[center][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/40b268e9-9477-4d81-97d6-81ce4b87c2d3.png[/img]

[color=tomato]"I want the car fax."[/color]

[color=888888]— Mika Fang[/color][/center]

Mika probably should have been back at HQ. But after completing her reviews of the freelancers and porting them over to Binky, her superior accidentally spilled the beans. Binky had mentioned that Ashley’s team had run into some trouble, and that Fritzi was thinking about promoting the high tech heroine. But Mika was no fool. She knew the doctor had wanted to promote Ashley for a while. On paper it made sense. She was the most senior member and did exactly what Fritzi wanted. But it was too early and unearned. A rank bestowed out of necessity rather than Ashley’s ability. Oh how Mika seethed when hearing her name. She knew she couldn’t keep her cool if such a thing came to pass. But as bad as returning to HQ would be, she also didn’t want to go home to an empty house with her thoughts. So she volunteered to join the clean up crew that Ashley had dispatched. Mika hadn’t been harmed during her last operation, and she had a bit of mana left if something happened. It was a hard offer for HQ to turn down. They still needed to recover cry baby Finn, and the other espers weren’t in the same fighting condition she was. Having an esper around to deal with stray monsters would be a boon. Her wish was granted, so long as she didn’t get into trouble.

But Mika wasn’t just trying to skip out on witnessing Ashley’s promotion. After her outing with Estelle, she figured it might be wise to visit the operation area before some monsters came and leveled the place. She had gotten a chance to look around the church, but she was sure that the agents at Dante’s hadn’t been the most thorough. Prior to her talk with Estelle, she wouldn’t have been either. 

The non-esper agents immediately went to work surveying the diner for damage. Not just structural damage, but PR damage as well. Two men were talking about possible vantage points and one had mentioned a nearby orphanage that might have heard the battle. But none of that mattered to Mika. She was a slayer of monsters, and she was only here because there might be some clues that lead to bigger, more important things to kill. 

Mika was cautioned not to disturb the scene, but there was nothing to disturb. It looked like a bomb went off. There were bodies everywhere. Along with blackened furniture that had all been overturned. Even the church didn’t look this bad, and that had been the home of a mad cultist before nuns fired smoke and fire everywhere. She wouldn’t find anything here, and she knew it.

But the back room…

The back room split off two ways, both of which seemed to be untouched by the skirmish out front. One door, oddly, led into a boy’s bedroom. Or at least it looked like a boy’s bedroom at a glance. There were posters for retro video games as well as some punk rock bands. But the longer she looked at the room, she noticed that the musicians were all from boy bands, and many of the games had cuter aesthetics that most boys wouldn’t be into.  There wasn’t a lot of furniture, and the only appliance in the room was a giant flat screen TV that was wired to a game system. In truth, Mika was a little envious. Su never let her decorate her room the way she wanted to. Probably because it would look like a kid’s sticker covered lunchbox if she did, but that was beside the point. Though Mika did notice there was no computer, which gave her a strange sense of pride. Su had wanted to teach Mika about computers, and even went as far as building her one so that she could get acquainted with all of their parts. She wasn’t sure if she could build one by herself, but the one she had would be good for years to come.

The other path lead to an office, which also housed the security equipment. There was also a door leading out back, but there wouldn’t be anything out there. Mika went to look through the surveillance footage, but there was nothing interesting. There was no sound, it was all black and white, and the cameras inside the building were inoperable or of such poor resolution that she couldn’t see what was going on. Alls she really knew was that everyone was talking and then Finn entered the front of the building. Mika audibly groaned. Why had Ashley decided to send Finn through the front? It didn’t make any sense, and was just one more reason that this promotion was poorly timed. Why not go through the back? Of course as Mika asked herself this, she realized that the security system was pretty well set up for the back entrance. She didn’t feel this invalidated her question. 

The only other interesting thing in the office was the fax machine, as there was no computer. Fax machines were really weird, weren’t they? Digital information was so malleable and easy to share, and with a fax machine you could take that digital content and print it on a physical piece of paper, at which point it lost its ability to be easily moved across cyberspace. That seemed like a negative in almost every way.

There was no paper shredder, but there was a waste paper basket, which Mika dug through. Something that had bothered Mika about her operation was that the nuns were able to prepare for her arrival. [i]She[/i] didn’t know about her mission until just a day ago, so how were they able to prepare so fast? And if Mika’s operation had been leaked, then had Ashley’s operation been leaked too? 

Mika found a crumpled up piece of paper in the waste paper basket buried under a half-eaten lunch. When she unfolded it, she could see a picture of Finn and Timekeeper printed at the top of the page, followed by a brief description of his abilities. 

Yes. Yes it had.