#47gaslamps

[novelmonger]

Character ask for Minerva McGonagall, Alastor Moody, Remus Lupin, Sirius Black, Molly Weasley, Albus Dumbledore and... Mundungus Fletcher, why not

From this ask game

Oh boy, HP characters!

Go grocery shopping with - Molly! I'd love to help her do her shopping for her enormous family, and I bet you anything she would help me find good deals on what I need, with some excellent life advice thrown in too. And she would just be such warm, homey company, as if I were shopping with my mom.

Have lunch with - I think Professor Lupin would be a great person to have lunch with. Lupin knows how to make you feel comfortable and seen, and he's great at listening. The conversation would be so interesting; he could tell me all about interesting magical creatures or useful little spells. I don't know if he'd feel comfortable discussing this or not, but I would also love to hear more about his experiences as a werewolf, and what his daily life is like. Maybe he could tell some stories about good times with the other Marauders. Maybe I'd ask him how he and Tonks met. All in all, I think lunch with him would just be warm and cozy. Hopefully we could schedule it during a good phase of the moon.

Have coffee with - Sirius Black! No, not as a date. I have no idea what we'd talk about, but it would just be really cool to meet him. I've always felt drawn to his protective uncle/older brother vibes, and if somehow in this hypothetical scenario I were friends with Harry, I think we'd be comfortable with each other. Maybe we'd break the ice by talking about him first. Maybe, in the end, we'd just sit in silence, but that would be okay too.

Go thrift shopping with - Okay...to be completely honest, I don't think I'd want to go anywhere with Mundungus Fletcher, but this is as good an option as any, I guess. He probably knows all the best places and how to get great deals from the back rooms where most people wouldn't be allowed. The only trouble would be getting him out of the place without shoplifting anything of value.

Explore a museum/art gallery/aquarium with - Originally, I was going to pick Lupin for this one. While I do think he'd be a good pick, it would also be interesting to go on a field trip, of sorts, with Moody. I'm not sure exactly what kind of museum we'd go to - do wizards have museums? Maybe it would be a history museum of some kind, and Moody would be able to tell me about all the secret magical side of historical events I thought I knew all about. It would be kind of scary to be around someone like Moody, what with his eye swiveling all over the place, and he'd probably keep me on my toes with his gruff manners and occasional cries of "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" But I bet I'd learn a lot.

Go the library/bookstore with - Professor McGonagall would be an excellent companion to the bookstore. I would be very intimidated by her, but I bet she could give great reading recommendations. She'd probably also accompany that with mini-lectures on anything touching upon her field of study, but like...that would be super interesting too!

Have as a plus-one at a wedding - Okay...I doubt this would be most people's choice...but I can't escape the thought of accompanying Professor Dumbledore to a wedding. For one thing, there wouldn't be the slightest worry about anyone taking anything the wrong way or unrealistic expectations or anything - it would be like going to a wedding with my grandpa. Also, Dumbledore is just so funny and unpredictable and witty and knowledgeable about so many things! It would be so fun to sit at a table with him during the reception and just listen to his conversation, or share little jokes with him. Also, we know that he likes to dance, and I could definitely see him coaxing me out onto the dance floor to dance some silly, improvised dance or teach me some incredibly outdated ballroom dance from his youth or something.

#ask and you shall receive #47gaslamps #stahp now you're making me wish i could meet them for real #you're awakening something better left dormant in teenage novie's heart! D:

[tiger-moran]

47gaslamps: A man who wears an opera hat may not BE posh, but at the very least he would clearly like to be PERCEIVED as such

I actually think it's the opposite really. I mean yes there may be times when he wants to be perceived as such but I think that is he wants to for a very specific reason (because it's a job or something, or maybe he just wants to go see some opera without people staring at him and then trying to chuck him out for being 'wrongly attired'), it isn't that he would like to be perceived that way, he just needs to be perceived that way to carry out a particular task. But in terms of his family Sebastian Moran is pretty 'posh'. Even if he's of Irish descent in a time and place which didn't really treat Irish people well, there were still Irish people or those of Irish descent in English 'high society' and he was born in London to what would appear to be a 'decent' family with a respected patriarch and he had the typical upper class education at Eton, then Oxford. But I am sure he doesn't want to be perceived that way - he's turned against society and I think that definitely includes turning against his father; he's been rejected by and has thus in turn rejected most of his family (and I think the only ones he did care or could have cared about, his mother, his sister, are dead). He also likely as a child experienced some pretty awful abuse in the form of 'fagging' and bullying and corporal punishment in the 'posh' school he was forced to go to. He got forced to 'retire' from the army too. So I don't think he sees any of that as really him. All that the 'posh' society did was mistreat and reject him. The real him is someone who talks with a 'common' accent and swears and uses colloquialisms and can be provoked into fights (definitely not abiding by the Queensberry rules) and does all the things he is not 'supposed' to do and I think the more he got censured (by his father or tutors/teachers or whoever) for doing these the more he did them and the more firmly they got cemented in him as his real character or personality. He may very likely genuinely like opera but the opera hat, like the 'posh' accent, is a disguise, camouflage, or part of a uniform, something to put on when he's playing a role and blending himself in so he can pass unnoticed or pass as someone who almost everyone else will underestimate.

