[100% OJ, Fanfic] Natsumi Day: The Great Detective, Part II
Genre: Humour/Slice of Life
Length: 5143 words
B/D: Continuing right on where we left off, it's chapter 2 of the Natsumi day festivities.
QP was a girl who had gotten used to seeing unusual things.
Still, as she looked down into the gutter at Mei, who was alternating between bawling her eyes out and hurling the kinds of invectives that QP liked to pretend she didn’t know about, she experienced emotions that she hadn’t experienced in some time, like pity, and anger, and a vague sense of hunger. (‘Some time’ was, in fact, measurable in hours, specifically three of them, which had elapsed since she had watched Syura trying to eat cup noodles with a spoon because her dishwasher was on the fritz.)
When she was done experiencing emotions, she took a scoop of icing with one finger and experienced cake, which was by and large a more pleasant thing to experience. The cake itself was particularly pleasant, in fact, and not even the sight of Mei’s animal print pyjamas could take away from the delicious taste of white chocolate and raspberries that floated through QP’s mouth. It was so tasty that she only vaguely remembered the whole thing about dogs and chocolate being a generally poor combination, but since she was only part dog and white chocolate was the least chocolate chocolate, she could probably get away with it.
She actually ate things that the average canine would be well-advised to avoid on a pretty regular basis, without ever even realising it and with little-to-no side effects. What granted this mysterious protection was a question for the ages. Perhaps her status as a deity of sweets immunised her from death via food, as befitted a member of the culinary pantheon. Perhaps her human legs and human arms and mostly human brain also came with a human liver and kidneys as part of a promotional stunt, and lesser dogs – ones who had not opted for the sports-model chassis at the corporeal form dealership – had not received this windfall. Perhaps inside of QP, there were infinite smaller, cellular QPs, who unleashed infinite smaller deluges of bullets on anything that even vaguely looked like it might impact her health, vaporising such offenders on impact. Nobody could say.
Eventually Mei stopped crying, although she never actually stopped cursing. Having already given up on catching the nefarious ne’er-do-well she’d been fighting, QP waited patiently for it to run its course. Sometimes you just needed to cuss out the world in general. Life was like that.
Eventually, when Mei was finished letting the world know exactly what she thought of it (and of its extended family, many of whom she claimed to have had intimate relationships with), she raised her head and said, in a low, level voice: “QP, you have to help me.”
“I’m not QP,” she said.
Mei’s slipper appeared in her hand, and she began to brandish it with self-righteous fury. “This is not the time, QP. I swear to the twelve gods of journalism that if you don’t help me out, I. Will. Smite. You.”
She waggled the slipper at every word. Some ancient dog part of QP’s brain cringed as she did. The slipper held a special place in the dog-human relationship. It was symbolic: dogs brought slippers to their masters each morning. To do so was a recognition of their master’s authority. If their master turned that slipper against them, they could do nothing but submit to the weapon that they themselves had delivered. She didn’t consider Mei her master, but the implication remained.
Still, for all her inclinations towards extreme violence, she was a good girl and heart, and chose to believe Mei didn’t know she was committing a war crime. “I’ll help you, but I’m not QP. I’m Danger Dog, your friendly neighbourhood hound who chases crime!”
“Listen, I don’t have time to argue. I don’t know what you were doing with that weird tin can man, but that cake you just tasted was meant to be an apology for my sister. I can’t give it to her like this, and I can’t show my face at home until I’ve got something to replace it,” Mei snapped.
“You and Nacchan were fighting? That’s rare. What was it about?”
“Nothing,” Mei said quickly. She might be tired, unfashionable and covered with cake, but there was no way she was letting QP know they’d been fighting over – no, no, about – her. It would bloat her ego so much that her head would blow up like a hot air balloon and she’d float into the sun, which as a situation had its attractiveness but would have repercussions down the line. “I just… I just need some help.”
She liked the voice quaver she managed to put into that. Damn fine work, if she said so herself.
“It’s… it’s been a rough day, and I’m covered in cake, and…”
Oh, wait. Was that a real voice quaver? An honest-to-god, born in the wild voice quaver?
