Yuuya Sakazaki (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
espigeonage) wrote2013-04-01 01:35 pm
espigeonage) wrote2013-04-01 01:35 pm
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World and personal history, for linking convenience. Taken from an app I wrote.
It’s really a lot darker than the premise suggests.
This started out as a 'verse very like ours on the surface, though the global Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 (thought to be a mutated bird flu) was mildly worse in this universe.
In 2068 a new strain of influenza - natural or designed is never specified - became endemic to aviankind, easily spreading from them to humans. This strain was nicknamed Sumatra Flu, and it was absolutely devastating; it killed humans rapidly but was relatively benign to birds, so wherever birds went, particularly pigeons, humans started dying en masse. By 2070 billions had died, and the global human population had dropped to thirty percent of what it was in 2068, with no signs of stopping.
In desperation, human scientists came up with an avian annihilation project, "Operation Carneades", a lethal virus tailored to birds. They released this in summer of 2070, and there was a brief, hideous drop in bird populations. Many species went extinct. But the Carneades virus had a strange effect on the birds which were resistant - it uplifted them. By late 2071 pigeons had begun to understand the situation and organize. By December they had started to launch attacks on the humans. That was called Hitchcock Winter.
In 2075 the birds adopted their own declaration of independence in the Philippines, and humans and birdkind went to war for thirty years. By 2105 there were a mere 140 million humans alive on Earth - 4.6% of the pre-flu population, a prehistoric low. Ten percent was directly due to war deaths. The rest was Sumatra Flu. The remaining humans were resistant to the virus, and there was a ceremonial cease-fire agreement, but the humans in Japan, at least, were largely kind of penned up in reservations and not given political rights, even the right to govern themselves. They could hold jobs within bird society - this was the only way they could make money, as there were still some skills birds couldn't manage - but they had few rights. Human resistance movements cropped up frequently in the next century. After a harsh suicide bombing, truce rules in Japan were drawn up and habitats were more strictly segregated, humans restricted to living in those reservations.
Two main political factions exist in global bird society - the Dove Party and the Hawk Party. In a nutshell, the Doves believe in trying to live and integrate peacefully with the remaining humans, while the Hawks want to restrict or even exterminate them. There's more to both, of course, it’s not as black-and-white as it looks, and a Crow Party is mentioned without much context. The average bird might be fine with the few humans they know, even considering them friends, and still think of humanity as dangerous and hostile.
For whatever reason - maybe there had been humans sympathetic to the birds, teaching them language and how to organize - the new bird-run civilization is strikingly similar to the old human one. In fact, they largely seem to have just filled the vacancies, though there are some abandoned skyscrapers around. The same countries exist, schools are set up in familiar ways, there's similar infrastructure and traffic laws, music classes still study long-dead human composers, birds write and consume books and manga (some are birdified versions of 21st century stuff), there is Google and online porn... It's almost all recognizable, just mostly adapted so birds have easier uses of it.
Doves and pigeons of all species were the first to become truly intelligent, and were the most numerous besides, and so they dominate the population and all professions. Doves of particular breeding lines like the Le Bels are a kind of nobility. The uplift effects of the virus spread slowly to other avian species and, gradually, birds of many varieties hatched that grew a little slower and larger, had greater dexterity, and lived longer, though pigeons still live considerably briefer lives than humans. Recently uplifted species take some time to adjust to the lifestyle. By this point, 2188, the Prime Minister of Japan is a shoebill stork and kakapos have just become uplifted enough to be able to be toilet-trained. Other known citizen birds include various species of parrot, pelicans, java sparrows, quails, partridges, pheasants, puffins, seagulls, and crows. There's a certain psychological fragility to many birds, which is speculated to be due to the uplift process, and some individuals are "ferals" or "throwbacks", less intelligent to various degrees.
Poultry seem to be spared and uplifted birds continue raising and slaughtering them for food. A character has noticed that a (non-sentient) swallow parent is tending its offspring four months after all swallow chicks should be grown and out on their own, and speculated that all birds must be changing, but as of this point there are still numerous species which aren't sentient.
Oh, also: there are ghosts in this world, tied to locations near where they died and visible only to the pure of heart, and they can pass on to an elaborate afterlife and chat with Death. The afterlife can also be visited by dreamers, and there is Inception-tech that can be used to let a sleeper enter someone else’s dream even if it’s afterlifey. Medical technology is imperfect, but researchers can create or tinker with life in labs, and mount human heads on robot bodies. The one human we know much about, Hiyoko Tousaka, has “hunter-gatherer instincts” that seem to serve as enhanced intuition. One bird believes himself to be the reincarnation of a fallen angel, and claims a similar origin for Tousaka. The fact that he exudes hallucinogenic pheromones and can draw people into elaborate fantasies with them would seem to make that entirely delusion, except that he also has strange powers and another character actually is the reincarnation of a god.