Actually this does raise the interesting point that this is another reason maybe why Moran does resonate with a lot of trans people? Because even if he's not transgender, he's born as one thing but he doesn't see that as real, he doesn't see that as his authentic self; the real him is someone else entirely, someone he's made himself into and someone who is only truly accepted by a select few (like Moriarty).

#Sebastian Moran

[47gaslamps]

Dr. Van Helsing's activities this Guy Fawkes Day:

Successfully erecting a barrier against incorporeal assailants...

Confirming the continued loyalty of his most valuable ally, which had been in doubt...

Pressing onward to the very enemy stronghold...

Putting paid to the enemy's most powerful lieutenants...

Cutting off the enemy himself at the knees...

In sum, giving Tumblr user 47gaslamps an unusually happy holiday.

#dracula daily #november 5 #abraham van helsing #mina harker

[artic-willow]

For some reason I can't read your DM. What's up?

Oh, it's because Tumblr is give me problems with messages people. So for now I can't message no one util Tumblr resolve the problem

Hopefully soon.

#47gaslamps #love y'all <33 #<33

[brawltogethernow]

I'm a Death Note blog. Needless to say, I'm fine with the diversity in Death Note's portrayal of genius. Human vagaries ought to ruffle the smoothly-laid plans a bit more, but it does happen, especially in the second arc. (And incorporating hotel stationery into it makes me unreasonably giddy.) However, the collected works of Orson Scott Card really grind my gears in this respect and if you've got an essay on that, I'd love to hear it.

(x) I love your energy and genuinely I wish I had read so much as a single chapter of Card so I could reward your attempt to throw me a different body of work like raw meat yote to a degenerate emperor’s vicious captive hyena. I want to maim something for sport for you.

#i thought your point was going to be 'you're wrong about death note' to which i was going to have to be like 'probably.' #so the plot twist i experienced in real time is SO funny. #47gaslamps #asks answered

[mikami]

Does Misa's demonstration of the limits of her eyes suggest that a medical mask would protect you from Kira, or not?

Misa’s drawings don’t really specify this in any satisfying way, but the rules are luckily a bit more descriptive:

In order to see the names and life spans of humans by using the eye power of the god of death, the owner must look at more than half of that person's face. When looking from top to bottom, he must look at least from the head to the nose. If he looks at only the eyes and under, he will not be able to see the person's name and life span. Also, even though some parts of the face, for example the eyes, nose or mouth are hidden, if he can basically see the whole face, he will be able to see the person's name and life span. It is still not clear how much exposure is needed to tell a person's name and life span, as this needs to be verified.

Which basically means that if you wear a medical mask as it is meant to be worn (covering both mouth and nose), you would not have your name visible.

If that isn’t a plea for proper mask wearing, I don’t know what is.

#answers #covid reference // #47gaslamps

[13eyond13]

Your last ask got me thinking: why do character-meme headcanons tend to assume Yotsuba Arc conditions? Because that is definitely a thing.

Hmm, I think maybe because that's the part of the story that slows down the grueling plot the most and shows a different side of the main characters than we saw from them before, and in the closest proximity to each other. L starts moping and acting less motivated and showing very shady tactics for crime-solving during this arc. Light and Misa lose their Kira memories and Light in particular changes drastically to a mature and empathetic person who strongly disagrees with manipulating others to get what he wants. The task force struggles to choose between their commitment to the Kira case and L and their home lives, which shows where their priorities lie and where their allegiances are strongest or weakest. Anyone interested in the emotional states and relationships between these characters is bound to want to see them explored more in circumstances like these, I think. And it's much harder to get them all together in a daily living situation in canon otherwise because of the nature of the Kira case and how secretive L normally is.

#ask #47gaslamps #p #l lawliet #light yagami #misa amane #death note

[secretshinigami]

Artist: @bluelyath For: @47gaslamps Prompt: “Naomi kicking Light’s butt after he attempts to use force” Artist’s notes: I had been wanting to draw this for a while now and just needed an excuse. This was the perfect excuse. I hope you like it!

