Every time Tanaka Yuuki was presented to a new facet of the piece of pyrite that his new partner had turned out to be, it seemed to be a negative one. First, he had found that, while she was indeed as female as he had hoped, she was about as unsuitable a partner as could be, seeing as she was only thirteen years old. He had then found out she was a loudmouth and a brat who seemed to enjoy pissing him off like nothing else.
To top it up, he had then learned she was a HiME, and that, with her Child, Durhan, she was both scarier and better at catching criminals than him.
Therefore, he felt that he really should have anticipated the bad surprise he'd been given that morning, when he'd come to the station to learn he was supposed to go and fetch her at the place she lived at.
Every morning, from now on.
Or at least until those damnable two weeks were up. (Was it really only the second day?)
It seemed that everything about her existed for the sole purpose of pissing him off.
-
The Himeno Kojiin, Himeno Orphanage, was a cozy-looking two stories tall building of modern occidental architecture that somewhat looked like a small school like those back home. Its walls were made of brown bricks and pierced by clean, unbarred sliding windows. The dark brown front door was accessible by a cement path framed by a well kempt lawn and a row of burgeoning lilacs growing along the sidewalk and providing some privacy, though the intersection the two paths was framed by a pair of tall, leafless trees that he couldn't identify.
Sitting at the foot of one of the aforementioned tall trees, a teenager with a thick pair of round glasses who was most likely one of the tenants looked up from the novel she had been reading (the cover page seemed to bear a warring states era couple a embracing in front of a grove of blooming Sakuras) as he slowed the patrol car to a stop in front of the path. She calmly inserted a bookmark in the pages, as if having a police car parking itself in front of their residence was something perfectly normal and to be expected – but then, it probably was, considering who they lived with – stood and headed up the path. By the time Yuuki had cut the engine and got out of the car, the girl had already reached the door and was opening it.
"Natsuki," he heard her shout, "Your ride's here!"
So, he stayed near the driver door of the patrol car. The glass-wearing girl, whom he estimated to be aged around fifteen, did not seem surprised to see someone new was fetching the brat; either the guys at the station usually cycled and had… volunteered him to do it today, or, more likely, she had told them about him. He did notice and recognize the appreciative glance she gave him, though, having seen it in other women's eyes before.
There was movement at the door and the girl moved aside to let two girls walk past her. He recognized the first easily, as she was the one he was supposed to fetch – she was wearing a blue kangaroo hoodie and dark blue jeans today, he noticed. The second, however, struck him as odd, though for a reason that escaped him at first.
She seemed to be a little older than then bluette, but not by much; maybe a year at most. Her hair was wavy and light brown, her face was pleasant to look at, if too young, and while she was dressed surprisingly conservatively in a somewhat too small pinkish-white Yukata, there was no doubt in his mind that the girl would grow up to be a looker.
Pity he was probably ten years older than her.
As she looked up at him, though, one detail jumped to his eyes; hers, actually. They were one of those kinds of eyes that could express both amusement and disapproval at the same time, or complete the perfect poker face and conceal everything hidden beneath. And perhaps even stranger, they were bright red; he had never seen eyes that color before.
He analyzed her walk and found it to be peculiar as well; the gracefulness she showed was something he had seen before, while investigating on a theft in a remote Wakayamaan mansion; the house's mistress, a traditional near-Yamato Nadeshiko, had shown similar poise. (1) This was something found in the upper ranks of society, and for a young girl like her to show that could only mean she was a rich daughter.
Strange that a girl like that would wind up in an orphanage.
Strange… Yes, that was what had bothered him. Why would a rich daughter end up in a little orphanage like this one? Usually, a family like hers would have had contingency plans in case her parents die, to hand her to a relative or have a maid or someone to raise and care for her… It was a mystery, if an unimportant one, and as a detective, he had immediately latched on to it.
They were approaching, though, and while the brat was looking as unpleasantly moody as yesterday, the brunette was actually smiling at him. Deciding to return courtesy with more of the same, he smiled back.
"Maido," he greeted in his Kansai dialect. The girl's red eyes widened in a surprise he couldn't explain until she spoke next. (2)
"Gokigenyou," she returned pleasantly, "uchi wa Fujino Shizuru dosu. Keikan-san wa?" (3)
Oh, ho! A fellow Kansaijin! (4) He let a grin draw itself on his face, which grew when he heard the brat groan in apparent agony and mutter "shit…" in a pained voice.
"I'm Tanaka Yuuki. Her… well, her partner, for now."
She nodded in acceptance with no surprise; apparently, the brat had told them about him. Her question must have been sheer formality; she was definitely a genuine Ojousama.
"Your accent is… south coast, I believe?" She asked.
"Kii peninsula," he précised. "And yours is yahari Kyoto dosu." (5)
"Se ya," she replied affirmatively with a demure chuckle in her voice. (6)
"I should have known they'd hit it off…" the brat muttered, bumping her forehead against the car's side window, which she was only tall enough to reach the middle of.
"Is the fact that his accent is similar to mine the reason why he annoys you so, Natsuki?" Her voice was innocent, but there was a subtle hint of teasing in it that made the bluette bristle visibly.
"N-No! He's an ignorant pervert, that's why! I told you that."
Yuuki opened his mouth to protest, but the red-eyed girl disarmed him simply by looking honestly downcast and replying, much less honestly,
"And here I believed it was because you now always have a reminder of me in your presence… I'm so disappointed; I was hoping I flustered you more than this."
"Ah—Yamero, Shizuru!" (7) The bluette snapped, her ears crimson. Her friend chuckled at her discomfiture, then bowed respectfully in his direction.
"Please take care of her," she said. "She acts like she is twice her size sometimes; we all worry about her."
"Mou, Shizuru, stop it already… and you're not that much bigger than me, by the way."
Ignoring the now red-faced girl, the red-eyed girl continued, "If it would not be inopportune, I would like to invite you for tea later today, after you both have accomplished your duties. I am certain Fumi-obaasan, the administrator, would be delighted to meet you." (8)
"Er," he hesitated, before shaking his head negatively. His politeness didn't extend to the point of spending more time than needed with the brat. "Thank you, but I… uh… I'll be dreadfully busy later," he half-lied; he still had stuff to unpack back home, but nothing pressing that he couldn't put to another day.
It was obvious the brunette didn't believe him, but politeness obliged she didn't press further. "Then I will just have to reinstate my request another day," she said in deject that did not entirely seem real. "A pity, I am certain you would have appreciated a chance to dispel the rumors Natsuki spread about you last evening. I would have even shown you the best ways to embarrass her, had you been as kind as to ask."
