Background

Although I never knew my father he is in a lot of ways responsible for a lot of the direction in my life. I have vague memories of meeting him once, on my 6th birthday when he turned up out of the blue to give me my birthday present, Choki, at the time an 8 week old Arden Hound (yes we know the breed doesn’t exist, but that’s what breed he said it was, of that my mother is very sure). It was a birthday present my mother definitely did not approve of. Neither did she approve of his assistance that I was to be enrolled in Martial Arts classes, but enrolled I was – even now young girls doing martial arts is still frowned upon, although more are taking up self-defence classes of their own accord when they reach their teens.

The other 2 events which significantly shaped the direction of my life were the assault and rape of my best friend Eri Asada when she was 14 and the Tohoku Earthquake in March 2011.

Until the assault on Eri I had no real direction or idea what I really wanted to do in life – yes I wanted a career and maybe in the long distant future a family but that would mean an end to any career I chose and having to play second fiddle to a potential future husband.

I had always enjoyed walking, especially with Choki on which subject I shall return to later, and swimming, and had actually been in the baths at the time the attack occurred. Although I enjoyed swimming I had decided that I didn’t want to be a swimmer, and had deliberately and consciously stopped trying 2 years previously when I’d been force to take part in the National Team trials, my swimming times when I tried already significantly better than my nearest rival. It was about that time that I had started to consider that perhaps like Choki I was “Unusual”.

I had also since my sixth birthday attended the local Aikido school, a traditional school that followed the original tenants of Morihei Ueshiba. The traditional style at that time suited me fine. I didn’t have to compete and there was no compulsion to excel. As long as I made progress I could proceed at my own rate and I did slowly, such that by the time of the assault I was 2 years behind my peers.

The assault changed my perspectives greatly. After I found Eri, naked bruised, bleeding and traumatised, and witnessed the profound impact it had on both her and her family I vowed I would never be a victim of such an attack. Now with determination, and somewhat to both my instructors and my surprise I supressed and overtook my peers in less than six months but now I felt there was something missing. It took me a couple of months but I eventually found a Shadokan Aikido school, a form of Aikido that emphasises competitive combat. My initial classes were a disaster and I very nearly gave up. Thankfully I didn’t and within a year had very much surpassed my previous accomplishments. The only downside to the Shadokan form is that it places very much less emphasis on the spiritual aspects of the martial arts, so after 6 months I returned to my old school to further this aspect. I have been doing both ever since, but it is the spiritual form that has led to the most interesting discoveries in the last 12 months. [GM Note: Chi Powers]

The other impact was that I now knew what I wanted to do as my future career.. I wanted to be a Police Inspector, and for that I really needed to go to University and study Law. I also determined that a good foundation in science would prove invaluable and thus my Junior High School year subjects were picked. I suppose now I should return to the subject of Choki, my very unusual dog, as were the circumstances of his arrival. It is pretty much the only thing I have a clear memory of from my child hood and the only clear image of my father, as by that point we were living on our own, my mother running the Ryokan as she has done for as long as I can remember, although after the Tsunami it has been refurbished and very much modernised.

Anyway on that afternoon of my sixth birthday my father had turned up completely out of the blue. With him he had a small puppy, the runt of the litter according to him. My mother had called me and insisted I meet him, so as a dutiful child I did so. He had called me by name and said “Choki meet Natsuki, Natsuki meet Choki. Natsuki look deeply into Choki’s eyes”, and I had done so. My head swam and I could hear strange thoughts and feel strange feelings and I was frightened and I could see myself. I had broken eye contact then, but I still felt frightened, all this was too new and very different from the forest where I was born and where I was raised amongst my 8 brothers and sisters. It took me a little while before I realised these were not my feelings, I was feeling what Choki was feeling. “It’ll be alright Choki, I’ll take care of you” I heard myself saying as I gingerly picked him up. “Good Girl” my father had said, “You two take care of one another. I’ll return in a few years and take you both the Arden.” He had left then. I had asked my mother about Arden. She said it was a magical mystical place but a frightening one. She’d only been there once for a few weeks then Ren had insisted they return here. He’d stayed a few months, organised and financed the purchase of the Ryokan, and then left. That had been the last time she’d seen him. He hadn’t been happy here, even with the magnificent landscapes that we enjoy.

