Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item Chapter2 (section)

===Part 1===

July 7, 9 AM

“Hooray for laziness…”

“Mugino.”

Mugino Shizuri was still lying in her large bed well after students and workers alike had gotten going. And for some reason, Takitsubo was in bed with her.

The negligee girl sleepily rubbed her eye.

“Why are you in here?”

“There weren’t enough beds.”

Takitsubo’s blank expression was as unchanged as her outfit. She wore her track suit at home, when going out, and even when sleeping.

“With two extra members all of a sudden, the room allotments are a mess. And right when we can’t access our money. You said we wouldn’t be able to buy new furniture for a while, remember?”

“…”

Maybe she had said that.

That didn’t seem like reason enough to climb into bed with her, but this could be solved by making beds for the two newcomers from a sofa or yoga mat or something.

“And didn’t you say you were going for an early morning jog before it got too hot? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but this is the third time I’ve woken you. The sun is already pretty high in the sky.”

Sure enough, she heard a clattering noise from the various small items Takitsubo had in her pink track jacket’s pocket. Rolling over like that had to hurt, making it hard to sleep.

“Ugh, but I’m still tired. Besides, it’s already too late to jog today. It’s not the end of the world, so I can start jogging tomorrow.”

“Last night, you said to make you get up even if I had to spank you. Here, I recorded you saying it on this voice recorder. So what will it be? Do I have to spank you?”

“Curse my past self for being so thorough.”

The negligee girl made a highly unscientific complaint and crawled out of bed. She opened the bedroom door and entered the large living room just in time to see something green swaying in front of her.

They were in an apartment, but Frenda Seivelun was crossing the living room carrying a giant bamboo over her shoulder. But not because she had a new pet panda.

“Tanabata, it’s Tanabata☆”

The apartment’s decorative plants, tropical fish tank, and such were managed by a rental company and were replaced quite frequently, but Frenda had still stuck the bottom of some bamboo into a giant pot of moth orchids.

And some red, blue, and green decorations were attached among the bamboo leaves.

This wasn’t a school or shopping district, so it seemed unlikely individuals had attached all of those tanzaku. Frenda was apparently confusing the Tanabata bamboo with a Christmas tree.

There were far fewer tanzaku than other decorations and one of them said the following:

''Don’t let anyone on Item get hurt.

''Oh, and I want money, status, fame, time off, popularity, and friends!! As much as I can get!!!

:::''-Frenda Seivelun

Mugino held a hand to her drowsy head and sighed.

“What are you doing? This is supposed to be a city of science.”

“Mugino, what do you do with that afterwards? I doubt you can put it out with the normal trash.”

Why would she know the rules of some silly superstition?

After taking a shower, Mugino changed into a tank top and long bike shorts to exercise in. Her sneakers were an expensive shock-absorbing model. Then she grabbed her music player…no, today she went for her folding handheld 3D game console. Frenda had said it worked too. The movement of jogging seemed like it would dislodge wireless earphones, so she decided the wired type was safer. She wasn’t picky about sound quality, but she had gotten the kind with pure gold wires anyway.

Takitsubo was the indoorsy type despite wearing a track suit year round, so she had no intention of joining Mugino. She was staring at the canine pet robots bumping into each other and having a turf war. Frenda was…what was she doing? She was at the table with a notebook open and looked delighted. It may have been the finance book (for managing their evil team). And yet she was the one wasting money on decorations like that bamboo.

Mugino ended up riding the elevator down to ground level on her own.

The lower floors contained a shopping mall full of luxury brand shops. As soon as she walked out of the automatic door and lost the blessing of the air conditioning, an invisible wave of heat radiating from the pavement hit her right in the face.

“This summer heat really makes me hate my own legs. Yet another thing I can blame on eating bread. Really, the wheat culture is to blame. The Japanese digestive system wasn’t made for Western food.”

The Fifteen Bells complex was something like a small amusement park, so jogging the perimeter made for a decent distance. Mugino decided to expand the area she covered in something like a spiral after one lap.

She put her earphones in.

One she got started, jogging was easy enough.

Mugino was an expert at being lazy, but she had more than enough stamina.

And as she jogged, it became very clear that today was July 7, Tanabata. Event advertisement flags were set up like streetlights on either side of the major street and the weather forecast provided by the large screen on the belly of a blimp also had a predicted arrival time for some meteor shower or another.

Four or five high school girls were sticking quite close together on the sidewalk. But rather than some girl-on-girl flirting, one of them appeared to have a cooling power. Mugino was jealous. That girl had to be like a seaside restaurant – popular in the summer but forgotten in the winter.

As Mugino passed them, the earphones attached to the folding game console did not play a fitness rhythm or the voice of an automatic advice mode.

It played some data recorded as videos.

''“The Colosseum? We’ve been pursuing it too, but no luck so far. Several times now, one of our people goes missing and turns up a few days later as a pummeled corpse. These are people who can’t return to their dorm and have nowhere left to turn. How do you get such a valuable insurance policy on someone like that? My name is Komaba Ritoku. Contact me if you learn anything. I’ll buy any data you have with cash. I want to settle the score myself if possible.”