#fanart #submission #bluelyath #47gaslamps #Naomi Misora #Light Yagami #pairings: none #Demegawa-chan's Sakura TV Special 2019

[moro-nokimi]

47gaslamps replied to your post:

(Source for this take: Indian saying they are culturally close to Japan because “Asian.” And therefore your argument is invalid and never mind exactly why. That is just not an honest .)

what got me was them talking smack about white ppl taking in manga/anime and how we wouldn’t understand it bc of our whiteness..... when that wasn’t what the debate was about.

like, white westerners’ points of view are always going to be limited because of those factors of being white and western but when we’re talking characterization i feel that we have a fair shot at understanding it fairly well? we miss some cultural stuff like how jp couples don’t show affection in public or even how jp pizza toppings differ from american toppings ofc, bc those are different cultural/racial contexts.

but if i’m saying “hey, i don’t really think that’s him letting go of his ego” and they go in a circular argument and i point out shit that directly disproves it (i didn’t have the page numbers/chapters on me because i haven’t memorized the entirety of the manga.... yet - but i did still quote characters) and they cite my western whiteness as a mark against me i can’t say as i understand it

#replies #47gaslamps #also not to mention that india and japan are....... very different culturally as i recall #vd

[kiranatrix]

Perhaps you might remember my prior post about the potential significance of the white roses (and specifically, the number of them [47]) in this illustration (below, left) by Obata of L I posted a couple weeks ago. I concluded that Obata was making a reference to the legend of the 47 Ronin, L’s successors, and tying in the symbolic meaning of white roses in Hanakatoba (the language of flowers).

So I decided to also count the white roses in this illustration of L (above photo, right) and got 74. At first I was a little bummed— the number was not the same as the other picture so maybe I was talking out my ass about my theory. But...a little more thought and it hit me like a piano on my head. A few more pianos followed.

First, it’s an inversion of the numbers 7 and 4. The first picture, an illustration used on L’s true name card in How to Read, had 47 roses. This one has 74. The number 7 (七) is a lucky number in Japan, and in Buddhism in particular, while 4 is highly unlucky (四, sounds like death 死 ‘shi’). This could represent a shift in L’s luck, his loss to Kira and death.

It’s also goroawase (語呂合わせ). This is common form of Japanese wordplay where words that sound the same (homophones) are associated with a given series of letters, numbers or symbols, to give new meaning and express a superstition about certain letters or numbers. The number 74 (七十四) can be read separately as "nana-shi", and “nanashi" (名無し ) means "secret/stealthy” or “nameless.” The first meaning is similar symbolism as white roses in Hanakatoba (i.e. silence) The second seems specific to L, as one of his major secrets was his true name. Also note that the second character in nanashi is 無 — Mu. The end of Death Note said that all humans go to Mu (nothingness) when they died. Mu also has specific relevance to Buddhism, and Ohba was influenced by Buddhism and gave Death Note 108 chapters for this reason as it is a sacred number. The Japa Mala has 108 beads, 108 is the number of human feelings/emotions, and a famous sutra has Buddha being asked 108 questions...and so on.

The final kicker that it wasn’t a coincidence is that the 74th radical in Japanese kanji is... 月. This is the word for moon, and it is also Light’s first name (夜神月 : ya gami raito).

Edit!: @47gaslamps noted that L’s inverted position might be symbolic of the Page of Swords reversed in tarot. The general meaning of this card and position is bad news. It refers to a person who can be manipulative, cynical and sarcastic and may consider themselves superior to others and that the rules don’t apply to them.

#death note #l lawliet #takeshi obata #tsugumi ohba #meta #white roses #religious symbolism #tarot

[v-pasiphae-v]

Watched @47gaslamps awesome vid and inspo struck me with full force. A Misa-centered AMV had been in my mind for some time but hadn't found a suitable song for her. I’ve tried to approach her unhealthy dependence on Light and their relationship. Even if it's Misa's POV, you can't talk about her without bringing Light into the equation too, he's such an attention whore xD Youtube's a bitch and has blocked it almost everywhere (/@&%$€*!!), but people in USA and Mexico should be able to watch it (in HQ configuration plz, it’s 1080p).

If you liked it, tell me what you think, please.

#Death Note #AMV #Misa #Adele #Skyfall #Mine

[tiger-moran]

47gaslamps:

I really thought that was just a Tumblr joke because you liked the character dynamics. As to the essay... I can see the criticisms; I just don't know how you can work it into a defense of the Moriarty Crime Ring.

It was sort of half serious and half a joke I guess.

This isn’t just about ‘why they’re not really the villains’, I’ve written about all kinds of stuff - biographical stuff and character analysis, Moriarty and Death symbolism, his connection with other characters, real life influences, how Moriarty compares to Holmes and to other canonical villains, etc etc.

Also me getting kind of salty with the Sherlock Holmes fandom and how that has treated the characters and the relationship over the years

#and a lot of the contradictions and plot holes #SO MANY contradictions and plot holes #yes the Wile E Coyote thing is in there

[47gaslamps]

Hi, I'm 47gaslamps, which means "the 47 Ronin" mashed with "turn up the gas," so it's pretty exactly synonymous with my icon. (Look, if you can't be anonymous in this fandom, you can't be anyonymous anywhere.)

I'm a Christian thirty-year-old woman who discovered Death Note as an atheist in college and it's pretty clear I'm never going to be over it, or anything else Macbethian and/or detective-oriented. I sometimes feel lonely for still caring about the canonical plot, but the crack is a lot more canon-flavored than it was circa 2008, let me tell you. I have a perpetually-unfinished symphony of Death Note poetry on my hard drive (Light's left wrist being the longest-running motif).

