A Red Letter Day pt. 20
"Does it?" Mami asks, smiling up at you.
"Yes, it does," you say, poking her on the nose. Her eyes cross to follow your finger. "Your opinion means a lot to me, Mami."
Mami gives you a soft, warm smile, ducking her head with a pleased blush on her face. She cuddles against your side, making a contented noise.
You look up at the sky, squeezing Mami gently. It's only four-thirty or so and bright out, a few tiny clouds scudding their way across the clear blue expanse. "So, Mami?"
"Hmmm?" she says without moving.
"There's three things I want to do before we head home, if that's alright?" you say. "One is - Miss Inoue gave me Kuroki's last known location, so I want to go and have a look at that, and uh, Homura wanted to talk to me, too. So I think we could go take a look, not too long, and then check in with Homura?"
"That sounds fine," Mami says, levering herself off your side and stretching luxuriously with her arms over her head. "Ahh. Though, um, you mentioned three things?"
You blink, recounting what you'd mentioned and what you mean to do. "Ah, right, slip of the tongue, the Mikunis need some things, so I was thinking we could go buy them, too."
"Ah, I see," Mami says, frowning thoughtfully. "Would we be able to buy what they need at a supermarket? We could pick up some groceries for ourselves, too."
"Oh, good idea," you agree as you bank the flying platform to head east. "Speaking of groceries, we need more bonito."
"Hm?" Mani blinks golden eyes at you. "Fish flakes? We still have some, right?"
"Yes, but I'm thinking of cooking something that will need quite a lot of it," you explain.
"I see," Mami says, nodding. She smiles at you, eyes alight with curiosity. "What are you planning?"
"It's a surprise!" you say, tapping her lightly on the nose again.
She laughs, and reaches up to tweak your ear. "Alright, then."
You spend the rest of the flight out to the old industrial district in a comfortable silence, Mami cuddled against your side and your arm around her in a sidelong hug. By the time you arrive, Mami's dozing lightly, though her eyes flicker open as you coast to a stop among the mouldering old warehouses.
And it is a warehouse. Mami helps you navigate, checking the GPS coordinates Yuuki had given you with her phone - and as best as the two of you can tell with the resolution her phone offers, it's centered exactly on this particular building that you're standing in front of.
You release Mami's arm -her other one's holding her phone still- and crack your fingers. "Well, this is where she was last," you muse, giving the unassuming, dilapidated warehouse another look.
"Why do magical girls always try to hide out here?" Mami says with a sigh. "First Miss Mikuni, then your Warehouse-kun, and now Miss Kuroki."
"Hey, Warehouse-kun is not for hiding," you say, smiling at her. "Warehouse-kun is for science."
"I see, my mistake~" Mami laughs, tucking her phone away somewhere in her costume. "Shall we?"
"Yup," you say, taking her arm and walking forward. The wire mesh gate of the fence swings open at your touch - unlocked, and brittle with rust that coats your fingers brown. "Eurgh."
Still, that's hardly anything to deter you. With Mami at your side, you venture forward, nudging the warehouse door open and peering inside. Motes of dust dance in the sunlight filtering in, illuminating...
Well, it looks like someone had been binge-eating while hiding in the corner. There's an entire pile of sweet wrappers and various paper packets, stained with dried grease, and even a few sticks from ice pops. The bare concrete's stained with what seems to be food residue and-
There's her phone, resting beneath a dent in the cheap metal sheeting of the opposite wall. All but destroyed, as Yuuki predicted, screen completely shattered and plastic casing cracked to pieces. You walk over, gingerly collecting the wreckage.
"Is that a cross?" Mami muses, poking her finger at a sticker that's the only thing holding together two pieces of plastic.
"Yeah," you say. "She went to Catholic School, didn't she?"
"Mmm," Mami says. "Looks like she was a throwing a tantrum?"
"Or venting," you agree, humming as you pace about the warehouse, looking for anything that might be relevant. Mami separates from your side, searching around with sharp, careful attention.
"She was crying, I think," Mami says, pausing and nudging a pile of tissues with her shoe. She crouches to inspect it.
