Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Mental Out SS (section)

===Part 4===

Kamijou Touma looked down at the paper cup in his hand.

He tilted his head.

“Including tax, that was only 321 yen for two drinks. …I don’t get it. Why is this tea in a paper cup okay when the canned drinks were out of the question?”

“Your ignorance is showing. The world is not so simple that price is directly correlated with quality. Did you think the mineral water sold at a tourist markup in amusement parks had some special ingredient inside?”

While avoiding Misaka Mikoto who would (according to Shokuhou) make them explode and die, they had arrived at a section of the park where food trucks sold bentos, drinks, and more. All the temporary obstacles were perfect for someone who wanted to stay hidden.

Kamijou looked up and tilted his head further.

“By the way, do all Tokiwadai girls like to go behind the food trucks?”

“There’s so much to see back here☆”

The honey girl hid the truth behind a smile and listed off some plausible reasons.

They were all accurate even.

“All the front counters are nice and clean, so you can’t judge the difference there.”

“I suppose…”

“But circle behind the trucks and you can find all sorts of valuable information ability: you can see how they cook, you can check the collapsed boxes to see what ingredients they use, and you can find out how clean they keep things that won’t be seen.”

The honey girl smiled and raised a white-gloved finger.

“This is worth remembering. A food truck that is messy and dirty in the back will be a complete disaster ability on the inside. And by checking the company names on the boxes and labels, you can make a decent guess where their ingredients come from and what kind of chemicals they use☆”

<You refuse to drink any kind of instant drink made using teabags or freeze-dried ingredients. And you won’t touch the popular chain brands that try to mask their low quality with artificial flavorings and colors. You only accept tea that was made by hand. You really do love your natural ingredients, Queen.>

“(Anyone with sense does.)”

On this alone she would not compromise.

The pointy-haired boy stared into his paper cup in a way that suggested he didn’t drink black tea very often.

“I never knew there were so many different kinds of black tea. I knew it could be bitter or sweet, but this is more sour. Is it supposed to taste that way?”

“Hee hee. Most tea plants for black tea are Assam or a derivative, but the flavor changes depending on the location it was grown: Nepal, Nilgiri, Darjeeling. When you stop and think about it, it is strange, isn’t it?”

“What do they even mean by steaming the tea? How does that compare to the canned stuff?”

“…”

In a way, no one was more unshakable than someone who didn’t care.

Shokuhou was reminded of the nature survival travel show (which had made her feel like she had visited the destinations despite lying on the sofa the entire time) where an expert had used a handmade water bottle purifier to filter and drink puddle water.

The honey girl sighed and spoke.

“Why do I get the feeling you think a strawberry shortcake is something you get by pointing into the display case at a cake shop?”

“Wow, it’s like you profiled me. Baking is a complete unknown territory for me.”

She had meant it as an insult, but he was instead impressed.

Had that been accurate?

She had meant it to be over-the-top enough for him to argue back and keep the banter going.

Both the Tokiwadai girls, who may have been more familiar with tea than ordinary water, felt mildly guilty.

The honey girl opened her mouth while holding a hand to her forehead to keep her blowing blonde hair under control.

“It is a common mistake, but profiling is not meant to read the thoughts of a specific person.”

The pointy-haired boy tilted his head, but he seemed interested.

The honey girl cleared her throat.

“The essence of profiling is quizzing all of humanity on the same questions. Do you get what I mean?”

“?”

“Well. For example, you take a set of criteria – mid-teens, female, plenty of spending money, accompanied by an older boy – and then you ask the exact same question to all the girls who meet those criteria. It could be something like ‘what do you want to eat on this Sunday afternoon?’ If you asked this during a food festival with 100 food trucks gathered in the park parking lot, you would probably find their answers trended in a certain direction, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, you probably wouldn’t get much of the thick cutlet sandwiches or the greasy stamina-building garlic gyudon, but you would get a lot of sweets. Um, like macarons and crepes.”

(Now that’s an extremely biased answer based on the fantasies of unpopular boys, but that isn’t the point here.)

<Why do you sound so pleased to describe him as “unpopular”, Queen? Is that a hint of relief I sense in your mental voice?>

(Shut up☆)

“If you accurately record the distribution of those trends, they can come in handy later on. Let’s say you come across a girl in her mid-teens who has plenty of spending money and is accompanied by an older boy – like me, for example – then you can make an educated guess about what I might want to eat on a Sunday afternoon even though you’ve never met me before.”