I am an artist who wishes she could draw from her imagination instead of getting stuck with the Betty Edwards formula forever and anon. You can't make webcomics drawing from life! Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse flavors the way I live my entire life, with the exception of the dishes currently accumulating grime in my sink. I may be a towering slob at home, but I can't see litter on the path and just leave it there, and the same goes for the greater wrongs.

I'm a stammerer, a forgetter of faces and a chronic loser of small, portable things. With 3G flip phones on their way to extinction, this last is becoming a serious problem at the moment.

The Wednesday before last, I became engaged to be married to the most effortlessly charitable guy, and the most gentlemanly single guy, I've known in my life. I don't really expect excitement from the Internet crowd, but I have got to shout it from the rooftops now that you've gone and encouraged me.

#dn meetup

[mikami]

While we're on anime versus manga, what do you think of Light's comparative deaths? I cannot for the life of me decide which of them ought to be the definitive version.

Unsurprisingly, I prefer the manga death by a long shot, haha.

The anime death is very pretty and I do get really emotional every time I watch Light run for his life, but ultimately I think it trades substance for aesthetics.

On the solely logistic level, it’s pretty hard for me to believe that Light (who gets shot more in the anime than the manga) can actually run a marathon in his state - and somehow shake the four uninjured men pursuing him. This is, of course, very petty, and irl logic can often be set aside for the sake of story.

On a story level, I just think the anime’s actual death is fairly… unimpressive?

It’s just unremarkable on every level to me. Light doesn’t actually know he’s dying (he has no awareness of Ryuk being his killer) and he gets to pass away more peacefully and slowly than any other person who’s ever had a heart attack on this show. He just… fades out. It looks pretty but as a character moment, it’s not really memorable. The most exciting thing going on is him hallucinating L, but that opens a whole other can of worms.

Light sees L and that’s specifically when he starts closing his eyes. The anime here mirrors L’s anime death by giving Light, too, a degree of acceptance for his defeat. The anime emphasizes “L vs Light” much more heavily than the manga and turns it into the core of the story. If that’s your cup of tea, I see how that makes the anime ending more appealing. For me it kind of cheapens down both characters to view them as these fated enemies destined to consume one another… Like that’s such a cookie cutter nemesis plotline that happens in media really commonly. And like, it can be good? But trading a less generic plotline from the manga for a very common one in the anime feels like a downgrade.

Light’s manga death meanwhile is probably in my top three of favourite scenes for how much it stands out with how ugly it allows his death to be. I cannot think of another anime or manga that portrays the death of its protagonist this raw and completely unaesthetically. Light’s death is horrid. That’s why it’s amazing.

We get to see our composed and manipulative main character reduced to the most primal fear and panic of wanting to keep on living. There is no acceptance here, there is only the absolute certainty of death and the sheer horror it evokes. Even if you’ve never seen Light as sympathetic, I think it is hard to watch him beg for his life and not feel for this most basic of desires - to stay alive.

It’s raw, it’s ugly, it’s utterly karmic to have Light experience this same moment of certain death that he’s put so many people through… and it’s honest in its portrayal. There are no aesthetics. Even Light’s corpse looks ugly and undignified. This moment confronts with mortality head-on.

The scene also ties up the relationship that actually started the plot: Light & Ryuk. More heavily so by actually keeping in the scene that confirms there is neither heaven nor hell. The anime keeps it as a rule-card but most of the viewers never read it. They think Light gets to become a shinigami or all other kinds of nice and hopeful things. On every level, the anime plays it safe.

And I guess that sums up my feelings about the anime generally: it takes unique concepts and replaces them with more marketable common tropes, consistently.

#47gaslamps #answers #luna thinks

[13eyond13]

While we're on "Rem + Birth": why is it so much less believable that Beyond Birthday's mom WAS a shinigami? You'd think fertility was either out of the question or it wasn't, and yet

Haha, that’s a good point! If we’re ignoring the DN rules and letting the shinigami bang the humans then we should also consider the idea that B’s mom could’ve been the death god. Maybe Bob Birthday got busy with Nu or something like that, lmao

#though if thats the case #how would B's human mom have been tricked into thinking he was hers? #maybe he was just adopted #or maybe the shinigami mom passes as human #idk its never been my headcanon for B's origins lol #but i do like the fandom jokes #ask #47gaslamps #beyond birthday #p

[secretshinigami]

among friends, knowing foes

Author: @47gaslamps For: @paralllaxes Pairings/Characters: Naomi, the SPK, Mello, Takada, Mogi, implications of Naomi/Gevanni because apparently when I decided not to write for any ship I was confining myself to the ones where the two characters even coexist in canon Rating/Warnings: Rated T, warnings for manga-only aspects and high levels of keikaku Prompt: Naomi being with the SPK (with or without Raye is the author’s choice) Author’s notes: Did not elect to include Raye. An alternate universe in which a) Raye is alive and b) the SPK exists would have had me churning the variables until the end of time like one of those supercomputers in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

In his youthful glory days, it was said that the great detective James McParland had had to train himself, on his life, never to react to the sound of his own name. And so it was with Shoko.

