Power Ewes: Gigamon Action Go! was an action-comedy series produced by Yakonoko Animation, with two seasons released from 1993 through 1995. Read Dr. Lee's first dispatch for details.

Despite the official account of the show’s two-season production, Dr. Lee found a credible source, Middleton Police Chief Harry Thompson, who claims that a third season was privately screened for personnel at the Yokota Air Base in 1996 at the latest. Read Dr. Lee's second dispatch for details.

Upon viewing the last known copy of Power Ewes at the home of an anime archivist named Ataru69, Dr. Lee comes away more convinced than ever that paranormal forces are involved. Read Dr. Lee's third dispatch for details.

A dream suggests the involvement of Cyberlams, leading Dr. Lee back to Ataru69, but too late to save his life. After the archivist's associates speculate on the coincidence of truck-related accidents and Ataru69's affinity for stories in the isekai genre, Dr. Lee finds herself being pursued by an ominous truck. Read Dr. Lee's fourth dispatch for details.

Dr. Lee has a strange encounter and undertakes a dangerous journey with an entity of inhuman origins in a vehicle with metaphysical powers. Read Dr. Lee's fifth dispatch for details.

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Dr. Elara Lee, noted expert on the Sleeping Android, writes:

Gentle Reader, I have a confession to make. I have withheld from you certain details from my multi-modal biographical deep dive into the life of Ichika Miura, the teen prodigy creator, writer, and storyboard artist behind the Power Ewes series.

This was, in part, because my inquiries often take the form of tedious legwork punctuated by rare bouts of profound insight. A focus on the former usually detracts from the impact of the latter, and I couldn’t expect you to remain on the edge of your seat through all the false leads and fruitless inquiries that occur between the bombshell revelations.

But sometimes, the full impact of a moment requires a deeper understanding. At this point in my narrative, where temporal doppelgangers and an actual Cyberlam have entered the story, some backfill will be necessary to make sense of what happens next.

Ichika Miura died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1994, just as her career in Japanese animation was taking off. As I expanded my circle of research beyond the tragedy that ended Miura’s life, I uncovered details of a cursed production and the posthumous extension of that curse to additional members of Miura’s family.

Miura’s father died in 1996 in an industrial accident involving an assembly line at the Pocky factory, an unfortunately placed sheet of plywood, and a skateboard dropped by a visiting X Games athlete. I don’t envy the examiner who had to document the 796 places where his body was pierced by chocolate-covered pretzel sticks.

Miura’s mother died in 1999, pecked to death by a genetically enhanced chicken that escaped from a research lab. If you’ve ever wondered about the “based on a true story” claim printed on Angry Chicken for Nintendo 64, now you know.

Miura’s only sibling, a younger brother, slipped on a banana peel dropped by a co-worker onto a girder they’d been riveting into place on the 112th floor of a skyscraper under construction in 2006. He landed in a cement mixer of marbleized concrete. A bronze cast of his body decorates in the lobby of the building he’d died helping to construct.

Most of Miura’s extended family perished while on vacation together in 2012, when the Yamato Cruise Lines vessel, the Nova III, was struck by an iceberg that fell from the sky while being airlifted to an event commemorating the Titanic centennial.

Similar stories can be found among the lead animators and middle management of Yakonoko Animation. Given the unlikely circumstances attached to these deaths, I can only theorize that the same force responsible for the erasure of Miura’s legacy has also been at work on her bloodline.

Miura’s final relative I was able to trace, a second cousin named Yoko, died when the lithium battery in her mobile phone caught fire and exploded during a conversation I was having with her. It was the first phone call Yoko had taken since withdrawing to an underground bunker in 2016.

Yoko’s caretakers recorded her final words: “I am not the end of this. She is still alive.”

I flew to Tokyo to make further inquiries in person. Through diligent searches, I attempted to track down Ichika Miura’s former teachers, classmates, childhood friends, neighbors, and co-workers. However, every avenue I started down quickly hit an all-too-often-literal dead end.

The records at Miura’s school had been destroyed by a fire that started when a drummer in the student “battle of the bands” event rubbed two drumsticks together with a little too much gusto.

The neighborhood where Miura lived her entire life had been flooded by effluent from a badly designed shark, octopus, platypus, and piranha research laboratory, and is today a large pond with a quite unique ecosystem.

The building where Yakonoko Animation was once located is now a Starbucks. Mind you, Gentle Reader, I don’t just mean that this ten-story office building has a Starbucks in its ground floor retail space. I mean that the entire building is one enormous ten-story coffee shop with baristas stationed in every cubicle!

Through the corporate bankruptcy of 1995 and dissolution of 1996, there were several attempts to sell off Yakonoko’s assets to another studio, but no willing buyers until an eccentric Starbucks franchisee stepped forward with the dream, the vision, and the drive to establish an office space that dropped all pretense that the consumption of coffee was of secondary importance to the conduct of business.

It seemed unlikely that any information about Ichika Miura remained within the building, but my other leads had run thin and I’ve often found physical structures to be haunted by ghostly remnants of the corporate entities that once leased space within them. So with schematics in one hand and a series of lattes in the other, I searched that office building for several hours, until caffeine jitters prematurely ended my day.

But I didn’t obtain my reputation as the world’s foremost Cyberlam investigator by giving up easily or by strictly following laws against trespass, burglary, and employing false identities. The next day, I deployed a bright red parcel addressed to Yakonoko Animation, forged a badge that identified me as “Cheryl-Ann, Roasted Bean Inspector from the Central Office,” and took up a surveillance position on a comfy couch by the lobby fireplace.

The parcel arrived on schedule. Japan Post does not disappoint.

As soon as I had visually confirmed that my parcel had entered the building, I remote-activated the tracker device inside the box and followed the pings from one barista to another to another until the signal abruptly stopped.

With schematics in one hand and a latte in the other—decaf this time—I went to an area on the 8th Floor where my tracker had gone dark and found an undocumented wall with an undocumented door that held the faded logo from a long-defunct animation studio.

Yakonoko Animation, we meet at last.

One lockpick later, I let myself into a cramped storage closet. The coffee-saturated air that rushed past me into the space sparked tiny bolts of static electricity as it hit a musty environment of old paint and celluloid.

My tracker started pinging again, leading me to a bin of undeliverable mail. My red parcel had been tossed in, coming to rest among the most recent layer of letters addressed in care of Yakonoko Animation. These all seemed to be medical bills.

I tore one open.

“She is alive,” is what Ichika Miura’s second cousin, Yoko, had said with her dying breath. With this bill, I had an inkling of what she had meant.

Gentle Reader, the bill in my hand was current, sent from a Tokyo psychiatric facility, listing a patient with the surname of Miura.

To be continued...