MEANWHILE…

Haru Sakamoto stared at the gigantic plasma-screen TV in front of him, then glanced quickly at the guards standing at attention behind him. Grinning, he licked his lips at glanced hungrily at the party of three walking from the dojo's main entrance all the way to the training room.

"Good think it's far," Haru said lazily, plopping himself down on his La-Z-Boy (do they have La-Z-Boys in Japan?) and grabbed a remote control from his sofaside table. "I want to discuss the options I have with this boy while Nakamura goes to test him."

"You know, this isn't such a good idea. I mean, Yoshiro isn't even a bad guy," the head guard, Ayame Kobayashi, said, biting her lip. It was tough to become head guard for anyone - even a lazy guy like Haru - and even more so if you were a girl.

"Yeah, so? I mean, it's all the better for me," the bad boss of Bushido said, clicking off the surveillance camera tape from the main screen and opening it to his satellite TV. He flicked the small gray surf-button on the remote till he came to Disney Channel, where he sat up a little straighter, watching with attention to Lilo and Stitch.

Ayame rolled her eyes. Why was it that Haru liked watching Disney Channel? That might be normal for any other seventy-one year old spending time with their grandchildren, but not for a megalomaniacal and possibly demented guy who wanted to conquer the modern world of 200X, Navi-less to top it off. "Strategically, it might be all the better for you, but I'm talking about guilt and whether you have a heart or not." She frowned when he didn't answer. "You're not helping anyone with this, you know."

"The problem with you, Kobayashi, is that you're too nice. You always want to be nice to other people, put yourself in their shoes. But we're bad guys, Kobayashi. We don't need to care about other people." Haru gave his pathetic reply, curling up on the couch as he did so. "You get it, Ayame?"

It was a special thing when Haru called her by her first name, but to Ayame it meant nothing. She was really a good guy in disguise anyway, being a spy for the good side, and she had to warn that kid, Hikari Netto, somehow. "Sakamoto-san…"

"End of story," Haru said, reaching for a bottle of strawberry-kiwi smoothie he'd left on a side table.

Ayame sighed. When Haru reached for a smoothie, it really was the end of story.