Long before the formation of the SPK, when Shoko (despite her ever-precarious position as an FBI agent) was in effect little more than a crank letter writer to key figures in the Hoope administration – submitting unasked-for analyses of the events surrounding the week- or weeks-long periods known as Kira’s “reposes,” or the latency of Kira’s judgments in regions such as Israel or Ethiopia; continually re-emphasizing the probability that the investigation in Japan was not being conducted by the L she had personally worked with; never sure, until last March when Director Mason approached her in person, that anyone was even bothering to look at the byline – “Naomi Misora” had already become a bland ambient phrase that failed to pique any particular attention even when her own mother used it. And she was not speaking to her mother, of late.

But Shoko Maki, unlike McParland, had the great good fortune to have erased her own name in order to live among allies and friends – even now, in the darkest hour the SPK had ever faced.

They had faced death upon death. They were, if you believed in the weight of presidential executive orders, disbanded. But here they were, alive, still united without a second thought, in a safehouse built small enough that Shoko felt, for the first time, that the five of them could properly breathe.

She had to admire Near’s preparation, she thought, watching Rester unbuckle him from the body armor. Near had thoroughly put her off at first, a boy who put on a hermetically sealed childishness like a permanent costume, whose eyes followed an elusive train of thought as though it were a gnat drifting across the room – the first chance she had to have a private word with the boy, it was unfortunate how little the details of his origins surprised her – but (she could not say this for Mello) Wammy’s House had evidently become more habitable by the time Near was entered into the rolls. He knew his own weaknesses, he genuinely respected the strengths of his colleagues, and he held to a strange honor that Shoko could not quite grasp, but could view with a dim awe.

The way he’d danced about the NPA ever since their “temporary alliance” with Kira, delicately and laboriously circling in and in, going direct for the throat of the matter only because he realized it might be his last communication on earth…

Above all, he prepared in advance: he had kept in reserve a safehouse, and a gallery of heavy-duty masked NYPD suits (enough to outfit all the original SPK, Shoko was sure, though time had been too pressing to make a count), and a vault filled with bales of hundred-dollar bills, and an industrial fan in the penthouse which he’d thought to reserve for the local propagation of vital information, and lacking any of those four elements, the SPK would almost certainly have taken losses, and the most likely loss of all would have been Near.

In that case, they would have been finished. Kira’s reign would be without challenge. Shoko knew that, now – although she imagined she would have been a lot less inclined to know it in the actual event of Near’s death. She didn’t act in rational self-interest. No one did.

As Rester began to bring the backup data bank back to life, she turned her attention back to the hostage, Kanzo Mogi. All she really knew about the man, even now, was his stolid, stubborn loyalty to the second L. The precise nature of that loyalty was not quite a resolved question. But perversely, she found her guard on him more relaxed now than she had before the strike on headquarters.

Shoko entertained no foolish notion that Mogi’s arrival had directly preceded Demegawa’s discovery of their location by sheer happenstance. That would be tantamount to drawing an insurmountable wall between Kira’s right hand and his left. No one of any sense, no one, could make that mistake. Yet if Mogi were loyal to Kira, the luster of that loyalty couldn’t but be dimmed by the knowledge that Kira had considered his life expendable.

But he might, of course, be controlled by Kira. And if not, you couldn’t assume rational self-interest. If Mogi tried anything, Shoko had to be ready for action.

Besides, the more concentration she brought to bear on Mogi, the less she could afford for the man taking guard beside her.

There was no getting around the fact of Stephen Gevanni. Stephen Gevanni, the CIA agent with the indelible trace of an English accent, whose work ethic bloomed into frightening levels of efficiency as it approached the last minute, who had told her that he had chosen to change his name and join the CIA while employed in the booming tech district of Southampton, smiling shyly as though it explained everything (and, with a little consideration for the character of the hardware and software designed there and the proximity of the city to Winchester, Shoko had to admit it explained a lot)…

…but however she got to know him, there was no getting around it: he looked a good deal like an old colleague who had carried a flame for her, a flame that had even been a spark in her own heart for a fleeting moment. A shade of the skin, the slightest shifts in the angles of the eye or the jaw, were all that distinguished his face from that of Raye Penber.

Raye had been a good man, who had always meant what was best for her. But she had soon realized that his conception of what was best – for her or for anyone – was a life fitted, as much as possible, to whatever was safest and most routine. The extraordinary effort sometimes needed to apprehend a suspect, the gratuitous thrill of a motorcycle ride, anything that went either above or beyond the strictest call of duty: these things, in Raye’s eyes, were reducible to the level of needless hazard involved.

