Mysteries [Private]

A lot had built up to this moment and Mamoru’s mind ran through it countless times. He no longer had a place here. His parents were the only ones who were not interested in convicting him of the murders of the two police officers and Mamoru knew his story was sketchy, but it was not even the greatest fear he had. He had half-heartedly tried since and had not been able to summon that creature, that Thanatos. If it was gone, then he could accept death, he felt he somewhat deserved it. He could not however, if Thanatos was not gone, risk it breaking loose around even more people. No one in town had powers and if they did they were rather secretive about them. Mamoru, while holding nothing but contempt for the great majority of his “peers” still did not wish to see harm befall them. It was a point of rather persistent stress for him in the past couple days. He couldn’t control the monster inside of him and it had already shown that it had a pretty indiscriminant killing streak to it. The only person it didn’t seem interested in killing was Mamoru himself and even he couldn’t be particularly sure of that at this juncture. Consequently, young Mamoru was packing up what little belongings he cherished and other essentials to survive a journey to a major city nearby. He had scrounged up an old map that they had buried in the annals of the house and packed enough food rations to last him for a couple weeks. He didn’t expect to need much more food and water than that…hopefully.

That was where we left Mamoru as he carefully took stock of everything he had in his little duffel bag. He did not need to take stock, being gifted with perfect recall made things like “double checking” quite irrelevant so he knew he was just stalling, afraid to actually leave the only place he knew as home. The brief pause would prove to be somewhat advantageous though. It allowed him to hear the footsteps encroaching upon the front gate that he apparently had. Mamoru froze completely still as he listened intently, his brain working in the manic way it always had, calculating each step and the sound that accompanied it. Under his breath and most likely inaudible to anyone around him without some sort of supernatural sense of hearing, Mamoru spoke his thoughts.

“Normal walking pace, one point two second interval, increased volume suggests approximately two eight point zero eight four inches stride length. Stride length suggests approximately sixty eight inches tall, five feet eight inches. Weight of impact suggests smaller foot, most likely female. Steps are precise, trained, not local, not farmer. Not here to clasp in irons.”

Of course, that was only the initial assessment, but it did raise another concern in the young man. Why would an outsider and one that seemed to be, if not trained, highly physically capable be on his doorstep right after he had inadvertently killed a hollow, a shinigami…he thought, and two humans. The likely and least coincidental conclusion implied that she was here to kill him for being the danger that he was. Possibly a shinigami, that’s what the stories depict them as doing, keeping people safe from dangerous creatures. Mamoru’s first instinct was to run, to attempt to escape the woman at the front gate, but when considered rationally he knew that was a rather hopeless venture. Even though he was dangerous, he himself had no power. He had not been physically stronger than he ever had been and he knew the stories depicting shinigami as being faster and stronger than normal humans. If he had time to prepare then he might be able to trick the woman but he did not and no amount of element of surprise was going to let him escape this unfortunate situation. Besides, perhaps she was not here to kill him and was merely lost or something less interesting. As the door bell rang and echoed throughout the household, Mamoru’s gaze narrowed. The last thing he wanted to do if any of his suspicions were remotely correct was to involve his parents. They did not need to know that their son was a monster. Mamoru quickly shoved his way out the front gate, not paying any heed as to whether or not the woman had moved and he hadn't even looked at her, presenting his back to her and the perfect opportunity to kill him if that’s what she wished, if she did then at least he’d die testing a hypothesis about his “monster.” Assuming he wasn’t dead, a curt and rather irritated tone would emanate from him as he hastily closed the gate behind him, duffel bag in tow.

“What?”

Well, she knew which buttons to push. Mamoru did not show much emotion when responding to her remarks, he never did, but an especially observant person would notice his fist clench slightly and his body tense for the briefest of moments as her words washed over him. The expression did not last long before the boy’s deadpan and vacant mannerisms returned, his body calm, cold, and calculating once more. Internally however was a far different scenario. Mamoru was furious and he did not like this woman at all. Her first sentence was not out of the ordinary. Many people came to the Fushimi residence to inquire about their services and almost all of them found their problems to be of tantamount importance, whether they ranged from a missing cat to a refrigerator not being cold enough and consequently, Mamoru was very used to brushing off requests that were “very big” because they tended to be anything but. However, this woman was not the typical client to begin with and as such, there might be more merit to her estimate, but he doubted it. Problems are always the most impactful to those they affect and even the slightest speed bump can be misinterpreted for a mountain. Unfortunately, speed bumps were more annoying than exciting for those not personally involved and Mamoru has gotten rather good at tempering his expectations.

