Day 8 Chapter 27
New
- Location
- Around here
[X] Plan: What The Hell, Girl?
Once you've finished giving those two crooked cops the illusion of choice, they agree to your terms, and you send them on their way. Unfortunately, you're still left with the stylist – who saw everything and is currently still only halfway through cutting Tomoe's hair – and the receptionist who called the cops on you in the first place. You sigh, and fall back into the chair you had claimed earlier. "Why can't things just go easy on me, for once?"
"I apologise, Archer," Tomoe says. "This is my fault. Had I left when it seemed like the receptionist was being cagey about our presence, we never would have found ourselves in this mess to begin with."
"Tomoe, the only thing you're at fault for is snapping before I had the chance to," you say. It's hardly anything to fault her for. You were trying to keep your cool, even after those bastards said those awful things about Minako and threatened to sell your daughters. "Frankly, even still I'm glad you did. Those bastards had it coming once they brought Minako and the girls into it."
Tomoe's hair stylist is still standing there, slack-jawed and stunned speechless at everything he's just borne witness to. You've got to do something. But more importantly, you've got to do something about the receptionist first. "Listen," you say to the stylist as you fish a ten-thousand Yen note from your wallet. "Finish cutting my daughter's friend's hair and this whole thing's yours." You hand the man the note without a second thought. "You deserve it after the shit you just had to see."
"I…" The stylist, still stunned, has little choice but to accept the note you've just offered him. "Thank you, sir. I… I'll do my best to forget I saw anything."
"That's a good man," you say to yourself as you advance on the receptionist. You'll make sure he forgets everything, but unlike his co-worker you'll let him down gently. He's done nothing wrong. "Hi there." The friendly gesture is laden with poison. "So… Do you mind telling me what that was all about?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," the receptionist insists. "I didn't see anything."
"Like hell you didn't." You aren't playing around now. Those cops threatened your wife and daughters. Cops who were very open about their Yakuza affiliation threatened your wife and daughters. "I can understand being nervous in your position: What if I really were someone dangerous and the girl I brought with me weren't my daughter's friend? Considering the position this city is in, I can understand why you'd have acted the way you did." "So then what's your problem?" you can almost hear the receptionist mumbling. That's not good enough. "The problem, ma'am, is that the cops in this city are on the Yakuza's payroll." You'll take great pleasure in breaking her blind loyalty to a police force that doesn't deserve it in this city. "That's right, the same cops who are supposed to protect this city from the kidnappers and abductors are on the payroll of the very same."
"I… I didn't know…" the receptionist mumbles. "I just thought that-"
"No, no, you thought rightly, at least for your position," you say. "You had no way of knowing that the cops are corrupt in this city. But I do; and those two cops you called on me just so happened to threaten my wife and my two daughters, so I'm not exactly in the most agreeable mood right now." The receptionist tries to shrink down in her seat, but you won't let her. "So, here's how things are going to play out," you say, seeding your words with a spell of command. "You're going to tell me where the security cameras are in this place. I'm going to wipe any evidence from them that the police were here. Then when I'm done, you are going to forget that my daughter's friend and I were ever here. Understand?"
Shakily, the receptionist nods her head, and points you to a back door you had overlooked. "The cameras are hooked up to a laptop in the closet over there," she says. "I know it's not the safest solution, but we're small. We can't really afford a lot better than that."
It's better than nothing. Fortunately, you're better with technology than Rin is, or you'd be completely screwed. Growing up in the modern era does have its benefits, after all… "Now, let's see…" The easy part is going to be deleting just the footage of the cops. The hard part is going to be making it look afterwards as though the video has never been tampered with. You can do the former, but you wager you'd need to be a certain kind of mage proficient with video editing software to make the latter go as seamlessly as you'd like. As it stands, while you're able to get a pretty good approximation of a job well done, someone with a more careful eye and a more technically proficient hand would still be able to identify where you've altered the footage.
But it's the best you're going to be able to do with the limited time you have, so it'll have to do. You close the laptop and head out, ready to- "Tomoe, are you almost finished?" You have to stop yourself when you see the work the hair stylist has done.
"It… Might be a little shorter than you were hoping for," the stylist says to Tomoe as he holds up a mirror for her. "Some of those cuts were quite jagged, so I had to take a bit more off than I anticipated in order to level everything out. But, I hope you like it."
