Amon has to buy a spark plug

Nishiki's face was not as well-known to any of their enemies, so he was sent on coffee runs by default. As he climbed back into the borrowed car and handed off the can of coffee to Amon, the young ghoul groaned.

"How much longer do we do this?"

"Until we see something, or we feel sure that this site is clear." He cracked the can and took a drink.

"Ugh. This might be the most boring thing I've ever done, and I once took a pharmacokinetics class."

"This is what real detective work looks like." Amon frowned. "Normally, this is the sort of thing you'd assign to rookies to put them through their paces…but we don't exactly have a new class of graduates at our disposal."

They both stared out the windshield at the laboratory down the street.

Nishiki had interrogated Amon at length, trying to figure out what reagents and compounds Kano was using in his research. Amon, unfortunately, was not very science-minded and could only repeat snippets of conversation that he'd overheard.

They kept circling back to one product though: monoclonal antibodies. If the doctor was running any tests on the RC levels of his artificial ghouls, he must be using monoclonal antibodies for ghoul and human RC cells in at least one assay.

From there they'd called in Chie Hori to get access to the online catalogues of the very, very few suppliers of those particular antibodies in the region. They were very expensive and in very limited supply, so any significant quantity being sent anywhere other than the CCG research labs was a lead.

A couple of minor cybercrimes later, they had a list of several shipping addresses. They'd been staking them out, one by one, trying to figure out which one was a front for Aogiri's research program.

The building they were camped near was non-descript, several stories high with just a logo on the front door. The kind of place that could be hiding anything—or nothing important at all—in its walls.

"So the rookies do the grunt work like this shit, guys like you in Division I do the field work, and Division II does the strategy and analysis stuff?" The ghoul adjusted his glasses and took another sip of coffee, continuing their conversation from the previous night.

"Correct," Amon said. "And the lab handles all of the…lab stuff."

Nishiki snorted. "You mean they're the real heroes, it's just everyone else is too dumb to understand how critical they are."

"Maybe," said Amon with a laugh.

"It must suck," observed Nishiki. "I mean I know it sucked for Kaneki, but it must be so much worse for you, going from inside the CCG to being hunted by those assholes."

The erstwhile investigator felt the need to defend where he came from. "The people I remember…were honorable. They put their lives on the line to protect the innocent, and died in the hopes that those left behind would have a safer, more peaceful world. That's not wrong."

Nishiki pondered Amon's words. "You're all still assholes, but…I guess wanting that's not wrong. The problem is I want that for myself, too. And for…" He stopped himself.

"They mentioned that the woman you're looking for was your girlfriend. She's human?"

The ghoul frowned deeply and spoke in a quiet voice. "Yeah. It kind of complicates things when I don't want to starve to death, but I don't want her to get eaten, either."

"Even after everything, I still have a difficult time wrapping my head around it…how you can just kill and eat a human."

Nishiki was quiet, thinking carefully before he spoke. "Once when I was working at Anteiku, this mom came in with her kid. She got a latte and a chicken salad and he got a ham sandwich. He had a picture book about farm animals he was reading. While they were sitting there eating lunch, that boy had the realization that the animals in his book were the same animals they were eating…poor little guy had a meltdown. Couldn't finish his food. It seems like lots of human kids have moments like that, right?"

"Yes," said Amon. He'd had a terrible reaction in his youth when he realized that the chickens he helped feed as part of his daily chores were the same chickens placed on the dinner table at night. And there was the patience his foster father had shown as young Amon processed the harsh truth that for him to eat, an animal had to die…But he didn't want to consider that now.

Amon's recent experiences had cast some parts of his childhood in a more complicated light, and he wasn't sure how to feel about that just yet.

The younger ghoul continued. "I know I wasn't born wanting to hurt people. Most of us aren't. You have to choose to desensitize yourself, to eat. To survive. It sucks, but it's life."

Amon thought as he took another swig of coffee. "You're either predator or prey, you're either a law-abiding citizen or a murderer…Maybe it's a false dichotomy and both answers are wrong."

"I'll drink to that." Nishiki held out his coffee can.

They sat in comfortable silence for a while, each ruminating on the late night conversation—how much of it was deep thoughts, and how much of it was just bullshitting around to pass the time.

"You know," Nishiki broke the silence in a bored voice, "It's not that hard to date a human if you're a ghoul. Just remember to buy them lots of snacks, or else they tend to get mad at you for no reason."

Amon closed his eyes for a moment, wishing he could be anywhere but that car. "Thanks, I'll keep that in mind."

Really, though, Akira seemed so exhausted and stressed all the time that he didn't want to do anything that could add to her burdens. She was always staring intently at nothing in particular, with that focused look on her face that meant her mind was running at a hundred miles an hour.

He'd asked her once what she was always concentrating on. "It's all so complicated," she'd replied distractedly. "There's so many moving parts. I can't make notes and leave a paper trail, so I need to think it through over and over."

He didn't feel like he had the right to demand any of her attention, on top of everything else. Frankly, they both had so many other problems taking up real estate in their heads. There were fleeting moments, though, where he thought back to the night that he'd brought her home drunk. He wondered where they would be if she'd been trying to talk to him instead of her father.

Amon shook his head, trying to clear it of the residual mortification he still felt when he recalled that little incident, and refocused on the task at hand.

They stared at the building down the street.

Suddenly, they both sat up.

"Did you see that," asked Nishiki.

"I did."

