"Should a little girl like you really be smoking?"
Mob looked up. She was taking a break. That was what this walled garden was for, smoking breaks. She knew what the sign said even though it wasn't in Japanese. She also knew what her cigarette box said even though it wasn't in Japanese. Selling cigarettes to minors was illegal. She was a minor in every country. She was going to get in trouble if she got caught.
And she had been caught.
But she was not afraid of getting in trouble. That rules was for the outside, not Claw, because Claw was a world in and of its self. Her world. A world which she controlled. A world in which she had all the power. She had all the power in the world, it felt like, because dad had all the power in the world. Dad had all the power in the world because he was going to take over the whole world. That was his plan. He was the one who was going to rule the world after all.
Dad was going to rule the world. She just wanted to smoke a cigarette in peace.
"If I want to smoke then I can smoke." Said Mob. She didn't know if she had said the right thing or not. She had just been saying what she had to say. She had just been telling the truth. She was going to smoke and nobody could tell her not to and she really needed this.
It had been a long meeting.
She just decided that everyone could have raises, it was just easier, and it shouldn't have taken that long to come up with that solution. She had been too worried about messing with the budget. The money people said that there was too much money and it needed to be moved around and laundered, which meant mix it with clean money and not actually put it through the washing machine, and the solution was so clear. Just give everyone a raise. There. Dad…he wouldn't have done that. He would not have wanted her messing with the budget like that but…
But he wasn't there.
She was there, alone, and she just…wanted to take her smoking break before she had to get back up to her office.
Well not alone, not exactly. There was a man there with her. A man dressed in all white, which seemed sort of dangerous since food fights broke out every few days and also someone had been drawing on people as they walked by, and also his hair was super short which Mob didn't much understand. Didn't he feel the sun beating down on him? Or maybe he just wasn't hot because he had light hair, not black hair like hers. He looked like a foreigner and she wanted to ask about that but it would have been rude. She was Japanese but not in Japan. She was the foreigner here.
Still, she felt like she should have said something because he was leaning against the wall next to her.
"Stuff'll kill ya, kid." The man said.
"Lots of things can kill me." Said Mob. He seemed so familiar…where had she seen him before? Not an Awakened, no, the aura was wrong. Also he wasn't wearing an Awakened's uniform…but then again she had told everyone that every day would be casual Friday from now on…but only in the sense that they could wear everyday clothes. The week hadn't been rethought or anything like that. She didn't have that kind of power….and if she did then she certainly didn't want it. She had enough to deal with in her life without having to redraw calendars on top of everything else.
"That's true but this stuff will kill you faster and you're too young to die." The man said. Mob tried to place a name to his face. She knew that she had seen him before. The white coat, the black shirt, the necklace, the hair…she had seen him before…and this was driving her crazy. She had been trying to learn people's names. People liked it when she called them by their names…
But there were just so many people….
"I'm ten, ten year olds die all the time." Said Mob. She knew that she had to say something so she said that. What she really wanted to do was to ask this man his name but that might have been rude. She didn't know the rules for this. The only person she ever smoked with, like this, was Shimazaki but she'd…she'd had enough of him for a while. He had been touching her hair a lot lately. She knew that it was soft and she knew that he liked to touch things, she had seen him spend half an hour just playing with the wallpaper in the office, but she didn't know why he always had to touch her hair. That was against social rules…right?
She didn't know. There were too many social rules to remember.
"Yeah, but, it's always a tragedy when someone as young as you dies. Death is always a tragedy." Said the man. Mob wondered if it would be ok to just…ask him his name…but she had done that once before and then the Awakened had started crying because she didn't know his name…even though there were HUNDREDS of Awakened and only one of her….
She took another drag.
That was another word that Shimazaki had taught her. When you inhaled it was called taking a drag. It had been hard, at first, because the smoke had hurt her lungs but she got used to it. She knew that this was bad for her, it was written right there on the box that it was bad for her, but it made her feel better and also she had Fukuda to heal her if she got sick…if he ever came back…which he would because he was just on a mission with dad and not gone forever….
A very long mission with dad.
"Oh course you wouldn't know about that." Said the man. Mob nodded. She didn't know much about death. She knew that dad's mom and dad had died before she was born and she got the feeling that mom's mom and dad were dead too but she hadn't gotten any confirmation of that. She had never lost a friend, either, or a pet. She didn't know much about death at all.