With a stiff hand, Tomoe reaches up to brush her fingers over her new, shorter, hair. "It's lovely," she says. "It's definitely not a style I would have gone for if the choice had been mine, but now that I'm seeing it…" You see a faint smile grace Tomoe's lips, and she says "Now that I'm seeing it I find myself wondering why I never tried cutting my hair this short before."
"I'm glad you like it, miss," the stylist says, brightly smiling as though he's just seen the sun for the first time in forever. "For what it's worth, I'm terribly sorry that our receptionist called the police on your gentleman friend. I've got two young daughters myself, and hearing them talk like that left a sour taste in my mouth. Even if I… Don't understand entirely what happened, I'm grateful to you for shutting them up."
It almost hurts, but you make sure to leave that man's smile intact as you erase his memories of tonight's encounter. Doing that to a fellow parent… You hate making him forget that there are people out there who are trying to make the city a safer place for his daughters. But you know you have to. Too many people know of magic's existence in this city. You can't put any more lives at risk by leaving someone you have absolutely no connection to unturned. So, as much as it hurts, you're forced to wipe that man's memories so he can go home to his wife and daughters and not put them at risk. "Come on," you say to Tomoe as you finish up. "Let's get you home."
Getting Tomoe home is the easy part. Having to face Minako and explain to her what happened when you had to cut her off is going to be another thing all together. You wait until your shoes are off and you've locked the door behind you before giving an "I'm home," to Minako.
"Archer?" She sounds as worried as she looks. "Archer, what's the matter? Why'd you have to hang up on me so suddenly? Did something happen?" No sooner have the words left her mouth, than it's as though she already knows the truth. "Whatever happened… How bad was it?"
"On a scale of one to ten?" It's a rhetorical question. "I've had worse, overall, but it's…" This time it's different. This time, it hit you that close to your home. It's rare that whatever is causing trouble hits you that close to home, but somehow you've managed to line up two such instances in the span of one week. "The receptionist at the place I took Tomoe to get her hair cut called the cops on us," you say. "I can't say I blame her. From her position, I'm a total stranger escorting a young, vulnerable-looking girl in the middle of the night. She doesn't know who I am or what I'm up to, but she thinks she's doing the right thing…" You sigh, reluctant to relive the experience. "Unfortunately, the cops who arrived were Yakuza flunkies, something I didn't realise when I handed them my phone so they could call you to verify my identity."
"What happened." It's not a question, and you know it's not a question. "Archer, what happened?"
"Instead of calling you," you say, "They took one look at my home screen and started talking about selling Homura and Kirika." That was after making tons of unnecessarily promiscuous accusations about Minako, but really, it's the fact that they talked about selling your daughters that you know Minako will care more about. "If Tomoe hadn't been there to take them down first, I might have…"
"You should have." You don't know when you and Minako pulled each other into the other's arms. It just happened, somewhere in all the worry. "If you didn't… If Tomoe didn't… I would have, Archer. I don't care what that would have done to me, nobody threatens my babies and gets away with it. I've thrown away my life for Kirika's sake once before, and I'd damn well do it again if it meant putting a pair of bastard cops in a shallow grave for thinking they could talk that way about my girls."
"It was unhealthy the first time you threw your life away for Kirika's sake," you say to Minako as you pull her in tighter. "I'd hate to see you do it again, no matter how badly they'd have deserved it. Besides, if you went to jail, who'd be there to make sure our girls had a mother?"
You're glad that, in spite of what you've just told Minako, she can still find it in herself to laugh as she says "Well, if anything ever happened to me, I'm sure Kirika would happy to see you and Caren get together." You find the thought repulsive, even more so when you remember how frequently Caren talks about that time she was intimate with All The World's Evils. While he was wearing your face, no less. "At least then she and Oriko would have a reason to go back to living together…"
"Minako, please don't ever talk like that again." The real reason is because you can't stomach the thought of being intimate with Caren Ortensia, but you'll pretend for Minako's sake that it's because "I don't want to have to think about what would happen to our family without you." That is another real reason you don't want to think about it. But not wanting to think about being intimate with Caren Ortensia is just more immediate.
