[100% OJ, Fanfic] Natsumi Day: The Great Detective, Part I

Genre: Humour/Slice of Life

Length: 5026 words
B/D: It's the 23rd of July -- or, in the OJ fandom, Natsumi Day! To celebrate, QuincyUSA on twitter commissioned me for not just one chapter, but a full three chapter story, of which this is part 1. It follows on from the previous Natsumi & Mei story, and retains the conceit that they are sisters. Enjoy!

Another day, another donut. That was all that you could expect from life as a detective in the city that never sleeps.

Well. It was technically a box of donuts, rather than just the one, and the city was in fact a town, and the town actually did sleep, at pretty regular intervals. It was iffy if Mei even counted as a detective, if you really wanted to quibble about things.

But like many detectives, she had a hat. And that was what really mattered. Nobody could take that away from her.

This and other interesting monologues floated through her mind as she spiralled, with all the grace of a bulldog in oversized slippers, towards the gutter. The run-off water embraced her like a mistress, and so did the stone; she felt something sticky across her forehead as she pulled her face out of the drink. The force of the blow had rattled her bones, and maybe her brain. She rested her cheek on the curb – she had just enough forethought to use her hat as a cushion, because who knew what had been on the street – and thought, momentarily, about how she had gotten herself into this predicament.

It all began with organised crime, which, as everybody knew, was the sneakiest kind of crime.

To be entirely fair, Yuki didn’t do it because it was sneaky. Her plans generally involved high drama, giant robots, and explosives. Sneaking wasn’t really her thing. She just liked her crime to be tidy. She was going to take over the world someday, and she didn’t want her seven billion prospective subjects to think she was some kind of slob who didn’t even tidy her crimes. She had a reputation to think about.

This, and other minor misunderstandings about what organised crime actually was, were why Yuki was generally considered more of a visionary than a legitimate villain. Yes, she ran a few minor gambling rings, but she’d never quite had the heart to enforce the ‘win too much and they might find you at the bottom of the nearest river’ part of the equation. Why did she have to? The house always won. The games were literally designed to make sure that, by all known laws of probability, she would end up richer than any given winner. Besides, it didn’t seem sporting. She was a gambler herself, and knew how it felt.

Likewise, she’d bought up shares in several local businesses, and cackled to herself when they paid her a dividend for doing nothing. Yes, it did demonstrate the sins of sloth and greed, but it was also just how capitalism worked. Really, if she just cut back on the giant robots and the correspondingly giant explosives, she might have passed for an upstanding member of society.

This, among other reasons, was why she was not immediately tackled to the ground upon entering the vicinity of QP’s school, and why she was allowed to skulk from corridor to corridor until she ended up in the sociology classroom.

Contrary to popular belief, there were better places to skulk than sociology classrooms, although they were few and far between – alleyways, chiefly, and sometimes warehouses, which to Yuki lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. What they did have was boxes – boxes, in absolute abundance. People in Ebimanyou Town apparently bought a lot of crates and left them in conveniently atmospheric but illogical locations. It was a culture thing.

But she hadn’t come to the sociology classroom to skulk. She had come for business.
Sitting at the teacher’s desk (that had a flask of whiskey in the bottom-right draw, which was almost certainly a little emptier than when she’d checked it last) was Mei, the premier source of rumours, scuttlebutt, and hearsay around Ebimanyou Town. She made it her business to have the dirt on everybody and everything, and then to air that dirt liberally in a school newspaper that virtually nobody actually read. It was an ideal arrangement; not only was her desire to dish salacious details satisfied, but her kneecaps remained mostly intact.

She looked at Yuki. She looked at her lithe figure, her boyish shirt, the habitual sneer she wore on her face. She looked at the half-empty pack of smokes tucked into her breast pocket. She looked at her own shoes and discovered the laces were untied, and nonchalantly ducked beneath the desk to tie them. She stayed under the desk for a good, long time. Almost as if she were hiding.