Yuuya’s highly bred Japanese noblebird mother was betrothed to a French Le Bel for political reasons. She eloped with a common-born bird, a leatherworker of the lowest possible status, and had Yuuya in 2176. They were poor and not unhappy, but this state didn’t last long. Within two years, Yuuya’s father was murdered so the Le Bels could force his mother into marrying her betrothed.
After moving to France she laid an egg containing Yuuya’s full brother, but the “new father” wanted it smashed; he would feed Yuuya and adopt him into a lesser branch family only if this was done. She couldn’t stand to do it herself. Yuuya - who by then was fully fledged but not mentally mature - volunteered to do it but actually kept the egg safe and incubated it covertly. He talked to it every day.
His mother almost immediately mated to her new husband and soon laid an egg. Yuuya switched them, kept the new egg safe until he was sure the first egg would hatch, then smashed the new egg. Partly this was so that his brother would be raised and loved - partly it was out of sheer spite, since he suspected what the Le Bels had done. Even Yuuya’s not sure of his own motivations. But by that point the new egg was fairly developed - he didn’t simply break an egg as he thought he was doing, he murdered his own half-brother. That was the end of his innocence.
Sakuya was raised well as the Le Bel heir apparent, disdaining his “half-breed” brother as he was taught. The Le Bels arranged to have them usually apart, to keep Yuuya from tainting him, and Yuuya wanted as little to do with them as possible, even discarding the name of the branch family and retaking his father’s name, Sakazaki, as soon as he could manage alone. Still he tried to know as much as possible about Sakuya. He knew Sakuya would be disowned if his heritage was discovered or he didn’t toe the line, something he dreaded. Sakuya needed to continue in his place in the world - if he left, and Yuuya did come to want that, it should be on his own terms, following his own path.
As a young dove, Yuuya joined the Dove Party, an influential political faction which favored trying to live in peace with the remaining humans and opposed the similarly influential pro-bird Hawk Party. In part, he did this to further spite Le Bel, since the family was very Hawk-leaning. Before he was eight he was recruited into the clandestine branch called “Heaven-Soaring Wings”. They trained him as a spy and helped him develop skills in weaponry and clandestine information retrieval, and sent him on various missions. On some of them he associated with and became familiar with various humans. At nine, he was sent to the Japanese school St. Pigeonation’s, a prestigious three-year senior high school set up for gifted birds of all species, which had been started with the public goal of fostering cohabitation with humans.
There was one established Dove Party agent at the school, Mister One/Leone J.B., who worked as the janitor and mostly gave intel, assignments, and tech to Yuuya while allowing him great discretion. Honestly though... Yuuya had his uses, and he went on a lot of shorter-term assignments outside of the school, but as far as the school surveillance assignment went, he was essentially there to take the risks and attract the attention.
Much of the school had been set up with Dove goals, but right from the start there had been Hawk-leaning staff using the facility for their own purposes. There was a medical center in the basement that had even been used to test new lethal virus strains on captive humans. After it burned down, the head researcher took the name Doctor Iwamine Shuu and the position of school’s physician. The school was high-stress enough that sudden drop outs and students losing their grips on reality - since birds were so recently uplifted, they were somewhat prone to this under strain - weren’t too unusual, but sometimes they just went missing. There were rumors that missing students’ bodies were mixed in with the shredded poultry in the cafeteria...
Starting in 2186, Yuuya attended for all three years like any other student, doing things like infiltrating a weird club which had gotten obsessed with bonfires and became a cult. Because he was often needed for assignments in Hatchiman Littledove City - things like covertly protecting people from threats, or retrieving information - his attendance was rather lax, and about half the time he didn’t go to school at all. Still, he was good when he was there, and it added to his image as carelessly cool.
Yuuya also joined an after-school activity, serving on the infirmary staff, whose members had a marked tendency to either quit or, if they annoyed the doctor, to vanish. Yuuya was quick to figure out ways to cope there, and picked up some things about medicine over time. By his third year he was the health committee chairman, running the infirmary when Shuu was out, but the doctor was growing suspicious of him.
In Yuuya’s second year negotiations between the birds and humans of Japan led to a human girl, Hiyoko Tousaka, being admitted to the school as a minority representative. Partly it was an experiment, to see how well a human could be integrated among the birds, and that was the very Dove-ish public reasoning. There were secret negotiations, too.
If Tousaka were to die on the school’s grounds, the campus would be sealed off, and twelve hours after sealing, all the birds inside would be given to the humans as prisoners. The school would be declared an extraterritorial zone, and the humans would have free rein to do to the birds as they wished. That was partly to assuage paranoid humans, who were used to birds not putting much value on human life, and partly Hawk-ish, designed to start another round of fighting. The Dove Party was aware of this, and therefore Yuuya decided to look out for her, but that year was uneventful as far as risks to her went.
