Mind Games - Chapter 28

“So... I didn't ask last night, but...” My father began, a pair of chopsticks pausing over his curry and rice. “What exactly...”

He trailed off, not entirely willing to finish the question he'd begun, but the concern in his expression was enough for me to intuit where he was going with it.

“Nothing too strenuous,” I replied, waving my own wooden utensils. “I needed to drop by a store and buy something, that's it.”

Shinso Niko blinked, staring at me in mild disbelief. “Buy something? Y-you mean, from a store?”

I chuckled and nodded, “I even kept the receipt so I could get reimbursed.”

In this Economy?: Affordable housing is a heavily mythologized tale told to younger generations in order to encourage their blind obedience to the mutilated capitalist dogma mortal economies function under. The Company only requires your suffering to be entertaining for you to earn a decent place to live. Steal at least [10 Million Yen] of money and/or goods from criminal enterprises over the course of a thirty-day period to earn your Pocket Apartment (One Purchase).

I wasn’t even joking, not really.

A moment after I finished, Dad seemed to cotton to the fact that I was fucking with him and gave me an unamused look, which only made me laugh harder.

The crackling snap-dry wind of disbelief only drove it home.

My old man sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Hitoshi, if you don't want to tell me...”

“I'm actually being serious, if omitting a few details,” I replied, still chuckling. “There was a shop nearby that had... well, stuff that it wasn't supposed to have. They didn't know what they had, really, and were selling them for a lot less than they should have, but... things like that shouldn't be left in the wrong hands. All I had to do was go in, flash some cash, grab them, and walk out.”

All I had to do, yes. Not what I did.

“Oh,” Dad muttered, blinking awkwardly, then frowning. “What kind of things did you have to buy? You said they shouldn't be in the wrong hands... they're not dangerous, are they?”

“Only if you don't know what you're doing,” I shook my head, then rolled my eyes at his insistent gaze. “Ugh, fine... it's just a bunch of evil statues. Nothing too nasty.”

“Evil... statues?” Niko asked, his tone suggesting he thought he was being punk'd again.

“If you keep them around and look at them directly for too long they make you go crazy,” I explained with a sigh, holding up a hand before he could open up his mouth to object. “When I say, 'too long,' though, I mean years or decades. Not minutes or hours. Besides, I'm keeping them in a tinted case so you can't see them well enough for anything bad to happen.”

“Ah... evil statues, then,” Dad muttered, frowning as he rubbed his chin. “You're not... keeping them in the house, are you? I'm not sure if I want things like that-”

“They're sitting in a secure site right now, at least until I can hand them over to my contact with the bureaucracy, don't worry,” I cut him off gently.

Again, close enough to the truth. They were sitting in the vault in the Apartment, secured where even Himiko couldn't get to them, and I'd had Velma run a scan on the place to make sure there wasn't any leakage on top of that. Even if this section of The Company wasn't licensed to create things that blocked Eldritch Crazy Juice out, the Pocket Apartments were made by a branch that was able to do so.

“O-oh,” Niko mumbled, nodding after a moment's thought. “If that's the case... then I suppose it's fine. You don't seem to be doing anything too dangerous, so...”

We both went back to eating for a few moments, but I knew the conversation wasn't done.

Sadly, the older man was just too run-down by his life to know when to push for more answers. Which, in a way, was exactly what I needed as a guardian figure in this life. Niko wouldn't press me if I dodged the questions he managed to work up the nerve to ask and, moreover, he wouldn't ask most of the questions he really wanted to for fear of distancing himself from me.

It wasn't what would make him happy, though.

No, more than that, letting him stew in that kind of uncertainty and quiet misery would only result in a slow poisoning of both the man himself and our relationship.

“You can ask, you know,” I stated absently, as if remarking on the weather. “The only questions I said you shouldn't ask were the ones with answers that might bother you. That's your call.”

A foreboding chill wind began to blow.

