Once a Stranger

Darker than Black (Kuro no keiyakusha)



In the near future and ten years before the story starts Something happened. The something involves several elements :

• The sky and what it held has been... changed. The night sky now contains no moon; and the stars were replaced by new, fake ones.
  
• Two very weird zones of weird stuff happening have appeared at diametrical location of the earth. One in Brazil, called Heaven's Gate, and one in Tokyo, called Hell's Gate. Those zones have been isolated and studied by a new branch of the UN called PANDORA; which has resulted in many breakthrough in technology, notably a lot of memory and personality manipulation stuff. Five years before the start of the story, the Gate in Brazil has disappeared, taking a huge chunk of South America along with it.
  
• People have started manifesting powers. There are two sorts : Contractors have one kind of superpower, and are compelled to pay a "price" right after using it (called by various names in different translations, but my favourite is "obeisance" for the bad French) which ranges from the weird compulsion to the horrific (there's one Contractor whose obeisance was drinking the blood of babies. Fun!). Contractors also appear to lose all sense of morality and most emotions and only act pragmatically for their own self-interest. Dolls have the ability to observe things through one medium (such as water or electricity), however Dolls, as their name indicates, appear to lose all personality and will of their own.
  
• The existence of Contractors and Dolls has been hidden to the public, by erasing their memories when they came into contact with them if necessary, but governments couldn't stop many rumours from spreading out, of course. The new fake stars are also somehow related to each Contractor, so they have put a surveillance system in place based on astronomy. A lot of spy agencies have business in Tokyo because of Hell's Gate and they are not usually shy about employing Contractors.

Our protagonist is a Contractor named Hei who works for a mysterious Syndicate in a team comprised of a grumpy old man who doesn't like Contractor much, a Gothic Lolita Doll and a cat. His work usually includes stuff like information retrieval, infiltration and assassination.

Asides from Hei, we also follow a variety of secondary characters, such as a team of cop charged with dealing with Contractors related stuff, led by Misaki Kirihara, a cool and determined female cop; a team from the MI6 composed of two Contractors and one Doll, and a (not very successful) private detective and his sassy, otaku secretary.

( cut for length )