Before the start of Yuuya’s third term, he had received word that Sakuya would attend St. Pigeonation’s. He was given the choice to leave on new assignment, as was standard procedure whenever family became involved, or to stick it out. He chose to stay, claiming he and his brother would have little to do with each other, but on the very first day he tried to talk to Sakuya and was rebuffed. Throughout the school year he tried again with similar results, annoying and being insulted by the young aristocrat, and was never dissuaded.
In that year Hiyoko, who’d adjusted to school life, signed up for several after-school activities, including infirmary duty. She took well to Yuuya, as she did to almost everybirdie, though at some point she did tell him his flirtation was too much - he used a pick up line too awful to ignore - and he backed down a little. Hiyoko helped him out at the first-aid tent for a sports festival, and covered for him when he had to leave early.
Investigations were not turning up much; this was his last year at St. Pigeonations, so he stepped up attempts and found that every few months the flesh of missing students was served along with chicken, and their feathers were often sold in the school store. In July he got too careless searching the doctor’s desk, but he was saved when Hiyoko confirmed his fraudulent alibi.
At a summer festival he escorted Hiyoko around some, but had to leave unceremoniously when he spied dangerous birds looking for him. The next time she saw him it was while he was going through trash, and when she pressed him, Yuuya said it was dangerous to associate too closely with him. After that, while she stayed friendly and continued to cover for and talk to him, she cooled a little and focused more on other friends, to Yuuya’s equally hidden relief and slight disappointment.
At the tail of summer, the doctor took Yuuya aside. He had given Sakuya the customary pre-admittance physical examination in the spring and knew he was not a Le Bel. Shuu threatened to expose Sakuya in the harshest manner possible, unless Yuuya worked with him - Shuu had had an old injury to one wing and couldn’t do heavy lifting, but Yuuya was a young dove, and clever, even aside from the suspected-spy thing, which he didn’t admit to.
The Le Bels are awful people. Being exposed so openly might not just mean Sakuya getting kicked out into the street, though that would be bad enough - he was smart but had poor interpersonal skills and was not at all savvy or able to function on his own yet. Other potential heirs had sent assassins after Sakuya in the past. Even if Yuuya confessed everything to his Dove Party superiors and asked for their help - which went very much against his nature, and he didn’t even think of it for a long time - the Le Bels were powerful.
So Yuuya became complicit. He falsified reports, covered for the doctor, cleaned up the blood and incinerated the remains of one of Shuu’s victims, and tended the ones Shuu wanted alive - some imprisoned, some let go with stitches and confusion - as well as taking on more infirmary duties to free up his time. Shuu was working on something and had entire other rooms somewhere, but while his new help saw more, he didn’t get to see everything.
Yuuya hated this, but continued on with the same outwards careless cheer, even still vanishing now and then to go on simpler, action-y missions for the Dove Party. He couldn’t stop Shuu even by killing him - things had been set up so word would get out if the doctor died, and Yuuya needed time to find and disable them. Which he didn’t have. Yuuya ran himself ragged doing... small things, instead; quietly sabotaging some experiments, trying to prevent birds Shuu was interested in from being caught, leaving the ids of missing students out where they could be found, managing to get some birds slated for death free. He was very careful not to be implicated, and so did less than he could’ve.
In October a discouraged doctor put a hold on his in-school work and spent more time out of the city or working with older samples; the imprisoned students were released with no real memories of what had gone on, and Yuuya was released from his extra duties. Things returned to relative calm at the school, though Yuuya still could not tell anyone. With more time to spare he found one of those blackmail safeguards on Shuu’s computer, but didn’t know if it was the only one, and was reluctant to cold-bloodedly kill somebirdie who wasn’t actively in the process of chopping students up.
Late in December the party ordered him to investigate some mysterious tree-stealing individuals dubbed the Christmas Thieves. It was a ridiculous, straightforwards-looking case that Yuuya took on with a degree of eagerness, and almost immediately after discussing it late at night with JB they hit the school. Sakuya had had a lovely tree in the school council room, which was bombed and the tree destroyed. Yuuya gave chase but couldn’t catch them, and only got a picture of the thieves as they made off with the tree topper.
The next day, finding that Sakuya and Hiyoko were investigating, he gave them the photo. Sakuya was angry that Yuuya hadn’t alerted him, and Yuuya calmly said that he hadn’t been able, since Sakuya had repeatedly refused to give him his phone number. Yuuya suggested they use Sakuya’s grand home tree as bait, and Hiyoko helped get Sakuya to agree to the plan. Yuuya had clout with the newspapers and could get that announced.
That evening the thieves brought a tank, and neither Le Bel security nor Hiyoko’s valiance could stop it. Yuuya was there with an anti-material rifle, but although he put some holes in it ultimately it didn’t really do any good and he got his tailfeathers burnt protecting Hiyoko from the cannon. Shuu showed up and got Hiyoko to throw a gas grenade that disabled the thieves, revealing that they were sentient but simpleminded genetically engineered mammal-bird hybrids created by a different researcher. Named Miru and Kaku, they were Christmas-obsessed and had been running around for years, ever since they were set free.
