not tired at all,” Aiba sheepishly tells his assistant when she brings him a bottle of water. “I’ll get it right on the next one, I promise.”
Before they can set up for the next take, however, his manager calls Aiba over with a grave look on his face, cellphone still dangling from his hand.
“I’m not sure how to say this,” he tells Aiba, “but I’ve just received a call saying that Matsumoto-san was struck by lightning half an hour ago.”
“What-”
“He’s all right,” Aiba’s manager interrupts. “They’ve taken him to the hospital to get checked up and he’s suffered no apparent injuries, but...”
“But?”
His manager takes a deep breath. “But they’re still trying to find out how he managed to burn a medium-sized crater in the middle of the field he was standing in.”
3.
It’s Nino who sneaks Jun out of his room and up onto the hospital roof in the middle of a storm one night.
“You’re going to get us killed!” Jun shouts, barely audible over the crashing thunder and the relentless pounding of the rain.
“Trust me, I’ve given this a lot of thought!” Nino calls back, handing Jun a glass jar. “At most you’ll just get me killed!”
“What is this supposed to do?” bellows Jun.
Nino is about to respond when an arc of lighting shoots down from the sky towards them. There is a blinding flash, and Jun opens his eyes to see the jar in his hand shining with an unbearable light.
Nino has been knocked off his feet and is lying on the ground some way off, but Jun just stands there, soaked through by the rain and thoroughly mesmerised by the light’s consuming heat; the way it flares up when he flexes his fingers and dims when he relaxes them.
4.
Things like mutant superpowers are supposed to be kept secret, traditionally speaking, but it’s rather hard when your name is Matsumoto Jun and you can transform lightning into balls of destructive heat.
It doesn’t help that some inquisitive paparazzi have managed to photograph not only Jun and Nino’s adventure on the hospital roof but also Aiba on his morning jog. He appears in four separate points along Tokyo Bay that are kilometres apart within the span of a minute.
In a press conference held on Monday afternoon, members of pop supergroup Arashi stated that they would use their new-found ‘powers’ “only for the good of society”.
Member Matsumoto Jun (28) told reporters that he was “very surprised at this turn of events”, but was determined to “exercise this ability responsibly, if at all”. Matsumoto was reticent when asked for exact details about his power, which appears to involve some degree of lightning manipulation.
Aiba Masaki (29) echoed this sentiment, although he also mentioned in jest that his new ability to travel at great speed with little fatigue might serve him well for quick trips to the convenience store.
It is not clear what the government’s stand on this startling new development is, but as leaders around the globe begin to sit up at news of Japan’s “real life superheroes” it is evident that Arashi is, indeed, ‘creating a storm throughout the world’.
5.
Nobody is told what Sho’s superpower is.
It does manifest itself, but nobody appears to want to notice Sho’s uncanny knack for persuasion. He convinces Himitsu’s producers that a corner revolving entirely around Jun manipulating lightning is a bad idea, and manages to wrangle an interview with a reclusive ninety-year-old Italian novelist with just one phone call. The only member of the press who appears to catch on to the nature of Sho’s power is a journalist named Kitahara Megumi, who later agrees, after a short and entirely delightful tea with Sho, that publishing a report about him would be a terrible invasion of privacy with potentially dangerous consequences.
The others are immune to him, a fact they discover after Aiba flatly refuses to share the last of his mother’s chicken karaage despite Sho’s best efforts.
“Same explosion, I suppose,” says Jun, shrugging a little and returning to reviewing stage plans for their next concert.
Nino isn’t immune, but he puts a stop to any attempt at persuasion on Sho’s first try by beating Sho across the head with a rolled-up copy of the Asahi Shinbun.
“Get that under control,” Nino snaps. “There’s nothing funny about manipulating other people.”
“That was rather vicious,” says Jun, after both Sho and Nino have cooled down and Sho solemnly promises to use his power as prudently as possible. (And not join politics if he can help it, Aiba adds, because it’s an extremely unfair advantage Sho has there.)
Nino just shrugs and turns away.
6.
Ohno, apparently, does catch sight of the look on Nino’s face as he walks off - his expression is hard with something like envy; envy and guilt at being jealous of something that’s so clearly a burden.
