"You think you've distracted me?" Hiroto asked.

"Look around," I said, gesturing at the alien cityscape around us. "Does this place look like Tokyo to you?"

He dropped out of his kendo stance as he turned his head, this way and that.

"...Huh," he said, silently agreeing that, no, this city did not look like Tokyo. "Son of a bitch. How'd you manage that?"

"An anti-tank grenade won't put a hole in a vault like that," I said. "But it does make a big noise, and a great excuse to open a big honkin' portal on the wall. From there, it's just a matter of getting you occupied and out of the way until I can get away and swoop back in to deal with your mess."

"You can make portals, huh?" Hiroto asked. "How'd you figure that one out?"

"I didn't," I said with a shrug. "See, your secret powers make perfect sense in context- an ashikabi is just a human with latent psychic potential, and you've had twenty-odd years to study and develop that into psychic powers. Me, though? I'm an outside-context problem. Ever heard of Jumpchain?"

"Well, I'll be damned," Hiroto said. "Huh! Well, I suppose congratulations are in order. You win. What next?"

"I take a fucking nap, that's what's next," I said.

"Well, sure, but... What's next for me?"

I shrugged. "Fuck if I care. You've been separated from your power base, and if you cause more trouble, the local police can deal with you. I'm done with you, Hiroto. You're someone else's problem."

A portal opened between us, and I swept in, leaving him alone.

"Alright," I said, reemerging into the vault and picking up the Jinki. "Let's see, let's see... ah, here we are."

Another pulse of energy, and everyone got back up, groaning.

"So," I said. "Who wants to go home?"

----------------------------------------

The first thing I did, once we got back to Izumo Inn, was to un-wing Karasuba, as promised. The next thing was figure out how to disable the security interlocks that kept Matsu out of the Jinki. The third thing I did...

...was take a fucking nap. After the day I'd just had? I'd earned it.

"So," I said blearily, walking down the stairs. "You two lovebirds playing nice?"

"Provisionally," Miya said, glaring daggers at Karasuba.

"She still hates me, of course," Karasuba said casually, sipping tea. "It's just now she can't justify it the way she used to, because she knows I didn't actually kill her stupid husband."

"Oh dear," I said dryly. "Would the lady Quixote Miya like me to find her an alternative windmill?"

Karasuba sprayed tea everywhere, and Miya's face took on that look it did when she was this close to giving you brain damage.

"Rose," Miya said sweetly. "Please explain to me precisely why what you said was so funny."

Of course the Spanish-speaking Sekirei gets a Quixote reference.

"It's a reference to an old Spanish book about a knight-errant," I said dryly. "It isn't funny, not really, but I suppose Karasuba is simply surprised someone else has read that book."

C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, buy it already...

"Yeah," Karasuba said, "and I'm the Queen of England. C'mon."

"Oh, look who's all about Ashikabi being respectful to Sekirei except when she thinks it's funny," I said in Spanish.

"Don't tell me you're that scared of her," Karasuba said, also in Spanish. "I saw how you moved, back there. You can take her."

"I really cannot, I know nothing about swords," I said. "Musubi helped me learn karate, but I'm not as insanely confident in it as she is, so I'm pretty sure it'd be a bad matchup against a fucking sword."

"Pussy."

"You are what you eat."

She rolled her eyes.

"Rose," Miya said calmly. "She can stay here... on two conditions."

"Those being?" Karasuba asked.

"One," Miya said. "Rose wings you for the duration of your stay, to ensure you behave. And two..." Miya shrugged. "Karasuba alone warrants a hundred thousand yen a month in rent."

"Yeesh, you're an expensive pet," I said, grimacing at Karasuba. "Don't suppose I could put you up literally anywhere else?"

"I do have a room of my own, you know," Karasuba said. "If it's all the same to you, I'd rather not live in the same building as you."

"That does raise the question of what we're gonna do about MBI, now," I said. "...But, well. Matsu's probably got it handled."

"Letting the Sekirei do all the work," Karasuba said, rolling her eyes.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Letting the Sekirei make their own choices," I said. "My goal is to set them free; they'd hardly be free if I had to do everything for them, would they?"

"Whatever helps you sleep at night," Karasuba said.

"Did someone say my name?" Akitsu asked, stumbling into the dining room, bleary-eyed, her robe askew. "Come back to bed, Rose..."

"Well," I said. "If you insist."

----------------------------------------

"Christ on a bike this company is a mess," I said.

"Excuse you," Takami began.

It was the next day, and... life went on. Matsu had pulled several fast ones, and now, although my position was shaky, I was the "CEO" (really, proprietor; MBI didn't have investors or stockholders, but Hiroto liked the sound of 'CEO' as a job title, so 'CEO' he was) of MBI.

"Look, Takami, you're a great researcher, but you are not a project manager," I said. "I can tell from this paperwork that nobody with white hair was a project manager, nor did they believe that project management was a skill to begin with."

"We founded MBI just fine, didn't we?" Takami asked.

"Yeah, and all you needed to do that was a grad student with eighth grader syndrome and a psychic ship full of alien technology to reverse-engineer," I said dryly. "Ugh, christ, this is a mess..."