Shuu said the grenade had worked better because of those holes and thus gave some credit to Yuuya, much to Yuuya’s surprise. He also had Miru and Kaku live in the infirmary and was relatively patient and gentle around them. For Shuu, anyway.
During all this Yuuya had gotten a look at Sakuya’s crow butler Albert, and he didn’t like the man at all. Actually, Yuuya went and used Dove Party resources to investigate him. It took a while before he got results.
Late in January Shuu went elsewhere for a week, leaving Yuuya in charge of the infirmary. He did well at it. During this time a mad scientist rival of Shuu’s named Tohri decided to destroy the school with a laser weapon relying on a student’s hallucinogenic/reality-warping ability and powered by the fantasies of captive otaku birds. (Yes, really.) Yuuya’s connections with the Dove Party meant that when this weapon was destroyed, he had birds to help him get all the otaku out before the building crumbled.
Albert’s history was revealed in early spring. Yuuya’d thought he might be a spy, but he turned out to be an assassin! He was barely persuaded to wait and hear the details, which included the fact that Albert had killed one of JB’s coworkers, before he went and staked out the mansion, staying for days until he saw Albert taking off while holding a knife. Yuuya figuratively lost his head (You think I’ll let you!?) and got knocked out. His last words before losing consciousness and his first on regaining it were for Sakuya to run. With a lot more patience than usual, Sakuya told him the circumstances of the night - Miru and Kaku had been sneaking in to use a bathroom and Albert was to catch and scare them - and of Albert. Sakuya was both client and target, because this kept Albert from being employed by Sakuya’s enemies and because Albert, waiting for the signal, had to keep Sakuya alive until then. Yuuya had to accept this arrangement, but told the butler that if he did hurt Sakuya, he would be hunted to the ends of the earth and back.
Near the end of term a number of birds including Sakuya, Hiyoko, and Shuu went to watch a lunar eclipse on the roof, fell asleep, and had a long synchronized dream. Yuuya and JB, who hadn’t been up there, found them and could not wake them. Yuuya used some Inception-y tech to get into the shared dream through Sakuya, but rather than explain the circumstances right away he elected to chat and was ejected by his furious brother. Tohri showed up and was upset at not getting to fight his rival, so elected to help by clearing the clouds with his new improved laser weapon. After JB insisted that he was to try and get everybirdie out, not to try and take a hit for his brother, Yuuya went back into the dream.
He found Hiyoko and one of her friends, but they couldn’t get out. The dream was an element of the afterlife, the Holiday Star, created by a ghost called the King who was too afraid to move on. The King trapped them in a weird dark place. A wandering ghost dove gave them hints about what to do, and Yuuya split up from them. His first instinct was to protect the lady, but he knew she’d be safer with her friend. Yuuya found Sakuya and got him to want to leave by emphasizing the local lack of taste. Hiyoko’s childhood friend Ryouta took longer, since he was afraid of being apart from Hiyoko. Yuuya spoke to him patiently and at length, eventually convincing him partly with a confession that his own confidence and lack of fear was in part a bluff.
He met briefly with Hiyoko and her friend again and found out that one person was still missing - Hiyoko’s homeroom teacher Nanaki. Hiyoko went on to confront the King while Yuuya went on search and rescue. JB was able to briefly contact him and explain that he was about to administer psychotropics to both Yuuya and Nanaki, which apparently would help. Some of the King’s ghostly citizens tried to get in Yuuya’s way and he tried to explain, but eventually said if there was no negotiation he would make them move. They turned out to be projections of the King.
The King brought up Yuuya’s one greatest sin, the breaking of his brother’s egg, and offered to take the pain from him by absorbing him. Yuuya refused. That pain was part of him, who he was; he had accepted his guilt and what it meant, which was a thought so alien to the King that he left.
Yuuya found Nanaki in a deep pit. The quail was eyeless here and wanted to stay. Yuuya kept at it and tried to help out when Nanaki started trying to find him, only for the quail to try and strangle him. Getting clear, Yuuya talked to him soothingly, concluded that Nanaki had mistaken him for someone else, and managed to remind him that there were things he still needed to do in the real world. He went on to guide the quail out and help Hiyoko and Sakuya and the others fight the King, performing a delaying action while Hiyoko and Nageki went after the source of the King’s power.
The Holiday Star dissolved back into normal afterlife dreamstuff; the King became a normal quail ghost and those he had absorbed became normal ghosts again and were sent on along by Death, who also sent the dreaming birds and Hiyoko along back towards waking. Sakuya begrudgingly admitted that Yuuya had helped, which made Yuuya very happy.
Something he had seen had profoundly affected Shuu, who even weeks later was unusually withdrawn and quiet, disinterested in his work. He left infirmary duties increasingly to Yuuya, but then the term ended and Yuuya had to graduate and leave the school without finding and disabling other safeguards.