“R-right... I'm just not sure if this is one of those,” Dad admitted with a frown as he looked away. Then, before I could respond, he appeared to steel himself. “How does someone... get hired by the Celestial Bureaucracy?”

I stopped chewing momentarily and blinked at my father, actually startled at the train of thought, then picked up my drink and took a heavy pull before swallowing. “That's... hmm, that's actually a good question. Can I have a moment to think about how to answer it?”

“If you don't want to – or think I shouldn't hear it-” Niko began, already backpedaling.

I waved him off, leaning back in my chair as much as I was able to. “No, no... it's just... kind of complicated? I mean, on one level... it's kind of like any other job? You send in a resume or you get a recommendation or, well... that kind of thing.”

“They... accept resumes?” Niko asked, confusion pouring down light rain from on-high.

I sighed and scratched at my head for a moment before pulling out my phone. “Not really, it's just... like this, okay?”

Dad blinked and looked over the small rectangle. “This isn't a resume, Hitoshi... this is, I don't know what this is, actually. 'You have been chosen to defeat the Demon Lord, Pick One Major Boon and Three Minor Boons.'”

“Yeah, I know what it looks like,” I snorted. “But... it's kind of a stealth resume, in a way. A... test of character, to see what you choose and how you'd go about saving the world.”

Niko blinked, looking at the simple document in a new light. “Huh. I... that actually makes a little sense. So you submitted one of these and they liked your answers?”

I grimaced slightly. “I... ah, actually got in on a recommendation.”

Dad's eyebrows furrowed, harsh confusion beating down like the summer sun. When he spoke it was slow and ponderous, as if he didn't know whether he wanted the answer or not. “Can I... ask... who? I mean, as long as you can tell me, since you're trying to keep everything secret.”

I drummed my fingers on the table in front of me, considering how best to answer. “I'm going to answer this in a roundabout way, so... let's say... you hire someone for a job, okay?”

“Okay?” Niko nodded slowly, resolving himself to my little thought experiment.

“He's a good employee. He does all his work on time, gets his assignments done, doesn't cause any problems, learned the ropes quick after you hired him, barely anyone has a negative thing to say about him, okay?” I asked, painting a fairly ambiguous picture.

“Sounds like a great guy,” Dad nodded. “If I were running the business, I'd probably want to hire ten more just like him.”

I grinned suddenly, raising a hand and snapping my thumb against my middle finger in a motion that left a 'finger-gun' on my right hand pointing at him. “Right! Exactly! So... why don't you hire ten more of him?”

Niko frowned at me. “Because, obviously, I couldn't find ten more people exactly like him. If I knew how to do that, Hitoshi, I'd sell the secret for a few billion yen and never work a day in my life again.”

We both knew that last part was a lie, but I let it pass unremarked.

“Not people exactly like him... just ten more of him,” I repeated, emphasizing my earlier statement.

It still didn't click, the older man staring at me. “Are you talking about... clones, or something?”

I shook my head, pushing that explanation away to never. There were things my father would be willing to accept and things he wouldn't be, and that was firmly in the latter category. “No, just... if you think Shinso Hitoshi makes a great employee, all you have to do is find a world that's close enough to the one you hired him from and look for the Shinso Hitoshi there, then see if your current employee will affirm a recommendation.”

“Oh!” Niko's eyes shot wide as the penny dropped, then wider still as the implications hit home. “By the Gods! Th-that means... oh my... you were recommended by yourself?”

“I'm told I'm a great judge of character,” I smirked. “And I said it, so I know it must be true.”

Niko's jaw dropped and, for a moment, I thought the joke had landed flat, until he started laughing wildly. His fit of laughter lasted almost an entire minute, the sound almost pitching into the hysterical, but not quite. The way I could feel his mood change the atmosphere of the room meant that I could tell he viewed the entire thing as more of an exercise in absurdity than anything else.

Which was, honestly, a healthy reaction to learning how 'big' things were, out there.

Especially since the alternative was usually an existential crisis.

