before the sky split [ninjago next generation]

maiya gordon-walker

The Mechanic's warehouse creaked and echoed strangely, buzzing with the last set of fluorescent lights in Ninjago City illuminating the ceiling and not much more. Maiya knocked on the cold steel wall with gloved knuckles and struck it hard to compete with the sound of waves pounding against the seawall.

"Hello?" She called as she simultaneously activated the torch of her new wrist gauntlet to shine against the cobweb-laden shelves of defunct trinkets. The crash of metal against metal in the distance led her where she needed to go, but not before she closed the overhead door behind her with the odd sound of wheels in naked tracks. It was like stepping forty years into the past. Maiya shivered, and not due to the cold.

"Watch your shoulders, I moved the shelves into the walkway," Maiya's friend called, just as Maiya ducked away from her usual path across the stone floor. She moved the pinned-up blankets from the crude entrance to what could have been mistaken as a pile-up of fallen shelves from any point on the outside. Inside, a mishmash of salvaged materials and questionably acquired home goods made up Nagako's hideout, which Maiya suspected with increasing certainty that it was her full-time home.

"Hi," Nagako said. At first, didn't look up from her hasty re-organisation of tools on her wall. The coloured lights strung from wall to wall illuminated her gold-plated cybernetic arms strangely with too many lights and no shadows. Nagako frowned and her mechanical forearms split open to allow a million clawed pincers to rearrange her assortment of wrenches and screwdrivers faster than fingers could. Maiya fiddled with the one piece of her Samurai Z gear, sighing with relief as the dim light finally turned off.

"There."

"Ah, finally ready to take on the perfect form of cybernetics?" Nagako asked playfully. Maiya shook her head and shoved her gloves in her pockets as Nagako's little pincers coalesced into the rough form of human arms after smoothing out her long, dyed hair. It was purple and orange this week, braided in two twin tails that reached the back of her knees. "Your loss."

"Did you get it working?" Maiya paid no mind to her as she sat on the bed. The boxy old television, something she had only heard descriptions of, sat in the middle of the floor with wires strung towards the walls and ceiling from its backside like a heart being ripped from a body.

"Just about," Nagako said. "It needs an old kind of signal, so I can't get half the channels on it. The channels I can get don't broadcast in the colour keys this is made to display, so it's all discoloured."

"Huh," Maiya said. Between all her failed projects and the ancient space heater desperately trying to warm the little cave, Maiya couldn't fathom why her friend deliberately tried to live in the past. Even so, it was a nice retreat from her mother and aunts' well-intentioned attempts to cheer her up as the Fire Twins' laugh-ridden boasts penetrated the Monastery's thin walls. Since the lunar new year, they had rigged the courtyard with lights and cameras to bring the action to their virtual audience. The presence of Zane's child didn't help her relax, either. Jade felt more like a hauntedƒ doll than a person.

"But," Nagako continued, hoisting a cardboard box to her hip to navigate the cobweb of wires she had woven, "I don't think we'll be able to get a signal in this storm anyways, and we've got these instead."

Unmarked VHS tapes clattered across the bed.

"I picked these up off some old rich guy at the film club who got them at a friend's estate sale," Nagako said. "A few of them are old-timey movies. I haven't tested the rest of them."

" Starfarer," Maiya read as she peered closely at the faded label stuck neatly to the underside of one, "episode four".

"That's an old, like, science fiction-y series, but it's based on what people, like, seventy years ago thought about the future, which, I think, is technically last year."