That was not what annoyed him about the woman though; it was her next comment that brought forth the smallest of emotional expression from the boy. That was ultimately his biggest problem he had faced in the past few years, he was a boy. Not many people take a child seriously before he proves himself and sometimes he is still disregarded after that fact. So when this girl, the wind obstruction and her general tone of voice indicating that she was not much if at all older than him, questioned his competency based on his age; the boy was infuriated. He turned slowly to face the girl, his face the blank and expressionless mask as his eyes scanned her up and down for but a few seconds before he started speaking in a manner that could only be described as excitedly bored.

“Height: five foot eight inches, confirmed. Unblemished skin and muscle tone suggest a life of ease and luxury, lack of bruising or blemishes rules out any sort of violence involved from either environment or peers with muscle tone indicating a lack of hard labor in life. Member of a high class or nobility, obvious self-defense training further confirming claim. Precise steps when walking to gate, trained, direct, efficient, not completely vacant muscle tone confirms some physical exertion has been put forth over the course of life. Lack of abrasions or callous skin on knuckles or hands rule out hand to hand self defense training, which suggests weapons. Relatively light, most likely smaller bladed weapons, knives or swords, triceps muscle tone suggests longer weapon, sword confirmed. Similar but not exact tone between arms suggests typically two blades, asymmetry suggests one is favored. I am not a child and you are burdening me.”

With that, Mamoru quickly turned and stalked off toward the outskirts of the small town, trying to put some distance between him and the woman. He wished to pretend that he suddenly stormed off out of some desire to seem “cool” or some other preposterous notion and hopefully the woman would engage in such fantastical thoughts, but the truth of the matter was far from such a romantic and dramatic ideal. Mamoru stalked off because he was worried and confused. One of the side effects of being able to look at a person and tell so much about them was that he had to look rather closely. While normally this was not of concern, it was different with this woman, something was wrong with him, his face was warm due to an accelerated blood flow and his adrenaline levels were abnormal. He had seen women before and there were many in his town that were attractive and even considered beautiful. He had always been able to rationally identify them as attractive, could understand why people had sought after them, but he had never really cared himself. The biological reaction wasn’t that interesting to him and it was so very predictable, which made it so very boring. But there was something different about her, maybe it was because she wasn’t from here and that made her instantly more interesting than anyone else here, but that wasn’t it, Mamoru could read her much like he could read anyone else. There wasn’t anything different there, not that he could see right away anyway. So what was that strange feeling? Was that infatuation? It was annoying.

Mamoru, for lack of a better term, was amusedly annoyed at the girl suddenly stomping after him as he ever so dramatically stormed away from the Fushimi gate. He had absolutely no idea where he was storming or even how he was going to get to the aforementioned hitherto unfound storming destination, but the important point of note was that he was storming and righteously so. Her chasing after him meant that his analysis was suitably impressive and that she was suitably ashamed for doubting his prowess simply because of his age. He was prepared for that reaction though, he was impressive if slightly narcissistic and he deserved the accolades for his genius and any slights against it should be apologized for, multiple times and with the most emphatic regret possible. What he was not prepared for was for her to violate his absolutely no touching policy. The touch itself wasn’t the only point of concern, albeit the major one, it was also that her grip was much stronger than her muscles suggested it should be for the briefest moment before reverting to a softer clutch. To some, it might have been considered mere imagination but not Mamoru; he did not imagine details like that.