But, something you will have to think about is what to do with the remaining Yakuza and with the corrupt members of the city's police force. Causing operational disruptions like you had been has only worked out so much, and with the revelation that the captain of the city's gang violence unit has been throwing out arrests of Yakuza members left and right, you're doubtful it's even done the little you'd thought it was doing. Then there's the rest of the crooked cops in this city, of which there are apparently more than you'd bargained for. Homura's contact in the force only tipped her off regarding a few police captains and maybe the city's police commissioner, but digging through the gang violence captain's office you found records of several other officers in his unit also being on the take. Then there's crooked beat cops, and probably more than just the one crooked koban sergeant you found last week…
You don't want to be thinking this, but your current methods haven't worked to root out the problem nearly as well as you'd first thought. Causing chaos isn't good enough. You need to make examples of the people in the wrong. But, what sort of danger would you be putting the rest o the city in by calling out the corruption and making its knowledge publically-known? Mitakihara is already on thin ice, can you really afford to adopt such a drastic tactic? You know you've compared yourself to Batman before in jest, but what would Batman do in this situation? Bruce Wayne had to root out corruption in Gotham's police force as well, but real life isn't like in the comic books, and Batman never had to deal with a society of mages waiting to doomsday the entire city for revealing one too many of their secrets.
[ ] What should you do?
-[ ] Call Homura* and Kirika and make sure they're both safe
-[ ] Go over to Tomoe's apartment and confront Caster about why he didn't keep his master safe tonight
-[ ] Develop a more in-depth plan for making an example of the Yakuza and the corrupt police
-[ ] Take Minako to bed and make sure yourself that she's safe
-[ ] Other (write-in)
[Homura] (choose only if * was chosen)
-[ ] How do you think Madoka is coming with her lesson?
-[ ] Did Archer tell you what happened to him and Tomoe tonight? (write-in yes/no)
-[ ] After you're done sitting in on Madoka's lesson, do you
--[ ] Call your contact in the police and ask him what he knows about corruption among street-level cops
--[ ] Go for a walk and try to run into some corrupt cops yourself: maybe you can scare them into submission like your other contact
--[ ] Head back to Tomoe's building without going out and doing anything else
---[ ] Go straight to your parents and reassure them that you're still safe
---[ ] Pay Tomoe a visit and check in with her before going back to your parents
---[ ] Pay Matou Sakura a visit and see how her work is coming along
-[ ] Other (write-in)
Once you've finished giving those two crooked cops the illusion of choice, they agree to your terms, and you send them on their way. Unfortunately, you're still left with the stylist – who saw everything and is currently still only halfway through cutting Tomoe's hair – and the receptionist who called the cops on you in the first place. You sigh, and fall back into the chair you had claimed earlier. "Why can't things just go easy on me, for once?"
"I apologise, Archer," Tomoe says. "This is my fault. Had I left when it seemed like the receptionist was being cagey about our presence, we never would have found ourselves in this mess to begin with."
"Tomoe, the only thing you're at fault for is snapping before I had the chance to," you say. It's hardly anything to fault her for. You were trying to keep your cool, even after those bastards said those awful things about Minako and threatened to sell your daughters. "Frankly, even still I'm glad you did. Those bastards had it coming once they brought Minako and the girls into it."
Tomoe's hair stylist is still standing there, slack-jawed and stunned speechless at everything he's just borne witness to. You've got to do something. But more importantly, you've got to do something about the receptionist first. "Listen," you say to the stylist as you fish a ten-thousand Yen note from your wallet. "Finish cutting my daughter's friend's hair and this whole thing's yours." You hand the man the note without a second thought. "You deserve it after the shit you just had to see."
"I…" The stylist, still stunned, has little choice but to accept the note you've just offered him. "Thank you, sir. I… I'll do my best to forget I saw anything."
"That's a good man," you say to yourself as you advance on the receptionist. You'll make sure he forgets everything, but unlike his co-worker you'll let him down gently. He's done nothing wrong. "Hi there." The friendly gesture is laden with poison. "So… Do you mind telling me what that was all about?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," the receptionist insists. "I didn't see anything."
"Like hell you didn't." You aren't playing around now. Those cops threatened your wife and daughters. Cops who were very open about their Yakuza affiliation threatened your wife and daughters. "I can understand being nervous in your position: What if I really were someone dangerous and the girl I brought with me weren't my daughter's friend? Considering the position this city is in, I can understand why you'd have acted the way you did." "So then what's your problem?" you can almost hear the receptionist mumbling. That's not good enough. "The problem, ma'am, is that the cops in this city are on the Yakuza's payroll." You'll take great pleasure in breaking her blind loyalty to a police force that doesn't deserve it in this city. "That's right, the same cops who are supposed to protect this city from the kidnappers and abductors are on the payroll of the very same."