But when he follows Nino down the corridor and calls out to him, and when Nino turns round and sort of slips one arm through Ohno’s, curling his fingers in the fabric of Ohno’s jacket, it occurs to Ohno to add lonely to that list. Nino’s the odd one out, the normal one. The lucky one, if they go by Nino’s manager’s definition.
So he holds on to Nino a little tighter, trying his best to communicate without words that they’re still Arashi, that they are still five guys who were thrown together more than a decade ago and who will keep pushing on for years to come, powers or not.
“I suppose when your power manifests itself it’ll be something ridiculously cool like freezing water or walking through walls,” Nino grumbles.
Ohno laughs. “I think my power’s pretty silly, by your standards,” he tells Nino.
“It’s a mutant superpower, Satoshi; there’s nothing silly about that,” Nino replies. “What is it, then?”
“I can talk to plants and animals,” says Ohno.
There is a pause in which Nino considers this for a moment.
“You’re right,” says Nino, “that is rather lame.”
7.
Ohno learns two things on his first morning out at sea after the accident. The first is that fishes talk like sailors. The second is that they deeply dislike being fished.
He stops fishing after the first mackerel he catches starts talking to him. It swears with great gusto and threatens to off Ohno’s entire family in return, and when Ohno flings it back to sea it calls him a great big pussy (no pun intended).
It’s a terrible blow for him, really, because Ohno really, really, really likes fishing.
Aiba tries to cheer Ohno up by securing him a guest appearance in the next episode of Tensai Shimura Dobutsuen. It doesn’t quite work out, though; the assistant director is driven to tears because no matter what they try, all the animals keep flocking to Ohno with no regard whatsoever for Becky.
“I met a teenage tiger today who reminded me of you,” Ohno tells Nino, later that evening, when they’re taking a break from filming the PV for their newest single, aptly titled Super Storm.
Nino barely glances up from his DS. “How so?”
“Well, at first he threatened to eat me,” says Ohno, “and then he spent a good half an hour paying me no attention at all. And then he wandered over and fell asleep in my lap.”
Nino crinkles his nose. “How is that like me at all?” he asks, but Ohno can see that he’s amused.
8.
“It’s a pity so many forests have been cleared for Japanese cedar plantations,” Ohno says offhandedly during an episode of Shiyagare. “I’ve discovered that they make for the most boring conversations.”
Nobody takes much notice of it, and the comment is probably just left in there because the editor didn’t have anything better to leave in (it had been a rather painful shoot with an extremely bland rock keyboardist), but Ohno’s manager gets at least a dozen calls from environmental groups around Japan.
The following week, he spends his two days off trekking through forests, listening to trees and the occasional animal that feels like hanging around.
A month later, he goes back with a camera crew.
Conversations with Ohno Satoshi manages to raise awareness among the general public about the true effects of covering mountainsides with concrete or diverting or damming up rivers in the countryside. He shows us how the mountain roads that lead nowhere do so much more than we think, writes one reviewer, never mind the fact that he sometimes comes across as rather deranged as he wanders through the wilderness.
Nothing much changes, though, tangibly speaking. That is, until Sho makes some very earnest phone calls to a number of bureaucrats in the Ministry of the Environment.
Why the world needs to learn from a group of Japanese superheroes
... Japan made some actual steps towards stricter regulations on dioxins this month after a large-scale awareness campaign sparked off by a two-hour episode that featured Arashi’s Ohno Satoshi communing with trees in a forest north of Niigata Prefecture.
In the meantime, Ohno’s bandmate Aiba Masaki reportedly rescued five people from a burning building after he spotted the fire from the window of the television station he was in. He pulled the four children and their mother from a two-story dwelling twenty minutes away from the station before the building could collapse. After saving the family, he waited with them for the arrival of the fire brigade and ambulance crew before running back to the studio to complete the filming on schedule.
9.
“I blame Aiba,” says Jun. “The fans were a lot less overwhelming before he started chasing down snatch thieves and bank robbers.”
“Ohno talks to trees, though,” Aiba protests. “That’s got to count for something.”
“True,” Jun concedes.
“Jun-kun hasn’t set anything on fire or made any new craters,” says Ohno. “And if Godzilla emerged from Tokyo Bay I’m sure he’d blast it to pieces.”
“But Sho-chan here has been using his dastardly powers of manipulation for good,” says Nino. He sighs and shakes his head. “It’s like we’ve started vomiting rainbows or something. The next thing you know, Nissan will be sponsoring an Arashi-mobile.”