"Yeah," you agree, grimacing. "Any blood or anything? I hope she wasn't injured..."
"None that I can see- achoo!" Mami's sneezes are adorable, with the way her nose scrunches.
"Hm. Fairly thick dust in here, too," you muse, wandering over to Mami. "She hasn't been in here for a while."
"There's- nothing fresh here," Mami agrees, rubbing her nose and sniffing in annoyance. "All the food and the stains look... a few days old."
"Yeah," you grumble. "OK, speaking of Science, mind if I take a few minutes to try something?"
"Of course not," Mami says, giving you a warm smile. "I'll keep looking around, and see if I can find anything."
"I'll be right here, alright?" you say, rubbing your hands together and beaming at her. Grief sails in through the open door, plenty of it. You'll need quite a bit for what you have planned.
"Alright!" Mami says, beaming back.
You're already shaping the Grief with your mind. You want to try and find Kuroki. Unfortunately, it's fairly obvious that she hasn't been here for a while. However, it's a fairly stale environment, and there might not be visible footprints left behind, but that doesn't mean that there aren't footprints.
Apart from yours and Mami's, of course, but those should be easy to distinguish.
You push the extents of your Grief manipulation. Physicists would kill for the kind of fidelity you can achieve, absolute control moulding out millions of tiny, tiny structures on a nanoscale level. Millions of tiny levers, small enough to be deflected by individual photons of light, whirl into existence, arranged in a circular disc: a camera built on mechanical principles, with the kind of impossible precision only you can achieve.
A monochromatic light source is easy, one emitting a clear, coherent infrared light just as much. The lens array coalesces into existence, stinking of Witch. Neither of those are new to you, after all, you'd created both lasers and clear windscreens before.
You don't need esoteric magical effects to create a damned near to perfect spectroscope. You could create a gamma ray tomograph, but apart from the problem of irradiating everything around you with harsh radiation, it seems likely that Kuroki hasn't been here for a while. You'd rather look for traces of her presence, a trail to follow.
Sensitivity... just so. You hold your hand out, feeling the images as the lever array bounces with photons, like an image drawn on your skin with impossible fidelity. Of course, it's kind of nonsensical without a computer to crunch equations, but the right arrangement of lens and aperture performs effective integration over the frequency domain, boiling down to something recognisable, if not entirely legible.
All you need to do is, hunt for shapes in the image. You don't need absolute frequency resolution.
Mami walks over, giving you a curious look. You give her a quick, reassuring smile. You've got this. Directing the assemblage of Grief at her feet, you scan until you find the traces of rubber from her shoes, drawn in delicate traces of synthetic polymers. The footprints are bright and clear under spectral analysis, but you don't expect anything Kuroki's traces would be anything similar.
"I'm looking for her footprints or something," you murmur to Mami, sweeping the array around.
"Ah," Mami says, smiling at you. "Um... is it a bad time to tell you that she probably went out by the back?"
"Probably?" you say, pouting at her. "I put work into this, you know."
"Oh, alright," Mami says, nodding in grave understanding. "I'll tell you that I found her footprints in the dust later, then."
You sigh, swinging the array to point up at the ceiling. "Oh, fine," you say. "Show me?"
Mami giggles, linking her arm through yours and tugging you over to the loading bay of the warehouse. As promised, you find undisturbed tracks in the sandy dust of the warehouse, shielded from the wind by the walls of the little recess. Almost certainly a girl's shoes, too, just judging from the size, and leading only one way - out. Unfortunately, they peter out as they leave the sheltered area.
"Try your scanner?" Mami suggests.
"Mmm," you agree, starting to sweep the area carefully. "There."
You manage to follow the footprints outside, though they get fainter and fainter as you head into slightly more travelled areas - the industrial district's fading, not dead. You push your senses out, too. Kuroki has stealth powers, according to Homura, but she can't hide from your Grief sense.
But...
Her footprints vanish, between one step and the next. You frown, swinging your scanner around. You've wandered to the outskirts of an abandoned construction site. A forest of rusting iron girders claws for the sky, protected by a fence that rattles in the wind. Nowhere she could have vanished to. No particular scuff marks or anything that would indicate a fight, either.