“I want some information,” Yuki said, sauntering towards the desk. She found herself quite pleased by this development. She was rather of the opinion that people should hide when they saw her coming, as a mark of respect. It was like genuflecting when you walked into a church, complete with the whole ‘praying for salvation’ schtick. “And I hear you’re just the girl to provide it.” She counted to five in her head; when the fifth second passed with no answer, she lowered her voice to a husky purr. “Hey. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

The ‘or else’ was implied. It was always implied. You never didn’t imply it, and it was considered clumsy or even childish to say the ‘or else’ out loud. The ‘or else’ was all-powerful, provided that it was never seen, and thus qualified as a monster from a b-tier horror film by sheer technicality.

Mei, who was well-informed enough to know who she was dealing with, inched out of the table to stare into the abyss. The abyss was staring back, and it had one hell of a mean-looking smirk on its face. She bit her lip. She summoned her courage. And she made peace with the idea that she probably wasn’t getting out of here without getting her ass kicked.

“I… I have prices! No hand-outs!” she declared, bravely standing up for what she believed in.

“Oh, right. Sure. I’ll get you a pocketful of candy or whatever it is you want,” the cat said dismissively, although only because information was not a thing that would fall out of Mei’s pockets if she held her by the ankles and shook. “Now get out from under the desk. I got something to show you.”

With a single sweep of her hand (that she had no doubt practised endlessly at home, for such smooth motion did not come without dedicated effort) she spread out three glossy photographs on the table. Mei picked them up, one by one, for examination.

“Did you actually go and get these developed? Wow, that’s super old fashioned. Why not just send me the jpegs? You know how to email, right?” Mei asked conversationally. “I’ve got a contact address, y’know. I made business cards.”

“Look, it’s for aesthetic purposes! Geez. Kids today have no style. This is why you wouldn’t make it as a member of a criminal organisation. Not that’d I’d know anything about that,” Yuki sniffed. “Look at what’s in the photos, brat.”

Mei looked, and .5 seconds later said, “Well, it’s QP.”

“Of course it’s QP! Why would I go to some weird kid for information if it wasn’t about somebody who’s literally in the same class as you?!” Yuki shouted. She seemed to be having fun. “What’s different about her?”

Upon further inspection, the pictures showed QP wearing a mask. Not much of a mask, to be absolutely fair – only a domino mask, which didn’t really do anything to protect her identity. People did not identify QP by her eyes. They identified her by her tail, or her yelling, or her habit of causing excessive amount of property damage in her day-to-day life.

She was also wearing a crimson scarf, which somehow managed to billow behind her dramatically even though Mei was pretty sure it hadn’t been at all windy recently. Maybe she’d fixed it in place with hairspray. You never knew with that dog.

“She’s in some kind of superhero get-up,” Mei said.

“Right. See, I don’t know when she started playing at being a cape. But it’s been brought to my attention that she seems to have a new nemesis,” Yuki explained, drawing out the last word with a hiss that could only belong to a cat. “And the reason it’s been brought to my attention is that two of my frie – ahem, goons, have gotten caught up in the crossfire. Multiple times.”

Having honed her ability to say stupid things by way of long effort and practice, Mei saw no reason to stop now. “You sure you’re not just jealous? Last I checked, you and QP also had that weird archenemy thing going on.”

“Say that again.” Yuki’s voice, ordinarily smooth and low for a woman, suddenly became sunshine and light – but the kind that usually happens between ants and magnifying glasses. “Go on. Say it again. See what happens.”

Mei decided that this was one of those rhetorical instructions she wasn’t supposed to follow, like advertising slogans and anything said by her geography teacher. “A-anyway. Why do you need my help? It looks like you already have all the info you need. You have pictures and everything.”

Actually, when she thought about it, her last case had involved a client telling her a new rumour she really should have known about. It seemed weird for an information broker to consistently be the one receiving the information, but maybe that was just how the job worked. You got the information, you sold it on for a profit, like banks with debt.

“I have almost all the information. What I need is the identity of her nemesis. I don’t have a picture, and from what my goons said, their stupid villain costume is a lot better than than that mutt’s mask, so they can’t get a visual.” Yuki shifted uncomfortably. “As much as I’d love to just wreck QP and solve the problem that way, taking on that dumb dog is more trouble than it’s worth. So I’ll wreck her new ‘nemesis’ instead.”