She saw it again. The man falling out of the Awakening chamber….and she took another drag of her cigarette.
That man had not been dead. Dad would not have just stood by and let someone just…die. No, he had just been really hurt. Like how when you fought in Pokemon, she hated making her Pokemon fight even though they weren't even real, and they got so hurt that they fainted. She knew that she had seen a lot of spirits, a lot more than usual, at the Eighth Division but those…some places just had a lot of spirits. That was all. She had never seen anyone die and she never would.
She ran out of cigarette.
"Seriously, though, things have been very peaceful around here since you took over." Said the man
"I didn't take over." Said Mob
"You aren't Her Ladyship, Suzuki Shigeko?" asked the man
"I'm not a Ladyship. I'm just…me. You can call me Miss Suzuki or just Suzuki or Suzuki Shigeko or just Shigeko or Mob, too. Just not a Ladyship." Said Mob
"Mob? That's a weird thing to call anyone let alone the girl signing my checks." Said the man
"Well it's what I like to be called but you don't have to call me that if you don't want to." Said Mob. She didn't know why people were so against calling her 'Mob'. She knew that it had started off as a mean nickname and she knew that she should have been more upset about it but…but that was just what she wanted to be called. She could give everyone raises, she could judge the official Claw chair jousting championships, she was the only one who was allowed to play Picchu in Smash Brothers, and she could do a whole bunch of other boss of Claw stuff…but for some reason she just couldn't be called by what she wanted to be called Mob.
She didn't get it. She just didn't get it.
"How about just Miss Suzuki then?" asked the man. Mob nodded. That was ok. Suzuki-san, not Suzuki-sama. She didn't like being sama to people. She didn't like to be anything other than Mob but she really just did not like being called sama.
The only thing worse was chan.
But nobody but Shibata called her chan. That was ok. He called all kids chan, he said, and he didn't mean anything by it. She wasn't a sama but she wasn't a chan, either, even though she was only ten. She was a san, now, because she was an adult. A kidult. Somewhere between a kid and an adult. Somewhere in this confusing in between space that she just…did not always know the rules of.
Like now.
She felt like she didn't want to be there. She wanted to be on her own and she knew that because she was the boss she could have told him to get lost…but she was not dad. She was not someone who could just tell someone to get lost. She could not just tell him to go away and let her smoke in peace. She couldn't kick him out, though, because this was a space just for smoking. She was in the everyone allowed smoking space. There was a place for everyone and a place for only upper echelon people and a place for tech support and stuff like that…and she had her office which was her place…but she needed to be outside. She was tired of being all cooped up with Shimazaki and him being in her space all the time and touching her and stuff.
She wanted to be on her own for a little bit.
But she was not rude enough to tell him to get lost. He was fishing his own cigarette box out of his pocket. She watched him. She had just a box but he had a pretty metal case for his cigarettes. She wanted one, too, because it looked nice and also it looked like it kept them safe. Sometimes hers got squished, like when Mukai kicked her in the side and stuff. She made a not to get a cigarette box. She would be able to hide them better, too, for when dad came back. He would not have liked her smoking.
"That's fine. Miss Suzuki is fine. It's nice to meet you." Said Mob. She knew this social rule. She was taking a gamble, assuming that they hadn't met before, but he was not an Awakened and he would probably take her not knowing who he was better. This new batch of Awakened was extra weird, Minegishi said so, and Mob could tell without being told.
They were so tiresome.
"Nice to meet you, too. I'm Joseph. Foreigner Division." Said Joseph. He bowed to her. He did the full bow. The one you were supposed to do when someone was important. Dad almost never bowed back. He nodded, sometimes, but he almost never bowed. She knew that she shouldn't have bowed back, dad would have been mad at her because she was not supposed to treat people like her equals, but dad wasn't there and she was going to be polite.
It wasn't any trouble to bow.
"I have a meeting with you guys later today." Said Mob after straightening out. She fixed her ribbon. It had come loose. She didn't know why you had to wear something around your neck to be dressed like a grown up. She didn't much like it. She wanted to be back in her else dress. Her tights were trapping her legs and the seam was digging into her, too. The waistband made her feel like she was being squeezed like a tube of toothpaste.