It’s really a lot darker than the premise suggests.
This started out as a 'verse very like ours on the surface, though the global Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 (thought to be a mutated bird flu) was mildly worse in this universe.
In 2068 a new strain of influenza - natural or designed is never specified - became endemic to aviankind, easily spreading from them to humans. This strain was nicknamed Sumatra Flu, and it was absolutely devastating; it killed humans rapidly but was relatively benign to birds, so wherever birds went, particularly pigeons, humans started dying en masse. By 2070 billions had died, and the global human population had dropped to thirty percent of what it was in 2068, with no signs of stopping.
In desperation, human scientists came up with an avian annihilation project, "Operation Carneades", a lethal virus tailored to birds. They released this in summer of 2070, and there was a brief, hideous drop in bird populations. Many species went extinct. But the Carneades virus had a strange effect on the birds which were resistant - it uplifted them. By late 2071 pigeons had begun to understand the situation and organize. By December they had started to launch attacks on the humans. That was called Hitchcock Winter.
In 2075 the birds adopted their own declaration of independence in the Philippines, and humans and birdkind went to war for thirty years. By 2105 there were a mere 140 million humans alive on Earth - 4.6% of the pre-flu population, a prehistoric low. Ten percent was directly due to war deaths. The rest was Sumatra Flu. The remaining humans were resistant to the virus, and there was a ceremonial cease-fire agreement, but the humans in Japan, at least, were largely kind of penned up in reservations and not given political rights, even the right to govern themselves. They could hold jobs within bird society - this was the only way they could make money, as there were still some skills birds couldn't manage - but they had few rights. Human resistance movements cropped up frequently in the next century. After a harsh suicide bombing, truce rules in Japan were drawn up and habitats were more strictly segregated, humans restricted to living in those reservations.
Two main political factions exist in global bird society - the Dove Party and the Hawk Party. In a nutshell, the Doves believe in trying to live and integrate peacefully with the remaining humans, while the Hawks want to restrict or even exterminate them. There's more to both, of course, it’s not as black-and-white as it looks, and a Crow Party is mentioned without much context. The average bird might be fine with the few humans they know, even considering them friends, and still think of humanity as dangerous and hostile.
For whatever reason - maybe there had been humans sympathetic to the birds, teaching them language and how to organize - the new bird-run civilization is strikingly similar to the old human one. In fact, they largely seem to have just filled the vacancies, though there are some abandoned skyscrapers around. The same countries exist, schools are set up in familiar ways, there's similar infrastructure and traffic laws, music classes still study long-dead human composers, birds write and consume books and manga (some are birdified versions of 21st century stuff), there is Google and online porn... It's almost all recognizable, just mostly adapted so birds have easier uses of it.
Doves and pigeons of all species were the first to become truly intelligent, and were the most numerous besides, and so they dominate the population and all professions. Doves of particular breeding lines like the Le Bels are a kind of nobility. The uplift effects of the virus spread slowly to other avian species and, gradually, birds of many varieties hatched that grew a little slower and larger, had greater dexterity, and lived longer, though pigeons still live considerably briefer lives than humans. Recently uplifted species take some time to adjust to the lifestyle. By this point, 2188, the Prime Minister of Japan is a shoebill stork and kakapos have just become uplifted enough to be able to be toilet-trained. Other known citizen birds include various species of parrot, pelicans, java sparrows, quails, partridges, pheasants, puffins, seagulls, and crows. There's a certain psychological fragility to many birds, which is speculated to be due to the uplift process, and some individuals are "ferals" or "throwbacks", less intelligent to various degrees.
Poultry seem to be spared and uplifted birds continue raising and slaughtering them for food. A character has noticed that a (non-sentient) swallow parent is tending its offspring four months after all swallow chicks should be grown and out on their own, and speculated that all birds must be changing, but as of this point there are still numerous species which aren't sentient.
Oh, also: there are ghosts in this world, tied to locations near where they died and visible only to the pure of heart, and they can pass on to an elaborate afterlife and chat with Death. The afterlife can also be visited by dreamers, and there is Inception-tech that can be used to let a sleeper enter someone else’s dream even if it’s afterlifey. Medical technology is imperfect, but researchers can create or tinker with life in labs, and mount human heads on robot bodies. The one human we know much about, Hiyoko Tousaka, has “hunter-gatherer instincts” that seem to serve as enhanced intuition. One bird believes himself to be the reincarnation of a fallen angel, and claims a similar origin for Tousaka. The fact that he exudes hallucinogenic pheromones and can draw people into elaborate fantasies with them would seem to make that entirely delusion, except that he also has strange powers and another character actually is the reincarnation of a god.