"Sabrina?" Mami prompts.
"Her footprints end here," you explain. "Just... vanish."
"She could have jumped?" Mami suggests, looking about. "There, maybe. It's within reach."
"No, she..." It's hard to tell, from days old traces of footprint. "She... she fell. Sideways, and... The fence."
"She grabbed on here, maybe," Mami says, completing your thought. "It kind of sags."
"Yeah," you agree, frown deepening as you sweep the scanner about. You've been around this area before, haven't you? "I'm not seeing anything from here, though."
"I'll look around," Mami says, releasing your arm. She looks up for a second before bounding up to the girders in a fluid, easy jump.
You hunt around for a good ten minutes, weaving between the shadows cast by the I-beams. The smell of rust hangs heavy in the air, and the fiery orange hues of the evening are already starting to creep in by the time you call it quits. You have other things to do - but you're pretty sure she was here.
You sigh, raising your head to look for Mami. "Anything?"
"No," Mami calls back from way up high. She loops ribbons around a girder and lets herself down.
"Bleh," you say, ducking your head and grimacing. "I want to find her, but..."
"We don't have enough of a lead here," Mami says with a sigh. "There's no other trace of her around here?"
"No," you say, grimacing. "Not at all."
Voting opens
[] Continue searching
- [] Write-in how
[] Move on
- [] Something else?
[] Write-in (word count limit: 150 words)
Sorry this one took so long; I wound up busier than expected last week.
Also, fun fact, what Sabrina did there is theoretically sound, in the spherical-cow-in-vacuum sense.
"Yes, it does," you say, poking her on the nose. Her eyes cross to follow your finger. "Your opinion means a lot to me, Mami."
Mami gives you a soft, warm smile, ducking her head with a pleased blush on her face. She cuddles against your side, making a contented noise.
You look up at the sky, squeezing Mami gently. It's only four-thirty or so and bright out, a few tiny clouds scudding their way across the clear blue expanse. "So, Mami?"
"Hmmm?" she says without moving.
"There's three things I want to do before we head home, if that's alright?" you say. "One is - Miss Inoue gave me Kuroki's last known location, so I want to go and have a look at that, and uh, Homura wanted to talk to me, too. So I think we could go take a look, not too long, and then check in with Homura?"
"That sounds fine," Mami says, levering herself off your side and stretching luxuriously with her arms over her head. "Ahh. Though, um, you mentioned three things?"
You blink, recounting what you'd mentioned and what you mean to do. "Ah, right, slip of the tongue, the Mikunis need some things, so I was thinking we could go buy them, too."
"Ah, I see," Mami says, frowning thoughtfully. "Would we be able to buy what they need at a supermarket? We could pick up some groceries for ourselves, too."
"Oh, good idea," you agree as you bank the flying platform to head east. "Speaking of groceries, we need more bonito."
"Hm?" Mani blinks golden eyes at you. "Fish flakes? We still have some, right?"
"Yes, but I'm thinking of cooking something that will need quite a lot of it," you explain.
"I see," Mami says, nodding. She smiles at you, eyes alight with curiosity. "What are you planning?"
"It's a surprise!" you say, tapping her lightly on the nose again.
She laughs, and reaches up to tweak your ear. "Alright, then."
You spend the rest of the flight out to the old industrial district in a comfortable silence, Mami cuddled against your side and your arm around her in a sidelong hug. By the time you arrive, Mami's dozing lightly, though her eyes flicker open as you coast to a stop among the mouldering old warehouses.
And it is a warehouse. Mami helps you navigate, checking the GPS coordinates Yuuki had given you with her phone - and as best as the two of you can tell with the resolution her phone offers, it's centered exactly on this particular building that you're standing in front of.
You release Mami's arm -her other one's holding her phone still- and crack your fingers. "Well, this is where she was last," you muse, giving the unassuming, dilapidated warehouse another look.
"Why do magical girls always try to hide out here?" Mami says with a sigh. "First Miss Mikuni, then your Warehouse-kun, and now Miss Kuroki."
"Hey, Warehouse-kun is not for hiding," you say, smiling at her. "Warehouse-kun is for science."