Mamoru listened as she spoke; his eyes having left the ground in front of him and instead trailed down to the hand holding his wrist, a less than happy look on his face as she rattled off everything she had to offer him. Considering she had just met him a few moments ago, this was incredibly suspicious and combined with the stronger than should be plausible grip that he felt on his wrist, this woman was becoming closer and closer to his initial worry, not human. Currently, his greatest flaw as a detective in the present world was his lack of information on other species but it would not be completely implausible that the same restriction applies to a majority of spiritual and otherwise non-human beings. Offering transportation, room and board and food on top of whatever fee he would require seemed a little too naive even for someone from the background Mamoru pegged her as. Not to mention that she didn’t actually tell him anything at all about whatever she wanted him to locate, he was oh so very tired of Easter egg hunt jobs, they had gotten so very stale. If Mamoru did not suspect her of being more than a human being, he’d have already written this off as a scam to pin him in a dark alley while her gang banger cronies mugged and left him for dead. He’d dealt with similar schemes before and this was lining up to be a prime suspect for one, but the red flags he had seen earlier and the timing was just too coincidental, so he decided he would let this one play out for the time being. Besides, he doubted he was lucky enough to have gotten rid of Thanatos and if he was in danger, well, he hoped they were especially adept at fighting monsters or could at least run rather fast.

The irony of the name was lost on him but as she spoke it, the boy’s eyes slowly drifted up from the hand around his wrist toward the face that was speaking to him, a look that somehow seemed to convey that he was irritated and bored with what was happening. Logically, he should ignore her, get to a more prominent city, and start slow by learning all he could and amassing information, but his ego was just too large and his thirst for a challenge simply too staggering to pass up the strange circumstances that led up to this meeting. He wanted to know what this girl was and hopefully he was right and she wasn’t just a normal human, that’d make this venture so very boring.

“First, I have a strict no touching policy, release me. Secondly, you have provided me with no information regarding this heirloom and the object itself could range anywhere from a hair brush to a church organ. I need whatever data you have on what you wish me to locate or I simply will not be of any help to you.”

While the boy did not know the machinations or nature of his new acquaintance, he/she/it was not the only one who could play other people to get the results he desired. Mamoru’s objective was excitement, he was bored and this girl, for the time being at the very least, seemed to promise some semblance of intrigue. He was not able to do a complete one hundred and eight degree flip of his personality, he had determined that he would at least be kinder for the sake of pity at the very least. Still, there was a lot about this girl that bothered him as she released his wrist and not simply for the hormonal reasons that one would expect, though those were having a rather profound effect on him as well. For the longest time his parents had figured something was wrong with him and his rather complete lack of interest in the opposite sex. While a no touching policy did in fact exist before five seconds ago, the reason he was so adamant about getting her to release him was not because he wasn’t enjoying it, but because he was. Mamoru did not have emotions and desires like that; he had done a very very good job of completely shutting them off for the entirety of his rather young life. How quickly those feelings had blindsided him like this had made him extremely uncomfortable around this woman. There was more than that, however. Her story felt…wrong…off. There were holes, something amiss, like it was a little too perfect, a little too rehearsed, a little too spontaneous chance to truly be a coincidence. It was also something that Mamoru was going to shrug off and ignore. The boy did not deal in feelings, he dealt with cold, calculated facts and reasoning and that was not going to change any time soon and while he was having trouble discarding his attraction to the girl, he was still rather set in his ways about removing emotional impulse from his decisions and he was rather determined to see it through. It was a tumultuous time for the young Fushimi and life was happening too quickly, he needed something to cling on to, at least for the time being.

Mamoru listened quietly as the girl spoke and while his face did not betray it, he was rather bemused at her words. They did not quite seem to fit. Circumstantial evidence tends to refer to something that requires an inference to connect to the claim. In a scavenger hunt such as this, any evidence is going to be circumstantial. Any direct evidence would mean the item had already been found. That meant either the girl was lying to him about having talked to anyone or she simply was not bright enough to follow someone throwing big words at her to confuse her and get her to go away, or maybe she simply watched a procedural cop drama and saw them use the word circumstantial and just not understand what it means. Mamoru wasn’t sure which scenario he thought more likely at this point in time. Regardless, it wasn’t really a concern. What was concerning was just how…shady everything the girl said sounded. Perhaps she was too naive to understand her own words, but inviting a guy she just met who seemed to be in a rather big hurry, which is rarely a sign of something positive, to her secluded cabin in the middle of the woods where no one can hear you scream sounded either suspicious or really stupid. Her legs suddenly getting weak and wobbly as soon as it corroborated her story seemed even more coincidentally perfect for the situation and while his face did not betray it, Mamoru grew more and more suspicious by the second and the boy was not sure how to proceed. Her offer seemed as good a starting place as any though. He did not have an immediate answer though to her query. Mamoru was not someone anyone else would be pleased to see at the moment and if for some reason she did prove to be a danger and he lost control of Thanatos, he did not want to be near anyone to begin with.