At that point, the honey-blonde girl softly pressed her light-pink lips against the rim of her paper cup.

It wasn’t a porcelain cup, so the tea was cooling faster than she was used to.

Kobayashi’s voice played in Shokuhou’s head.

<Makes me think of the TV dramas and movies where girls are caught up in a murder case over some sweets.>

“(Profiling is not a bloody thing only used in criminal investigations. It’s just that the public agencies in charge of law enforcement can indiscriminately gather people’s personal information without any backlash, so they’re open about doing it. The technique is actually used in all sorts of fields, including sales and internet advertising.)”

The honey girl kept up a perfect smile to hide the telepathic conversation going on in her head.

And she continued her conversation with Kamijou Touma at the same time.

“Basically, profiling is a surveying technique that combines a massive amount of data in the form of ‘this kind of person generally likes or dislikes these things’ or ‘people who like or dislike these things are generally this kind of person’ to narrow things down as much as possible. The more questions you can ask, the greater the detail of the conclusions you can draw.”

“Huh.”

The pointy-haired boy didn’t seem to be listening. Like he was in a boring class.

Girls could tell just how much attention was being directed their way.

So the honey girl decided to give this conversation a bit more of an impact.

“That means it doesn’t work with someone you know nothing about. A mismatch in the profiling renders it useless.”

“Eh?”

The pointy-haired boy turned forcefully toward her.

She had his attention.

“For example, police dramas often have the police say they learned their profiling techniques directly from the American FBI, right?”

“Yeah. Once you hear that, you know they can catch even the most genius criminal, right?”

“Ah ha ha. If you ask me, a real genius would use their prized brain ability to stay out of a situation that forces them to commit a crime in the first place. …Also, those techniques wouldn’t be any use in Japan. After all, their data comes from tens of thousands of Americans from all across America and what good is data on people from a gun culture when it comes to solving crimes in Japan?”

“Oh, you’re right… Guns are everywhere in America, so criminals there would naturally come up with different ideas.”

“Right. Japan has different average incomes, family structures, home sizes, distances between houses, daily routines, bans on weapons like guns, and other rules, so if you want to solve crimes here, you would need to redo all the data collection in Japan☆”

So even a 180+ IQ genius investigator couldn’t use that technique on their own. Being a group was the greatest strength of an investigative agency.

But more importantly…

“If you want to read an individual’s mind, you might be better off using a polygraph – that is, a lie detector.”

The honey-blonde girl smiled and stepped closer.

She stood right up next to the boy.

“Our words can lie, but our bodies cannot. Stage magicians and gamblers often use that fact to read people. For example, if I place my hand against your chest, I can feel your heartbeat.”

“H-hey?”

“Minute movements of the eyes and facial muscles and irregular breathing are also simple ones to look out for. The most classic example is sweaty palms. If I simply hold your hand like this – my, my – is holding a girl’s hand making you nervous by any chance?”

Taking this any further looked like it would make the pointy-haired boy fall backwards and dump his hot tea over his head, so she decided to spare him anymore.

“Well, I will praise you for taking a sip before adding any sugar or milk.”

“What, are you saying drinking tea plain is the mature thing to do?”

“Of course not. The flavor of tea and coffee is greatly influenced by what you drink them with. If you drink tea with a sweet shortcake, you wouldn’t be able to taste the sugar in the tea even if you did add some.”

The honey-blonde girl looked to the side.

Right there was an option that had apparently met her exacting standards.

“A dessert food truck?”

“They have a lot of mobile shops, but I suppose they just barely earn a passing grade.”

The truck sold financiers that, even after lowering the price as much as possible, did not rely on artificial flavors and sweeteners for a cheap flavor boost.

She had used her eyes much like a soccer player pulling a feint, but she had actually made use of one of the basic needs: the need for friendship. Everyone felt some desire to be freed from the tension when they were asked for their opinion, so as the tension and doubt grew inside them, they tended to follow the other person’s gaze to seek out the correct answer.

The honey girl smiled a little at successfully luring him in that direction.

“Do you have plenty of spending money, young gentleman?☆”