Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter1 (section)

===Part 6===

The unnaturally-well-cleaned restaurant was the location of interest, so they first had to look into the identities of the owner and all the workers. If any of them was a professional magician, the danger level would immediately rise.

“B-but what kind of magical ritual could you even do at a restaurant? Ah!? Th-this doesn’t mean there was a corpse hidden below the floorboards where we were eating, does it?”

“What would they gain from that?”

Angelene began to tremble, but Agnese responded with obvious exasperation. Lucia took a more businesslike view of the issue.

“So, Sister Agnese, where do we begin the investigation? We should be able to find information on the people at the city hall and the restaurant at the labor office.”

“Let’s go somewhere we know better than that,” casually replied Agnese. “Namely, a church.”

It could seem strange to the Japanese since most of them celebrated Christmas and then visited a Shinto shrine a week later, but churches contained plenty of personal information. After all, in Christian cultures, children were brought to the church to receive a baptismal name shortly after they were born. The local church would generally have all the information you could want on the local residents. Agnese’s group were part of the magic side and they would prefer to sneak into a place that operated under familiar rules. It especially helped that Spain was a Catholic country.

They needed to visit the church’s record storeroom.

“Th-that’s a Catholic church.” Angelene was nervous. “If we’re caught there, our lives are over.”

“So what?”

Magic was supposed to be a noble thing and not a tool to fulfill one’s immediate worldly desires.

Yet there were an awful lot of spells to hide your presence, sneak into places, or transform into the opposite sex.

“I swear these spells must have been developed by peeping toms and panty thieves.”

“Sister Agnese,” chided tall and fastidious Lucia.

Agnese had just undergone a transformation.

She did not need the Lotus Wand for something as simple as this.

Specifically, she had constructed a spell by taking the familiar Christian ritual of death and rebirth and rearranged it based on the story of a goddess from a different mythology. The Golden magic cabal, said to have once been the world’s greatest, had researched how to gain a mythology or religion’s power using a stage performance. Part of “getting into character” for those performances was to dress up as a god.

“While supported by the holy tetragrammaton of YHVH, we don the clothing of Isis, goddess of the lunar hexagram, so we might be resurrected from death and ascend here as new beings altogether.”

A change came over them.

However, they could not see the change themselves since they were on the inside of the spell. Just like someone in a mascot costume could not see the costume they were wearing.

Lucia was a clean freak on the mental side of things as well.

She considered herself a nun who served the one true god, so she looked extremely displeased with this.

“Dressing up as Isis, huh?”

“Deal with it. It’s only a symbol.”

Instead of disguising themselves as some specific person, they had turned themselves into “nobodies”. They would not stand out in the crowd, but no one would remember what they looked like after taking a few steps away.

“But it isn’t perfect. If someone sees you six times, they’ll see through to your true face, so no pacing back and forth on the same road and no doing anything suspicious enough to earn a double take. Just focus on our goal and keep walking.”

They slipped through the main double doors to enter the church.

The documents they wanted were further in than the public chapel.

“(There sure are a lot of people here.)”

“(Eh!? Are they doing a wedding!?)”

That was perfect. A wedding might seem like a solemn occasion, but there would actually be a lot of people running to and fro behind the scenes. With so many unusual people in the church, fewer people would think to stop a few nondescript “nobodies” on their way to an off-limits room.

“In sickness and in health.”

They glanced over at the happy couple while quietly walking along the chapel wall to remain as inconspicuous as possible.

The priest continued the vows.

“May your bond be a strong one, never to be broken even by a curse.”

“(Hey, that’s not the usual vows, is it? Is the priest really allowed to adlib here?)

“(S-Sister Agnese, I bet he forgot the next line and is stalling until he can remember it.)”

They made their way to the back.

The place was fairly cluttered. The chapel items not needed for the wedding must have been stored back here. It was kind of painful to see the silver candlesticks and the glass container of holy water just sitting there on the floor. The scent of that water consecrated with a pinch of salt reminded the trio of home.

Once inside the actual document storeroom, they instead smelled musty old papers.

You could call up a church pilgrimage map on your phone these days, but churches still tended to rely on analog data.

All four walls were covered in drawers, with just barely enough room left for the door. The place was a treasure trove of personal information on all the people who had been baptized at this church.

Angelene grew unnecessarily nervous about being in here.

“Um, where should we start looking? Actually, do we even know the names of all that restaurant’s workers?”

It did not matter how much information a search engine had at its disposal if you did not know what name to type in. Similarly, they needed a name to look up anything in here.

Which was why Agnese decided to cheat.

“Tejas of Vayu.”

With a buzz, the space around them shook. The drawers containing the information they sought began to faintly glow and they opened those to find the necessary pages giving off light as well. Handwritten documents had their advantages. With residual thoughts soaked into them, you could perform a search like this.

There were 24 workers in all.

That might sound like a lot, but with three shifts, that was just barely enough for everyone from the waiters to the cooks. Although that was probably normal enough for a privately-owned restaurant.

“Benito, Juan, Cecilia, Pablo. Hm, they use part-timers for everything that doesn’t need special qualifications. Only four of them are full-time employees: the cooks and the accountant.”

It might seem unusual that a list of baptismal games given to newborn babies had so much information, but churches also had confessionals where people revealed their daily worries.

Angelene seemed disturbed by the level of detail found here.

“This always seems like a type of profiling to me.”

“They prefer to call it factually-supported fortunetelling, Sister Angelene.”

The ruling class had been indiscriminately gathering personal information long before the term “big data” was ever coined.

Gathering everyone’s hidden worries could help predict misbehavior before it happened or resolve local troubles. When a priest or fortuneteller seemed to see right through you, it did not necessarily mean they were using some supernatural power.

And they found another notable entry.

“Let’s start at the top with the owner: Nihili Padpois.”

“Um? I don’t recognize that last name. Is that what Spanish sounds like?”

“You need to learn some Latin, Sister Angelene. Spanish and our native Italian both come from it.” Agnese sounded exasperated. “He must not be from around here. He never received a baptismal name here because he moved here later in life.”

“Where did he live before?”

“Port-au-Prince.”

Lucia and Angelene tilted their heads at yet another unfamiliar term.

Agnese shrugged.

“That is the capital of Haiti, located between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.”

Also, the restaurant was privately owned yet none of the four full-time employees had that same last name.

Which meant…

“Is Mr. Padpois single?”

“He hasn’t always been.” Agnese tapped at a point on the document and read off the red text there. “His move from Haiti to Spain was the result of a certain event. He originally had a family of three, but his wife passed away and he apparently did not want to continue living somewhere so full of painful memories, so he moved to Spain with his daughter.”

That alone would have been a tragedy.

But Agnese’s group had come here to investigate the possible use of illicit magic at his restaurant.

“How did his wife die?” asked Lucia with a frown.

“No one knows.”

Someone had definitely died and the cause would have been thoroughly investigated, yet that was Agnese’s answer.

But some people did have their theories.

“She died a seemingly supernatural death when several coincidences coincided with seemingly astronomical odds. It was apparently rumored back in Haiti that she had died of a curse.”