Brainwash Serpents Hoodoo

He could admit that to himself, at least. Stanley had always come though, always won, and yet there had been no sign of him for ages. No radio chatter, no distant smoke, no odd radar ping that might be a large ship, nothing. The Perseus was by all accounts a well made ship. However, while Brody and the team Xeno led building White Castle were excellent with metal parts, could Stan’s strike team properly maintain a wooden ship built and rebuilt to purpose with no standardized parts according to designs that must have been as much from Ryusui and Kaseki as Senku? Some quick patch they planned to fix properly when the conflict was over may have worn out, or maybe the ship encountered a bad storm. Perhaps the aircraft carrier design, which was an amazingly quick remodel, wasn’t as sea worthy as the original design or had quirks only the original owners knew of that made going around Argentina far more difficult than expected. They could have hit an iceberg while rounding Cape Horn too far out to sea or else grounded the ship by cutting too close to shore in their haste. Leonard could make a new radio so long as he could find or keep the existing crystal necessary for it’s operation, but Xeno didn’t think anyone in Stanley’s squad knew the chemistry required to make a new one nor the geology required to find suitable natural galena crystals. Any diagrams or instructions left on the ship to aid repairs would be illegible, since Xeno was the only American who knew any Japanese. Due to the reduced literacy of the stone age members of the crew some essentials may be documented with pictographs, but if something serious broke could anyone in Stanley’s strike team fix a ship like that? Kohaku wrote a note for Senku early one morning and Senku had needed assistance figuring out which words the pictographs represented - and then the actual message was the first syllable of each picture similar to how Japanese kanji worked. Francois had it half correct and Mr. Asagiri was needed for the remainder. Without verbal clarification or any reference materials to aid translation, and given that the people born in this century took wild liberties with the concept of written language, would any pictographs Stan and his team found on the ship be coherent enough to bridge both the cultural gaps as well as the language barrier?

Stanley wasn’t normally sloppy, but he’d lost several times to Senku and he did get into his feelings when holding a grudge or feeling cheated. That’s how they’d ended up arrested for shooting a football out of the air with one of Xeno’s railguns. This time, Stan had failed to kill Senku with his sniper rifle. He’d had to take the bait in Panama, giving Senku’s team a greater lead. He’d failed to stop them on the beach when they switched to motorcycles. He’d failed to find them in Araxa. After so long, Xeno had to assume he’d failed to triangulate the few radio broadcasts Senku had sent out since building their fort, and had possibly gotten himself lost for a time in the rainforest. Stanley may even have missed them and gone too far north.

There was a working Medusa in California. Maybe Stanley had gone back for it? It would be a tactical advantage, but the delay isn’t something Stanley would accept under any circumstance unless he knew where they were but couldn’t approach for some reason. Xeno didn’t like that thought much better than Stanley and his crew being shipwrecked without a working radio.

As the months passed, there really wasn’t anything Senku and his group could do but continue on with their plans. The original plans, from before they kidnapped Xeno. Mining operations were started, locals were revived, and while they were on guard in case Stanley attacked them the focus slowly shifted to their Alloy City project. Even Xeno’s focus shifted. It didn’t happen quickly, but the process had begun all the way back when Gen handed Xeno a knife so he could learn how to collect the sap from rubber trees.

Senku’s disinterest in politics reveled itself to Xeno in momentary flashes before the epiphany finally washed over him 127 days into Xeno’s captivity. Senku hadn’t been dismissing his logic or challenging his reasoning back in 2018, he’d been dismissing the topic as uninteresting and expressing that he had no natural aptitude nor interest in politics. Senku still didn’t. That wouldn’t make any sense if he was the leader of a nation, but Senku was not the leader of a nation. Gen hadn’t lied, he’d merely twisted things to give Xeno what he wanted to hear after Xeno disregarded his more honest initial answers as too vague. They really weren’t pirates, colonists, raiders, or conquerors. They really were just explorers who interpreted the corn in the river as a distress signal. Roppongi Hills, Ishigami Village, Soyuz Island, and Neo Sacramento (Senku’s ridiculous “Corn City” was merely the project’s name, Xeno would not accept such silliness and doubted Brody had either,) were city-states that supported the Kingdom of Science.

The Kingdom of Science was not a government, it was a think tank. Senku was already living the dream of unlimited and unrestricted scientific inquiry that Xeno had planned to achieve by the end of ten years in White Castle. Senku wasn’t distracted by the day to day operation of his country, he had others to handle the mundane operations of establishing laws, minting currency, the organization of labor, and management of property. He was free to travel and had only bothered to secure the authority to carry out his plan to confront ‘Whyman’ about the global petrification. Gen was the one dealing with the politics related to the think tank: a diplomat and people manager that despite the language barrier was a deft hand at organizing the newly revived locals without a single whiff of friction.

