This is inspired to me by a movie and the anime. I'm sure few of you know what the movie is and that's good for me because it helps me add some surprises in it.
Disclaimer: I do not own Paranoia Agent
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The time of day was Wednesday after school, 2:30 P.M. In most schools lots of children would be walking home hand in hand while their mothers watched over them. The reason for this was they were afraid of a woman covering her mouth who was said to eat children. The ones dumber than the minimum wage workers at fast food restaurants were the ones who didn't know rumors like that helped keep children safe.
Who kept people safe from Lil' Slugger? Violence was always top news in countries, even in the most crime filled ones where human life is nothing but work, eat cheap food, and then die. In a strange way, the violence of Lil' Slugger helped people in what was Japan's depression time helped keep crime down and helped some people with their pressure. It was like the country was mingling together.
Roshan Hiro was an honest man for reasons that shaped back to the death of his younger sister, Hang Hiro. He was twenty-five years old, lived with his girlfriend in a small house, and worked on a site called Upwork, where he accepted jobs as a Freelancer so they would pay him on his account.
Upwork was a funny site. You get to choose to be either a customer or a freelancer on it. As a customer, you are able to send out a request a freelancer can do and choose three levels of how much of an expert they are. Sometimes, since Roshan was a Freelancer, he would enter a video call with someone to try showing them pages of the comics they wanted.
"How come I can hear you but I can't see you?" A voice from the site asked.
"I don't know but maybe it's for the best," Rosland said. "So you're looking to make a fantasy comic where boys and girls fight each other until a cop with a lipstick mark shows up and helps them mingle together?"
Judging by how excited the voice was, he could tell the boy was nodding his head. "Yeah. I didn't know any popular ideas until I heard girls saying they don't trust men after what their mothers went through with Lil' Slugger."
"And the first page is a peasant woman walking through a road, when a lizard monster with spiky hair you sketched from a scary sunflower picture-kind of looks like Frieza from Dragonball Z-is just standing there?"
"Aha."
"I cost two thousand yen an hour. Are you okay with that?"
The person agreed he should be his artist, however, he was sidetracked by the sound of a vehicle engine. In the suburbs it was hard to tell when there's a certain person driving a car, but the sound was something Rosland never forgot.
Not caring if this client stayed on the computer screen the whole time or waited until tomorrow when Rosland would work, Rosland got out and greeted his delicious apple with nutella.
His girlfriend's name was Jessie, short for Jessica Benezeack. Yes, she was a foreigner to this country, but the reasons she was here was because of Rosland. Rosland's family risked everything to get him to America, and worked seven days a week to support him to grow up like the most financial country they lived in. Unfortunately, his parents disappeared one day and a man with a bushy mustache and blue shades brought him back here under a kind of grounding.
Jessie herself was one of those girls who aren't actresses until they make a scene in a grocery store or start work as an assistant on set. In Layman's terms, she was skinny but not anorexic, had a black hair scrunchy for her long blonde hair, had red lips, blue eyes, and porcelain skin.
"Can you take some time off making work that takes years of school and practice wasted on making a lazy client famous and help me carry in the groceries?" Jessie asked in her very fluent Japanese language.
Rosland did something he used to do all the time when he was in shape; he carried four bags of groceries from the car into the house, and then helped Jessie take the food out of the bags to shove into the cupboards and fridge.
"Jessie." Rosland peered in her eyes trying to tell her what he wanted to say. "Can we have dinner at eight o'clock today? I'm going to try doing some character sketches for a new client I met today."
"Was the level Intermediate or Expert? The higher they request your help the more they realize they can use your stunning brain." She said.
Rosland loved to hear stories from Jessie. If he was a writer, and not someone doing jobs for people in other countries, he would write that in his story. All that excitement in her face, however, vanished when she talked about troubling news.
"There is this new kind of phenomenon scaring people out of the minds. Houses are getting phone calls with the voices of a little girl, a woman, and a man talking to them. I hear they're ghosts looking for the response of someone, someone they won't leave alone."
"Neat. Let's just not blab about it to no end like people did about Lil' Slugger long ago."
Rosland and her were quiet about the events of Tsukiko Sagi and how she went crazy drawing an equation in the ground, before she vanished from the world. It was very hard getting back to having the best time of their life living together with new groceries.
The next thing Rosland knew, he was having two different kinds of wines: red and white. The white one tasted like lobster butter and the red was a strange Russian flavor vodka that almost made him wonder if anything metallic got in the wine before he tasted it.
There was one middle aged Korean cop and a five year younger African descent police officer holding a complete psychopath in an interrogation room while the girlfriend from five hours ago of the convicted murderer was watching him from a one-way mirror. What the middle aged cop did to the killer was out of an action movie, he took out his gun and held it to him in the interrogation room.
"I can shoot three shots in your head and no one would run in to stop me; no one outside or inside would save you. You killed a little girl, pretended to be gay to rob and murder one homosexual, and you bent an aluminum baseball bat to kill a struggling writer like Lil' Slugger once hit people."
To the person who was locked in the interrogation room it didn't matter. What mattered was he was free, and could turn to the side he knew the mirror was and wink to the girl behind it.
Rosland and Jessie were sleeping soundly when the phone rang in their house. Rosland, being nagged into answering it but wanting to go back to sleep, walked to the phone with a blanket over his head.
His phone was connected to a wall that diverged the kitchen from the room where the fireplace was. Rosland picked up the phone. On the other end was the sound of a lady who was almost crying at the end.
"Do you know?"
"I think you've gotten the wrong number," Rosland replied, before putting the phone back on the hook. He turned around to walk to his bed.
Rosland had a good one and a half hour sleep before the phone ringing woke him up and made him get out again with his blanket over his head.
The person on the other end was a male this time with a hint of anger at the end of his question. "Do you know?"
"Did your friend set this up? Do you think calling people in the middle of the night is funny? Don't do it again, or I will have the police trace this call." Rosland said to the phone caller.
He hanged up the phone and walked back to his bed. It was like a ghoul reached out to him in the form of the telephone ringing again. Most people would just ignore the telephone and let it go to voicemail, and Rosland was no exception. He went to the kitchen to get a nice glass of milk. He poured it in a glass and took a sip when the answering machine played. This time it was the voice of a preschool girl.
"Do you know?"
"That's it!"
Rosland, in his anger, hanged up the phone and walked to the room where he kept his headphones. He put his headphones on and walked back to his girlfriends room. However, from the basement he heard someone humming a tune that was more spine tingling than relaxing.