"I see, my mistake~" Mami laughs, tucking her phone away somewhere in her costume. "Shall we?"
"Yup," you say, taking her arm and walking forward. The wire mesh gate of the fence swings open at your touch - unlocked, and brittle with rust that coats your fingers brown. "Eurgh."
Still, that's hardly anything to deter you. With Mami at your side, you venture forward, nudging the warehouse door open and peering inside. Motes of dust dance in the sunlight filtering in, illuminating...
Well, it looks like someone had been binge-eating while hiding in the corner. There's an entire pile of sweet wrappers and various paper packets, stained with dried grease, and even a few sticks from ice pops. The bare concrete's stained with what seems to be food residue and-
There's her phone, resting beneath a dent in the cheap metal sheeting of the opposite wall. All but destroyed, as Yuuki predicted, screen completely shattered and plastic casing cracked to pieces. You walk over, gingerly collecting the wreckage.
"Is that a cross?" Mami muses, poking her finger at a sticker that's the only thing holding together two pieces of plastic.
"Yeah," you say. "She went to Catholic School, didn't she?"
"Mmm," Mami says. "Looks like she was a throwing a tantrum?"
"Or venting," you agree, humming as you pace about the warehouse, looking for anything that might be relevant. Mami separates from your side, searching around with sharp, careful attention.
"She was crying, I think," Mami says, pausing and nudging a pile of tissues with her shoe. She crouches to inspect it.
"Yeah," you agree, grimacing. "Any blood or anything? I hope she wasn't injured..."
"None that I can see- achoo!" Mami's sneezes are adorable, with the way her nose scrunches.
"Hm. Fairly thick dust in here, too," you muse, wandering over to Mami. "She hasn't been in here for a while."
"There's- nothing fresh here," Mami agrees, rubbing her nose and sniffing in annoyance. "All the food and the stains look... a few days old."
"Yeah," you grumble. "OK, speaking of Science, mind if I take a few minutes to try something?"
"Of course not," Mami says, giving you a warm smile. "I'll keep looking around, and see if I can find anything."
"I'll be right here, alright?" you say, rubbing your hands together and beaming at her. Grief sails in through the open door, plenty of it. You'll need quite a bit for what you have planned.
"Alright!" Mami says, beaming back.
You're already shaping the Grief with your mind. You want to try and find Kuroki. Unfortunately, it's fairly obvious that she hasn't been here for a while. However, it's a fairly stale environment, and there might not be visible footprints left behind, but that doesn't mean that there aren't footprints.
Apart from yours and Mami's, of course, but those should be easy to distinguish.
You push the extents of your Grief manipulation. Physicists would kill for the kind of fidelity you can achieve, absolute control moulding out millions of tiny, tiny structures on a nanoscale level. Millions of tiny levers, small enough to be deflected by individual photons of light, whirl into existence, arranged in a circular disc: a camera built on mechanical principles, with the kind of impossible precision only you can achieve.
A monochromatic light source is easy, one emitting a clear, coherent infrared light just as much. The lens array coalesces into existence, stinking of Witch. Neither of those are new to you, after all, you'd created both lasers and clear windscreens before.
You don't need esoteric magical effects to create a damned near to perfect spectroscope. You could create a gamma ray tomograph, but apart from the problem of irradiating everything around you with harsh radiation, it seems likely that Kuroki hasn't been here for a while. You'd rather look for traces of her presence, a trail to follow.
Sensitivity... just so. You hold your hand out, feeling the images as the lever array bounces with photons, like an image drawn on your skin with impossible fidelity. Of course, it's kind of nonsensical without a computer to crunch equations, but the right arrangement of lens and aperture performs effective integration over the frequency domain, boiling down to something recognisable, if not entirely legible.
All you need to do is, hunt for shapes in the image. You don't need absolute frequency resolution.
Mami walks over, giving you a curious look. You give her a quick, reassuring smile. You've got this. Directing the assemblage of Grief at her feet, you scan until you find the traces of rubber from her shoes, drawn in delicate traces of synthetic polymers. The footprints are bright and clear under spectral analysis, but you don't expect anything Kuroki's traces would be anything similar.