''“Sorry, young lady. I appreciate the Musashino Milk, but I really don’t know anything about the Colosseum. For better or for worse, I’m keeping my hands off that one. I’ve told my entire team to do the same, so I couldn’t tell you what’s going on there now. What’s that? You thought Big Spider was led by a guy called Kurozuma? …It’s probably best if you go on believing that.”

“I can’t concentrate on this while running. …Mostly because it’s too damn hot.”

The fundamental problem was Mugino oversleeping.

She knew nothing was going to come of this, but she still replayed the footage several times, focusing on the people’s breathing and word choices to try and see if they were lying.

(Their quality is about as low as it gets, but they do have numbers. And because they’re weak, they know how to take advantage of their location. That means they’ll be monitoring every last nook and cranny of the back alleys. So if those Skill Out teams haven’t seen anything, where could the Colosseum be holding their deadly matches? And if it’s true they use a different location each time, do they follow some kind of pattern?)

They had hit a decent obstacle even for Mugino.

For one thing, this kind of investigation and pursuit wasn’t supposed to be Item’s job. They preferred jobs where they were given their target’s location on a map.

Mugino turned a corner while glancing over at a luxury department store bag abandoned in the gap between two shrubs growing on the side of the road.

Then someone caught up to her from behind. No, the person came up alongside her.

“Super good morning.”

It was Kinuhata Saiai.

The external voice triggered the earphones’ accident prevention feature, automatically lowering the volume.

Kinuhata was not out of breath as she ran. Mugino wanted to stay in the shade of the roadside trees or pass through the cool mist shower to fight the summer heat, but Kinuhata stole that position.

Kinuhata had already jogged several laps more than Mugino and she looked like she could keep going just fine. Mugino and Frenda were decent fighters, but in a pure fistfight, this small girl had to be even better. But that didn’t really matter. The dark side was especially irritating because ''you needed more than that''.

Mugino removed one of her earphones without slowing her pace.

“What, are you taking an early morning jog too?”

“Early?” Kinuhata checked how high the sun was in the sky and released an exasperated sigh. “I’ve been watching movies at the theater at the bottom of our building. Seven in a row. I started yesterday, so I’m super stiff and thought I should loosen up before getting some sleep.”

“Movies, huh? Don’t we have a home theater system in our room?”

“It’s super nice, I’ll admit, but it’s just not the same as a real movie theater. Also, I thought that theater was the fashionable kind that panders to couples, but whoever selects its lineup knows what they’re doing. Especially late at night when it plays lots of super minor B and C movies that you can’t even find on streaming sites. After you freed me, I took a look around, but you super don’t see many theaters showing South American zombie horror flicks. Yeah, a big jungle chainsaw and tequila Molotov cocktails are super perfect for a tropical city where civilization has collapsed after a widescale blackout!!”

“Why do you like movies so much?”

“There wasn’t much in the way of entertainment when I was confined in that lab. I think they were super scared we’d kill someone if we had any toys. All they did was gather the subjects in a white room and super project the movie on a screen meant for presentations, but it stuck with me. …Of course, super who knows what kind of subliminal messages and ultra-low frequency sounds they were including in those.”

That explained it.

Those people imprisoned children, tested risky drugs on them, and gave them brainwashing movies as their only form of entertainment. The fact that she wasn’t disturbed by this proved to Mugino that she really was part of the dark side. Her only real thought was “sounds about right”. In dark side terms, she gave it 50 points. So exactly average.

Even the dangerous people who caused enough trouble to get expelled from school wanted nothing to do with the dark side. You couldn’t let every little thing surprise you.

“Wait? So when we went down to receive data on this job…?”

“Yes. As you’ve super guessed already, that was my first time in a real movie theater, something I’d always wanted to see. It was super weird doing it to see the data we would need to kill some super idiot, though.”

“Sorry about that.”

Kinuhata sounded blue, but Mugino’s response had no real emotion behind it.

Was that experience like fulfilling your lifelong dream of visiting Italy and being served awful pasta on the plane trip there?

“And did you find a new ''part-time job'' too?”

Kinuhata fell silent.

Mugino fanned her face with a hand while focusing on the rhythm of her jogging.

“It’s not an accusation. You’re allowed to have a side job. I believe Frenda heads out on forensics jobs sometimes.”

“Forensics? Oh, she’s a super expert with bombs, isn’t she?”

“It’s less about the explosives and more about the chemistry knowledge. Of course, she isn’t helping investigations trying to hunt down the bad guy. It’s more like she helps people know who to take revenge on for killing their buddy.”

Their conversation continued as they jogged.

“But if you are going to make drop-offs, you can’t leave the bag in such an obvious location. You’ll get complaints if the goods don’t reach their destination because someone else found it and took it away. By which I mean the client will send someone after you to reclaim their payment.”

“I think this client super wanted it to be found. They want to update the outdated criminal infrastructure. So they super want an accident with some convincing item.”

“I see.”

The dark side had its own etiquette.

They were all criminals who broke national laws and city regulations, but they could be picky about such things.

“''Super more importantly, what about Hanano Choubi-san?''”

“''Her investigation should be done soon.''”