“You know what they say. The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Mei said sagely, quoting the wisdom given unto her by children’s television shows.

“Whatever,” Yuki sniffed, taking out a long, thin cigarette and reaching into her pocket for a lighter. “Here’s the deal. I want full info on this idiot she’s playing with. Name, address, age, how many pets they have, the works. You turn it over to me, and you aren’t responsible for what happens after that. We never met, and we don’t know each other. Capiche?”

“Out of curiosity,” Mei said slowly, “what if I said no?”

“Well. I never considered it. People don’t generally say no to me,” the cat replied ominously. “They usually have too much to live for.”

“Noted,” Mei said cheerfully, having forgotten her emergency buzzer at home. “Well, I suppose I could take on the case.”

“Attagirl,” Yuki said, sneering, and lit her cigarette.

This was a miscalculation, because ever since somebody had burned off the metalwork teacher’s eyebrows off with a blowtorch, the school had been obliged to review its fire safety code and had found that randomly putting sprinklers everywhere was the quickest way to fend off lawyers. One of them was in the sociology classroom, and it immediately began to simulate what it would be like to stand under a waterfall with a colander for a hat.

When the first drop of water hit her, Yuki snarled. “Damn it! Quick, what’s your price?”

“I get twenty five a day, plus expenses.”

“Here! Keep the change. I’ll pay the rest on delivery. Don’t let me down, kid,” the cat said, throwing some money down with a sweep of her arm and running from the room, traumatised by memories of detentions past.

Mei looked at the money, blinked, and then shouted: “Hey! I meant dollars, not cents!”

There was no reply. So Mei picked up twenty cents, two buttons and a bottle-top, and ran out of the room to ponder her newest case before the teachers found her.

Much like active volcanoes create fertile soil, the sudden sprinkler attack turned out to have an unexpected upside.

Firstly, it was an excuse to trudge into the house dripping wet and looking sorry for herself, which was a great way to attract sympathy from her immediate family. It also meant she got first dibs on the shower, and could enjoy the warm water for as long as she pleased.

But most importantly, it meant that Natsumi – who in Mei’s opinion was the world’s most excellent sister and might have been among the world’s most excellent people, period – would be waiting for her when she came out, armed with a hairdryer and a gentle smile. There was simply no greater pleasure in Mei’s life than sitting down in her warm, comfy pyjamas and letting Natsumi dry her hair for her while she considered her next move. She hesitated to use the word ‘sublime’, but there was no better way to describe the experience.

“Did you get any clients today?” Natsumi asked, setting down the hairdryer and reaching for a brush.

“I did.”

“Oh, how wonderful. Was it Syura-chan again? I’m so glad you two get along.”

Syura was Mei’s most regular customer by a country mile, something which had caused her to skyrocket in Natsumi’s esteem. As far as the chef was concerned, they were the best of friends – which, Mei supposed, was true, insofar as Syura could really be said to be friends with anybody. As a proud gamer girl, programmer and dabbler in the niche subcultures of the world, the redhead didn’t really do standard interpersonal relationships as Mei knew and understood them.

“Not Syura this time. New client.”

“That’s lovely. Do I know them?”

“I hope not,” Mei grumbled. She didn’t know how a meeting between Natsumi and Yuki would go, and she didn’t want to find out. “Should be an easy case, though.”

After all, it wasn’t as though QP was hard to track. That dog barely knew the meaning of the word ‘covert’, and almost certainly didn’t know how to spell it; when she wasn’t zooming around yelling, she was playing at high drama. Nothing QP did stayed secret for very long.

The other reason the case would be easy was that Mei had no intention of doing more than the bare minimum. She’d been soaked, bullied, and paid with no more than a pocketful of shrapnel and some vague threats, which were not conditions that inspired loyalty to her current client. Yuki might, if she was lucky, get the information she wanted, but more likely she’d be getting nothing, and if she wasn’t careful she might just get what was coming to her.