In itself, it had been one of those unfortunate and brief flirtations that simply happened in life, a mood that came and went and scarcely left a trace. But in the black ink of the newspaper of that first December, Raye’s mark on her life had been made indelible. He had been a good man. To see his name in the list of the dead was to know, once and for all, what Kira was.

Gevanni was, in reality, very unlike him. Gevanni was far from a fearless man, but he did his utmost in spite of it. He had a secret fondness for frippery, especially in the realm of suits, which he preferred stitched by his own hand. If it came to a fight (whatever they might lead Kanzo Mogi to believe), Gevanni did not stand a chance. And, though he had been nothing but silent on the subject, Shoko was sure that some of his special skills had been refined while on the wrong side of the law.

In short, Stephen Gevanni was admirable and imperfect and compelling, a man who had survived the worst and stood with her shoulder to shoulder as the last bulwark against Kira, and there was a part of her that could not look at his face without thinking how she might mourn his death.

Of the SPK (a phrase precisely equivalent to “of the whole world”, these past few months), only Halle Lidner had heard any of this: some hours after President Sairas’s surrender, these sentiments had spilled over into their regular sparring session. Lidner won so easily she couldn’t but ask why, and Shoko, for her part, couldn’t but tell. For Lidner’s ears only. She did at times ponder, though. Perhaps, should they turn out triumphant…

Shoko shook herself out of the very reverie she had just resolved to avoid, and turned her attention back to Mogi. It was because of him that this silence prevailed around the safehouse, and most particularly the part of the silence that was hers, keeping from the words that most desperately needed to be said.

The words that Lidner, standing in point position beside the door, desperately needed to hear.

To assume rational self-interest was sometimes nothing short of foolish.

—-

It took longer than Shoko expected. But the results with the NPA were well worth the wait, and an hour after they saw Mogi off, and Aizawa, relaxation began to take hold again. Rester and Gevanni would take some time before they could compile for analysis all unique news footage of the trap they had just escaped from, Near had curled to sleep in one of the armchairs, and Shoko found her opening.

She approached Lidner almost casually. Though she would speak nothing but the truth, she had had time to consider her delivery with care.

“This new HQ makes a good change of scene, don’t you think?”

Lidner laughed. “I’m surprised you think so, Maki. Isn’t that motorcycle of yours still in the underground garage?”

In all the excitement, the last thing on her mind was her Kawasaki. But yes, of course it was there. Left to the first looter who might come back and claim it, along with all the other disused vehicles…

“But you think so too, don’t you, Lidner,” said Shoko, glancing toward the ground. “You don’t half expect…” She left the sentence hanging.

“Expect…?”

“To hear Powers babbling every last idea that comes to mind, or Mason holding forth with one of those gusts of authoritative phrases as though he’s really in charge. Or to smell one of Gardner’s furtive cigarettes. You know… all that.”

Lidner did not answer, but did close her eyes as though formulating one.

After a moment, Shoko said: “Mogi’s phone had a GPS tracker. That’s what has to have done it, right?”

Jarred out of her line of thought, Lidner only blinked and said, “Probably.”

“And it didn’t occur to anyone to confiscate his devices on his way to New York,” said Shoko flatly. “Knowing he was working with Kira.”

“The plan required his cell phone,” Lidner reminded her.

“Not necessarily.” Shoko looked her dead in the eye. “Not if Mello could have been in the main data room right along with us.”

“You know that would never happen, Maki,” said Lidner, her voice coming across with much less strength than her face. She was catching on. “Some passcodes are one use only.”

“Yes. We determined it would never happen, because his presence posed a threat. A threat that the SPK could easily neutralize. But he recognized our desire for distance. Near’s desire for reconciliation. And Kira’s desire to eliminate the SPK.”

A long silence.

“And yet,” said Lidner at last, “we’re alive. And in a stronger position than ever before.”

“You think he intended to fail.”

“It was a blow against Kira,” said Lidner, her confidence waxing again. “Mello doesn’t have much in the way of personal resources, these days, but I can guarantee you he would be glad to strike at Kira any way he can.”

Excepting the final strike, of course, if it were done by anyone but himself. There was no need to bother voicing something so obvious, though.

“What do you think are the chances that Kira intended to fail?”

“No chance at all,” agreed Lidner at once, “but Mello had something that Kira lacked.”

Shoko waited for elaboration.

“Ratt’s information.” Lidner, to her credit, offered these words a bit gingerly.

“I don’t suppose he’s told you what that information entailed?” said Shoko coldly. “Apart from the true identities of thirty-four of our colleagues?”

“Of course not,” she snapped. “But I do know that every one of the preparations that saved us was in place when Ratt was still with us. If nothing else, he certainly would have talked about the cash in the vault. And you remember he had access to the vault with the skyscraper’s blueprints?”