"I'm looking for her footprints or something," you murmur to Mami, sweeping the array around.
"Ah," Mami says, smiling at you. "Um... is it a bad time to tell you that she probably went out by the back?"
"Probably?" you say, pouting at her. "I put work into this, you know."
"Oh, alright," Mami says, nodding in grave understanding. "I'll tell you that I found her footprints in the dust later, then."
You sigh, swinging the array to point up at the ceiling. "Oh, fine," you say. "Show me?"
Mami giggles, linking her arm through yours and tugging you over to the loading bay of the warehouse. As promised, you find undisturbed tracks in the sandy dust of the warehouse, shielded from the wind by the walls of the little recess. Almost certainly a girl's shoes, too, just judging from the size, and leading only one way - out. Unfortunately, they peter out as they leave the sheltered area.
"Try your scanner?" Mami suggests.
"Mmm," you agree, starting to sweep the area carefully. "There."
You manage to follow the footprints outside, though they get fainter and fainter as you head into slightly more travelled areas - the industrial district's fading, not dead. You push your senses out, too. Kuroki has stealth powers, according to Homura, but she can't hide from your Grief sense.
But...
Her footprints vanish, between one step and the next. You frown, swinging your scanner around. You've wandered to the outskirts of an abandoned construction site. A forest of rusting iron girders claws for the sky, protected by a fence that rattles in the wind. Nowhere she could have vanished to. No particular scuff marks or anything that would indicate a fight, either.
"Sabrina?" Mami prompts.
"Her footprints end here," you explain. "Just... vanish."
"She could have jumped?" Mami suggests, looking about. "There, maybe. It's within reach."
"No, she..." It's hard to tell, from days old traces of footprint. "She... she fell. Sideways, and... The fence."
"She grabbed on here, maybe," Mami says, completing your thought. "It kind of sags."
"Yeah," you agree, frown deepening as you sweep the scanner about. You've been around this area before, haven't you? "I'm not seeing anything from here, though."
"I'll look around," Mami says, releasing your arm. She looks up for a second before bounding up to the girders in a fluid, easy jump.
You hunt around for a good ten minutes, weaving between the shadows cast by the I-beams. The smell of rust hangs heavy in the air, and the fiery orange hues of the evening are already starting to creep in by the time you call it quits. You have other things to do - but you're pretty sure she was here.
You sigh, raising your head to look for Mami. "Anything?"
"No," Mami calls back from way up high. She loops ribbons around a girder and lets herself down.
"Bleh," you say, ducking your head and grimacing. "I want to find her, but..."
"We don't have enough of a lead here," Mami says with a sigh. "There's no other trace of her around here?"
"No," you say, grimacing. "Not at all."
Voting opens
[] Continue searching
- [] Write-in how
[] Move on
[] Talk to Mami about Sayaka's training with Kyouko.
-[] Touch on Kyouko coming to Mitakihara. Don't push.
--[] You were hoping that Mami would agree to speak with Kyouko when she feels ready. Kyouko still cares, she just hides it, because caring hurt her.
[] Go buy the things Kirika wanted, then visit the Mikunis.
-[] Ask about Asunaro. Include Mami in the discussion if you can.
--[] If appropriate, have Mami message Michiru about us arriving sometime soon.
[] Before heading home, let Mami know Homu wanted to talk. Ping Homura.
-[] Touch on Kyouko coming to Mitakihara. Don't push.
--[] You were hoping that Mami would agree to speak with Kyouko when she feels ready. Kyouko still cares, she just hides it, because caring hurt her.
[] Go buy the things Kirika wanted, then visit the Mikunis.
-[] Ask about Asunaro. Include Mami in the discussion if you can.
--[] If appropriate, have Mami message Michiru about us arriving sometime soon.
[] Before heading home, let Mami know Homu wanted to talk. Ping Homura.
[] Write-in (word count limit: 150 words)
=====
Sorry this one took so long; I wound up busier than expected last week.
Also, fun fact, what Sabrina did there is theoretically sound, in the spherical-cow-in-vacuum sense.
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