“Probably not Nissan, they’re cheap bastards,” says Jun. “Maybe Toyota, though.”
There’s a short pause in which Aiba murmurs something about it being nice to have another car.
“Actually,” Sho tells them, sounding slightly sheepish, “I had a bit of a chat with Mitsubishi-”
“Oh dear,” says Nino.
“-and they’re giving us modified Pajeros.”
End
----
More notes: This was written in a fit of madness. That is my only excuse for it, really. Also, I kind of love the song a lot.
In my mind this story was supposed to be a lot more serious, but after Ohno developed the ability to talk to plants and animals everything sort of tumbled downhill into the abyss of Crack. So if you were wonding how this could have been inspired by Lights, you are asking the right question. The link is truly tenuous.
Fandom: Arashi
Summary: Superpowers. Jun is the first to find that something is wrong.
Notes: Written for the melody lingers on, an Arashi fiction quest. Inspired by Ellie Goulding - Lights (Messed Remix)
Earlier this afternoon, four members of Johnny’s Entertainment group Arashi were involved in an accident while filming a segment for a variety show.
While on location at Tohoku University, Ohno Satoshi, Sakurai Sho, Aiba Masaki and Matsumoto Jun were introducing a revolutionary new reactor when the machine malfunctioned and imploded upon itself, causing a minor tremor that was felt throughout the entire university campus.
All six of the people inside the reactor room at that time were unconscious when the rescue team arrived, but were otherwise unhurt. Investigations are under way, but the police are still puzzling over the nature of this accident, especially since all camera footage appears to have been destroyed in the explosion.
0.
Nino doesn’t make it to the location shoot because it clashes with a press conference for part two of Gantz. His manager calls it ‘the best thing that’s ever happened to him’.
The others emerge from the accident uninjured apart from bad headaches that last for a couple of days.
“I’m just glad the ordeal is over,” is what Sho is quoted as saying when they are discharged from the hospital in Sendai.
They return to work the next day.
1.
Jun is the first to find that something is wrong.
It happens on a Saturday evening. He’s fumbling with a power plug while installing a new Blu-Ray player in his living room when his hand slips and he touches a pin by accident.
He regains consciousness four hours later, to the sound of Aiba frantically banging at his front door. The first thing he notices is that the apartment has been plunged into pitch darkness. The second thing he notices is that he’s feeling extremely feverish.
“I took the stairs,” says Aiba, when Jun finally answers the door after the tremendous effort that is walking over to the entranceway. “The security guards told me that the entire building has shorted out.”
Jun takes the trouble to notice a third thing before he passes out again - Aiba has run up twenty-one stories without even breaking a sweat.
2.
Aiba’s filming a drama about a sushi deliveryman in the sixties who overcomes all odds to become a doctor. It’s tough work, with plenty of hurrying up steep hills and down winding pathways with baskets of sushi.
The director takes him aside before the day’s shoot to ask if he’s all right. Aiba assures her that he is.
“I’ll give nothing less than a hundred and twenty per cent,” he tells her, determined to make up for the week and a half that they lost because of the accident.
Today, his character is supposed to deliver a box of lovingly made onigiri to the sushi master’s estranged daughter before she leaves for Tokyo. As she vanishes down the road in a bus to the train station, Aiba chases after her with the box in hand, imploring her to return for the sake of her father.
Aiba is not supposed to outrun the bus.
The crew laugh it off at first, calling it “something for the DVD box set”. It’s only after Aiba does it twice more that they begin to look worried.
“I’m not tired at all,” Aiba sheepishly tells his assistant when she brings him a bottle of water. “I’ll get it right on the next one, I promise.”
Before they can set up for the next take, however, his manager calls Aiba over with a grave look on his face, cellphone still dangling from his hand.
“I’m not sure how to say this,” he tells Aiba, “but I’ve just received a call saying that Matsumoto-san was struck by lightning half an hour ago.”
“What-”
“He’s all right,” Aiba’s manager interrupts. “They’ve taken him to the hospital to get checked up and he’s suffered no apparent injuries, but...”
“But?”
His manager takes a deep breath. “But they’re still trying to find out how he managed to burn a medium-sized crater in the middle of the field he was standing in.”
3.
It’s Nino who sneaks Jun out of his room and up onto the hospital roof in the middle of a storm one night.