As Mei thought about the nature of karma (and how she might encourage the wheel to turn a little bit faster), Natsumi began to brush her hair, humming to herself as she did. Music wasn’t something that Natsumi had any particular talent at, but she was fond of singing to herself. It seemed to help her think. Mei considered it charming, although her contentious relationship with the school choir might have coloured her view slightly.

(The school choir was full of students with big, beautiful voices and big, beautiful ambitions. It was also full of drama and interpersonal rivalries, on which Mei had made a steady dime. There was a common joke in the student body that there were no knives to be found in the cafeteria, but you could find at least one stuck in any choir member’s back.)

“Come to think of it,” Mei said after a while, “you might be able to help me. You hang around with QP a lot, right?”

“Mmhm. Q-chan is a fellow dessert-lover, and she’s always such fun to be around.”

Mei very bravely said nothing. She’d recently had a small but extremely violent altercation with QP over a disagreement about the nature of QP and Natsumi’s relationship. Mei had thought QP was dating Natsumi, and, in a bout of sisterly rage, confronted her. QP apparently hadn’t even considered the possibility, but wasn’t really in the habit of shying away from a fight. It had ended messily, at least for Mei. As a result, she had chosen to refrain from commenting on QP and Natsumi’s relationship dynamics for the foreseeable future.

“Has she been doing anything weird lately? Like, running around dressed as a superhero, for instance?”

“I don’t know. Is your new case about Q-chan?”

“When are they not?” Mei grumbled, a little sourly. “All I ever do is dredge up info on that dog.”

Natsumi made a mysterious, but satisfied, kind of noise. “Hmhm. You’re like an expert on Q-chan nowadays. I’m a little jealous.”

Mei rolled her eyes. “That I know so much about her?”

“That she takes up so much of your attention.” Natsumi’s brush halted, and she began to toy with a loose curl in Mei’s hair, twirling it in her fingertips. “You’re always talking about her, you know. Or asking about her.”

“Wha…” Mei’s voice trailed off into horrified realisation. “Wait, no, you’re getting the wrong–”

“That’s probably why you get along with Syura-chan. You have the same interests. I think… she’ll be stiff competition, but you can do it if you try. Fight hard, Mei.”

She turned, jerking Natsumi’s hands away from her hair. “No, no, listen. I’m not interested in that dog at all. It’s just that–”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed. I think it’s wonderful that you’ve found somebody like that in your life,” Natsumi said sagely. It would be so easy to shout over her, but that quiet way she spoke – it didn’t seem fair. “And QP is very cute. But as your sister, I can’t help feeling just a little bit jealous… and maybe a little sad. It feels like you’re getting closer and closer to Q-chan, and further away from me.”

It was at this point that Mei realised that sometimes, having ‘pick a fight’ as your default first step in conflict resolution was not always a blessing. She couldn’t pick a fight with her own sister. But everything that Natsumi was saying was getting under her skin in the worst possible way. She felt angry, panicked. Her fists had started to itch.

“You’re wrong,” she said, and the effort she needed to hold her voice level made it feel cold. “Sis, you’re wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She didn’t realise she had stood up until she started running, and she didn’t realise she was running until she was unlocking the front door. She had just enough presence of mind to snag her coat and hat before she stormed out of the house. There was a deathly silence in the room after she left it.

“Oh dear. I think she’s mad,” Natsumi said.

It seemed like a good assumption. After all, there was nobody to tell her otherwise.

It took about thirty seconds of fresh air before Mei realised that, on the list of extremely stupid things to do, storming out of the house in your pyjamas and slippers was pretty up there.

To begin with, it robbed a little bit of the drama from her self-imposed exodus. Clothes didn’t necessarily make the man, but they sometimes made the moment, and at the current moment she felt more than a little ridiculous. Slippers were also not optimal shoes for slogging it across the city. Even slippers with penguins on them.

She had no plan on where to go, or what to do. She didn’t think any of her friends were crazy enough to let her sleep over with no notice, much less clothe and feed her. And although Red and Blue would certainly track her down to assuage her loneliness and potentially let her huddle with them for warmth, it would take them a good few hours at the very least.