"Miss Corcoran?" Matsu said over the intercom. "Mister Ichinomi is here to see you."

"Send him in," I said, setting the paperwork aside as the door to my office opened. "Ichinomi-san, welcome."

"Call me Natsuo, please," the ordinary-looking salaryman said, taking a seat. He was 28, and before being picked to be the Disciplinary Squad's Ashikabi- by Karasuba, oddly enough- he'd just been another clerk in MBI's pharmaceutical department.

Also written in his personnel file was the fact that he'd once been the lover of a doctor, only for said doctor to then die in a war zone, and he'd never been the same since then.

"Natsuo, then," I said, nodding. "Well, I won't waste your time, Natsuo. Effective immediately, you're being relieved of your status as Ashikabi of the Disciplinary Squad."

"I see," he said. "Don't want to take chances, eh? I can respect that."

"Oh, this isn't about the threat you pose to me," I said. "No, you're also having some very mandatory therapy sessions booked."

He blinked, catlike, long and slow.

"...Can you... actually do that?" Natsuo asked.

"I'm the CEO of MBI," I said with a shrug. "If Minaka's taught us anything, that little fact means I can do whatever the hell I want. Your gay ass is going to therapy, Natsuo. But if it makes you feel better, so is mine."

"That depends," Natsuo said. "Was going to therapy your idea?"

"It was not, and I was initially resistant to the idea," I said.

"Then... yes." He nodded. "That does make me feel better, that you have to suffer like I do."

"Whatever gets you in the therapist's office," I said. "Do you have any questions?"

"No, I suppose not," Natsuo said.

"Great. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go back to figuring out what the hell Hiroto's handwriting is trying to communicate. Seriously, I don't recognize these kanji- did he write this in Chinese or something?"

"That's Assyrian Cuneiform," Takami said.

"Why the fuck did he know Assyrian Cuneiform?!"

----------------------------------------

Some changes were small.

"Ooooh, my head," he whined piteously as he came to.

"Thank you," Miya whispered, tearing up.

This wasn't one of them.

"I'll leave you two to it," I whispered back, before vacating the room. "Matsu, how's everything else going?"

"Terminated Sekirei are being revived just fine," Matsu said. "Most of them aren't happy, right now, but... well, they aren't dead."

One of the really big changes was to Matsu herself. Now that things were stable, and we knew what was coming next, her Body Mod had been finalized, and she'd gone into the can to become the sort of overpowered nonsense she'd been dreaming about when I first said the words 'Jumpchain.' And while I could list out every last perk Matsu had taken for her build, I would spare you the accounting, and instead simply say that she was now some manner of psycholich space slimegirl who budded off parts of her slimy body to make more slimegirl minions as needed.

And, well, while I did think it was cool to cuddle up to a real-deal slimegirl, she mostly walked around in her original form, exploiting a particularly useful shapeshifting perk to retain the benefits of her multiple new alternate forms.

"What's making them unhappy?" I asked. "Medical trauma?"

"They want to go back out there and find their Ashikabi again," Matsu said. "And, per our plan... we aren't letting them."

"Right, right," I said, nodding. "Do we... have anything we're doing to alleviate that problem, or... do we just let them be unhappy until the relevant part of the plan?"

"It's tricky," Matsu said. "We don't really have anything that'd make them happy- you and Karasuba's cynicism aside, most Sekirei do actually want to find their Ashikabi. And right now, we aren't letting them have that. So, unless you have a bright idea?"

"Idea, yes," I said. "Bright, hell no."

"Well, let's hear it."

----------------------------------------

"Thanks to our community's swift response," I said, "and our strong sense of duty to one another, I am happy to report that all known cases of this virus have run their course in quarantine, and despite our inspectors' best efforts, no infectious pathogens at all have been found. And so, it is with this happy news that we are announcing a cautious rollback of lockdown. Thank you for your patience and cooperation, everyone. This could have gone so much worse."

"Cut!" the cameralady called.

"I hear someone had a bad idea," Akitsu said, waiting off to the side for me, a bottle of water in her hands.

"Yeah, it happens," I said, shrugging. "At least Matsu was there to tell me no."

"I do have to wonder why you ever thought rendering the revived Sekirei self-winged would make them happy," Akitsu said, leading me away from the set and back through the Warehouse, towards Izumo Inn. While we did now live in the MBI building itself- it had a penthouse suite that Hiroto sure as hell wasn't using anymore- instead of the Inn, I still paid rent, and Miya was glad to have a full table at mealtimes.

"My only frame of reference was you," I said. "And, as it turns out, these days I've come to know you as a fairly happy person."

"Yes," Akitsu said patiently. "After a tall and mean older girl made it her mission to kiss the sadness out of me."

"Well, when you list out all the reasons my idea sucked, of course it sounds like a bad one," I said. "You and your 'critical thinking' and 'ability to recognize my flaws.' Who are you and what did you do with my traumatized sex doll?"

"God, don't even joke," Akitsu said, shaking her head. "I still have mixed feelings about that, you know? But..." She shrugged. "Well, I am still enjoying myself, here and now. What more can I ask for?"

"A life without regrets, a world without pain, and a softboiled egg?" I suggested.

"We'll see."