"Shizuru!" The blushing bluette appeared to be in the opinion that the older girl was doing entirely too much of that at that very moment. He chuckled; she shot him a dirty look over the car's roof (though he was certain she had to stand on her tiptoes to do that). "Let's go already, Tanaka," she finally said quite transparently to change the subject, while opening the door and sliding in the car. "We'll be late and the Chief will yell at us."
"Can't have that," he agreed, sharing an amused look with the other Kansaijin. Yuuki got on his seat, gave the girl a final wave over the roof and shut the door before starting the car's engine.
"I like your friend," he announced with a smirk.
"Don't get any ideas," was her sour answer.
Ok, so maybe not everything about her was out to piss him off.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My∞HiME
Book 1
Fresco
-
Disclaimer: My HiME doesn't belong to me. If it did, it would have had a real fight between Miyu and Mikoto, and would have probably ended Shakespeare-style by having Mikoto getting her head chopped off, thus Mai getting the greensparkle treatment, thus screwing up the Obsidian Lord's plan completely by leaving no available HiME to control the star. A much better ending than "HiME Sentai, attack!", in my opinion, even if it leaves a sense of "…well, fuck. Now what."
…on second thought, maybe it's a good thing I don't own My HiME…
-
Chapter 2: Missing Greens
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Take a right here!"
"Ok, hang on!"
Lights flashing and siren blaring like the priority vehicle that it was, the patrol car took the corner with screeching wheels, much like a race car. Witnesses would have guessed it was hastily heading for some dastardly noteworthy crime and would be sorely disappointed to hear no mention of such during the evening news.
The truth was, the destination of the one and a half detectives had not become a crime scene yet. However, it had every possibility of becoming one; it all depended on their making it there in time.
"How much time left?"
"Um… one and a half!"
"Shiiit!"
"Language—"
"You've heard worse!"
Unusually, though, they were not hoping to be on time to stop the criminal from actually earning the appellation, but to remove the motive from under the crime. Now, normally, the police wouldn't be aware of a criminal's motives before he or she even committed the crime, but this was a special case. The pair inside the patrol car knew who the potential criminal was, and they knew the victims better than anyone else.
And being late was not an excuse for justifiable homicide, no matter what the very respectable Minato Ward Chief Constable and potential murderer had to say about it. Her opinion on the matter would not protect her from justice. Thus, it was for her sake (and more importantly, theirs as potential figurative murder victims) that they had to make it to the station on time. However, time was fading rapidly—
"Fifty seconds!"
"We're almost there—argh, that blasted gate!"
Thirty seconds were left by the time the patrol car stopped sharply in front of the electronic-controlled barrier that blocked access to the Police Headquarters' parking lot. The adult hastily lowered his window to show his police ID to the notoriously dysfunctional and stubborn scanner (although he had now idea it was notoriously bad, just that it made him look like a fool yesterday in front of a forcefully quiet thief and a brat of a partner who had unfortunately no qualms about laughing at him), while the young teen---
"I'll go on ahead," she said while untying her seatbelt and opening her door in the same movement.
"O-Oi, wait—" a sharply closing door was his answer. "Damnit!"
…abandoned ship like a brat-sized rat.
The scanner informed him twice that his card was invalid – "I'll show you invalid, you damn piece of junk!" – before changing its inexistent mind and activating the barrier. He was through before it had even finished raising completely; he was fairly sure the roof of his car had been scratched in the process.
He easily found a parking spot halfway through the lot and slid in so fast his wheels screeched when he stopped.
Let us consider the following situation. Subject A, a thirteen years old girl, sets off across the parking lot, running at a speed that began at approximately fifteen kilometers an hour to follow a descending parabolic trend on a said equation. Subject B, twenty-four years old man, starts fifteen seconds later, gets halfway across the lot at a speed of forty-two kilometers and then, after a two and a half second pause, continues in a run at approximately twenty kilometers an hour.
Who gets there first?
Nature had this wonderful way of not caring about mathematics. It also had this wonderful way of not caring about linguistics, either, which was probably the most likely reason why it couldn't show anyone how to reach the conclusion that both arrived at the same time. Of course, if you had asked either of the two subjects involved, the answer would have been a unanimous "me".
The doors were forcefully pulled away – the girl's notably more slowly - from their path as both of them burst in the waiting room like all hell was loose and after them. Which, actually, wasn't the truth, as hell was just barely contained and definitely in front of them.
…in fact, it was in front of them, right behind a meek-looking receptionist, and staring at them with stormy eyes. He felt more than saw the brat use his body to partially cover herself from the deadly glare.
"And there they come, two seconds ahead of time," the Chief said coldly with a sideway glance at the clock. "I want to see both of you in my office." And she left through the way leading deeper in the administration, leaving the pair wheezing and staring at where she had been, and Haruko looking at them apologetically.
"She's in a bad mood… someone forgot to fill yesterday's notice for the coffee machine, so it's empty; she's been on tea all morning." The receptionist explained, leaving Yuuki quite puzzled. "Add to it yesterday's incident, that missing girl and the security detail for the Princess Week Commemoration next month and… well…" The brat winced.
"We're fucked," she concluded. The receptionist nodded, before noticing Yuuki was sporting a somewhat bemused look on his face.
"Chief Akitori needs caffeine to be awake in the morning, and she hates tea," she explained. "The last time she spent a day drinking tea, she managed to make Kumaji hide from her, make a Yakuza goon squeal like a pig and make Princess cry – and that's harder than you'd think."
The little bluette shuddered at the memory. "And she wants us to go in her office. We're fucked, I say."
"Then we should go before she gets even more pissed," Yuuki said, to which the little girl agreed hesitatingly. Perhaps things would work out if they stayed really, really quiet, obedient and let her lose her steam?
-
It turned out to be wishful thinking, as she seemed to have as much steam as a submerged volcano; under the influence of deceptively inconspicuous tea leaves, the chief proved to go from the raging tiger on the prowl that she normally was to some kind of evil, loud creature that would make an ancient dragon pale in terror, or at least Step Past Out Of Clear Revulsion. After letting them inside the figurative maw that was her office, she had then proceeded to chew them up about very, very nearly being late, then spat them out of her office; Yuuki, feeling much like a man who had just faced a dozen Chthonian creatures simultaneously and had been soundly defeated, had somewhat understood the reason why he and the much shaken brat were sitting in the lounge afterward.