Her only option, realistically speaking, was to occupy herself for a few hours and then quietly slink back home, where her sister would be crying. Other sisters might be angry, but Natsumi was a genuinely gentle soul who would apologise tearfully for whatever she had done wrong, and promise never to do it again, and just generally have such an iron grip on the moral high ground that she could start charging taxes there.

So, she wandered, as aimless as a cloud, until she arrived where everybody who wears slippers and pyjamas outside must one day come to rest: the convenience store.

There were people – naive, romantic people – who believed that convenience stores were the one place in the modern world where you wouldn’t be judged, no matter what (or how little) you happened to be wearing and no matter what time you rolled in at. They were comforted by the knowledge that the staff could not care less about them, as a result of being constantly exposed to the weird and unfortunately dressed at all times.

These people had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of apathy. A judgement was something that happened all by itself, without effort. It wasn’t that the staff didn’t care enough to judge you. They just didn’t care enough to remember you. Your face was one among hundreds that they would talk to, smile at, and take money from; whatever judgement they had made would last until you walked out of the door, at which point they would cheerfully forget about you, so as to go on with their lives. Unless, of course, you gave them a reason not to.

Mei, having vanquished several customer service assistants in her tireless quest for journalistic fidelity and tasty after-school snacks, knew the score. She treated the staff with a healthy dose of fear and respect; as an information broker, she was more aware than most about the perils of upsetting somebody who had seen your face, your ID, and the kind of garbage you filled your basket with on a regular basis. She therefore scuttled behind the shelves at the back and occupied herself with staring wistfully at things that had too many chemicals in them to be anything short of a war crime.

There, she waited. What for, she didn’t know. Divine intervention, perhaps, or for a pair of penguin allies to sneak into the store carrying some real clothes, or at least some shoes. That wasn’t too much to expect, was it? A pair of shoes? They could carry one shoe each, to spare their little backs. If they really felt like putting the effort in, they could carry a pair each. Then she’d have four shoes and a pair of slippers – one piece of footwear for every limb, and a spare pair to use as throwing weapons in the event of a random encounter.

Then she saw it.

She had actually seen it several times. Made a point of looking at it wistfully every time she came into the store, in fact. It was a glorious, decadent, white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake, and she had wanted it for weeks. Whether Mei had a maiden’s innocent heart was a matter of debate, but she definitely had a maiden’s endless stomach for delicious dessert items. She also had a maiden’s small and limited allowance, which rendered the cheesecake outside of her usual buying power.

But what, she wondered, if the cheesecake was not just a cheesecake? Using social alchemy, she could transform the cheesecake into something much more valuable: an apology. Natsumi used cake to settle interpersonal disputes all the time, so it only made sense to do the same thing to her. It was now a diplomatic solution that would run in the family – a tale of two sisters.

Her purse was in her coat pocket, and she thoughtfully inspected the contents. The cake would rob her of all her allowance. But, she thought with the canny expression of a nascent business owner, she’d told Yuki that she got “twenty-five a day, plus expenses.” Cheesecake, she had decided, was an expense. She could say it was for a bribe. Bribes were a very private investigator thing to do.

It was decided. With trembling hands, she seized the cheesecake, which may well have been her destiny, and set off to the counter. She smiled guilelessly as she paid, and walked away with a skip in her step.

The cashier noticed, and remembered her. But only briefly.

Halfway home, with a cake in her hand and a declaration of contrition drafted in her head, Mei stopped sharply when she heard the sound of a garbage can toppling over.

On any other night, she would have put it down to a raccoon, or a fox, or just plain trash goblins. She was a firm believer in trash goblins, although she’d never seen one. It wasn’t that surprising, though; everybody knew that goblins were masters of the ninja arts, and trash goblins were the stealthiest of the bunch.

But then she heard shouting. And in Ebimanyou Town, saying you’d heard shouting was tantamount to saying you’d heard QP.

Her head said that she should just ignore it and move on with her life. She was carrying a precious and delicate cake, and furthermore she had no particular intention of letting QP know that she wore jammies with cute pictures of animals on them.