She wanted to get back into her Elsa dress.
"Yup. We'll try not to take up too much of your time. It's just the usual stuff we'd meet with Suzuki about. Mission reports, mostly." Said Joseph
"Can you guys write them down? I don't know if I can remember everything that you guys say and I know that dad wants to know what happened and I know that if I mess something up he'll be upset." Said Mob
"Yeah, we can. I'll pass that along." Said Joseph. He was watching her, now, and she didn't much like it. He was watching her with his eyes and with his aura. She let herself be watched. She didn't know what was so fascinating about her. She was just Mob. She was the boss but that wasn't such an amazing thing. Everyone in Claw had seen her address and people knew that they could talk to her whenever they wanted.
She was trying to be more friendly than dad had ever been.
It was working. People felt comfortable enough to come to her with everything. They came to her when they had problems or bad news or good news or when they needed her to judge a chair jousting match or a cookie eating contest or a Smash contest or a staring contest….they had a lot of contests. Mob didn't know why they had so many contests. Minegishi said that boys had to compete with each other all the time for everything because of their biology.
Mob wished that there were more girl espers in Claw.
She wished that she had a girl to hang out with. She was so tired of boys. She had never had a lot of friends who were girls, though, not even when she had been in school. Her only friend had been Sho. Now she had other friends. She had a best friend who wasn't Sho, now, but she wasn't sure if Minegishi was a boy or a girl. Not that it mattered. They didn't act like all the other boys that she knew. Still, she wished that she had a girl to hang out with. She couldn't wait until Mukai got old enough to hang out with her….
Not that they would smoke together.
Joseph pulled out a cigarette, his were longer and thinner than hers and she sort of wanted to know why, and she would have asked if not for the next thing that he did. He picked up the pendant on his necklace chain and, to Mob's surprise, it was a lighter. Not like hers. She had a plastic one that made fire. His was metal and used electricity.
It was so cool.
Mob's cigarette was burnt down to the filter, now. She dropped it on the ground and crushed it under her shoe. She checked the time on her phone. She had time for another one. That was called chain smoking. She had learned that word from Minegishi. When you smoked one cigarette after another after another that was called chain smoking. Also Minegishi said that it was a gross thing to do and that Mob would end up making herself sick.
She hadn't gotten sick once.
She was tired of it, people telling her that this was bad for her, that she was going to make herself sick doing this. She was the boss of all of Claw. If she could be trusted to run all of Claw, to make choices that effected hundreds of people and millions of yen or whatever they called yen in this country, then she could be trusted to smoke. Besides, the more she smoke the less she drank. This gave her more energy than drinking than and made her less…stumbly…if that was the word for it. The feeling like there was a layer of fog in her brain and heavy rocks stuck to her limbs.
She could smoke if she wanted to. The only person who could make her stop was dad and he was gone.
She reached into her pocket and got a new cigarette from her box. She was running low again. Shimazaki would get her more. He could tell when she was running low and he always got her more. He was nice like that. It was so weird how he could be so annoying but also so nice. Maybe that was why Minegishi liked him so much. Enough to kiss and stuff. Not that she was going to be kissing him anytime soon even though it seemed like he wanted to. She had thought that she would have been too young for someone his age to want to kiss.
But then again she was very clueless about things.
She didn't much know how to feel about that. She had wanted that for so long, for someone to want to kiss her, even since before she'd ever even had her first kiss. She liked kissing and she liked boys who were tall and stuff but…but she did not like him like that. He was too….himself. Too much in her space all the time. Too rude. Too obnoxious. Also he was friends with Minegishi and she would not kiss someone who her friend kissed. She knew that she would have been upset with Minegishi if they had ever kissed someone who she kissed and she knew that you were supposed to treat other people the way that you wanted to be treated.
Which was why she never told Shimazaki to get lost already.
"Need a light?" asked Joseph. Mob didn't, not really, because she had her own lighter but his lighter was also really cool. She nodded yes. She just wanted to see it again. She wondered where he had gotten that from. She wanted one. She liked Joseph, she decided, even though he had intruded on her solitude. That was something that Minegishi said a lot, don't intrude on my solitude, when they wanted to be alone to read and stuff. Mob still wanted to be alone but she was grateful to be talking to someone who was nice to her and also didn't act like they were younger than her despite being older than her.