They were to remain idle until the next case would open up; unlike officers, detectives' jobs tended to last for a few days at the least, and their partnership being what it was (in other words, as dysfunctional as a house entirely built with similarly charged magnets), their bumping in a case that was already being handled by another team would have done nothing but hamper, and there were no pending cases that were unimportant enough for them to test themselves.
Perhaps this was another of the Chief's plans to make them get to know each other, like the patrol yesterday - or perhaps simple tea-induced spite was to blame - but waiting did nothing to bring them close to each other. By the time they had somewhat recovered from their meeting with Chief Asmod--um, Akitori, the brat had picked herself a young woman's magazine and was reading it disinterestedly, and he had found himself looking around, spotting the details he hadn't spotted in his previous (admittedly short and eventful) visit in the room.
Looking at the differences between the panels that covered the ceiling was, he decided after a few seconds, a perfectly boring activity. After a few minutes, he found himself dearly wishing he had spent a few minutes to unpack his computer and MP3 player, so he could have had something, anything, to distract him. A quick search through the magazines in the basket near the notably empty coffee machine had turned up nothing more interesting than a copy of Otome Weekly, a lesbian manga magazine, and while he had already been branded as a pervert by his partner, there was no need to prove her point to her and the others in the station.
Besides; the cover was covered by the tackiest shade of pink he had ever seen.
About the others, he quickly found the station was quite active; the few clerks who wandered from cubicle to cubicle, or to and fro the archives, were too busy to do anything more than toss him a nod while passing - and, in one particular, mousy, blonde and busty example called E-something (he hadn't had the occasion to ask yet), squeak and scamper back to the archives, only to come back a while later and pointedly avoiding turning her blushing face toward him. Most of the conversations were about work, as could be expected…
"Any problems keeping the vultures off the case?"
"No, it was easy. We managed to make them look the other way by simply telling them we often get missing people false alarms from parents about girls her age being out late without warning anyone."
A relieved sigh, "It's a good thing they didn't ask her parents, they'd have learned that girl was the class rep-type…"
…but seeing as he almost never caught their start and had no idea what most of them were about it wasn't enough to keep him occupied. Besides, he wasn't an eavesdropper by nature.
Occasionally, an officer would come in, but they usually left in short order; apparently, everyone seemed to have noticed the coffee machine, and as the good policemen they were, hadn't taken long to guess the mood the chief would be, and thus made themselves as scarce as they could.
A few hours sped past at the speed of lethargic snails, and by the time noon came, Yuuki was starting to wish for a distraction to any god or deity he could remember ever hearing about. And it came, in the form of a cleanly-shaved, thin-eyed man just slightly taller than him, wearing an officer uniform bearing the Lieutenant Insignia and square half-rimmed glasses, with short-cropped dark brown hair, who entered the lobby from the waiting room with a report in his hand, to hand down to the Archives. When he noted Yuuki, though, a small smile drew itself on his face.
"Oh, you're the new guy, aren't you?" At Yuuki's confirming nod, he continued, "I'd like to be the first to congratulate you for your bravery, yesterday - it takes balls to sneak in the girls' locker room. It was just bad luck Princess was the one to find you; I assure you no one else would have raised a gun to shoot you. Well, maybe the boss."
"Bad luck my ass, Ishigami," the brat said, still looking in her magazine.
"Language, Princess," 'Ishigami' scolded. To Yuuki's surprise, Kuga "I've heard worse" Natsuki actually fidgeted in her seat, and while there wasn't a spoken apology, it was there to be felt in her body language. The other man seemed to be satisfied with that. "Oh, I haven't introduced myself, have I?" he asked, and didn't wait for an answer before continuing, "I am Lieutenant Ishigami Wataru, which means I take orders from you on the scene. Nice to meet you," he added with a pleasant smile, which Yuuki returned.
"Tanaka Yuuki," he replied, "and for the record, yesterday was an unfortunate accident."
The brat snorted loudly while turning a page - she was ignored.
"Accident, maybe, but what an accident it could have been--" before Yuuki could move, Ishigami had an arm around his shoulders and was waving at the blank wall like one would a beautiful work of art, "Imagine if Ichidouji-chan-- you know, the shy brunette in the Archives? Blonde, cuddly and busty... ah, you see who I mean, now – now imagine if she'd been changing at the time? Or even the chief!"
"She'd have killed me!" Yuuki exclaimed ("Pity she wasn't, then," the brat muttered, and was ignored again).
"Maybe, but you'd have died a happy man." Ishigami replied with a shrug, as if the assuredly agonizing death was an unimportant detail unworthy of attention.
"He would have died shot repeatedly in the arms and legs, stuffed with pens from both ends, cut open with a spoon and hung from the roof of this building by his entrails. I would hardly call that happy," came a cold, serious voice that killed their conversation in the aforedescribed way; the Chief had obviously heard as she had been walking toward them, down the cubicle-framed path that led to the stairway from where the administrative section of the second floor, and thus her office, was accessible. Ishigami rapidly turned tail and headed for the exit door.
"Ah… well, it's been fun seeing you, but duty calls—Tanaka-san, Princess—" and the door cut him off with a soft click and a soundproof-muffled "-chan", leaving the irate Chief alone with Yuuki – Natsuki made very sure she was profoundly busy in her lecture, and seemed to appear to be trying to hide her small body behind the much smaller glossed paper cover.
"Just so you know, if anyone else decides to take a page from your book and sneak in our changing room, your ass will be on the grill right alongside theirs, Tanuki." (9)
Now that just wasn't fair, he decided. But before he could protest, the brat had burst out in a loud laugh.
"Big-balled Tanaka Yuuki: Tanuki—Perfect. Nice one, Ch—er…" The latter was delivered after the thirteen years old found herself the recipient of a very cold short-tempered glare. As much as he disliked his partner, he had no wish to see the boss make her cry (mostly because he didn't doubt for a second who would be drafted to calm her afterward, and despite the receptionist's earlier assurance that making her cry was supposedly hard to do). A quick glance at the clock gave him a way out of this problem.
"Chief, we're taking our lunch break," he said, pointing at the clock (and doing his best not to flinch when the glare was returned his way). The brat caught on right away and quickly got up.
"Good, I'm starving," she said with a nervous glance at the chief, who gave a loud sigh and softened visibly at their transparent bid for safety.
"Sorry, I guess I am being pretty awful today," she apologized. The little girl waved her hand dismissively.