"I… I didn't know…" the receptionist mumbles. "I just thought that-"
"No, no, you thought rightly, at least for your position," you say. "You had no way of knowing that the cops are corrupt in this city. But I do; and those two cops you called on me just so happened to threaten my wife and my two daughters, so I'm not exactly in the most agreeable mood right now." The receptionist tries to shrink down in her seat, but you won't let her. "So, here's how things are going to play out," you say, seeding your words with a spell of command. "You're going to tell me where the security cameras are in this place. I'm going to wipe any evidence from them that the police were here. Then when I'm done, you are going to forget that my daughter's friend and I were ever here. Understand?"
Shakily, the receptionist nods her head, and points you to a back door you had overlooked. "The cameras are hooked up to a laptop in the closet over there," she says. "I know it's not the safest solution, but we're small. We can't really afford a lot better than that."
It's better than nothing. Fortunately, you're better with technology than Rin is, or you'd be completely screwed. Growing up in the modern era does have its benefits, after all… "Now, let's see…" The easy part is going to be deleting just the footage of the cops. The hard part is going to be making it look afterwards as though the video has never been tampered with. You can do the former, but you wager you'd need to be a certain kind of mage proficient with video editing software to make the latter go as seamlessly as you'd like. As it stands, while you're able to get a pretty good approximation of a job well done, someone with a more careful eye and a more technically proficient hand would still be able to identify where you've altered the footage.
But it's the best you're going to be able to do with the limited time you have, so it'll have to do. You close the laptop and head out, ready to- "Tomoe, are you almost finished?" You have to stop yourself when you see the work the hair stylist has done.
"It… Might be a little shorter than you were hoping for," the stylist says to Tomoe as he holds up a mirror for her. "Some of those cuts were quite jagged, so I had to take a bit more off than I anticipated in order to level everything out. But, I hope you like it."
With a stiff hand, Tomoe reaches up to brush her fingers over her new, shorter, hair. "It's lovely," she says. "It's definitely not a style I would have gone for if the choice had been mine, but now that I'm seeing it…" You see a faint smile grace Tomoe's lips, and she says "Now that I'm seeing it I find myself wondering why I never tried cutting my hair this short before."
"I'm glad you like it, miss," the stylist says, brightly smiling as though he's just seen the sun for the first time in forever. "For what it's worth, I'm terribly sorry that our receptionist called the police on your gentleman friend. I've got two young daughters myself, and hearing them talk like that left a sour taste in my mouth. Even if I… Don't understand entirely what happened, I'm grateful to you for shutting them up."
It almost hurts, but you make sure to leave that man's smile intact as you erase his memories of tonight's encounter. Doing that to a fellow parent… You hate making him forget that there are people out there who are trying to make the city a safer place for his daughters. But you know you have to. Too many people know of magic's existence in this city. You can't put any more lives at risk by leaving someone you have absolutely no connection to unturned. So, as much as it hurts, you're forced to wipe that man's memories so he can go home to his wife and daughters and not put them at risk. "Come on," you say to Tomoe as you finish up. "Let's get you home."
Getting Tomoe home is the easy part. Having to face Minako and explain to her what happened when you had to cut her off is going to be another thing all together. You wait until your shoes are off and you've locked the door behind you before giving an "I'm home," to Minako.
"Archer?" She sounds as worried as she looks. "Archer, what's the matter? Why'd you have to hang up on me so suddenly? Did something happen?" No sooner have the words left her mouth, than it's as though she already knows the truth. "Whatever happened… How bad was it?"
"On a scale of one to ten?" It's a rhetorical question. "I've had worse, overall, but it's…" This time it's different. This time, it hit you that close to your home. It's rare that whatever is causing trouble hits you that close to home, but somehow you've managed to line up two such instances in the span of one week. "The receptionist at the place I took Tomoe to get her hair cut called the cops on us," you say. "I can't say I blame her. From her position, I'm a total stranger escorting a young, vulnerable-looking girl in the middle of the night. She doesn't know who I am or what I'm up to, but she thinks she's doing the right thing…" You sigh, reluctant to relive the experience. "Unfortunately, the cops who arrived were Yakuza flunkies, something I didn't realise when I handed them my phone so they could call you to verify my identity."