Yuuya’s highly bred Japanese noblebird mother was betrothed to a French Le Bel for political reasons. She eloped with a common-born bird, a leatherworker of the lowest possible status, and had Yuuya in 2176. They were poor and not unhappy, but this state didn’t last long. Within two years, Yuuya’s father was murdered so the Le Bels could force his mother into marrying her betrothed.
After moving to France she laid an egg containing Yuuya’s full brother, but the “new father” wanted it smashed; he would feed Yuuya and adopt him into a lesser branch family only if this was done. She couldn’t stand to do it herself. Yuuya - who by then was fully fledged but not mentally mature - volunteered to do it but actually kept the egg safe and incubated it covertly. He talked to it every day.
His mother almost immediately mated to her new husband and soon laid an egg. Yuuya switched them, kept the new egg safe until he was sure the first egg would hatch, then smashed the new egg. Partly this was so that his brother would be raised and loved - partly it was out of sheer spite, since he suspected what the Le Bels had done. Even Yuuya’s not sure of his own motivations. But by that point the new egg was fairly developed - he didn’t simply break an egg as he thought he was doing, he murdered his own half-brother. That was the end of his innocence.
Sakuya was raised well as the Le Bel heir apparent, disdaining his “half-breed” brother as he was taught. The Le Bels arranged to have them usually apart, to keep Yuuya from tainting him, and Yuuya wanted as little to do with them as possible, even discarding the name of the branch family and retaking his father’s name, Sakazaki, as soon as he could manage alone. Still he tried to know as much as possible about Sakuya. He knew Sakuya would be disowned if his heritage was discovered or he didn’t toe the line, something he dreaded. Sakuya needed to continue in his place in the world - if he left, and Yuuya did come to want that, it should be on his own terms, following his own path.
As a young dove, Yuuya joined the Dove Party, an influential political faction which favored trying to live in peace with the remaining humans and opposed the similarly influential pro-bird Hawk Party. In part, he did this to further spite Le Bel, since the family was very Hawk-leaning. Before he was eight he was recruited into the clandestine branch called “Heaven-Soaring Wings”. They trained him as a spy and helped him develop skills in weaponry and clandestine information retrieval, and sent him on various missions. On some of them he associated with and became familiar with various humans. At nine, he was sent to the Japanese school St. Pigeonation’s, a prestigious three-year senior high school set up for gifted birds of all species, which had been started with the public goal of fostering cohabitation with humans.
There was one established Dove Party agent at the school, Mister One/Leone J.B., who worked as the janitor and mostly gave intel, assignments, and tech to Yuuya while allowing him great discretion. Honestly though... Yuuya had his uses, and he went on a lot of shorter-term assignments outside of the school, but as far as the school surveillance assignment went, he was essentially there to take the risks and attract the attention.
Much of the school had been set up with Dove goals, but right from the start there had been Hawk-leaning staff using the facility for their own purposes. There was a medical center in the basement that had even been used to test new lethal virus strains on captive humans. After it burned down, the head researcher took the name Doctor Iwamine Shuu and the position of school’s physician. The school was high-stress enough that sudden drop outs and students losing their grips on reality - since birds were so recently uplifted, they were somewhat prone to this under strain - weren’t too unusual, but sometimes they just went missing. There were rumors that missing students’ bodies were mixed in with the shredded poultry in the cafeteria...
Starting in 2186, Yuuya attended for all three years like any other student, doing things like infiltrating a weird club which had gotten obsessed with bonfires and became a cult. Because he was often needed for assignments in Hatchiman Littledove City - things like covertly protecting people from threats, or retrieving information - his attendance was rather lax, and about half the time he didn’t go to school at all. Still, he was good when he was there, and it added to his image as carelessly cool.
Yuuya also joined an after-school activity, serving on the infirmary staff, whose members had a marked tendency to either quit or, if they annoyed the doctor, to vanish. Yuuya was quick to figure out ways to cope there, and picked up some things about medicine over time. By his third year he was the health committee chairman, running the infirmary when Shuu was out, but the doctor was growing suspicious of him.
In Yuuya’s second year negotiations between the birds and humans of Japan led to a human girl, Hiyoko Tousaka, being admitted to the school as a minority representative. Partly it was an experiment, to see how well a human could be integrated among the birds, and that was the very Dove-ish public reasoning. There were secret negotiations, too.
If Tousaka were to die on the school’s grounds, the campus would be sealed off, and twelve hours after sealing, all the birds inside would be given to the humans as prisoners. The school would be declared an extraterritorial zone, and the humans would have free rein to do to the birds as they wished. That was partly to assuage paranoid humans, who were used to birds not putting much value on human life, and partly Hawk-ish, designed to start another round of fighting. The Dove Party was aware of this, and therefore Yuuya decided to look out for her, but that year was uneventful as far as risks to her went.