Yes. Shoko remembered. But their escape had still been far from a sure thing. “We backed Kira into a corner. Mello benefits. I’ll grant you that. If we were dragged out and exposed to the cameras… that would also benefit Mello.“

“It wouldn’t.”

“No,” agreed Shoko. “But this is a man who literally blew himself up. He’s probably up to figuratively shooting himself in the foot.”

She turned to where Near lay sleeping, curled below the screens where Demegawa screamed silently into Gevanni’s headset that they be given as a sacrifice to Kira, and she looked back on Lidner with pity and compassion.

“Why are you so eager to call him an ally? You tell him all we know about Kira, you block me from tackling him to the ground the instant he lets his guard down, and now you defend him…”

Lidner was matter-of-fact. “If you’d tackled him to the ground, that would have been a blow to his pride he’d never forgive.”

“Considering what a blow to his pride our existence is, I suppose I don’t want to see what it would be like if he didn’t forgive us.”

Lidner sighed, drew herself up an office chair and sat. “Listen, Maki. I do have an answer to your question.”

She paused a moment, and this time, Shoko took time to sit herself, and let Lidner get her thoughts together. If either of them became intransigent now, no good would come of it.

“During the arrest of Kyosuke Higuchi. Near’s source said the two shots that took out Higuchi’s front tire, and blasted the gun from his hand, came from a private helicopter. A helicopter that had been on the scene prior to the arrival of the police blockade.”

Shoko was clearly supposed to grasp something here, but she was lost.

“Well? Don’t you think it was L in that helicopter?”

“I don’t think so, actually,” said Shoko thoughtfully. “You need good posture to fire with that kind of accuracy from a distance.”

“I–” Lidner looked up, flabbergasted. “Are you telling me you know what the original L’s posture was like?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I met him. Only once, but–”

“What happened?” asked Lidner eagerly.

Shoko flushed dimly, wishing she had a better story. “He attacked me. I kicked him down a flight of stairs. I gather it was supposed to be some sort of test.”

“There!” whispered Lidner (Near had just snorted in his sleep). “That’s just what I mean to say! And the helicopter– if it wasn’t L, it was someone acting on L’s orders. Watari, or… well, it wasn’t anyone involved in the raid on Mello’s fortress, or he would never have had a chance to use the detonator. A crack shot, identity unknown. But that’s not the point. Is that an order Near would ever give?”

“No,” Shoko allowed. “But wasn’t this supposed to be your argument to justify Mello? Mello would just have blown Higuchi’s head clean off.”

“You say that like it would be a problem,” muttered Lidner bitterly. “But– I mean, you’re right. Of course you are. Mello is built to shoot first and ask questions later. But Near– he’s built more like your FBI man. He asks questions, and asks more questions, and only at the very last resort can he bring himself to shoot. If Mello isn’t there to shoot on his behalf, maybe… maybe he won’t see the last resort coming.”

Shoko felt the blood drain from her face, and her hands become vises around her armrests. To dredge up her private confidence about Raye, just for the sake of winning an argument that needed to be lost–

“There’s another possibility,” Shoko said, levelly, as though at a remove from her own body. “With regard to the helicopter. It might have been Kira taking those shots.”

She took a deep and shaking breath.

“We know that, at some point, Kira took L’s place. We know L was dead a week after that arrest. We don’t know how either of these things came to pass, but there is one way it might have come about. L might have found Kira useful. A crack shot, perhaps, and almost certainly a top-notch thinker… and what did it matter that he was a known murderer, if they were aligned in the same cause?”

Lidner stood and turned away, her eyes shut tight. She had no answer.

—-

The rift between Lidner and Shoko, though convenient for their cover, remained, very real, until the arrival of the plastic molding kit.

Rester had suggested (with all due respect, of course, and the edge in the voice that invariably came with the phrase) that all these special-order toys, like Mello’s chocolate trucks, posed a security risk, especially the Lego dolls ordered to resemble Kiyomi Takada and Light Yagami. Near – and Shoko was not sure this was an exaggeration – would sooner die than give up a chance to use toys as visual aids, but the kit was a reasonable compromise.

And so, in the lull before Gevanni’s last big operation, Rester, Halle and Shoko (but not Gevanni; tailing Mikami was always top priority) took one of Takada’s days off to watch Near craft the toys he thought he might need in the coming days. Mostly, what he thought he needed turned out to be soft plastic finger puppets. The SPK and the NPA were a bit caricatured, Near included. Mello, Misa, Takada and Mikami were caricatured to the point of political cartoon. And the portrayal of Kira, in one of Near’s strokes of sheer childish spite, was simply a cut-rate Hamburglar.

“But what on earth is this?” said Shoko, holding up a just-cooled mask in perplexity. It had a round face, blue matted hair, puffy bulging eyes, and weirdly puckered lips. “I can certainly understand wearing a mask to meet the second L, but why this particular mask?”

“I believe it’s a face Light Yagami will recognize.”

Halle Lidner looked from Near to Shoko, and then from Shoko to Near again, with increasing incredulity. “Near. Am I to gather that you have never actually met L?”