Had I been older I would have realised then that Choki was considerably different to a normal dog, but that realisation took several years and several incidents where we walked through alien landscapes. It wasn’t until shortly before the assault on Eri that I finally grasped some of the concepts and thoughts that Choki projected into my mind as we walked, thoughts of parallel worlds and realities. It was shortly after I grasped these that he really proved the point and showed me some really interesting sights.[GM Note: Shadow Path Ability – only well-known shadow is Natsuki’s native Earth]

How he does this I don’t know even to this day, but his other capabilities didn’t really come to light until the 11th March 2011. However, we have to go back to the early hours of 9th March when he woke the whole house at 02:46am which is about a minute after the 7.3 magnitude earth quake occurred 32km off shore on almost the same latitude as Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, Honshu(Japan), my home city. For the next 2 days he refused to settle, barking and jumping on people initially every several minutes and then once an hour or so. Of course in hindsight it is easy to see why, each of his “episodes” occurring about 1 minute after each foreshock. By the morning of the 11th my mother was exhausted and I was tired but coping, although not in a fit state to go to school.

For those who survived the quake that day it is something we will never forget. It started normally enough a little vibration and gentle shaking, small things vibrating across tables and shelves and falling off. Within a minute we knew this was not normal. It was difficult to stand, windows and screen started to crack and break, lights swung and broke. Then the power went out. Strangely Choki was silent, standing over my mother as she tried to shelter from falling timber and plaster.

It took like what seemed an eternity for the shaking to stop but records show it lasted 6 minutes. Choki was strangely silent. I cleared my mind and concentrated. [GM Note: Choki has a psychic connection to Hatsuki. If he is within Psyche:Perception miles and Hatsuki concentrates then she sees, feels, and senses what he does. Each Shadow difference counts as an extra mile. They can also exchange limited concepts as Choki has a vocabulary of about 250 words he fully understands the meaning of, including amongst others Tsunami, drowning, and swimming.]. Rather than the usual sensation of enjoyment there was a dark foreboding. Something really terrible was about to happen and we were right in the path of it. I shouted to my mother to gather valuables and food and warm clothing, and set about doing the same. Choki paced violently. He wanted us to be away from here. Then we heard shouting.. “Tsunami, Tsunami, Take Shelter”. The sirens had obviously failed. Grabbing what we could we made our way up the road to our designated refuge site. Thankfully for us our designated refuge is 200m above sea level. People arrived much as we did, some better prepared than others. As more people arrived we turned our attention to the sea, watching in horror as the level fell and then started to surge. From our vantage we could see people, firemen most likely struggling to close the sea gates in the wall. Then the water arrived, rushing over the walls as if they weren’t there, covering them so they vanished from view, along with everything below the 50m line along the shore; trees, boats, emergency vehicles, their occupants, and those unfortunate firemen.

The problem with a Tsunami of this magnitude is that the wave does not just arrive and vanish. The water stays for hours and surges and pulses, slowly subsiding over several hours.With the passing of the surge and backwash of the initial wave we surged off the hill in a vain attempt that we may rescue those the wave washed away. It was in those hours where Choki demonstrated exactly how unusual he is, cars and light vans were either just pushed aside or opened like a tin can with a slash of his claws or a wrench of his jaws, likewise suffered the fate of most timber debris. As the light faded we were forced to retreat to the inn, which although without power was still mostly standing. So it was we spent our first night in the cold, aftershocks dislodging loose plaster, brickwork, and masonry.

It would be nearly 72 hours after the quake before we were evacuated to refuge centres further inland, and over 5 months before we could return home, primarily due to lack of electricity and working water and sewage.

My return home was for me very short lived, not due to the state of the inn but due to the fact that in September 2011 I enrolled at Iwate University as an undergraduate at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences studying Social and Environmental Systems Majoring in Law. This meant leaving home and moving to Morika City. My initial intention was to leave Choki at home with my mother, but like a lot of things Choki has his own ideas. The authorities do not like it but their efforts in attempting to capture or dissuade him provide futile and by Christmas of 2011 they had given up, there are much more important things than attempting to chase a dog that can vanish into a parallel world taking those chasing him with him and then re-appear a few hours later. In most cases I was able to persuade him to fetch his pursuers a few days later.. in most cases alive.