"Don't worry, you're no worse than... um... uh..." her thoughtful reply trailed off, and as she seemed to fail to find a proper comparison, she shrugged, grinned and lamely completed with a sheepish, "We blame the tea."
The green-haired woman gave the little bluette a hard glare. "Oh, thanks." Wisely, the brat decided to shut up and follow him through the exit, to the waiting room. Once out of the line of fire, she gave him a querying look.
"Were you serious about eating? 'cause I was about being hungry," she said with a pat on her hoodie's kangaroo pouch. He nodded.
"I was," now did he think about it, he was feeling a bit hungry. "Fast food?" He suggested, remembering a burger place he had spotted on the way back from her house. He was fairly sure she'd agree - as far as he knew, all kids loved fast food.
And true to form, she grinned. "Let me just get something in the locker room's fridge," she said. She reached for the door marked "employees only", only to freeze with one hand pulling the faucet-shaped handle down, as if she had just realized something. After a short pause, she gave him a puzzlingly innocent look and an angelic smile.
"No you can't, not today," she said quite more loudly than needed. A sideway glance showed him that the handful of people in the waiting room, including the receptionist, Haruko, were now looking at them.
"I can't what?" he asked, just knowing he'd regret it. He was proven right.
"You can't follow me in the changing room, of course," she replied in that very same 'cute as a button' voice she had used to charm the thief's victim yesterday. "Maybe another day... wait for me please, Yuuki-oniichan!"
And she was through the door before he had time to snap at her. The people in the room were now staring at him suspiciously, while Haruko looked positively aghast, as if she had just lost something very important to a little nobody. He sighed - the two-button remote in his pants pocket suddenly seemed very heavy.
Now just why did she have to do that? Damn brat.
-
-------------
-
Anyone capable of hearing through the patrol car's windows as it stopped at a red light would have been witness to a debate as old as the world, or at least as old as when the first humans started to eat more than just the first thing to fall in their hands. It was an intensely philosophical debate with roots that went deeply in the human psyche and civilization.
"Pizza," wanted Natsuki.
"Hamburger," wanted Yuuki.
And thus the debate went, both sides arguing the virtues of their chosen unhealthy delicacies while their stomachs grumbled loud, wordless monosyllabic epithets and burned with impatience, protesting that either choice was a good as the other. Unfortunately, those at the reins, their brains, were too busy with pridefully holding their end of the debate to consider the value of the stomachs' advices.
Philosophical debate with deep sociological roots, indeed.
The 'something' she had fetched from the locker room was currently lying on her small lap, inside a white plastic grocery bag - it was some kind of metal thermos that gave no hint as to what it contained, as well as a spoon. When he had asked, she had replied something vague about a secret ingredient that went with everything and made it better. Seeing as she was a kid, he was guessing it was either sugar or something just as nauseatingly sweet, like jelly or honey or something, and that guess served to satisfy his curiosity.
"Burgers are a lot cheaper and faster!"
"Pizzas are a lot more filling and healthy!"
"Since when do kids care about their health?"
"Why should you care about how long it takes to get our food? It's not like we have anything to do today--green light."
"Uh?"
She pointed ahead; the streetlight had gone green. "Oh."
The girl rolled her eyes as he sent the car forward on its wheels. "Tshh. And I thought detectives were supposed to be observant."
"That does it-- for that one, we're eating burgers."
"Hey, no fair!"
No fair indeed, especially since he was driving. Thus the debate was won, not by the one with the best arguments, but by the one holding the steering wheel and the wallet.
Philosophical debate with deep sociological roots, indeed.
-------------
Seventeen years old Yaitabashi Daijiro, one of the cooks (read: all-purpose worker/peon/boss' punching bag) employed at "Beijin Burger", 4482 Kashiwagi street, scratched the side of his pimpled nose with one hand, the other idly stirring the fries-to-be in the sink full of boiling frying oil. Working in a burger joint, he had decided long ago, was repetitive, though not as much as retail work, and usually eventless; the occasional event, however, was disgusting enough to make him feel grateful they didn't happen more often.
While none of his co-workers were really disagreeable (with the notable exception of the boss), he wasn't close to any of them. The most beautiful girl of the spot won the title by a sizable claim that was not due to her actual beauty, but because the barely five feet tall, two hundred and ten pounds girl was the only member of her gender working in this cheap joint. Of course, had the boss heard his thoughts, he would have been scolded; the Honorable Beijin Burger, after all, could only be called a Restaurant or a Diner, at least in his employer's presence.
The smell of the place had initially attracted him, who had always been a lover of hastily-made simple fried foods. However, after a few weeks, he had found the aroma registered a bit less every day, until he only noticed it when he actually walked out of here and smelled something different. He knew from his friends smelling him that he now smelled strongly of fries, a smell that lingered to his hair and was thick enough that even a prolonged bath couldn't drive it away. This had, he knew, cost him a date last week; that sexy foreigner who had sniffed at him, said something in English he hadn't caught but that had certainly sounded disdainful, and something about a... what was the word again... a flake?
Well, he had looked through his parents' English-Japanese dictionary, and found that flakes had something to do with pastries--he couldn't exactly remember what, though. Obviously she had mistaken the smell around him for a bakery's, and had found it offensive. Thus, his loss of a chance date could directly (if incorrectly) be connected to Beijin Burger.
He didn't question his technique; any girl, after all, would have appreciated being told "You're cute, wanna go out with me?" in a language they didn't understand, by a plumpy guy who smelled like fries and whose porcine face was invaded by pimples. That could not possibly have been it.
"Hey, Yaitabashi, switch with me, I need to go to the bathroom," the cashier, a lightly older man with a bit of a gut and who always seemed to have hand-shaped fat stains on his uniform apron, asked him. Daijiro nodded uninterestedly; he couldn't even remember that man's name.
It was a repetitive, boring job that made him stink and made his skin feel fat. And it didn't even pay well, thanks to that skinflint boss of theirs. But he had been getting ready for the last two weeks, and had decided that today would be it.
He was going to quit. Today was going to be his last pay day... in this lousy place, at least.
As he served the policeman and the young blue-haired girl that accompanied him, a smile drew itself on his face. He would no longer have to handle his boss' lousy moods, no longer have to smell like he had just come out of the frying pan, no longer be paid...
...well, at least then he'd be able to have a date.
His mind forcefully pushed away the parts of his brain that proclaimed he hadn't been able to get a date before he started working here. That, he decided, was an insignificant detail.
