a/n: I'm glad you're all happy there's a sequel! Enjoy!


Chapter 2

Italy, 20XX, Police Headquarters

"Hold the elevator please!"

Lia stabbed the button in the elevator just as the doors were about to close. She looked out into the hallway to the lobby and saw a young man rushing toward her, waving his hands frantically, his jacket hanging off from one arm and his tie in his mouth with the ends streaming behind him.

He jumped into the elevator and grinned. "Thmks!"

Lia gave him a polite smile. "Floor?"

"Eghsheemph." He was about to press it himself but saw that the button for the eighteenth floor was already lit. He took his tie out of his mouth. "Oh. Are you one of the new assistant chiefs?"

"Yes. And you?"

He chuckled and nodded. "I'm Desmond."

"Anillia. Everyone calls me Lia."

"Lia it is. Excuse me, Lia. I was running late today, so I'm just going to..." he waved at his unkempt mop of red hair, so disorganized and blindingly red, unlike Lia's neatly tied off black hair.

Lia hid a snort, but she rolled her green eyes. "Go ahead."

As they rode the elevator, people got on and off, all the while Desmond fixed his hair and fixed his tie. When the elevator reached the eighteenth floor, he was presentable.

They were greeted by large letters on the wall that spelled out their department's name.

D.O.C.I.

Department of Organized Crime Investigations.

Lia took in a deep breath and stepped out of the elevator with Desmond. The man at the front desk looked up at them with a smirk. "Desmond. You've been early for five days in a row now. You're not going to break your streak, are you?"

"I'm a changed man, Pino! I'm never going to be late again. I'll be on time." Desmond bowed dramatically.

Pino laughed and jerked a thumb to the left. "Hurry up, or you'll have to take back those words before they finish echoing."

Desmond gave Pino a perfect salute, ruined by a cheeky grin, and led Lia down the hallway to a meeting room. In it stood eight young police officers, all of whom chattered away with one another.

To her surprise, Lia recognized almost all of them.

"Lia!"

"Oh hey, it's Lia! I didn't know they picked you, too! That makes seven of us from the Academy."

"It's been a year since graduation! How have you been?"

"H-Hey...I'm doing well, thanks. And you guys?" Lia didn't know who to answer first, overwhelmed as she was by the attention she was getting from her former classmates.

Before they could answer her, the door to the room slammed shut and all of them whirled to face it, their hands slapping to their weapon holsters.

The woman was five feet and seven inches tall. She had the hard eyes of a cop and had a long, thin scar running down her head behind her left earlobe. Her hair was a dark brown, cut in a burr. Her only accessory was a silver earring on her right earlobe.

She eyed each one of them before she nodded and walked to the front of the room. "I might say that you're all a little twitchy to be going for your guns in the middle of headquarters, but you never know what will happen. And considering the work each of you have done in the past year since graduating, I'd say you've honed your reflexes well in a short period of time. However." She dropped the thick binders she carried onto the table and placed her hands on either side of them. "You'll have to do better, if you want to survive in DOCI. Introduce yourselves and take a seat. Start from tallest to shortest."

Desmond was taller than the rest of them by a full head and he smiled sheepishly as they all turned their heads to him. Lia took the position to his left, and the others fell into line.

"I'm Desmond. I've been on the job for three years and I've been working with the Organized Crimes Unit. I patrolled the streets that had the most gang-related trouble."

Gasps were easy to hear in the silence at the name of the Organized Crimes Unit. It was DOCI's predecessor, but was abolished when Internal Affairs found out the assistant chiefs and higher ranking officers were on the Mafia's payroll.

"So you're the one who..." someone muttered before he was elbowed.

The woman nodded at Lia. "Next."

"I'm Lia. I've been working with the financial guard for a year."

She and Desmond took their seats around the large table while the rest of the officers introduced themselves.

"Okay," the woman said after the last officer sat. "I am Ilda, your deputy-superintendent. You will report to me during your first two months of training before I partner you up and release you to your own investigations as an assistant chief." She cocked her head to the side. "Really, at this stage, we see you as baby-chiefs, not even considered assistant chiefs, even if that is what is on your job description. Your first assignment is to find gather all the information you can on whatever we tell you to gather. Don't think for a second that this is a cushy job. You won't be relaxing behind a computer and looking up information. Anyone can do that. What you have to do is find information that we do not already have and report back. Use your contacts, your skills, and most importantly, your own mind, to dig up the information—the evidence. I don't care where you have to go to find that information, as long as you bring it back without endangering us or your comrades. Watch every step you take and make sure you understand the world you are stepping into."

Ilda paused. "Mafia politics. That is what we are talking about." She pointed emphatically out the window. "They have a hierarchy. Someone who controls the rest of them. Don't destabilize that structure before we are ready to take down the entire organization. Or else you, and the rest of us, will have hell to pay for. Is that clear?"

"Yessir!"

"Good. Now I'm going to give you your assignment." Ilda smirked. "It's the assignment that most Baby Cheeks receive when they first come to us."

Jaws dropped at the nickname. Baby Cheeks!?

Ilda slid three binders down each side and waited for the officers to take a look.

Desmond opened the binder and slid it between him and Lia.

File #OCVONG2772

VONGOLA FAMIGLIA, YEARS 20XX-XX

"The Vongola?" someone exclaimed.

"You need us to find information on the Vongola, the strongest Mafia family?" Desmond flipped through the pages. "But—"

"—But shouldn't we have more than enough information on them, maybe even our own team that investigates the Vongola?" Ilda completed Desmond's sentence. She glared at him. "Haven't you been keeping up to date?"

Desmond winced. "Um...sorry. Not recently. Been busy."