Humanity had a common, almost certainly alien, enemy and Xeno had been too caught up in his own head to fully conceptualize the implications. It wasn’t just that the existing national borders were gone and there was a power vacuum for someone like Xeno to fill, there was a common goal to unify humanity that could be exploited. If he’d welcomed Senku and his people with open arms he’d be sitting in his castle right now, a king in his domain, with enough manpower to expand their reach up and down the western seaboard and begin international trade across the Pacific. If he took Senku up on an offer to come with him to set up the alloy processing here in Brazil his people would be installing a vassal government with outposts all along the coasts and possibly a colony in Panama with the goal of rebuilding the canal. Senku didn’t give a single shit if Xeno became the Supreme Ruler of the Americas, he didn’t care who ran the local government anywhere so long as they acknowledged the danger of another global petrification and supported the mission. Those too selfish to trade fairly and those who would halt progress were his enemies, and while he’d lost some battles he’d never lost a war.

This think tank of Senku’s solved problems and worked to create or restore patches of civilization, but didn’t plan to rule over any territory directly. The stories Xeno was told of Ibara and the Empire of Might were… Well, he was proud of his student, but the boy had certainly been through more than Xeno had assumed. Far more than Xeno had experienced in the relatively quiet and uneventful years he’d spent building his castle in a peaceful and abundant valley. Six months of isolation and spotty nutrition and no guarantee of ever seeing another human was a torture Xeno wasn’t sure he would have survived. Eventually the cliffs overlooking the sea would have started to look like a fair option, if Stanley had remained a statue. Xeno had been certain the statues that didn’t wake from nitric acid alone were brain dead, and Senku had not. That was likely the deciding factor that kept Senku going. He looked around and saw people he could save, people who would be grateful enough to help him, if only he could figure out how to wake them up. Xeno had seen only corpses.

Getting caught up with their interpersonal history on the trail they blazed through the Andes had been silly vapid gossip, but the two wars Senku fought and won were much more interesting to learn about during the time they spent building the fort. Gen downplayed his own utility, making it sound like he’d just been nearby while the others did the real work, but Senku wouldn’t have it. The young scientist explained how the demoralizing propaganda attack using Lilian’s song was Gen’s idea and went into detail about all the ways the mentalist assisted in the creation of the radio, tank, ship, scuba gear, and even a drone! Gen had been the only modern person around Senku for the best part of a year, providing moral support alongside strong and nimble fingers and solid people management skills. After that long slow war, Gen had been the one running one of the three Japanese city-states with Ukyo while Senku, Ryusui, Kohaku, and Chrome found the oil and other resources they needed to build the Perseus.

About three-quarters of the way though Senku’s corrections Xeno realized exactly why Luna couldn’t get Senku to take an interest in her. Xeno often saw himself in Senku, but this was more uncomfortable than usual. A young queer autistic person who was too busy with his hobbies to realize he was in love. Perhaps two of them, given how Mr. Asagiri seemed to hate shoes and walk around with t-rex arms, and always fidgeting with the things he kept up his sleeves! There was no doubt that if Gen was masking the masks would be nearly flawless, so it was impossible to tell if it was autism or just quirks with other explanations. The ‘five generals’ as Kohaku called them were all frightfully intelligent and highly skilled in their respective fields. Xeno could excuse Senku’s blindness to his own infatuation more than what Xeno had gone through as a teenager, given the life and death stakes Senku had when Xeno was merely consumed by university classes and science experiments. Stanley had been the one to tell him they were dating, with the implication that they had been for quite some time and not that he was asking to start. In his more charitable moments he imagined telling Senku he should just kiss Gen, make it clear his platonic roommate would surely welcome the additional affection without becoming a productivity-tanking distraction, but more often he felt so bitter about being separated from Stanley that holding the secret of their mutual pining from the oblivious young men felt like a tiny taste of revenge.

It was exciting to have such rare minerals at his fingertips. Ever since Panama Xeno hadn’t really been treated like a hostage, and Xeno himself hadn’t felt like an outsider since the mountain pass and his short chat with Hyoga. Sure they tied him up when Stanley drew near, and he’d been a bit less helpful than he might have been early on, but just as often couldn’t help himself but participate. He liked this. It was fun. It was all the best parts of science with none of the paperwork or regulations. He made the nickel refiner in the shape of a skull and crossbones and the only people to seem uncomfortable with the design were Luna, Carlos, and Max. Kaseki praised his artistry! Suika - the freshly thirteen-year-old girl - said making it look scary was good because the gasses inside were toxic and needed to be carefully handled. Senku didn’t care much for aesthetics one way or the other, but thanked him for helping by giving him control over the coffee beans. As performance based bonuses went, the establishment of Xenobucks Coffee was wonderful.

The heat and humidity of living in Brazil was balanced by the joy of coffee and abundant fruit. He deliberately stopped asking what protein was in the meals before he ate them, putting the adventurous eating habits of Senku’s people down to cultural differences. He got into the habit of asking Francois what last night’s dinner was instead, so he could force his own ideas of what was acceptable food to expand to fit the currently available food supply. They’d gotten cattle so quickly in California, but even though they caught some pigs recently, any meat he was served was going to be more exotic than he was used to most of the time.