Near’s mouth turned up toward a cheek in irritation. “No, actually. I was merely operating on reliable and corroborated description. Pale skin the same color as his lips, dark unkempt hair, large eyes with deep shadows underneath. Is that not all correct?”

“How is it possible that L’s heir never met L?” Shoko demanded.

Near sighed and flopped back-first onto the floor, staring up at the ceiling. “In point of fact, it was because I was L’s heir. To be correct: one of the two. It was maybe a year before the Kira case that he paid a personal visit to Wammy’s House. Everyone went out to meet him, Mello included – it was a bigger event than three Christmases put together – but as for me, I stayed behind. I was sure he would want to speak with me privately, and if not, he would take the extra trouble anyway. Turned out, he was equally stubborn in passively drawing me out. Which made it a losing battle on my part. He left just as scheduled, and I had to get all the details second-hand.”

His eyes rested on Shoko. “But I gather you can set me straight. The records do say you once worked with L.” He rolled back into his regular crouch and smiled in that gooey way that always meant mischief. “All right. Let’s do this properly. But for future reference, Maki, there are some work history details you really ought to mention to your employers.”

Halle laughed.

—-

Taking up half Takada’s personal security detail had seemed like a good idea at the time, but in retrospect it was a waste of limited manpower. Takada was careful enough about her private communications that even her most trusted bodyguards never accompanied her inside her apartment suite; the only thing that proved of interest about her schedule otherwise was that she was always in meetings at one o'clock on Thursdays; and all that remained was to help accost the hostile riffraff a beautiful and politically outspoken celebrity inevitably accumulated.

The riffraff surrounding Miss Takada did not generally survive being accosted.

But her evening escort was mercifully without event, and all that remained was to smilingly endure the nine-o’-clock news. Tomorrow, if Mikami kept writing (Shoko was reminded that she and Halle weren’t the only SPK members complicit in Kira’s crimes at this moment), Gevanni would give the go-ahead to set the meeting. So much had been set in stone, so far in advance, and yet there were loose ends that no one had even considered tying up. Mello, lovingly immortalized though he was as Chucky the Living Doll, was still at large, and even the precise substance of these secret communications with Mikami Teru and Light Yagami…

“Good-evening-miss-takada,” mumbled the receptionist automatically as they passed. Megumi Kato, her name was. The epitome of a seat-warmer. She did what was plainly required of her, and then checked out. Not an option for an attache of Shoko’s prestige, unfortunately. A bodyguard had to take the initiative.

Yes. She did have to take the initiative. And Megumi Kato was her ticket to doing so.

During the evening broadcast, Shoko wrote a hasty notice, and, when she was sure Kato wasn’t really listening, delivered it to her and, without unnecessarily perking her ears by mentioning Takada’s name, told her to be sure to pass it along. By 10:05, the customary “good-night-miss-takada” assured her all was indeed well.

The following evening, with escort duty falling to one of the honest bodyguards, Shoko Maki arrived at Takada’s home alongside Gevanni, who was dressed as a professional locksmith. (Rester could tail Mikami for a day. He couldn’t confirm he was still writing, but that meant only twenty-four more hours before plans solidified beyond repair. Besides, she remembered with a squirm, Shoko’s preparations had really left Near no choice.)

Once inside, just as she had outlined in the note she left with Kato, she set out to make a complete security inventory of Takada’s living quarters. The points of entry (the windows were sealed and bulletproof, but the door, by the very fact that the search could be carried out, needed biometric scanners). The microphones and security cameras (all confirmed as NHN property, but numbered just in case). Any point at which a person might lie in hiding or a bomb might be placed to greatest effect. She’d borrowed Gevanni’s minicamera for documentation purposes. On occasion, she needed to call him over to get another lock. For the benefit of the cameras, she carried herself with brusque efficiency, punctuated only by the occasional comment and the click of the camera.

And when Gevanni unlocked the top left desk drawer and they both saw the sheaf of lined paper coated in names – perhaps she had visibly hesitated, or perhaps time had simply hung suspended for a moment – the photograph was made completely without comment, and the inventory went on.

They re-armed all the locks, proceeded out of the complex, and then out of the building. Shoko took one deep drag of the January air, and suddenly found her head swimming, the grey evening turning dark and green, and she fell to her knees into the brittle dead grass.

“We never did find those hotel notepads,” Gevanni observed wryly, from somewhere high above.

She laughed an unreasonable length over that, and just when she thought it was over, the fit took her again.

At long last she looked up through her tears into the haunting face of Stephen Gevanni. He was visibly sweating, propping himself up against the exterior wall for support.

“Let’s call headquarters,” she suggested.

#fanfiction #submission #death note #Naomi Misora #SPK #Mello #Kiyomi Takada #Kanzo Mogi #NaomixGevanni #47gaslamps #paralllaxes #ratings: t #Demegawa-chan's Sakura TV Special 2019