“You’re going to get us killed!” Jun shouts, barely audible over the crashing thunder and the relentless pounding of the rain.
“Trust me, I’ve given this a lot of thought!” Nino calls back, handing Jun a glass jar. “At most you’ll just get me killed!”
“What is this supposed to do?” bellows Jun.
Nino is about to respond when an arc of lighting shoots down from the sky towards them. There is a blinding flash, and Jun opens his eyes to see the jar in his hand shining with an unbearable light.
Nino has been knocked off his feet and is lying on the ground some way off, but Jun just stands there, soaked through by the rain and thoroughly mesmerised by the light’s consuming heat; the way it flares up when he flexes his fingers and dims when he relaxes them.
4.
Things like mutant superpowers are supposed to be kept secret, traditionally speaking, but it’s rather hard when your name is Matsumoto Jun and you can transform lightning into balls of destructive heat.
It doesn’t help that some inquisitive paparazzi have managed to photograph not only Jun and Nino’s adventure on the hospital roof but also Aiba on his morning jog. He appears in four separate points along Tokyo Bay that are kilometres apart within the span of a minute.
In a press conference held on Monday afternoon, members of pop supergroup Arashi stated that they would use their new-found ‘powers’ “only for the good of society”.
Member Matsumoto Jun (28) told reporters that he was “very surprised at this turn of events”, but was determined to “exercise this ability responsibly, if at all”. Matsumoto was reticent when asked for exact details about his power, which appears to involve some degree of lightning manipulation.
Aiba Masaki (29) echoed this sentiment, although he also mentioned in jest that his new ability to travel at great speed with little fatigue might serve him well for quick trips to the convenience store.
It is not clear what the government’s stand on this startling new development is, but as leaders around the globe begin to sit up at news of Japan’s “real life superheroes” it is evident that Arashi is, indeed, ‘creating a storm throughout the world’.
5.
Nobody is told what Sho’s superpower is.
It does manifest itself, but nobody appears to want to notice Sho’s uncanny knack for persuasion. He convinces Himitsu’s producers that a corner revolving entirely around Jun manipulating lightning is a bad idea, and manages to wrangle an interview with a reclusive ninety-year-old Italian novelist with just one phone call. The only member of the press who appears to catch on to the nature of Sho’s power is a journalist named Kitahara Megumi, who later agrees, after a short and entirely delightful tea with Sho, that publishing a report about him would be a terrible invasion of privacy with potentially dangerous consequences.
The others are immune to him, a fact they discover after Aiba flatly refuses to share the last of his mother’s chicken karaage despite Sho’s best efforts.
“Same explosion, I suppose,” says Jun, shrugging a little and returning to reviewing stage plans for their next concert.
Nino isn’t immune, but he puts a stop to any attempt at persuasion on Sho’s first try by beating Sho across the head with a rolled-up copy of the Asahi Shinbun.
“Get that under control,” Nino snaps. “There’s nothing funny about manipulating other people.”
“That was rather vicious,” says Jun, after both Sho and Nino have cooled down and Sho solemnly promises to use his power as prudently as possible. (And not join politics if he can help it, Aiba adds, because it’s an extremely unfair advantage Sho has there.)
Nino just shrugs and turns away.
6.
Ohno, apparently, does catch sight of the look on Nino’s face as he walks off - his expression is hard with something like envy; envy and guilt at being jealous of something that’s so clearly a burden.
But when he follows Nino down the corridor and calls out to him, and when Nino turns round and sort of slips one arm through Ohno’s, curling his fingers in the fabric of Ohno’s jacket, it occurs to Ohno to add lonely to that list. Nino’s the odd one out, the normal one. The lucky one, if they go by Nino’s manager’s definition.
So he holds on to Nino a little tighter, trying his best to communicate without words that they’re still Arashi, that they are still five guys who were thrown together more than a decade ago and who will keep pushing on for years to come, powers or not.
“I suppose when your power manifests itself it’ll be something ridiculously cool like freezing water or walking through walls,” Nino grumbles.
Ohno laughs. “I think my power’s pretty silly, by your standards,” he tells Nino.
“It’s a mutant superpower, Satoshi; there’s nothing silly about that,” Nino replies. “What is it, then?”
“I can talk to plants and animals,” says Ohno.
There is a pause in which Nino considers this for a moment.