“...and I’m in my jammies, and I have to shower again even though I already did because the sprinklers went off in class…”
She could feel fat, wet tears starting to flow down her cheeks. Was that part of the plan? It must have been part of the plan.
“...and that weird cat threatened me and she didn’t even pay properly, and I fought with Nacchan and that’s the worst part, and the cake is ruined so I can’t apologise and I didn’t even say hi to the penguins and… what am I gonna do?”
Finally, as if it had been waiting inside her for the last twelve or so hours, a wail escaped from her lips and she dissolved into tears – the incoherent, breathless kind of crying that stops you from talking properly, but demands that you try, because you have to make sense of it, because you have to give an account of how you got into this state.
QP listened patiently. She even reached out with one hand and tentatively stroked Mei’s forehead as she sobbed. When the first heavy wave of tears had receded (although, like all tides, it would return shortly), she spoke.
“Let’s go get waffles,” she said.
Mei didn’t know how waffles would solve all the problems she’d found herself with. But a world with waffles in it was better than a world without, so she nodded, and put her slipper back on her foot where it belonged.
It was, perhaps, the best waffle she’d ever tasted.
Mei didn’t cry that often. She was in touch with her emotions, but some emotions were close enough that she could borrow a cup of sugar from them and others were distant relatives that you only wrote to when somebody in the family died. Crying was somewhere in between, and usually dropped by unannounced before she’d had time to clean the emotional guest room.
So she forgot just how tiring it was, what with all the production of the tears and the moving of the chest and the making of noises she would forever deny that she’d made. It really took it out of you. She felt like she’d done a full-body workout, and she needed some glucose before her brain rolled down the blinds and turned off the lights for the day.
Sugar had been provided, in the form of soft, fluffy batter, straight off the iron and topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and lashings of syrup. It was heaven, and put things into some kind of perspective for her. Things could have been worse. She’d been pretty close to a live explosive, after all.
QP had explained the situation to the staff. Then she had explained it again, louder, and finally she made the kind of noise usually associated with a thermonuclear weapon taking a quick trip across the border to see the local landmarks. As a result, they were now allowed to use the employee bathroom to towel off Mei’s hair, provided they had their own towel. They didn’t, but reinforcements were coming.
“Thanks, QP. For this,” she said, and gestured to her plate. “It… really helped.”
“No problem,” the masked mutt replied, puffing out a chest that seemed to barely exist.
“It’s all part of the service.”
“The, uh… superhero service?”
“No, the dog service,” QP said patiently. “Don’t you know what ‘dog’ stands for?”
“It… it’s a word, QP. It’s not an acronym. It doesn’t stand for anything.”
“Nope! It stands for ‘doer of good’, just like ‘god’ stands for ‘guardian of desserts’. Geez, what are they teaching youngsters nowadays?”
“I… I go to your school. I’m in your class!”
“Oh, right. Did we have math homework? I kinda slept through the last bit of that class. Heroing really tires you out.”
Mei found herself nonplussed, which she suspected was the intent. It was harder to burst into tears when your brain was wrapping itself around the sheer Gordian knot that was QP’s logic.
She’d gotten no closer to understanding the profundity of QP’s brain when Syura announced her arrival. She did this by throwing a balled-up towel at QP’s face, declaring that it was her Jecht Shot Mark IV and that swimming behind the goal was the mark of a coward. She had the glazed look of somebody who was still thinking in terms of damage formulas and character builds, and it would take her a good fifteen minutes more to return to the world of normal humans.
Thankfully, she had at least brought some of her spare uniform, which was as close to Mei’s size as made no difference, and with it, she was one step close to an existence marked by dignity, professionalism, and a lack of cake in her hair. She scurried off to the bathroom, leaving QP and Syura to their own devices.
When she got back, there was another waffle waiting for her. She felt like she might burst into tears again. To the outside world, she, QP and Syura were just three weirdos in a waffle house. But in their hearts, they had forged a true and enduring bond of camaraderie. They solidified it by, wordlessly, agreeing to conform to the stereotype about what teenage girls did in waffle houses: discuss guys. Specifically, the guy with the bucket on his head that had planted C4 in Mei’s cake.
