Mai Taniyama was bored.
Scratch that, she was BORED.
It had been a month since their last case. Even a little one that all they had to do was say 'go to the light!' and bang, it was done. A MONTH.
And for the first time in her life, Mai missed High School. At least then she'd have something to DO. But no, she had finished that stage of her life this past spring. Her first summer as a free woman. She was so excited!
…. was being the key word.
And Naru wouldn't let her leave, or Lin either for that matter, no matter mow much or little work they had. She had no paperwork to do whatsoever, for the past week and a half, except one or two documents per day. She had even resorted to asking Lin to give her some of his workload… only to discover that all the typing he'd been doing for the past eleven days was just him being even more bored than she was, resorting to researching random topics that held any sort of interest whatsoever to him.
Finally, they had decided that teaching her more English would be amazing, because at least it might be slightly more entertaining than counting ceiling tiles (There were 142.75 in the main lobby, 56 in Lin's office, 42 in the kitchen and 17.25 in the hall).
And then looking for patterns in the dots within the tiles.
The connect-the-dots games they competed in with some felt-tip markers had been fun enough for a couple days, though, especially when Naru walked out of his office and realized his employees were so bored they'd begun drawing basic shapes on the ceiling. Keep in mind that one of those employees is the ever-silent and typing Koujo Lin.
So, for four days running now, they had been focusing on extending her education.
It was amazing the amount of work you could get done when a perviously boring subject became exciting, especially when with a good teacher. She had gotten nearly three months worth of English, school amounts, memorized.
They had already done six hours of English that day, and decided to spend the rest of the day trying to fold old paperwork into origami. Neither of them knew much, so some pretty crazy shapes had been made. And many fails had also been made.
They switched from origami to paperclip bingo - with a twist. In in order to choose the numbers, they took turns throwing pencils at some papers with numbers scribbled on them tacked to the wall, from all the way down the hall, which was as far as they could get. Mai had found out Lin had epic pencil-throwing skills, and hit his target number every time. Her own aim had gotten much better since they made up the game.
The door to the office opened.
Lin and Mai, standing only a few yards away, looked up in shock. The small family standing there stared at them.
Mai threw her pencil, and then threw her arms up in a victory pose. "Yes! I hit B9! I finally won a game!" She squealed. Lin frowned, realizing his perfect streak had just broken.
"Er - are we interrupting?" The man asked timidly.
"No, actually, I'm going to beg you to come in. The boss hasn't let us accept a case in quite a while, see, so we kinda ran out of paperwork to do like two weeks ago, and got creative. In that entire time, I hadn't won a single game against him, so thank you! You must be my good luck charms!" She rambled.
"O-oh! Um… you're welcome!" The woman responded, looking amused at her enthusiasm.
Mai walked to the door to the kitchen, glancing behind her to ask if anyone else wanted tea.
"Yes, please!" The woman and daughter chorused, while the man and older daughter denied the request.
"I'll take some, and it's 2:16, so Naru will be calling for his within twenty to sixty seconds." Lin warned her.
"Kaaaay!" Mai called happily, and walked into the kitchen. Lin turned to the clients, clicking open his computer as he showed them to sit down, and took a seat himself.
"Welcome to Shibuya Psychic Research. How can we-"
An office door in the hall opened, and Naru stuck his head out. "Mai, Tea!" He demanded loudly, then the door clicked back shut.
Muttering darkly, Mai walked out of the kitchen, grabbing a notepad and pen from the island table as she walked back over.
"Tea's on, it'll be about seven to ten minutes." She said sweetly, and clicked the pen.
"So." Lin re-started. "Welcome to Shibuya Psychic Research. What can we do for you today?"