But her gut told her that she was a journalist, and you didn’t become a journalist by not being nosy when the opportunity presented itself. Yuki’s twelve cents – most of the coins, upon further inspection, had been of foreign denomination – meant nothing to her, but she refused to compromise her god-given right to rubberneck. With justice on her side and without an ounce of fear in her heart, Mei darted around the corner towards the source of the fracas.

The ounce of fear Mei had misplaced was quickly returned to her when a glowing bullet of light soared past her nose and very nearly singed off her eyebrows. She needed her eyebrows. They were a very important part of her facial architecture, and like all historic architecture, needed to be protected.

In the alleyway, silhouetted by the dancing light show she was currently producing, was a dog. A crimson scarf – sadly not affixed by hair spray – billowed behind her. At some point, she had supplemented her costume with a dark spandex bodysuit, although she had failed the most important superhero commandment by not wearing her underwear on the outside. She had somehow sourced a bright yellow utility belt with a pudding-shaped buckle, against all laws of fashion; what tools it contained were a mystery, to be revealed when narratively convenient.

“This has gone too far!” she howled. “I can’t let you use those crazy devices any more!”

“Oh boy...” came the cool reply. “I’m only using them because you force me to.”

Mei blinked, a dangerous thing to do when observing a pitched firefight. She couldn’t help it. The voice had taken her completely by surprise.

Mainly because it was male.

She’d been convinced that QP’s new nemesis was, well, Syura. Who else would it be? Nobody else was stupid or obsessed enough to mess with her. But last she checked, Syura was definitely of the female persuasion, and certainly didn’t have the kind of vocal chords she’d need for a voice like that.

Not to mention that, well, now that she looked at it, the so-called ‘pitched battle’ really kind of… wasn’t. At the very least, it wasn’t up to Syura’s standards. The aspiring game dev couldn’t hope to match QP’s prodigious bullet output, but she lived and breathed bullet hell; few people in Ebimanyou Town could dodge and weave like Syura could, learning patterns and seizing opportunities. Whoever QP was fighting kept getting hit, muscling through it all with sheer durability.

“Give it up! I don’t know who you are, but there’s no way you can beat me!” QP yelled.
There was a momentary break in the deluge, and for a split second Mei saw QP’s opponent: clad in metal shin pads and a face-concealing helmet, they only stood a little taller than QP herself. Around their shoulders was a cape with more than a few scorched bullet holes, and they were breathing heavily.

“Hah… Seems it’s time for a distraction,” he muttered, and opened his palm to reveal what looked like a roll of quarters with a button on top, which he pressed with his thumb.

With lightning reactions, QP dove clear from the garbage can that had been knocked over earlier. Apparently, this hurt the feelings of the trash goblins within, because it exploded violently. The boom rattled Mei’s teeth and shook the ground beneath her, and a cloud of smoke billowed out from the blast. In the split second before it overtook her, she saw QP get nailed in the face by a flying banana peel.

The scent of smouldering trash hit her like a physical force. Then something actually hit her like a physical force as QP’s nemesis seized the opportunity created by the chaos and barrelled through the smoke cloud, barging her straight off her feet as they escaped.

She spiralled, in a glorious slow-motion shot, through the air, her hat tumbling off as she fell. Her face met the gutter with a crunch. Her cheesecake – the precious cheesecake, her apology to her beloved sister – soared through the air in a beautiful arc, until it landed with a splat on the back of her head.

For almost thirty seconds, Mei was motionless: face down, rump up, showing off her animal print
jammies to the whole world. She felt almost at peace with the world; it had been very scenic, she thought. In the film of her life, it would be a great shot.

When the shock wore off, it was replaced with a dull-thudding pain – and then with a very quickly rising anger. The cheesecake was delicious but it was destroyed, and with it, her plan at reconciliation with her sister. This was no longer about twenty-five a day plus expenses. This was about family.

And someone, somewhere, was going to pay.

A/N: I had to spend an extra hour basically reformatting this because blogspot sucks when it comes to anything even remotely complex. Oof. Oh well. See you in the next chapter!