(His offences, as was tradition, got larger every time Mei had to tell the story. By the time she’d told it ten times, he would have planted a nuclear device in her back garden and force-fed her penguins mud on live television.)
“What do we know about this guy?” she asked.
“Not a lot,” QP replied, her ears drooping. “He probably had a motive, but I kinda zoned out in his introductory speech so we could get to the bit where I won.”
Syura nodded her agreement. “Oh! I totally getcha there. I do that all the time in visual novels – just hold down control until I get to the action scenes.”
“Don’t you usually play like… yuri romance novels? Do they have a lot of action scenes?”
From what Mei understood, it was usually a very specific kind of action, but she was keen to move the conversation along from what she might or might not know about virtual erotica. “So you don’t know what he actually wants?”
“He wants to get his head examined,” was the growled response. “Who just runs around with explosives? I mean, who does that?”
Syura and Mei looked at each other, aware that QP had – in her own adorable way – blundered upon the world’s most important question. Who, in fact, did run around with explosives?
Mei, who couldn’t always remember if her job was being an information broker, a private detective or a high-flying, hell-in-a-cell professional wrestler, decided to apply strands of all three professions to her thinking. There weren’t many places you could get explosives in a small town like theirs. You needed to go through certain… paralegal channels. If you found those channels, you’d find his supplier, who was bound to have some information. At the very least, you could dispose of them, and thus his supply of things that went ‘boom’ in the night.
Syura, on the other hand, applied videogame logic, wherein the police were not present, ammunition was plentiful, and you could find both live grenades and healing potions bristling from the shelves of the local 7-11 in quantities only limited by the amount of money in your wallet. Predictably, her line of enquiries ended somewhat earlier than Mei’s.
“Come to think of it,” Mei muttered, “Yuki did say–”
At the mention of Yuki’s name, QP’s open, amiable face suddenly clouded over. Not, of course, in the way that a sunny afternoon clouds over as a hint that you should rethink your ambitions of a picnic, but rather in the way that a wide swathe of the ocean clouds over as a hint that you should rethink your current life expectancy.
“You’ve been talking to her? She’s bad news. She’s a bad cat,” QP said darkly, as though it was the sharpest expletive in her vocabulary. Perhaps it was. “I wouldn’t trust anything she says.”
“...that her goons had gotten caught up with that weird bucket head guy,” Mei finished.
“Oh, that’s true,” the dog confirmed immediately. “Well, kinda. I didn’t really have any leads on the guy, so I just sorta went around and–”
“–did what a QP does,” Syura said diplomatically. “You know. Throws stuff at the wall to see what sticks, tries novel solutions, lets loose the dogs of war. That kind of thing.”
Mei was familiar with the process, having experienced it herself several times. The logic seemed to be that if she beat up everybody in town, one of them was bound to have done it. But, she supposed, it had been a blessing in this case. If she hadn’t randomly been fighting people, Yuki never would have come calling for information, and they’d never have known the goons and QP’s new ‘nemesis’ were connected.
“I think,” she said delicately, “we should talk to Tomato and Mimyuu.”
“Is that, uh, the diplomatic kind of talking?” Syura asked. “Or is it the, uh, more direct kind?”
Mei scowled. “Let’s just say we probably won’t need words. We’ll have other ways to communicate.”
The plan seemed acceptable to all three of them. For QP, it was nothing out of the ordinary. For Syura, words like ‘it’s dangerous to go alone!’ and ‘X has joined your party!’ had made her grateful to include Mei in her backup, or rather, meat-shields. And for Mei… well, she owed QP for two whole waffles, and she had sworn revenge for her wasted cake. She didn’t swear revenge lightly, although she did do it slightly more often than the average bear.
“Oh, but let’s do that tomorrow,” QP interjected. “First, we gotta help you make up with Natsumi. I’ve got the perfect plan, so hear me out.”
Mei raised an eyebrow as QP puffed out her chest, and assumed the smug aura of a dog with absolute confidence in herself.