She wasn't sure how much older he was than her.
Not as old as dad was. Dad was very old, forty three, and she thought that Joseph was younger than that. He just seemed younger but…but not like how the Awakened seemed younger. Young but also an adult. Tall, too, very tall. And nice. He smelled good, too, when she leaned in to light her cigarette. The polite way to do it was to lean into someone's lighter. Minegishi said not to ever light her cigarette by pressing it to the end of someone else's. They had said that doing that was only for when you liked someone. Really liked them.
She did not, would not, and could not ever like Shimazaki like that.
Joseph on the other hand…and she had no idea why she was thinking thoughts like that. She had just met him. Why was she thinking that he could be a boy that she could like? She didn't understand herself sometimes. She had been thinking more about boys than usual. Not that she hadn't always thought about boys, she had liked boys for as long as she could remember, but now she was thinking…differently…about them. About how they looked and smelled and stuff. Thinking about getting close enough so that she could know how they smelled…
She was probably just overly tired. That would have made sense.
"Thank you. Um….your lighter is cool." Said Mob. She knew that she had to say something. She knew that she had to say something because she had been too close to him for too long. Even now she knew that she was too close to him. What was with her? She didn't even know him. She didn't know if he was nice or…or anything at all about him. Also he was older than her. She didn't know how old he was but she knew that he was a lot older than ten.
But she didn't even know any other ten year olds, anyway.
All of her friends, besides Sho and baby Mukai, were adults. She spent all day with adults. She felt more like an adult than a kid, these days, and she sort of wanted to feel like a kid again…but also there were some good parts to being an adult. When you were an adult you could do whatever you wanted…but you also had a lot of things to worry about….and she actually didn't know which was better actually.
But she did know that she had to take a step back and right now because she was breaking social rules.
"It gets the job done." Said Joseph. Mob nodded. She wasn't sure what to say to that. She was someone who was bad at saying things, she knew that she was bad at talking because dad was bad at talking and social stuff and she was his kid, but right now she wished that she knew what to say. She wanted to be alone again because, now, she knew that she had said something wrong in saying nothing at all. There were so many social things to remember and she just…couldn't remember them all.
She couldn't even remember the names of all the people who worked for her let alone all the social rules she was expected to memorize.
She felt the energy around her shift. She had never been more grateful for Shimazak to just show up. She knew that she shouldn't have left his side, he was the one who was keeping her safe after all, and maybe that was why she suddenly wanted to be cooped up in the office with him again. Even if he sat too close to her or played with her hair or said a bunch of weird and annoying stuff.
Better to be annoyed than to feel whatever it was that she was feeling.
"Really, Suzuki? And here I thought that I was special." Said Shimazaki. Mob didn't know what to make of that and she wasn't going to think too hard about it. He just sort of said things sometimes. He had said that he just said the things that popped into his head and that she should try it sometimes because it made life easier and stuff. Mob didn't know how blurting out all of her thoughts would have made her life easier.
Or more interesting.
That was another thing that he liked, interesting things, because he was bored all the time. Well sometimes work was boring and that was just how it was. That was what she wanted, anyway, being bored. Working. Being annoyed. All of that. Anything other than this weird feeling that was settling inside of her…that she had been feeling more and more often lately…because she was over tired….from working…
You were supposed to fight fire with fire even though that made no sense.
"Everyone's special, Shimazaki, now let's get back to work." Said Mob. She walked up to him a little too fast. Joseph have him a look even though everyone knew that Shimazaki was blind. She didn't think too much about that. People were always giving him looks. People didn't like him very much. He was ok with that even though she had no idea why he would ever be ok with that. If he was a little nicer then people would have liked him better.
That would have been boring, he said, that people were more interesting when they disliked you.
"Whatever you say, you Ladyship." Said Shimazaki. Mob didn't have time to tell him that she didn't want to be called that, that she hated being called that, because before she knew it she was back in her office. She didn't say anything. She just went back to her, to dad's, to THE desk. Shimazaki poured her another drink. She would sip it throughout her day so it didn't hit her too hard. Well she told herself that. Drinking was good for feelings that she didn't want to have. Cigarettes were good for that, too, and smoking outside was best…but she couldn't do that. She had a lot to do.
Her smoking break was over and she had to get back to work now.