Editing City Series:Volume7 Layer 9 (section)

===Record 103: We’ll Have to Search===
[[Image:TOKYO_141.jpg|thumb]]

'''01/05/1999

'''9:17

I had needed to take our New Year’s break by force, but that was over now and I had been going to the Officers’ living room since yesterday. The only people at school right now were the students with club activities, the ones who couldn’t go home for a variety of reasons, and a certain idiot.

“Hey, Professor.”

He turned toward me with a rolled-up diagram under his arm.

“Oh, what brings you here at this time of year? Today is the makeup astronomy exam, so are you here to join them for some kind of masochistic thrill?”

“Nope, I’m just here to punch you. I hear you’re already causing trouble this year. I’m about to raise my fist, so give me a good first scream of the year.”

“I’m sorry to say I have no interest in the imagined Japanese customs your mind has conjured into being. I am about to pour my efforts into researching Psyche Outer devices. Entrance exams begin in the third year, right? So if I can figure out how to activate the mind or increase people’s memories, I’m bound to make a killing.”

“Some of that concerns me, but man, we live in a convenient age.”

“We do, don’t we? The only slight problem is how everything I try just erases the test subject’s memories like I’ve bleached their brain.”

“How is that a ''slight'' problem!? And you’ve been experimenting on people!?”

“Not to worry. They lose their memories of the experiment along with the rest, so they are always willing to volunteer again. I am so thankful to have them.”

“Out of curiosity, how do you run these experiments?”

“Strap them to a chair, place a helmet on their head, and bathe them in a visible electrical current for three minutes.”

I punched him out. And…

“Excuse me.”

I turned toward the male voice behind me and saw an elderly man wearing a military coat. His gray hair was slicked back, he had a medium build, and he wore a katana. He was Snowy’s father, the Colonel. I had spoken with him a few times during negotiations between the Chancellor’s Officers and the military. He was pretty famous.

He nodded when he saw me.

“I am here for a parent-teacher conference, so do you know where my daughter is?”

I thought about that, tilting my head. I honestly wasn’t sure since we entered the 2nd year. I knew she lived in the girls’ dorms, but this school’s campus alone had hundreds of girls’ dorm buildings. The student affairs office was on vacation and the dorm mangers would only know about their own building. How could I figure this one out?

Then the Professor took a step forward and faced the Colonel.

“You need someone to summon Snowy?”

The Colonel simply nodded once. The Professor nodded back, pulled a magic marker from his pocket, and approached the nearby student dorm.

“He wrote “Girls’ Dorm” in messy writing on the entrance.

Then he wrote “Snowy” on the entrance door.

“Yes, that all looks right. Time to open it.”

He opened the door to reveal Snowy’s dorm room on the other side. The small room had a bunkbed and two desks by the window. Snowy stood in the center.

She was frozen in place with her eyes on us. For some reason, she was in her underwear. For perhaps the same reason, she held the rest of her clothing in her hands.

“What are you doing, Snowy? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were changing.”

She didn’t respond at first, until suddenly…

“You pervert among perverts!”

'''Anything a woman’s hand touches becomes a weapon.

We quickly slammed the door shut and corrected the label with the magic marker.

“ ‘Snowy Mountain’. There, now this door should lead to a frigid mountain peak.”

The killer intent on the other side of the door vanished and I breathed a sigh of relief, but the Colonel tilted his head.

“My daughter has opened up so much. She used to be so shy.”

“She really has,” I said just before the door opened and a fully-dressed Snowy rushed out with a roar of anger. She failed to even notice her father’s presence and left him behind, so the Professor and I fled from the sword-wielding disrespectful daughter.

I looked back to see “idiots” written on the inside of the door in ink calligraphy.

'''Author Comment:

It doesn’t sound like he got to have much fun during his break.

The fact that he goes to the Officers’ living room first shows you what he considers to be important.

The Colonel shows up too, but it doesn’t seem like he and his daughter interact much at this point.