“This is... so insane,” Niko muttered, shaking his head as he internalized what I was telling him. “So you really... did you actually meet your other self? The one who recommended you?”

I shook my head with a small smile, just grateful that the tension had been broken. “Not really, he just left a message with my superiors to pass on.”

Niko sat up a little straighter. “A message? What was it?”

I snorted and intentionally focused on making myself blush. “Ah... a warning about a girl I shouldn't date, to make sure I never got drunk enough to think tattoos were a bright idea-”

Dad jerked in his seat in a fit of suppressed laughter.

“-and to have a better relationship with you,” I stated, shrugging.

The older man blinked rapidly, one hand coming up to wipe at his eyes.

Which is why I lie to you.

The evening devolved into sappiness and heartfelt familial moments after that, which was as good a note as any to end the night on after such a relatively heavy discussion. Still, that left me more than enough time to do some data crunching for the report my vigilante side was building up for the yakuza group that was distributing trigger.

And there was a lot of data to crunch.

Thankfully, I was using a Company-made computer to do so, which essentially gave me a near fiat-backed amount of localized computing power. The bandwidth going in and out of the Apartment was still a chokepoint, but as long as I stored all of the incoming data on my personal computer in my room in the Apartment, I could play with it to my heart's content.

After giving it a day to build up to the point where I could get an actionable amount of intelligence to work with, I was rewarded by the terabytes and terabytes of unrelated bullshit I had to pare down and cull from what would be my final report submitted to a hero agency to get them to move on the locations I'd pinpointed.

The good news, though, was that I had built up a pretty solid map of their supply chain, safe houses, and command structure simply through the panic that had resulted from my robbery.

In fact, I had several good angles from my own hidden cameras on two of the gang's lieutenants and one of the underbosses directly inspecting the basement level.

Nothing, of course, that would tie any of it to All for One, though.

That wasn't much of a surprise, admittedly.

You didn't become the shadow overlord of crime on a national level by being easy to identify as part of a criminal syndicate.

In fact, even knowing he existed, I could only barely see the traces left behind by the invisible hand of someone shaping the movements of the chemicals and money behind the drug.

All of this just reinforced the real problem with All for One.

Simply killing the man was easy enough. At least, if you brought a certain level of ruthlessness uncommon in heroes to the battlefield. Even if he was an old, treacherous, and formidable villain... he was still just a man at the end of the day, even if he wanted to portray himself as some kind of demon king. Enough ordinance – exotic or mundane – would put him down, especially if All Might could cave his skull in. It was just a matter of how much collateral damage you were willing to tolerate and how well you could plan to deliver that firepower.

What you couldn't just blow to smithereens with explosives was the criminal network All for One had built up over the past two centuries.

Two hundred years worth of favor-trading, blackmail, extortion, and judicious redistribution of superpowers left a lot of people in his pocket and a lot more too scared to cross him.

It really underscored why they called All Might the 'Symbol of Peace,' when something like All for One was lurking in the shadows able to mobilize a small army of followers to destabilize the system.

I sighed and toggled up Nakamura's shop on my browser.

Thankfully, the safe I'd stolen last night had refilled my cash reserves and I could place another expensive order for more surveillance equipment.

Given where some of these trails led? I was going to need ironclad evidence to make a dent in this network.

A certain fiscal institution's name in particular had drawn my attention when I was looking over the yakuza's bookkeeping records for their shop.

Every little bit would help, after all.

With that comforting thought, however, I ducked back into the bedroom in my actual home before throwing off my clothes and heading to bed. I had, after all, what promised to be a very thoroughly irritating day tomorrow.

…

“You know, when I heard that I was going to be taking the day off from school for these tests, I really didn't imagine that I'd spend the day filling out math problems as if I was still in the classroom,” I commented, my tone dry as the desert as my pen danced over the equations.

