Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter1 (section)

===Part 7===

Restaurant manager Nihili Padpois had supposedly lost his wife to a curse.

Even after leaving his hometown and moving to Spain with his young daughter, there were signs of someone cleaning up all signs of magic in his restaurant. That suggested he was still using some kind of magic.

“Hmm,” groaned Agnese while lying back onto the sofa bed.

After getting the information they needed at the church, they had returned to the mobile home.

“Mr. Padpois did make a pretty extreme decision, didn’t he?”

She understood the general idea.

If the one person in the world you had decided to spend the rest of your life with was unfairly taken from you, it had to feel like your heart was torn in two. Although Agnese was nowhere near the point of even considering marriage, so she found that part hard to imagine.

Still, would that really be enough for him to cross the ocean to a new country?

Where would he have found the money for that?

“Just because you can cook doesn’t mean you can immediately start a restaurant. I mean no offense, but Haiti isn’t exactly a wealthy nation. Even if he worked his ass off and saved up everything he could, it might not be enough to overcome the price differences between countries.”

There was an extremely simple solution to that problem.

She sighed as she spoke it.

“Life insurance.”

The term had an unavoidably dangerous ring to it here.

When someone died, you were handed an opportunity along with the loss. There was nothing wrong with using that to move to Europe, but they also had reason to suspect he was still using magic – which could mean a curse.

“Sister Lucia.”

“Yes?”

“How is the restaurant doing financially?”

“Why not check it out for yourself?”

They had slept in too late. After taking the time to investigate and return here, it was already late evening.

The trio left the mobile home and walked to that restaurant again.

They were on a serious mission, but something occurred to Agnese on the way there.

“Wait! You haven’t cooked a single thing today, Sister Lucia! You’re supposed to be on cooking duty!”

“You must be imagining things.”

They checked inside the restaurant to see a fair number of customers at the tables and counter, but it was not so crowded you would have to wait for a table if you showed up without a reservation. They took a seat and looked around to see the place maintained its focus on food over alcohol even at this later hour. The only alcoholic drinks they served seemed to be mass-produced beer and cheap table wine.

Angelene was soon staring at the menu.

“They have a bunch of options that weren’t offered this morning! I want to eat this ajillo! And these skewers!!”

“You need to specify what kind of ajillo and skewers they are.”

The focus on seafood meant anything cooked in oil or on skewers was probably shrimps. Sea bream and salmon were also likely options. Despite having had them that morning, Angelene went ahead and ordered a bunch of clams. All of the alcohol had been cooked off, but the beer and wine were apparently primarily stocked for cooking dishes like that. The customers were probably drinking the extras that the restaurant ended up with because the minimum order with the distributer was more than they needed.

The spicy and garlicy ajillo came with bread. You were supposed to tear off pieces of the bread and dip it in hot bubbling olive oil, so it presented a fairly high hurdle for those girls.

“It’s delicious, but what kind of bread do they use in Spain? Spanish bread?”

“Work on your vocabulary, Sister Agnese. This is focaccia and it’s from our native Italy.”

Agnese felt someone looking at her, so she looked over to find that someone much closer than expected. A brown girl of about 5 was clinging to the edge of the table with both hands. She looked a lot like someone peering over a fence.

“Heh heh.”

And for some reason, she looked extremely proud of herself.

“Do you like it?”

“Y-yes.”

“You do? You actually like it?☆”

She began wiggling side to side like Agnese had complimented her.

There were a lot of races around the world, but she did not appear to be of purely African descent. She did have the dark skin, but her facial features and hair seemed more like the nuns. Agnese belatedly realized the girl was probably mixed race.

She was reminded that a lot of the beautiful gods and goddesses in Voodoo were depicted as mixed race.

“You chose a good day to eat here. This chef is really good.”

(So is this the daughter?)

“Solène, come here please,” called a deep adult voice.

The girl immediately turned around, so that had to be her name.

“Coming! Why does papa have to interrupt me when I’m letting the world know how great he is?”

She vanished into the back of the restaurant while grumbling some kind of complaint.

Agnese watched her leave.

“The restaurant seems to be doing fairly well. Based on the ingredients and prices, he seems to be running such an honest business I can’t imagine the profit margins are great, but he shouldn’t be in the red either. This place is definitely beloved by the local populace.”

“This location is, yes,” nonchalantly began Lucia. “But he expanded to a second location and that one is apparently struggling. Without the founder around to watch over things, the work has gotten sloppy.”

“How bad are we talking about here?”

“I don’t know the actual numbers, but I would guess they get only about a third the business this location does.”

That was devastatingly bad.

So bad it would honestly be best to immediately shut down that location and focus on this one. Did he have some reason why he could not do that?

“What if?”

Once they had finished eating, Lucia paid their bill.

She coldly continued the conversation as they left the busy restaurant.

“Let’s say this location really was started using life insurance money and now he’s run into more financial troubles. When someone manages to solve some crisis via criminal means, it can apparently start a cycle of criminality. A mugger will start mugging their way out of any future debts and a burglar will start burgling their way out of any future debts.”

“Wait, what are you suggesting?”

Angelene seemed confused at first, but Lucia’s meaning gradually dawned on her and her face paled.

“Th-then this is an emergency! I mean, that restaurant already showed signs of hiding magic use. If he needed another life insurance payment, he would only have one possible target…but, but that’s too awful to think about!”

“Voodoo is most well-known for its zombies, but it has many more curses to offer. Of course, the actual Voodoo zombies are nothing like how they are generally depicted,” explained Lucia. “The most horrific of those curses involves ''making a deal with a demon''. Your every wish is granted as long as you kill and sacrifice someone once a year. Worse, it has to be a family member or lover whose loss will tear your soul asunder. And if you fail to deliver, you yourself will be sacrificed. The deal doesn’t sound remotely worth it to me, but it wouldn’t be so well known unless a fair number of people decided to use the spell. I also don’t know if what they call a demon is the same thing as our demons.”

Who was in harm’s way here?

And what would the culprit gain from it?

When spelled out like that, it was a very simple situation. Enough so that they wanted to remove that brown girl from the restaurant immediately.

Agnese Sanctis brought a hand to her slender chin.

“This is troubling.”