Before the start of Yuuya’s third term, he had received word that Sakuya would attend St. Pigeonation’s. He was given the choice to leave on new assignment, as was standard procedure whenever family became involved, or to stick it out. He chose to stay, claiming he and his brother would have little to do with each other, but on the very first day he tried to talk to Sakuya and was rebuffed. Throughout the school year he tried again with similar results, annoying and being insulted by the young aristocrat, and was never dissuaded.
In that year Hiyoko, who’d adjusted to school life, signed up for several after-school activities, including infirmary duty. She took well to Yuuya, as she did to almost everybirdie, though at some point she did tell him his flirtation was too much - he used a pick up line too awful to ignore - and he backed down a little. Hiyoko helped him out at the first-aid tent for a sports festival, and covered for him when he had to leave early.
Investigations were not turning up much; this was his last year at St. Pigeonations, so he stepped up attempts and found that every few months the flesh of missing students was served along with chicken, and their feathers were often sold in the school store. In July he got too careless searching the doctor’s desk, but he was saved when Hiyoko confirmed his fraudulent alibi.
At a summer festival he escorted Hiyoko around some, but had to leave unceremoniously when he spied dangerous birds looking for him. The next time she saw him it was while he was going through trash, and when she pressed him, Yuuya said it was dangerous to associate too closely with him. After that, while she stayed friendly and continued to cover for and talk to him, she cooled a little and focused more on other friends, to Yuuya’s equally hidden relief and slight disappointment.
At the tail of summer, the doctor took Yuuya aside. He had given Sakuya the customary pre-admittance physical examination in the spring and knew he was not a Le Bel. Shuu threatened to expose Sakuya in the harshest manner possible, unless Yuuya worked with him - Shuu had had an old injury to one wing and couldn’t do heavy lifting, but Yuuya was a young dove, and clever, even aside from the suspected-spy thing, which he didn’t admit to.
The Le Bels are awful people. Being exposed so openly might not just mean Sakuya getting kicked out into the street, though that would be bad enough - he was smart but had poor interpersonal skills and was not at all savvy or able to function on his own yet. Other potential heirs had sent assassins after Sakuya in the past. Even if Yuuya confessed everything to his Dove Party superiors and asked for their help - which went very much against his nature, and he didn’t even think of it for a long time - the Le Bels were powerful.
So Yuuya became complicit. He falsified reports, covered for the doctor, cleaned up the blood and incinerated the remains of one of Shuu’s victims, and tended the ones Shuu wanted alive - some imprisoned, some let go with stitches and confusion - as well as taking on more infirmary duties to free up his time. Shuu was working on something and had entire other rooms somewhere, but while his new help saw more, he didn’t get to see everything.
Yuuya hated this, but continued on with the same outwards careless cheer, even still vanishing now and then to go on simpler, action-y missions for the Dove Party. He couldn’t stop Shuu even by killing him - things had been set up so word would get out if the doctor died, and Yuuya needed time to find and disable them. Which he didn’t have. Yuuya ran himself ragged doing... small things, instead; quietly sabotaging some experiments, trying to prevent birds Shuu was interested in from being caught, leaving the ids of missing students out where they could be found, managing to get some birds slated for death free. He was very careful not to be implicated, and so did less than he could’ve.
In October a discouraged doctor put a hold on his in-school work and spent more time out of the city or working with older samples; the imprisoned students were released with no real memories of what had gone on, and Yuuya was released from his extra duties. Things returned to relative calm at the school, though Yuuya still could not tell anyone. With more time to spare he found one of those blackmail safeguards on Shuu’s computer, but didn’t know if it was the only one, and was reluctant to cold-bloodedly kill somebirdie who wasn’t actively in the process of chopping students up.
Late in December the party ordered him to investigate some mysterious tree-stealing individuals dubbed the Christmas Thieves. It was a ridiculous, straightforwards-looking case that Yuuya took on with a degree of eagerness, and almost immediately after discussing it late at night with JB they hit the school. Sakuya had had a lovely tree in the school council room, which was bombed and the tree destroyed. Yuuya gave chase but couldn’t catch them, and only got a picture of the thieves as they made off with the tree topper.
The next day, finding that Sakuya and Hiyoko were investigating, he gave them the photo. Sakuya was angry that Yuuya hadn’t alerted him, and Yuuya calmly said that he hadn’t been able, since Sakuya had repeatedly refused to give him his phone number. Yuuya suggested they use Sakuya’s grand home tree as bait, and Hiyoko helped get Sakuya to agree to the plan. Yuuya had clout with the newspapers and could get that announced.
That evening the thieves brought a tank, and neither Le Bel security nor Hiyoko’s valiance could stop it. Yuuya was there with an anti-material rifle, but although he put some holes in it ultimately it didn’t really do any good and he got his tailfeathers burnt protecting Hiyoko from the cannon. Shuu showed up and got Hiyoko to throw a gas grenade that disabled the thieves, revealing that they were sentient but simpleminded genetically engineered mammal-bird hybrids created by a different researcher. Named Miru and Kaku, they were Christmas-obsessed and had been running around for years, ever since they were set free.