Dr. Kureka chuckled, his white labcoat a little off-color against his naturally-yellow skin, making the man look as though he were perpetually suffering from jaundice. In a pre-quirk world, at least. “Ah, I remember that feeling, Shinso-kun. When I initially looked into being a professional quirk assessor I thought I was going to get to play with high-tech gadgets all day. Sadly, reality always seems to be more boring than we'd like it to be.”

He waved a set of completed foreign-language tests for emphasis.

“Do you ever get to play with the gadgets?” I asked, partially out of real curiosity and partially out of a desire to relieve the mind-numbing boredom that came with proving I knew basic calculus.

Well, River considered it boring, anyway.

“Sometimes,” the professional shrugged his surprisingly broad shoulders with a small smile. “Not nearly enough, though, in my opinion. A great deal of quirk assessment – or reassessment in your case – is the grunt work of seeing what a given person's baseline performance is rather than the high-end capabilities of a professional hero's trained quirk.”

I hummed as I continued filling out problems. “I suppose that there's not much point in getting your quirk assessed if you already know what it does, for the most part.”

The older man chuckled, rubbing at this neatly-trimmed goatee. “You'd be surprised. I tend to recommend even professional heroes undergo a basic reassessment every decade as a part of a standard health check. Prolonged and intensive quirk use pushes abilities to grow in ways that are sometimes too subtle to catch without objective measurements and scientific data... and, unfortunately, it's rare to come across a hero that diligent in documenting their own quirk. Something of a blind spot, I've found.”

“Hmm... mostly at this point I'm just hoping that me filling out all these answer sheets tells you something important,” I stated, sighing as I flipped another page.

Oh, goodie... differential equations. Maybe they'll see if I can count on my fingers and toes next.

Which was, admittedly, an unfair gripe. Normal (whatever that qualifier meant in a world of quirks) people my age wouldn't have the training or skill set to handle this level of arithmetic. That didn't stop it from being the equivalent of basic addition for River Tam, though.

“Oh, we're already getting quite significant data from this little exercise, though your foreign language tests will have to be sent out to a few specialists to grade, sadly. We don't have the funding or resources to handle everything in-house as we'd like,” the doctor explained with a sigh of his own.

“If I'm such an interesting subject, mind telling me what exactly all of this is supposed to accomplish?” I asked, already having a guess, but listening to him explain it was better than nothing.

Kureka cleared his throat and nodded, ready to oblige me. “We're primarily looking to establish a baseline performance for you, Shinso. We want to know what you consider a personal level of strenuous mental exercise. Given your quirk's someone... opaque method of operation, we've formulated a certain hypothesis around it interfacing with your sense of proprioception – your sense of your own body's position and movement – due to the ease with which you pick up martial arts and other skills with a physical component.”

He was silent for a moment, apparently lost in thought, before picking his monologue back up. “That's... somewhat unusual for a quirk as straightforward as your own first appears. Which means that, after this, we're going to run you through another set of similar exercises, this time physical, though.”

I reached up and scratched at one of the pieces of metal and plastic glued to my head. “It'd be a vain hope to suggest that I don't have to have these sensors attached while I'm doing that, wouldn't it?”

“Afraid so,” the scientist nodded. “Frankly, you're lucky you're getting off with just the physical and mental rundowns. Given what Hot Ice told us about using your quirk to reduce your sleep and artificially generate REM cycles, we really wanted to keep you for a full week's worth of sleep study.”

I twitched. “Hard Pass.”

The doctor sighed, his shoulders drooping. “Which is why we'll only be doing an abbreviated one later in the day for you to demonstrate your ability to sleep on command and we'll extrapolate from there.”

I sighed deeply. “The things I do for the sake of becoming a hero.”

~~~

I do not suggest contracting a sinus infection while suffering from jetlag.

That knocked me on my ass for a good 24 hours.

In happier news, the update for Mind Games is finished and I should have the big chapter for The Hand We're Dealt out for Saturday. Thank you for your patience, I'm going to get the public post on QQ done now and go lie back down.

You're all amazing for your support, don't forget that. I really appreciate it.