"What happened." It's not a question, and you know it's not a question. "Archer, what happened?"
"Instead of calling you," you say, "They took one look at my home screen and started talking about selling Homura and Kirika." That was after making tons of unnecessarily promiscuous accusations about Minako, but really, it's the fact that they talked about selling your daughters that you know Minako will care more about. "If Tomoe hadn't been there to take them down first, I might have…"
"You should have." You don't know when you and Minako pulled each other into the other's arms. It just happened, somewhere in all the worry. "If you didn't… If Tomoe didn't… I would have, Archer. I don't care what that would have done to me, nobody threatens my babies and gets away with it. I've thrown away my life for Kirika's sake once before, and I'd damn well do it again if it meant putting a pair of bastard cops in a shallow grave for thinking they could talk that way about my girls."
"It was unhealthy the first time you threw your life away for Kirika's sake," you say to Minako as you pull her in tighter. "I'd hate to see you do it again, no matter how badly they'd have deserved it. Besides, if you went to jail, who'd be there to make sure our girls had a mother?"
You're glad that, in spite of what you've just told Minako, she can still find it in herself to laugh as she says "Well, if anything ever happened to me, I'm sure Kirika would happy to see you and Caren get together." You find the thought repulsive, even more so when you remember how frequently Caren talks about that time she was intimate with All The World's Evils. While he was wearing your face, no less. "At least then she and Oriko would have a reason to go back to living together…"
"Minako, please don't ever talk like that again." The real reason is because you can't stomach the thought of being intimate with Caren Ortensia, but you'll pretend for Minako's sake that it's because "I don't want to have to think about what would happen to our family without you." That is another real reason you don't want to think about it. But not wanting to think about being intimate with Caren Ortensia is just more immediate.
But, something you will have to think about is what to do with the remaining Yakuza and with the corrupt members of the city's police force. Causing operational disruptions like you had been has only worked out so much, and with the revelation that the captain of the city's gang violence unit has been throwing out arrests of Yakuza members left and right, you're doubtful it's even done the little you'd thought it was doing. Then there's the rest of the crooked cops in this city, of which there are apparently more than you'd bargained for. Homura's contact in the force only tipped her off regarding a few police captains and maybe the city's police commissioner, but digging through the gang violence captain's office you found records of several other officers in his unit also being on the take. Then there's crooked beat cops, and probably more than just the one crooked koban sergeant you found last week…
You don't want to be thinking this, but your current methods haven't worked to root out the problem nearly as well as you'd first thought. Causing chaos isn't good enough. You need to make examples of the people in the wrong. But, what sort of danger would you be putting the rest o the city in by calling out the corruption and making its knowledge publically-known? Mitakihara is already on thin ice, can you really afford to adopt such a drastic tactic? You know you've compared yourself to Batman before in jest, but what would Batman do in this situation? Bruce Wayne had to root out corruption in Gotham's police force as well, but real life isn't like in the comic books, and Batman never had to deal with a society of mages waiting to doomsday the entire city for revealing one too many of their secrets.
[ ] What should you do?
-[ ] Call Homura* and Kirika and make sure they're both safe
-[ ] Go over to Tomoe's apartment and confront Caster about why he didn't keep his master safe tonight
-[ ] Develop a more in-depth plan for making an example of the Yakuza and the corrupt police
-[ ] Take Minako to bed and make sure yourself that she's safe
-[ ] Other (write-in)
[Homura] (choose only if * was chosen)
-[ ] How do you think Madoka is coming with her lesson?
-[ ] Did Archer tell you what happened to him and Tomoe tonight? (write-in yes/no)
-[ ] After you're done sitting in on Madoka's lesson, do you
--[ ] Call your contact in the police and ask him what he knows about corruption among street-level cops
--[ ] Go for a walk and try to run into some corrupt cops yourself: maybe you can scare them into submission like your other contact
--[ ] Head back to Tomoe's building without going out and doing anything else
---[ ] Go straight to your parents and reassure them that you're still safe
---[ ] Pay Tomoe a visit and check in with her before going back to your parents
---[ ] Pay Matou Sakura a visit and see how her work is coming along
-[ ] Other (write-in)