Shuu said the grenade had worked better because of those holes and thus gave some credit to Yuuya, much to Yuuya’s surprise. He also had Miru and Kaku live in the infirmary and was relatively patient and gentle around them. For Shuu, anyway.
During all this Yuuya had gotten a look at Sakuya’s crow butler Albert, and he didn’t like the man at all. Actually, Yuuya went and used Dove Party resources to investigate him. It took a while before he got results.
Late in January Shuu went elsewhere for a week, leaving Yuuya in charge of the infirmary. He did well at it. During this time a mad scientist rival of Shuu’s named Tohri decided to destroy the school with a laser weapon relying on a student’s hallucinogenic/reality-warping ability and powered by the fantasies of captive otaku birds. (Yes, really.) Yuuya’s connections with the Dove Party meant that when this weapon was destroyed, he had birds to help him get all the otaku out before the building crumbled.
Albert’s history was revealed in early spring. Yuuya’d thought he might be a spy, but he turned out to be an assassin! He was barely persuaded to wait and hear the details, which included the fact that Albert had killed one of JB’s coworkers, before he went and staked out the mansion, staying for days until he saw Albert taking off while holding a knife. Yuuya figuratively lost his head (You think I’ll let you!?) and got knocked out. His last words before losing consciousness and his first on regaining it were for Sakuya to run. With a lot more patience than usual, Sakuya told him the circumstances of the night - Miru and Kaku had been sneaking in to use a bathroom and Albert was to catch and scare them - and of Albert. Sakuya was both client and target, because this kept Albert from being employed by Sakuya’s enemies and because Albert, waiting for the signal, had to keep Sakuya alive until then. Yuuya had to accept this arrangement, but told the butler that if he did hurt Sakuya, he would be hunted to the ends of the earth and back.
Near the end of term a number of birds including Sakuya, Hiyoko, and Shuu went to watch a lunar eclipse on the roof, fell asleep, and had a long synchronized dream. Yuuya and JB, who hadn’t been up there, found them and could not wake them. Yuuya used some Inception-y tech to get into the shared dream through Sakuya, but rather than explain the circumstances right away he elected to chat and was ejected by his furious brother. Tohri showed up and was upset at not getting to fight his rival, so elected to help by clearing the clouds with his new improved laser weapon. After JB insisted that he was to try and get everybirdie out, not to try and take a hit for his brother, Yuuya went back into the dream.
He found Hiyoko and one of her friends, but they couldn’t get out. The dream was an element of the afterlife, the Holiday Star, created by a ghost called the King who was too afraid to move on. The King trapped them in a weird dark place. A wandering ghost dove gave them hints about what to do, and Yuuya split up from them. His first instinct was to protect the lady, but he knew she’d be safer with her friend. Yuuya found Sakuya and got him to want to leave by emphasizing the local lack of taste. Hiyoko’s childhood friend Ryouta took longer, since he was afraid of being apart from Hiyoko. Yuuya spoke to him patiently and at length, eventually convincing him partly with a confession that his own confidence and lack of fear was in part a bluff.
He met briefly with Hiyoko and her friend again and found out that one person was still missing - Hiyoko’s homeroom teacher Nanaki. Hiyoko went on to confront the King while Yuuya went on search and rescue. JB was able to briefly contact him and explain that he was about to administer psychotropics to both Yuuya and Nanaki, which apparently would help. Some of the King’s ghostly citizens tried to get in Yuuya’s way and he tried to explain, but eventually said if there was no negotiation he would make them move. They turned out to be projections of the King.
The King brought up Yuuya’s one greatest sin, the breaking of his brother’s egg, and offered to take the pain from him by absorbing him. Yuuya refused. That pain was part of him, who he was; he had accepted his guilt and what it meant, which was a thought so alien to the King that he left.
Yuuya found Nanaki in a deep pit. The quail was eyeless here and wanted to stay. Yuuya kept at it and tried to help out when Nanaki started trying to find him, only for the quail to try and strangle him. Getting clear, Yuuya talked to him soothingly, concluded that Nanaki had mistaken him for someone else, and managed to remind him that there were things he still needed to do in the real world. He went on to guide the quail out and help Hiyoko and Sakuya and the others fight the King, performing a delaying action while Hiyoko and Nageki went after the source of the King’s power.
The Holiday Star dissolved back into normal afterlife dreamstuff; the King became a normal quail ghost and those he had absorbed became normal ghosts again and were sent on along by Death, who also sent the dreaming birds and Hiyoko along back towards waking. Sakuya begrudgingly admitted that Yuuya had helped, which made Yuuya very happy.
Something he had seen had profoundly affected Shuu, who even weeks later was unusually withdrawn and quiet, disinterested in his work. He left infirmary duties increasingly to Yuuya, but then the term ended and Yuuya had to graduate and leave the school without finding and disabling other safeguards.