-------------
The Beijin Burger was a cheap homely-looking joint. Its walls were white and blank of anything except the occasional tasteless nonsensical painting, the roof was made of flat panels interrupted by boring white neon tubes for lighting, and while the floor was thankfully not tiled with black and white, Yuuki found the unoriginal brown and orange bricks clashed a hundred times more horribly with the walls than the tiles would have.
Most of the surface area was filled with tables and cheap hollow plastic benches covered with thin cushions that seemed to only make the benches less comfortable. The separation between the smoker and non-smoker sections was very thin, and thus the sections were obviously more of a formality than anything else. There was very little care in the restaurant; Yuuki guessed the only reason why the tables were actually aligned was because the benches could not be moved.
At least it was clean.
The brat's anger about the injustice of not getting Pizza because of her big bad partner's refusal seemed to have vanished the instant their burgers had been put in the cheap plastic plate in his hands. As she guided him energetically toward one of the tables near the windows opposite from the counter, she attracted the looks of quite a few patrons, and he spotted small smiles appearing on the faces of a good number of her spectators. Yuuki probably would have as well, had he not been aware that she could go from Hello Kitty to Dennis the Menace in less than a second, and that she was only in the first mode because something, namely food, was distracting her for the moment.
Soon, they were sitting, and the brat had picked up her order from the plate. The stares were now mostly sent his way, as it seemed quite a few people were wondering what a cute and most likely innocent little girl like her was doing in the presence of a police officer, in a fast food joint. While she didn't seem to be bothered by them at all - or, perhaps more possibly, didn't notice them - he felt somewhat unnerved. He wasn't new at being stared at by crowds - he was a police officer, after all – but he wasn't used to receiving silent sneaking questions like those contained in the stares he was getting now.
"Just glare at them," she said; ok, so she had noticed after all. "That's what Kumaji usually did."
"I'm not him," he replied, although he did do as she suggested; an old woman who had been eating with her granddaughter gasped in outrage and her stare went from questioning to condemning; there was little doubt in his mind that she was now considering all kinds of grisly scenarios about why he was here with the little thirteen years old. The said girl snorted at this.
"I can see that," she replied in amusement while she lifted the plastic bag on the table. "He'd have put that one in her place, not make her huff and feel insulted."
"Kumaji probably could scare a Yakuza thug by blinking funny," he replied flatly. To his surprise, she actually let a light giggle escape.
"Actually, he did just that, once," she started with a grin, which froze into a blank stare before she shrugged dismissively and completed, "which is more than you ever will."
He blinked and glanced at her body language; whereas a second ago, it had told of her amusement at remembering and sharing something funny, it was now reserved and cold, as she did her best to look away from him and out the window while her hands undid the hamburger package semi-dexterously.
What was that? For an instant, he'd felt like she had been about to lower her defense of insufferableness and let him in a bit, but it was like she had realized what she had been doing and—
--…and quite transparently intentionally insulted him.
She was doing it on purpose!
But why?
His mind, already well-trained to guess the motives of hardened or occasional criminals only had minimal re-wiring to do before stumbling on an acceptable theory; she wanted their partnership to fail in order to get back with Kumaji. But, being a detective, he needed evidence of guilt, be it undeniable proof or simple admission, to be satisfied.
Besides, maybe he was jumping to conclusions.
His train of thought was derailed loudly, however, when she flipped her hamburger open and pulled the mysterious thermos and the spoon from the plastic bag. A deft twist later, the cap came off and Yuuki caught a peek of what was inside... some kind of white jelly?
With the spoon, she collected a generous amount of the stuff, then proceeded to smear it thickly on the burger bread.
"Mayonnaise?" he identified it. She grinned and nodded, repeating the process on the other slice.
"The stuff of gods," she said reverently with a conviction and tone that reminded him of a junkie he'd caught in the past as he described the substances he had acquired. He noticed she didn't stop at stuffing a thick layer on the bread when she picked up the too cooked meat and proceeded to smear more mayonnaise on both sides.
"You... um... bring your own?" He said intelligently, feeling queasy - at this rate, she'd be lucky to get a heart attack as late as twenty-five.
She nodded solemnly. "These places always get cheap brands that never taste like anything but crap," she said, everything in her tone proclaiming what a sacrilege that was, and what a fool he would be to disagree. "This," she poked the thermos with the clean end of the spoon, "is the good stuff. It's hard to find and not cheap, but it's so worth it."
"Ah..." deciding to change the subject and not to look at the now closer and oozing burger-flavored mayonnaise sandwich, he mentally backtracked to remember what he had wanted to ask her, "Say, you and Kumaji, you've been partners for a long time?"
She paused in mid-chew, ignoring the way the extra mayonnaise oozed like slime out from between the slices of bread to splatter in the cardboard burger package, and stared at him suspiciously, visibly wondering why he brought that up. Finally, she seemed to decide to humor him and replied,
"Hmn, you could say that - he was the one who I got stuck with when I started, since he's the best in the station and no one could know how good I'd be on the field."
He noticed her distracted body language; her free hand was toying with her collar, making him hear the words she had left unsaid; Kumaji had also been the only one they'd trusted to keep a cool head should she become overzealous, or even dangerous, and the only one they'd trusted the use the remote if she did.
"You trust him, then?" He asked. She took a bite of her dripping burger and nodded hesitatingly with a tilted head.
"Kinda," was her evasive reply. He frowned at the non-answer.
-------------
The poor cook at the counter had quickly realized there was a problem with his plan (what plan there was) to tell the boss today. That problem was that the boss, as usual, had been off somewhere and wouldn't be back until his shift was over. So, he found himself facing the prospect of doing additional unpleasant hours. Seeing his mood darkening, another co-worker whose name he couldn't remember had offered to switch with him, sending him back to his fries and away from the clients.
What kind of boss didn't stay at work during work hours, anyway? What if there was an emergency of some kind that absolutely required his attention?
...what kind of emergency would that be?
Come to think about it, the boss didn't seem to have any talents other than complaining and keeping money to himself. He was reminded of that time when they had asked him to get those new automatic model of frying baskets, those you just left there hanging from the sink and stirred on their own; he had given them a lecture about being lazy and wanting to skip on work at exorbitant expenses on his part, then set them off on their way; they were still using the old model and wasting their wrists and risking oil burns while using them.
Hm, was it just him, or was the basket heavier than usual? In fact, it was getting heavier, even as he held it. Soon after his arm informed his distracted brain of his, he looked down, to find a spindly purple appendage sticking out of the boiling oil, poking at the half-cooked fries and eating them from a tiny mouth at its end.