"Even if you are busy with your personal life, or if your week is filled with court appearances, your life may depend on you keeping up to date with new developments. The Vongola is always an important topic because for as long as we have kept files on them, the Vongola was, and is, always at the head of the Mafia."

Desmond nodded meekly.

"Usually, we would assign two or three of you to the Vongola Family and have the rest of you focus on other families that pertain to active cases that assistant chiefs are solving. This time, eight of you are going to be investigating the Vongola full time while two of you will take on light Vongola members to investigate so you can split your time to help the assistant chiefs with additional research."

Ilda folded her arms. "Can anyone tell me why I am having more of you assigned to the Vongola? No one? Anyone. Come on, Baby Cheeks. Don't be shy."

"Vongola Decimo," Lia murmured.

"Perfect answer," Ilda said. "Vongola Decimo and his Guardians. Two days ago in Japan, the Vongola had a ceremony where a man, Tsunayoshi Sawada, was officially declared as Vongola Decimo. He and his Guardians are moving to Italy some time this week. We don't know when yet, and one of you will be responsible for figuring that out." Ilda gave them a cold smile. "You should feel lucky. This happened close enough to your orientation day that we've decided to let you guys tackle the tenth generation. Now. Someone list out the titles his Guardians have."

Desmond raised his hand.

"Shut up, Desmond."

His half-raised hand fell to the table with a slap. "No one else is answering," he protested.

"Because you're taking all the answers."

"I haven't said anything!"

Ilda waited another minute before saying, "Lia, do you know the answer?"

Lia cleared her throat. "Their titles are Sun, Cloud, Rain, Storm, Lightning, and Mist. The Boss is the Sky."

"Very good," Ilda said. "As far as we know, that is correct. These titles correspond with the "flame" that these Mafiosi seem to have the ability to wield. No one that we've caught will tell us about these "flames". Some of our assistant chiefs are looking into that aspect, so feel free to ask your seniors for help.

"Figure out who is going to investigate which guardians. Figure out a plan of action and have one of you report back to me about it, while the rest of you start investigating. Understood?"

"Yessir!"

Ilda nodded and started for the door. "Oh, and those files are on our offline databases," she said, just as a few heads started to dip down to flip through the thick binders.

The door clicked shut.

All ten officers sighed.

"That was intense!"

"Not much more than my last superior."

"Who are you going to investigate?" Lia asked the room's occupants.

"The Cloud Guardian! He's the toughest."

"I thought that would be the boss?" Desmond queried.

"I heard that the Cloud Guardian is stronger than the Boss."

Desmond raised his eyebrows. "From...?"

"I have my own sources."

"If each of us takes a Guardian and the boss, that still leaves two newbies without a target," Desmond said.

They paused, and looked around them. Suddenly, pandemonium reigned.

"I call the female Mist Guardian!"

"Sun Guardian!"

"Dude, I wanted the Sun Guardian!"

"Well, too bad!"

"Fine, then the R—"

"Rain Guardian, called it!"

"Not cool, dude. Rain was my second choice! Jeez, okay, I'll take the Lightning Guardian!"

Lia flipped through the measly few pages that was about the Tenth Vongola generation. As far as DOCI knew, the boss and each Guardian were strong. According to files shared by the Japanese police force, they were young, but could hold their own against fully trained assassins. When they were attacked by assassins, Decimo's parents were vacationing in Italy, conveniently out of the way. His father is a construction worker, who is contracted to wherever—around the world, apparently—construction workers were needed. Decimo's mother is the hearth warmer, simply put, there to take care of her son in her husband's absence. But what else?

Lia flipped the page and flipped back. Page two. Page three. No missing pages. This is all DOCI has of Nana Sawada? How is that possible? She's the mother of Decimo. Did they never talk to her about the Mafia? Didn't she figure out something was afoot? They don't even have her basic data...then again, they did say DOCI only opened these files recently...

"I think I'll take Kenshin Nori," Desmond said.

"Who's he?" the rest asked.

Desmond tapped a finger to the binder Lia was flipping through. "The report about Vongola Decimo's family is written by a man named Kenshin Nori ten years ago. He was a detective in the Japanese police force, but he resigned immediately following the investigation on the Vongola. I want to know what happened to him and why there's speculation that he wasn't in his right mind when he wrote it. No one has seen him in ten years."

Someone snorted. "Have fun with that."

"All the Guardians and Boss are taken?" Lia asked.

"Yes."

"Then..." Lia looked down to the profile picture of Nana, who was smiling up at her. "Nana Sawada. Decimo's mother."

One of the newbies leaned back. "You two took the Deputy-Sup's definition of 'light Vongola members' pretty seriously. How much information do you think you'll be able to gather about a missing detective and a house wife?"

Lia closed the binder. "Who knows? I'm going to start now and see how far I get."


A/N: Wohooo, you made it to the end of chapter two! I hope you enjoyed it.

From what I've researched, assistant chiefs are the ones who do the actual crime solving. So I guess they have the same job as a detective. They're also quite low in the cop hierarchy. That's pretty much the extent of my research. Everything else is made up.

Replying to Guest Reviews:

I haven't read any stories about Nana being an assassin/info broker, though it sounds pretty cool! But I don't have anything that...well, to steal Ryohei's word, I don't have anything that extreme up my sleeve xD (and look forward to the next chapter! I'm going to call it 'Chapter 3: Inheritance Ceremony Pt 1'!).

I won't make any promises, but I will try to update soon :)

Since this is ten years later from the previous fanfic, you'll be seeing 16-year-old Lambo's side of the time travels! Fun, huh? I'm really looking forward to writing those parts.

Uploaded 2016-09-22nd

Edited 2016-09-22nd


-LLM