“Pudding,” she declared.
The other eyebrow joined its compatriot. Eyebrows, like rabbits, got lonesome easily, and always sought the company of their peers before long.
“That’s a great plan. You were gonna bribe her with a dessert anyway, so we’ll get the world’s foremost expert on pudding to whip up something special,” Syura opined.
“It wasn’t a bribe. It was just… you know. A gift, to say sorry.”
“Right. You were just trading food for forgiveness, and earlier you traded money for the food, so it’s not like you’re buying forgiveness with money.”
Mei got the distinct feeling she was being made fun of, but also felt like her day had been bad enough without punching somebody in a waffle house. She counted to ten in her head, breathed deeply, and imagined her sister smiling.
“Let’s do it,” she said, and she was so relieved that she forgot to ask QP why she was wearing that stupid superhero costume.
The thing about Yuki was that she knew how to put people between a rock and a hard place, and how to make herself function as both at the same time.
A classic example was the basic act of speaking to her. Whenever she spoke, it was smug. Mocking. She taunted. She talked down. She dared you to do something about it, to do something about her, and only smirked wider when you didn’t. She wanted to make you feel like you were weak and impotent, and often, she succeeded.
But the alternative to Yuki talking was Yuki being quiet, which was an entirely different experience. She understood that when your mouth fell silent, your actions shouted – and she knew just how to lash her tail, to flatten her ears, to put her hand just in the right position to make it look like she might pull her gun at any time. She only went quiet when she was furious – and when she was furious, she had a regrettable tendency to do something about it.
She hadn’t spoken for almost forty-five seconds.
Tomato and Minyuu, who were also silent but for entirely different reasons, looked at each other and engaged the kind of telepathy that only very close siblings could ever muster. Mostly, they were discussing who got whose stuff in the event that one of them died in the next ten minutes.
“So,” Yuki said at last, putting her hands on the desk. “I just got a call from one of my contacts in the police department.”
This was not a good start. It was a very very not good start. Teachers, in the sisters’ opinion, were bad enough. The police were like teachers on steroids, and they were allowed to hit you back if you got lairy with them.
“They say there’s been a series of explosions in the town. One a couple days ago. Another one tonight. Why,” Yuki asked, “do you think they would tell me about that?”
Rhetorical questions were also of the cat’s favourite tactics when it came to dressing down her underlings. If they didn’t reply, she got angry. If they did reply, she got even angrier. It was foolproof, and her goons were nothing if not fools.
“Okay. Let’s ask another question. How many fireworks factories are in this town?”
The sisters looked at each other again. They weren’t expecting a quiz. The Waruda made their base in an abandoned cram school, and Yuki had taken them to the principal’s office (in which she had installed a darts board and a cabinet full of expensive whisky), but nobody had said there would be learning. It was a breach of contract.
“The answer,” the cat continued, “is none. There are also no chemical plants in town, or chemical research labs. Nowhere makes ammunition near here. No mining operations. What do you think that means?”
Wisely, the sisters remained silent, and waited for the hammer to fall of its own accord.
“Let me let you in on something about the police. When things start going ‘boom’, it makes them upset. Usually, it’s a freak one-off. But when it happens twice in one week, they start asking questions. One of those questions is, ‘who, in this area, has the necessary skills to make explosive devices’?” She folded her arms. The tail lashed. “It’s not a long list. It’s not a list at all, because there’s only one damn name on it.”
“Oh,” Tomato murmured as the dots connected. “Oh,” Mimyuu echoed.
“Lucky for you, I have an arrangement with the cops. I come down on anybody causing too much trouble on my turf, and they get to stay fat and lazy until the day I come for them, too. But that means I gotta deal with this internally.”
“Uh, boss… That doesn’t sound lucky for us. It sounds worse.”
“I’m glad we understand each other.” She stalked out from behind the desk. She was getting into the swing of things, now. “So. Why don’t you tell me who you’ve been selling explosives to, Mimyuu?”
The junior Waruda looked at her sister, then at the ground, and at last, longingly, at the window. She could probably survive a two-storey fall. She was a kid, and kids bounced.