It happened quick, but they both noticed the motion on the otherwise still street—a small figure emerging from an alley, running up to the building, and rapidly scaling it to the roof.

"Someone that moves like that isn't human," muttered Amon.

"Do we go check it out, or keep watching?"

The former investigator thought. "Get down. Keep watching. This might be what we're waiting for."

It was a tense fifteen minutes before anything else happened. Then, just as quickly, a window on one of the lower levels opened and the figure reappeared—dropping to the ground and taking off down the street at a full sprint.

Amon's experience, honed from years of tracking ghouls, reared its head. "We follow. This location is now compromised—security will be increased immediately. Whoever that was probably set off all kinds of alarms, and if there was anything at this site we'd be interested in, it was just stolen or destroyed."

They exited the car and tracked the silhouette from a distance. Their target was very fast and agile. They were only able to keep a tail by virtue of the fact that they were both keeping their eyes peeled.

Their journey lasted several miles, zigzagging through the quietest parts of the city and avoiding any traffic as much as possible.

Amon had been retrained, in the last few months, to notice the kinds of spots where ghouls might be able to hide out safely for a few days. Usually high in buildings or underground, the neglected places that were difficult for regular humans to access, or even notice.

It took some skill to start marking the places most city dwellers were taught their whole lives to ignore: buildings undergoing construction that were only policed by a couple of cameras and a night watchman, vacant condos that were being renovated, property that was sitting empty while waiting for a buyer…and places like the building they were led to: A condemned block of apartments, slated for demolition as soon as it was stripped of copper wires and pipes.

The target easily leapt the barbed-wire fence, climbed the walls to the top floor, and climbed through an open window.

Amon and Nishiki stayed back, in the shadow of a nearby building. A faint light appeared in the window—possibly a candle—but after several minutes it was extinguished.

The ghoul scowled and leaned against the nearby stucco wall. "More standing around doing nothing, now?"

"You guessed it," replied Amon.

Finally, when it was nearly morning, their patience was rewarded. The black figure emerged from the window, appeared to survey the street, then dashed off in a new direction.

"Let's check out the room," suggested Amon. "Quick, before whoever that is returns."

The room was austere. Only a pallet and a small pile of clothes in a corner, with papers scattered on the floor and a large map of the Kanto region pinned to one wall. Many locations were circled or crossed out, with notes scribbled underneath.

"This map has a lot of the same locations marked as we do," noted Nishiki. "Looks like some of the ones we haven't gotten to have been crossed off." He grabbed his phone, and quickly took pictures of the wall, going quadrant-by-quadrant.

"I see," said Amon. He leaned in to look at a familiar location. It was circled, but unlike every other site, there was no note at all explaining why. "The Yasuhisa mansion…"

The ghoul finished photographing his evidence. "Huh?"

Amon pressed his lips together. "Twins I knew from the Academy…but the last time I saw them, Doctor Kano had clearly done work on them, and both girls were badly wounded."

With his hands in his pockets, Nishiki surveyed the small room, the sparse belongings, and the sleeping pallet…too small to fit more than one person. "Twins? It looks like we're only dealing with one of them, right now."

"I know," said the former investigator. His heart sank. Distantly, he noted the black clothes on the floor, and his sharp eyes picked out a few long dark hairs left on the pillow. Kurona.

Nishiki crouched on the ground and flipped through the papers. "It's copies of packing slips…I know this company." He held up a paper. "They make specialty surgical tools…Kimi always told me that I had to buy her a set of their obsidian scalpels as a graduation present. They don't advertise it, but if anyone makes scalpels out of quinque steel, it'd be them."

"She's tracking Kano through his surgical equipment," nodded Amon. He stared at the map. "I'm sure once we combine our targets with hers, our search will become a lot easier."

"I got pictures of everything. She might come back looking for a fight…we should get out fast."

Dawn was breaking, lighting up the rim of the horizon an electric orange.

Nishiki and Amon took a long walk back to the car they'd left behind at the start of the adventure. It had been left behind by some suicide victim that the café ghouls had found. They were under orders to abandon the vehicle at the end of the night, but it wouldn't be wise to leave it right by one of the sites they were investigating. They still had to drive it to a less suspicious spot.

A bevy of cop cars surrounded the building they'd been staking out, probably investigating the alarms that had been set off overnight.

At least by that time, Amon and Nishiki could pass for commuters heading off to work. There was nothing suspicious about them heading towards the car. A cop walked past them, probably on his way to canvass the neighborhood for any suspicious activity. Nishiki nodded politely as they crossed paths.

As they both got in the vehicle and sat for a moment to decompress, Amon's cell phone went off. It was a text from Akira. He reread it several times, trying to make sense of it.

"Hold on. Do you know if there's a store around here where I can find…" He frowned at his phone screen. "…a spark plug?"

Obsidian scalpels are real! They're much sharper than normal scalpels, but very brittle.

I originally had Amon and Nishiki's stakeouts and recon just mentioned in passing, but I started to feel bad about cutting corners on something that could be very fun to see and now here we are.

Anyone else ever watch 30 Rock? I kept laughing as I wrote this because I was thinking about Kenneth crying, "I ate my father-pig!" the whole time. That's also the sitcom with the hilariously dark Tokyo Ghoul-esque line, "Ambition is the willingness to kill the things you love and eat them to stay alive."

Well, I'm off to an undisclosed location to eat, drink, and nap for the next several weeks :P

Next time: Akira and Touka engage in medical fraud