Tonbeau Nuvenberg clapped her hands together, hands like a pair of fat lotus flowers. “Are the preparations ready?”
“Yes,” the doll girl answered crisply.
She was in a corner of the forty-by-forty foot room, backing away from a rugged-looking cylinder studded with large rivets. A dynamo.
The brick walls were lined with shelves stacked with medicines and elixirs, guides to the earthly and transcendental realms, atlases of human physiology. Dried plants and roots dangled from the ceiling on cords, along with the antique lighting fixtures. From the lack of windows and the dank claustrophobic atmosphere, they must be in an underground vault.
In the center of the room was a rollaway table. A wooden box was on the table, the item that Mayor Kajiwara brought them.
Tonbeau had tried everything she could think of to break the seal. Now with the help of the doll girl, she was resorting to the last desperate measure she could think of.
Namely—
“Injecting the Akashic Records.”
She pulled down on the rusty lever rising out of the floor. The chains coiled beneath the lever were wrapped around that which her older sister, Galeen Nuvenberg, had sealed away.
Knowing there were no other means, she had swept aside her older sister’s magical wards in under an hour. An hour later she was getting ready the means to control the Akashic Records.
The generator gave off a low hum.
By “injection,” nothing in fact tied together the wooden box and the outside world. But two pairs of eyes—one filled with avarice, the other with reason—could feel the currents flowing toward the box.
“Do you know when to stop?” the doll girl asked.
“Well.”
“Are you intending to inject an infinite amount?”
“If that’s what it takes. That loathsome lid is gonna open sooner or later.”
“Jealousy and envy are at the root of your being.”
“Aw, shut it. Ah, the wind.”
The hair of both of them wafted backwards.
“A gentle breeze. A wonderful breeze. These are the currents of the universe.”
“The draft circling the repository of the transcript. How many others have felt its touch, I wonder?”
“What in the world?” The doll girl stared at Tonbeau.
“What are you looking at?”
“You have returned to your younger self. You were quite pretty.”
The ruddy cheeks of a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl reflected in her blue eyes. Her braided hair hung down to her waist. She was wearing a one-piece dress, pink flowers on white fabric.
“You’re turning into your raw materials too. Ah, don’t look down.”
The doll glanced down at her right hand. Seeing the bright red fluid circulating through glass tubes twined around brass bones, she gasped softly and closed her eyes.
“It seems that our bodies themselves are reading through the records of the past. Any number of wizards, warlocks and my big sister have done the same. The problem is the future.”
“The lid has never been removed in the past, then?”
“Only a very powerful sorcerer could have erected such powerful defenses.”
“With four thousand years of Chinese history at his disposal, Kikiou must have known of the Akashic Records and when they were made.”
“No.” The five-year-old child shook her head. “He wouldn’t have. Neither would have we.”
“When you talk like that, you remind me of my mistress.”
“Thank you,” she said with an unusual gravity. Tonbeau’s voice didn’t come from human vocal cords. It wasn’t even a “voice.” The body projecting it had lost its human form and turned into a lump of protoplasm. The doll girl herself had reverted to an unformed nothingness.
Despite having lost their forms and all their senses, together with this underground room, their individual existences still clearly remained. They had gone back to the beginning.
“I understand everything. Everything and all at once.” There was fear and trembling in the doll girl’s “voice.”
“You’ll forget it all soon enough,” Tonbeau answered her. “No one can bear the full knowledge of all there is. And so we make as much of life as we can. Now that we have arrived, expand your consciousness wider. See the future when that box is opened.”
“Yes.”
What had happened to these two? This was the result of injecting the Akashic Records. The energy spanning all dimensions in the universe stabilized its very structures, and thereby served as a record book upon which the entire history of creation was inscribed.
The entire history. The past and the future. Every and all possible futures. The lid of the box—that had not been opened in eons in this universe—had been opened in an infinite number of others.
Tonbeau Nuvenberg and the doll girl only had to pick one among those infinite others and apply it to the box in this one.
“I have found it.” The doll girl’s voice echoed from within the distant chaos. “I will now superimpose that reality.”
“Take care. Not even my big sister touched these mysteries. A most serious undertaking. Edgar Cayce read but a smattering, and only enough to heal the sick, and even those skills retrograded to the material levels of this world. Nevertheless, and because of that, he was able to completely fulfill his divine calling.”
“We can only pray that the same may be said of us.”
“Yeah. Pray on. No, let’s get it done!” Tonbeau’s “voice” filled with her customary arrogance.
“Here it comes!”
“Go for it!”
Within the shapeless nothingness, something was “chosen.”
And in that moment—