“Some guy with a bucket on his head,” she muttered miserably.
“I see. And one day after you sold him the explosives, QP came looking for him, didn’t she? And she beat you up, because that’s the way she operates – she just fights a string of people and then the problem resolves itself. One person just naturally leads to the next.” The cat began to pace, her arms folded. She was, at this point in her life, something of a QP expert. She found the dog annoying, but if there was one thing she respected in life, it was strength – and QP had that in spades. “She’s right, too. You’re part of the chain. She just doesn’t know it yet.”
“Uh… boss. Why is this important?”
“It’s important,” Yuki hissed, “because you didn’t tell me you were involved. You told me she just did it randomly. I’ve hired somebody to look into it, out of my own pocket – and she’ll probably figure out what you two idiots were up to right away, and tell that stupid dog about it. What do you think that mutt will do?”
Tomato gulped. “Uh… Round 2?”
“Round 2,” Yuki nodded grimly. “She’ll come back for you idiots, and then probably go straight to fighting me. Because I’m one step up the chain, right? So. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna head her off at the pass.”
“You mean we’re gonna ambush her?” Tomato asked dubiously. She was, naturally, all for the idea of an ambush – but against QP? Even with the element of surprise, it was a hard sell.
“No. We’re going to catch up to this bucket head guy and we’re going to teach him what happens to troublemakers in our town. We take his bombs away, turn him over to that dog, and we get credit for helping subdue a dangerous terrorist.” She cracked her knuckles. “Mimyuu? Start checking on the spy network. Tomato, hit the street. If we can get him quickly enough, Waruda will come out of this smelling like a rose.”
And you two, the unspoken addendum went, will come out of this alive.
Night had begun to fall by the time Mei waved goodbye to Syura and QP.
It was a very careful kind of wave, because her other hand was occupied by one of the largest preparations of pudding she had seen. It was, of course, top quality. One spoonful, QP swore, would make any pure hearted maiden weak at the knees, and there was definitely more than that in the container. Mei must have been purer of heart than she thought, because her legs felt like jelly when she looked at the peerless pudding she had been bestowed. When you looked into the wibbly-wobbly abyss, so too did it look back unto you.
She’d had no hand in actually producing the pudding. QP had been very emphatic that neither she, nor Syura, were allowed in her kitchen. Perhaps this was wise. Syura seemed to consider concepts like nutrition and food preparation as dishonourable for a hardcore gamer like herself, and Mei cooked about as much as you would expect for a girl with her sister’s infinite cooking prowess to rely on, i.e. not at all.
But carrying the pudding was, by itself, a sombre and noble duty. It was like being the one who carried the crown at a monarch’s coronation, except most monarchs did not then dig into their fancy regalia with a spoon. It had happened – royalty was a very strange and powerful drug – but not very often.
It was, she had to admit, tempting to take just a tiny taste. It was a premium pudding, after all. The best of the best. Did the footman that bore the crown never once dream of wearing it for themselves, just to see how heavy it was on the brow?
But, with a will folded tempered like the finest samurai swords that Krila was always ranting about, she resisted the temptation. Pudding was a powerful force, but it was momentary. Her sister’s forgiveness would taste far sweeter, and wouldn’t go to her hips.
A small, traitorous part of her – the part that calculated the fees for her agency and carefully gauged how much interest any event would have in the gossip column – whispered that she would probably get a taste of the pudding anyway. Natsumi had some very chef-y habits, one of which was eating just a little of something and then thinking about the flavour profile. She loved to watch other people eat delicious things. It was such a basic, vital kind of happiness, and she wanted everybody to be able to experience it.
That was the thing Mei loved most about her sister. There was no greed in Natsumi. No gluttony. They just weren’t a part of her makeup. She went out of her way to give people things, to make them happy. If she had nothing to give, she made something. It was one thing to share what you had, and quite another to make something with the intent of giving it away.
It was rare, and it was precious. Mei wanted to protect it – that way of thinking. That way of being. She’d fight tooth and nail if she had to, and she’d fight anybody. It didn’t matter who. She’d even fight herself.