“Alright, come with me then. There’s a place you can rest for a bit.”

It was not a long walk, both because Mamoru had completely memorized the area and because the actual distance to the small clearing playground was rather short, but it did give Mamoru time to process his thoughts. The boy pushed through some overgrowth in to a small clearing that held the abandoned playground that Mamoru had frequented as a smaller child. It had been replaced soon after he reached the age to play on it by a newer area closer to the center of town and this one quickly fell in to disrepair. There were still working swings and slides however and after a little dusting they were still perfectly suitable places to sit. Mamoru stood silently and stared at the swing, hoping she either figured it out herself that swings were convenient things to sit on or that the message was conveyed through some form of miraculous telepathy. Regardless of what she did, Mamoru would stand in silence for what felt like an eternity before two little words were uttered.

“Fushimi Mamoru, third of the Fushimi Detective lineage.”

Over the course of what would prove to be an agonizingly long thirty minutes, Mamoru had posted up against an old slide as the girl excitedly bolted toward the swings. While he was loathe to spend so much time near his previous home, his original plan involving fleeing rather quickly before the collective villagers came to a decision about what they wished to do with him, even risking the chance of deception the woman provided too great an opportunity for means of survival and too great an opportunity for excitement that Mamoru simply couldn’t resist the temptation, even if it meant tolerating a thirty minute sit down while she rested her legs. Mamoru’s focus was not on her at the moment anyway, he had more pressing issues on his mind, like plotting an escape route in the event angry villagers with pitchforks and torches started rampaging toward his home. He’d have maybe fifteen minutes once they realized he wasn’t home to escape so while they had some time to laze about on the abandoned playground, this wasn’t a place to stay any longer than the half hour she had allotted for herself.

Mamoru’s eyes did not leave the direction they entered from even as the girl began singing a rather dreadful and disturbing song in an awkwardly calming manner. The combination of the two extremes was rather…unnerving. While he had truly wished to maintain sentry incase he saw any sign of aggression from the villagers, he also was pretty determined to not notice how attractive her soft legs looked as they were highlighted by the few beams of sunlight that penetrated the wooded area. Being hyper observant did have a tendency to be a disadvantage especially whilst trying to ignore hormones. He had more or less let her words go unanswered as their time together passed, as she had noted he was not an especially talkative person to begin with, at least when speaking to other people and not mumbling to himself, and was not the type to be offended by things such as that anyway. Typically, the only things that tended to set him off were comments that impugned upon his level of competency and intellect. If anything, she was being rude in assuming that he did not know everything there was to know about his home and surroundings, regardless of their theme. For the time being though, he chose to ignore the slight and focus on something other than…her.

She seemed pretty intent on not allowing him to maintain his silence however as she constantly barraged him with song and inane questions and statements. She seemed to be nervous as she somehow managed to jumble her words up between saying that he was the first friend she had ever made and the first person she had ever spoken to without being coaxed by someone else. Mamoru was hoping she was shooting more for the second direction because they weren’t friends, Mamoru didn’t have friends. As the thirty minutes she had asked for expired however and she continued talking was when the boy finally responded, turning and moving toward her, a faint tinge of urgency lining his still somewhat vacant expression as he tried to ignore how cute she was with the hint of red on her face. If they were not alone it would be problematic, it would mean the aforementioned angry mob was closing in and there would be multiple problems if that were the case.

“Hopefully we are; which direction to your cabin?”