--wait, that was not normal! That could only be an--
-------------
"ORPHAN!"
The
scream had come from the counter, and had rapidly caused a panic. One
of the cooks, an overweight and pimpled young man, was stepping away
from the frying sinks, as--
As half a dozen purple spindly
tentacles erupted from it and started flailing about, sending drops
of boiling oil at anything they touched. One of them found the stand
where the hamburger meat was being cooked, opened its tip wide and
started swallowing burger after burger like a vacuum cleaner.
It hadn't taken long for the crowd to react; with a common scream, the patrons suddenly stood and flowed for the exits in complete disorder. As for Yuuki and Natsuki, well, the former found himself chocking on a fry at the first scream, and the latter had been in the process of taking a sip of her orangeade…
"Pffft!"
---which of course meant she had spat it most unpleasantly from her nose. Wiping it with her sleeve, the little bluette gave a glare at the creature up at the counter.
"Just my rotten luck--" she muttered, punctuated by the twin flashes of light and the whirring sound that announced the materialization of her Elements.
The tentacles had continued to grow, both in size and in number; by the time the restaurant had been completely evacuated, they were counted by the dozen and were tall enough to reach the liquor machine, which they broke in an impressive feat of coordinated strength to drain the sweet liquid inside.
It rapidly became obvious they could not see; they whipped and flailed about, touching, feeling and tasting; a bag of fries was devoured, both fries and paper, just like the content of a bowl of soup, both the food and the spoon. Only the latter was spit out, mangled and bent.
The young HiME had started using her elements - with stunning accuracy, he noted - but while the tentacles she shot recoiled and flinched in obvious pain, there was too many of them for her to stop, no matter how quickly she seemed to be able to fire.
Or at least, too many for her to protect their meal, which quickly took the way of the Orphan's stomach, along with--
"NO! MY MAYONNAISE!"
--the brat's 'sauce of the gods', which was soon sucked away like the rest of the food. The offending tentacle found itself becoming her sole target until it was little more than a block of ice standing on the end of a whippy stick. This did nothing to make it less dangerous, as the flailing block of ice was now a club of respectable strength that was promptly whipped in their direction. The HiME didn't even flinch as she raised her guns to parry; a strange silvery energy shield that barely covered her upper arms sprouted from the circular section of her guns and blocked the blow with a minimum of effort on her part.
By now, the rest of the Orphan was in the process of slipping out of the sink. The main body, which he only saw for a second, seemed to be little more than a small sphere from where hundreds of tentacles sprouted. Yuuki boggled as he recognized what it was shaped like.
"...it's... a big purple koosh ball," he noted blankly.
"It ate my mayonnaise. It dies," growled Natsuki. "Durhan!"
And, with an explosion of icy spines - "Whoa!" Yuuki said as he narrowly avoided losing an eye - the metal wolf that was Natsuki's Child appeared, shaking its metal head and howling mechanically. The ice shattered like glass and seemed to vanish into thin air the same way her Elements did when she dispelled them.
"Durhan! Load silver cartridge!" she shouted in English. The revolver-like backs of the wolf's cannons flipped open, along with two bullet racks hidden in its hind legs. The topmost shells slid inside the cannons, which flipped shut with a metallic clang immediately after.
"FIRE!" she commanded. A deafening blast later, two shots were flying for the Orphan, and to his surprise, they flashed and became a literal flood of ice crystals in mid-air, slashing and ripping tentacles left and right as the monster silently flinched with its entire rubbery body.
"Load chrome cartridge!" she shouted again...
-------------
"WHAT'S THE MEANING OF THIS?"
Ah, there he was, Daijiro thought as the boss' roly-poly shape walked out of his red car parked near the sidewalk in front of the relatively long path leading up to the restaurant. He seemed to be quite irate and was looking around at people escaping from his restaurant, with a look on his face that swore that heads would roll for this.
He was angry. Not the time to tell him he wanted to quit, his brain warned.
He was there. Perfect time to tell him he wanted to quit, the rest of him said.
And in a perfectly democratic fashion, majority won, leaving the brain to sulk. He walked toward the boss and said, meekly,
"Ano..."
The boss didn't hear him. To his excuse, there was still about ten meters between them, and with the screams of panic from the escaping crowd, there was no insurance that he would have heard his voice shouting over the noise. He continued to approach, avoiding a broken manhole (in his single-mindedness, he didn't ask himself why it was broken) and getting pushed by fleeing man around his age wearing a backpack in the process, before repeating,
"Ano---"
---VROOOOM!---
"FUCK!" Both the boss' curse and the sound of the engine inside the black van that nearly clipped his boss' chubby back in its hurry to escape the scene served very efficiently to silence his meek mutter this time.
Third time's the charm, and so it was; less than three feet away, he tried again.
"Ano..."
"What is it!" The boss barked.
As the rest of him reconsidered the wisdom of asking now, his brain decided it needed a break from those fools and promptly left the rest of him in control. Yet, his determination, stubborn idiot that it was, made him steel himself - he knew he would regret it if he didn't do it now (despite the now fervent objections from everything else).
After a brief revolution, Democracy lost to Despotism.
"Boss, I wanted to... um... I would like to... uh..." Ok, that was pathetic, President Determination condemned. Self-confidence! Nerves of steel! Explosion--
-------BOOM!-------
...of courage, glass and rubble!
er... what?
"NOOO! MY DINER!" The boss screamed in horror, his small-fingered hands pulling at his frizzy hair as the restaurant went up in a ball of flames; they were far enough that the only debris that reached them were pebbles and dust. "You! You're fired!" He added at the cook's direction, if only to vent his anger – it didn't seem to work.
"Ah... uh... thanks?" Daijiro said hesitatingly. The boss didn't listen; he was still staring at the source of the explosion while biting his fat lower lip. Beyond the cloud of plaster dust and settling debris, the restaurant seemed to be still standing. The same thing could not be said about the windows, which had been literally blown away by the force of the blast. There was a flickering yellow glow that told of the presence of fire, too; the newly fired cook wouldn't be able to work again today--
...er... wait, he was fired.
His brain finally came back to its senses, berated the rest of his body for making them look like an idiot, then made him leave the place with a weird look on his face, a kind of vacantly thoughtful smile-frown - "Grandma, did the Orphan get him?" "Don't look, honey. We're going home."
Oh yes, that grandmother had had better days. She would have been willing to bet that mean, aggressive, child-kidnapping police officer had something to do with this, too.