So although Natsumi would offer her some of the reconciliatory pudding, she wouldn’t take it. Or if she did take it, she’d only take a little bit. She would wrestle down that selfishness, take it out into the alley and introduce its metaphorical kneecaps to the equally metaphorical baseball bat of discipline. Natsumi gave so much. It was time she got something for herself.
As she thought about this, something felt wrong.
The town that never slept, except when it did, was putting on its nightcap and brushing its teeth before bed. Children were being tucked in, scandalous television series were creeping onto the air, and hundreds of microwave turntables were rotating as hard-working people prepared ready meals before or after work. The streets were almost empty.
But not quite.
There was a saying that pets took after their owners, or that owners took after their pets. Mei was the proud owner of a pair of very paranoid penguins, and while she didn’t have their immediate urge to cringe away in a flurry of feathers, she was alert enough to know when she was being followed.
She didn’t turn around. In a town with as many nooks, crannies, and conveniently placed boxes as Ebimanyou Town, she wouldn’t see anybody. Instead, she listened, with ears honed by rumour and gossip.
Somebody was timing their footsteps to match hers. But they were a little louder than hers would have been. A little heavier. They were probably bigger than her, then, although not by much.
She stopped for a moment, pretending to be absorbed in the state of her shoelaces, which did not exist because she was wearing slippers. The footsteps behind her also stopped. Not just a tail then, or at least not a competent one. A good tail would have kept on walking to deflect suspicion, circled around and started following again at the closest opportunity.
It was at about this point that Mei began to ask herself some very important questions, like how loud she could scream, and how fast she could run.
She didn’t quite know the answer to the first question, but the answer to the second was ‘not fast enough’. Syura’s spare clothes had not included a pair of shoes, and her slippers weren’t exactly the sportiest of footwear. They’d fall off near instantly if she broke into a sprint, and between a person in proper shoes and someone running barefoot, she’d wager on the one in shoes ten times out of ten.
Flying wasn’t on the cards, either. All the arguing, crying, and consuming of waffles that she’d done had burned through her energy, and flying took a lot out of her at the best of times. Taking flight on an empty tank was a good way to end up with a broken arm or leg.
Fighting… was not a great option. Without a pair of penguins to throw at her opponents, she’d be reduced to throwing hands, one of which was currently occupied with a very precious pudding. Logically, she could put it down. Logically, it didn’t matter if it was damaged. But at this point, that pudding was a symbol of all sorts of things, and she couldn’t bear to let go of it.
She was quickly narrowing down her options to nothing, and the footsteps had begun to feel like they were drawing closer.
There was one option that seemed like it might work. She didn’t want to get in an all-out brawl, but she could turn around, get in a quick sucker-punch and then use the opportunity to flee. She knew the area well enough, and she could probably either find a shop that was still open, make it back home, or just lose the trail before they recovered – especially if she flew for just a little bit, just enough to take her over a wall or something…
Behind her, a foot crunched in the gravel – far nearer than she’d thought, and too close for comfort. Her time had run out. Her hackles rose. She breathed deep, turned like the crack of a whip, and swung.
There were three iron laws when it came to street fighting, and Mei knew them all. One: she who strikes first, succeeds. Two: if your back hits the ground, you’re as good as done.
The third, and perhaps most important rule, was that you either went for the eyes, or for the groin. As Mei’s knuckles bounced uselessly off a familiar metal helmet, she really wished she’d gone for option B on that one.
Her back hit the floor ten seconds later.
A/N: Blogspot broke even more horribly than usual while I was formatting this chapter, and wouldn't even let me position the little banner images I use in place of horizontal lines for scene breaks. Why do I use those images? Because blogspot won't let you insert horizontal lines. Why not just put horizontal lines in the original document and copy/paste the entire thing? Because then blogspot's editor changes the colour and size of roughly 50% of the text for no reason, and no amount of fiddling with formatting settings will get it uniform, short of just removing all formatting completely.
Sorry, but you're going to have to live with it, or check out the Ao3 host.
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