“You’re right,” says Nino, “that is rather lame.”
7.
Ohno learns two things on his first morning out at sea after the accident. The first is that fishes talk like sailors. The second is that they deeply dislike being fished.
He stops fishing after the first mackerel he catches starts talking to him. It swears with great gusto and threatens to off Ohno’s entire family in return, and when Ohno flings it back to sea it calls him a great big pussy (no pun intended).
It’s a terrible blow for him, really, because Ohno really, really, really likes fishing.
Aiba tries to cheer Ohno up by securing him a guest appearance in the next episode of Tensai Shimura Dobutsuen. It doesn’t quite work out, though; the assistant director is driven to tears because no matter what they try, all the animals keep flocking to Ohno with no regard whatsoever for Becky.
“I met a teenage tiger today who reminded me of you,” Ohno tells Nino, later that evening, when they’re taking a break from filming the PV for their newest single, aptly titled Super Storm.
Nino barely glances up from his DS. “How so?”
“Well, at first he threatened to eat me,” says Ohno, “and then he spent a good half an hour paying me no attention at all. And then he wandered over and fell asleep in my lap.”
Nino crinkles his nose. “How is that like me at all?” he asks, but Ohno can see that he’s amused.
8.
“It’s a pity so many forests have been cleared for Japanese cedar plantations,” Ohno says offhandedly during an episode of Shiyagare. “I’ve discovered that they make for the most boring conversations.”
Nobody takes much notice of it, and the comment is probably just left in there because the editor didn’t have anything better to leave in (it had been a rather painful shoot with an extremely bland rock keyboardist), but Ohno’s manager gets at least a dozen calls from environmental groups around Japan.
The following week, he spends his two days off trekking through forests, listening to trees and the occasional animal that feels like hanging around.
A month later, he goes back with a camera crew.
Conversations with Ohno Satoshi manages to raise awareness among the general public about the true effects of covering mountainsides with concrete or diverting or damming up rivers in the countryside. He shows us how the mountain roads that lead nowhere do so much more than we think, writes one reviewer, never mind the fact that he sometimes comes across as rather deranged as he wanders through the wilderness.
Nothing much changes, though, tangibly speaking. That is, until Sho makes some very earnest phone calls to a number of bureaucrats in the Ministry of the Environment.
Why the world needs to learn from a group of Japanese superheroes
... Japan made some actual steps towards stricter regulations on dioxins this month after a large-scale awareness campaign sparked off by a two-hour episode that featured Arashi’s Ohno Satoshi communing with trees in a forest north of Niigata Prefecture.
In the meantime, Ohno’s bandmate Aiba Masaki reportedly rescued five people from a burning building after he spotted the fire from the window of the television station he was in. He pulled the four children and their mother from a two-story dwelling twenty minutes away from the station before the building could collapse. After saving the family, he waited with them for the arrival of the fire brigade and ambulance crew before running back to the studio to complete the filming on schedule.
9.
“I blame Aiba,” says Jun. “The fans were a lot less overwhelming before he started chasing down snatch thieves and bank robbers.”
“Ohno talks to trees, though,” Aiba protests. “That’s got to count for something.”
“True,” Jun concedes.
“Jun-kun hasn’t set anything on fire or made any new craters,” says Ohno. “And if Godzilla emerged from Tokyo Bay I’m sure he’d blast it to pieces.”
“But Sho-chan here has been using his dastardly powers of manipulation for good,” says Nino. He sighs and shakes his head. “It’s like we’ve started vomiting rainbows or something. The next thing you know, Nissan will be sponsoring an Arashi-mobile.”
“Probably not Nissan, they’re cheap bastards,” says Jun. “Maybe Toyota, though.”
There’s a short pause in which Aiba murmurs something about it being nice to have another car.
“Actually,” Sho tells them, sounding slightly sheepish, “I had a bit of a chat with Mitsubishi-”
“Oh dear,” says Nino.
“-and they’re giving us modified Pajeros.”
End
----
More notes: This was written in a fit of madness. That is my only excuse for it, really. Also, I kind of love the song a lot.
In my mind this story was supposed to be a lot more serious, but after Ohno developed the ability to talk to plants and animals everything sort of tumbled downhill into the abyss of Crack. So if you were wonding how this could have been inspired by Lights, you are asking the right question. The link is truly tenuous.