No one saw or heard the pair of partners as they surreptitiously left the building through the back door... ...or at least as surreptitiously as they could while arguing.
"Shrimp and mayonnaise!"
"Pork and cheese!"
"Shrimp and mayonnaise!"
"Pork and cheese!"
And a full minute later, a nervous cashier-whose-name-the-newly-fired-cook-couldn't-remember stuck his head out of the miraculously intact bathroom.
"Is it over?"
…it was just another day in Tokyo, it seemed…
-
-------------
-
Had the patrol car been capable of understanding what its passengers were saying, it would have sighed. Actually, it would have needed to be able to sigh to be able to do so, but it probably would have tried anyway.
"Pork and cheese, it's the best way to have Pizza." reasoned Yuuki.
"Shrimp and mayonnaise, Pork gets stuck in your teeth and you end up with bits of it between them for hours," shot back the brat.
"Pork and cheese, you're just a mayonnaise- "Station to Tanuki and Princess, please respond." –freak --hold on a sec—" He picked up the radio, "Tanaka Yuuki to station, 10-4,"
"We have a code 3-C flagged at 4480, Kashiwagi street. Please investigate."
"A what?" The brat hissed. He waved her down with one hand, making her huff and pout in her seat.
"10-4, station, proceeding to site," he replied before putting the radio back down. He turned toward his little partner. "We were just on Kashiwagi, weren't we?"
She nodded. "What's a code 3-C again?"
"Post-fact theft report," he replied.
"Oh, bleh. That's boring."
"Hmm," he agreed. "Pork and cheese."
"Shrimp and mayonnaise."
-
-------------
-
"Ok. This is crazy." Yuuki declared eloquently.
4480 Kashiwagi turned out to be a small family fruit shop. It looked completely normal, if a bit run-down, and would not have caused such a reaction from the police detective had it not been built directly beside the now lightly fuming remains of the Beijin Burger.
He and Natsuki stepped out of the car and were immediately intercepted by a firefighter, who informed them the fire wasn't criminal and had been caused by an Orphan and a HiME fighting. The misunderstanding was easily cleared, but not before--
"Police! Finally--I want to file a complaint about the little menace who destroyed my restaurant!"
...the boss of the Beijin Burger spotted them. He was a short, stout, far-bellied foreigner with a springy mustache and frizzy grey-black hair that stuck out comically on both sides of his head to leave the top completely bald. Yuuki spared a glance at the suddenly nervous Natsuki and, for an instant, flirted with the idea of telling him exactly who the little menace was, but decided against it - he was busy, after all. Plus, the boss would kill him if she got in trouble by his hand.
It was damn tempting, though.
"You'll have to file your complaint to the station, sir, we're busy for the moment," he said diplomatically. The pudgy man's small black eyes rolled upward as he continued to approach them with a tilting walk that made him look like a weird round pendulum.
"BAH, bureaucrats—nothing ever moves with 'em!" he spat with a breath that made Yuuki's nose wrinkle. "And they probably won't do a thing because a damn HiME did this – she'll probably have some stupid law backing her up," Yuuki noticed his partner's flinch and took note of it while the man continued to rave. "If she was human, she'd get sued left an' right for causing this much damage, but no. Not a HiME. And my insurances probably won't pay me for this because she did it... 'em damn freaks, public dangers, the lot of 'em! They should all get locked up somewhere they won't attract Orphans on decent people--"
Throughout his speech, Yuuki had been hearing a noise, a strange crescendo sound that sounded a bit like an angry cat growling. With these words as punctuation, the tone rose and became accompanied by a short-lived high-pitched whine, and before he knew it, the overweight man was facing both of a furious Natsuki's guns.
"Shut. Up." The little girl ordered. The portly man went an interesting shade of puce, then hastily turned face and stormed back toward the ruined restaurant, muttering epithets that Yuuki chose not to listen to, with the brat glaring at him the whole way.
"...you ok there?" He asked worriedly. She wasn't going to go berserk on him, right?
"Yes," she replied in a tone that said 'No, and stop asking'. He wisely decided to leave her alone.
"Ano... you're here about the theft, aren't you?" Asked an aging female voice - with a somewhat hunchbacked posture in the doorway was a frail-looking aged woman who had a tired look on her lightly wrinkled face.
-
She introduced herself as Umino Kasumi, sixty-two years old and owner, manager and cashier of the small fruit shop "Umi no ki", tree of the lake, which she had inherited from her parents a long time ago ("My father was a bit of a poet," she explained, both to explain the shop's name and her own, 'Mist of the lake'). While she gave a strange look at Natsuki, as if wondering why Yuuki was letting her get involved (not that he had much choice about it, really), she didn't ask, for which the Kansaijin officer felt very grateful. Both investigators noted the aura of ancientness that hovered inside the modest shop, from the rustic wooden stalls to its homely sun-given lighting. A strong fruity smell permeated the air quite pleasantly, Yuuki found, though from the way Natsuki's nose was wrinkling, she was appreciating it much less.
"Then people started screaming and running, saying there was an orphan in the burger next door," the old woman was telling an attentive Yuuki, while the little girl looked around the shop, "I was helped outside by Mrs. Izumi, who'd been here for her usual Sunday shopping. It's a good thing that HiME beat the Orphan so fast, I don't exactly have the means to repair this place."
"Not very successful, then?" The brat asked bluntly, earning herself a dark look from Yuuki, which she didn't seem to notice in her inspection of the door. Predictably, the old woman appeared mildly insulted.
"It used to be a very successful shop, young lady," she admonished. "I often had days when I had to empty the register four or five times. But then those huge markets popped in near Yagama Street and... Well... I don't have the equipment or the room to sell everything people want under one roof. I can't compete in terms of practicality, but I haven't seen one of those sterile places with as pleasant an atmosphere as here!"
The woman seemed to be quite proud in her little shop. The little girl didn't seem convinced, but stayed silent.
"What happened afterward?" Yuuki asked, returning to her testimony. The old woman resumed,
"When I came back after the Orphan was beaten, I found my door had been opened - you need to give it a good tug to shut it right, and it wasn't - and someone had stolen all the money in the register."
"How much money are we talking about?"
"Oh, probably a few dozen thousand yen, nothing very impressive. At least they couldn't touch the Saturday rush!"
Idly listening, Natsuki had been looking around the shop, as she had grown used to while partnered with Kumaji. The shop had obviously seen better days. The floor, made of old and faded vinyl, resisted her slight weight, but creaked ominously under her partner's. The two bare light bulbs set on the ceiling hadn't lit up when she had poked the switch; either they were burned out or the button had stopped working. Many of the stalls were in a bad shape and she very carefully avoided touching them, lest she came away with a dozen painful shards in her fingers. She knew it looked no better from outside; if she had wanted to steal something, this would be the very last place she would have tried. A look outside confirmed her suspicions; there was a jewelry shop just on the other side of the street, still deserted from the evacuation.
Indeed, she concluded, their thief was an idiot.
"You wouldn't have enemies, or someone who would want to see you go out of business? A buyer, maybe?" her partner was asking, making her realize she hadn't considered that possibility. The woman shook her head negatively.
"I haven't had anyone who wants to buy my shop or the land in the last twenty years. My grandson already told me he doesn't want it, and the closest thing I have to an enemy is that little toad who owns the burger next door, because his junk food joint steals some of my costumers and stinks up the place. But then, you'll see there aren't many people around here who like him, even his own employees. And I think he had other things on his mind at the time than to come here to steal what he'd consider to be pocket change."
An inspection of the register for prints proved the thief had been using gloves; not exactly an unusual thing to carry on a spring day, but suspicious as it was quite comfortable outside without them. Other witnesses proved to be useless - most people had already left the scene in the evacuation and very few had come back, if only to get their cars and leave again. The firefighters had been understandably too busy to see someone coming in or out of the Umi no ki during the panic, the burger workers hadn't seen a thing, and the joint's boss--
"My restaurant got blasted to bits, I nearly got run over by a lousy driver, one of my employees just quit, and you're asking me if I was someone steal from that old ruin next door! Of course I didn't, you fucking morons!"
...had proved to be just as useless.
"Can't we lock him up for that?" the bluette asked silently.
"Do you seriously want to ride back to the station with him whining on the back seat?"
"...never mind."
The old woman gave them understanding looks when they had returned empty-handed, with only the insurance that her report would be listed at the station and she would be told if the thief was ever caught.
"That's what I get for not installing cameras," she bemoaned. "I guess the only thing I can do is hope whoever did this won't waste my money on drugs or a weapon."
-------------
The sky had been almost imperceptibly yellowing for the past few hours as the green-lit numbers of the clock mounted in the patrol car approached 5:00, the bright rays of the sun glowing in the cloudless sky rebounding off the white walls and painting them with their light, giving the scene a brilliant air. Inside the patrol car, however, the atmosphere was morose and silent as the two partners drove aimlessly down the streets, feeling like they had failed.
"You think she'll be fine?" Natsuki finally asked, breaking the gloomy silence. The detective gave her a sideway glance, noticing the pensive frown on her immature face, then replied,
"She will, it's not like that thief took a lot of money with him. At least she knows we're not likely to find whoever did it."
The little girl's frown grew deeper. "I bet Kumaji could--"
"He couldn't," Yuuki interrupted. "We have exactly zero leads on who did it; no one saw it happen, so we don't have a description. Most of the people who were there, and we're talking about at least two dozen people, excluding the firemen, the burger workers and us, had already left the scene by the time the crime was flagged, and there isn't a list of who was there, so we can't find who did it by elimination.
"The thief came in through an unlocked door, wearing gloves, and completely emptied the register; at most, we can find out what kind of gloves he was wearing, which might narrow the list down to... oh, maybe a few hundred thousand people in Tokyo, though we'd have to ask everyone if they have gloves like those, which would be long and silly, when you consider how much missing money we're talking about. Plus, with all the smells in the place, I don't think even your dog would be able to sniff a trail.
"So unless Kumaji had the magical power of coming up with clue out of nowhere, or unless the thief decides to try his luck again, I'm afraid this case is going to remain unsolved," he concluded. His eyes had been riveted on the street as he spoke, which was why he missed the impressed look the little girl had sent his way, if only for a second. By the time he did look, she had put her face back into a bored, disappointed frown, and didn't appear to be willing to talk, making him roll his eyes exasperatedly.
For the next few minutes, the drive was silent, but as they turned a corner and drove past a small ramen Yattai, both of their stomachs made their voices known as one.(10)
A shared glance later, Yuuki suggested, "Ramen?"
"Hn," she replied with a nod.
-
It was a pity, but it turned out they didn't have mayonnaise. The cook's face when she had asked had been priceless, however.
-
-------------
-
Author's notes:
I swear the chapter wasn't this long on paper!
As I hope you can guess, I like Shizuru. She's a great character, both at bringing out the best of another favorite of mine, Natsuki, and on her own. Plus, her Child, and especially the legend behind it, fit her perfectly. I'm always one for a good plot device, like how they used that legend in episode 25.
I'm quite sorry for all the Japanese at the start of the episode, but this was a special case, a scene that could only really be shown this way. Or maybe it was artistic license. Whatever.
Final note: Never eat Pizza in Japan. They eat weird stuff on them. Ô.o
As always, Reviews are very, very welcome.
-
Japanese notes:
(1) Yamato Nadeshiko: This is a somewhat outdated Japanese concept of the "perfect wife"; well known anime examples of such girls are Belldandy (Ah! Megami-sama) and Tendo Kasumi (Ranma).
(2) Maido is a Kansai-ben greeting. The Kanto-ben (Tokyoite) equivalent is "Konnichiwa".
(3) Er… sorry for the Japanese. Shizuru says "Good morning, I am Fujino Shizuru. Mr policeman is?". I had to write it that way, to point out her own accent ("Uchi" and "Dosu"). Gokigenyou is a somewhat unusual, ultra-polite form of greeting. I also had to look for a while to find Shizuru's favored second person term, but I couldn't find it, so... Keikan-san it is.
(4) A Kansaijin is someone from Kansai.
(5) "Yours is obviously Kyoto", he said, but parodying her own accent; the "Dosu" part is very much typical to Kyoto.
(6) "That's right", again, in Kansai.
(7) An impolite "Stop that"; the English version didn't pack the same punch, I felt.
(8) Gods, eighth one and I haven't reached the title… Obaasan is, roughly "Auntie"; it's a distantly respectful honorific for an elderly woman, or a woman in your family who is quite a bit older than you (and isn't your grandmother).
(9) A Tanuki is a creature of Japanese Mythology, usually shown as a Raccoon with very large (almost comically so) testicles. Sometimes a trickster spirit, sometimes an evil being, sometimes helpful.
(10) A Yattai is a mobile restaurant. Unlike North American counterparts, they tend to be clean and as viable a food source as a restaurant (if not more).
