“Mizuki, we need to talk.”

I was going to be extremely busy for the next week. First, I had the plan to go to the Twin Elms, and then I needed to meet up with Jacques. Suffice it to say, preparation was needed. I returned to my world to get things squared away down here. Tom and the caravan didn’t plan to leave until the morning, so I had a single night to resolve things here. Of course, I could always slip over back over, but I didn’t want to waste crystals if I didn’t have to, and if we were traveling all day to make it to Twin Elms, I could only be here at night, using my precious sleeping time.

That meant that I had to set up things here so no one asked any questions. The easiest source of excuses was Mizuki, so I needed her to come up with some reasoning that would keep Gabriel and Mother from prying too much.

“I’m sorry, Mizuki isn’t available at the moment.” A male voice responded. “May I ask who this is?”

I blinked, surprised that Mizuki’s number was picked up by someone else. “I’m Daniel? Where is Mizuki?”

“Ah… so you’re that young entrepreneur she has been wasting resources fretting about. I’m not sure what you did to catch my daughter’s interest, Daniel, but I suggest that you end it now.”

A frown formed on my face. This was her dad? He had a deep baritone voice, and he honestly found it a bit intimidating.

“Where is Mizuki?” I repeated.

“She is back in a hospital where she belongs.” He responded. “I will be sending her overseas shortly to a top hospital in Europe where I’ll be working. I suspect she will pass before you have a chance to see her again. This is why I’ve suggested you put whatever relationship you have with my daughter to rest for your own sake.”

For some reason, his words started to irk me. “For my own sake? Is that what you’ve done? Put her in some hospital for your sake?”

“Excuse me?” His voice lowered an octave. “Young man, who do you think you are?”

“I’m the man who gives a damn about your daughter!” I hung up furiously.

He was some high-powered CEO who was worth a ton of money, but despite every meeting I had been with around Mizuki, I had never seen him or her mother. The first time we met, she had been telling me he had never spent much time in her life before her seizure started.

She still was very sick, and yet I had never given her the anti-cancer medication. The injection I had given her was just some RegenX. It would have temporarily healed up some of the damage caused by her cancer, but it wouldn’t have undone the cancer. It looked like it had only bought her about a month before she started falling apart again. I had been fairly certain that the only reason she was interested in me was because of the miracle drug. After all, every other child in that ward healed, and only she

I had held the drug over her like a toy, forcing her to keep doing whatever I wanted. Now her, illness had progressed once again and she was back in the hospital. I felt a bit like an idiot. Mizuki was a resource I couldn’t afford to lose. Argos Solutions was just made, and all of the information was with Mizuki. Other than her spending up my black card to buy supplies for my stalled bazaar, we had made no progress into the future of the business. I was making this trip to Twin Elms exactly to begin that future, and now she was at risk of being taken away from me. This was a situation I couldn’t afford to fix right now. Even though it was nearly supper time, I wasn’t going to be able to rest before my long journey. Why was business never easy?

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“Cecelia. Can you figure out where Mizuki is located?” I asked.

“I already searched, Master. She’s been placed in a private hospital clinic. The father was not lying about her being moved overseas either. I’ve found her registered for a flight ticket in one month.”

“Call me a carshare ride.” I declared as I started to leave the factory. “I’m going to visit her.”

“It’s past visiting hours,” Cecelia warned.

“I don’t care. I’m going to see her anyway.”

“What I meant to say is that if Master plans to break into the hospital, perhaps Master should depend on some of the security devices we brought over from the other world.” Cecelia declared.

I stopped just as I reached the door. “You don’t mean…”

“In Argos City, you shouldn’t go anywhere without proper preparation,” Cecelia explained. “I haven’t found this world to be that much different.”

I gave a slight nod and then turned back into the factory. I grabbed a few items from the stock I hadn’t sent to the Ascension Bazaar and placed them in my digitizing inventory. These weren’t turrets and droids, but there were a few items that might be useful in this world and perhaps not that useful in that world that I decided to bring over. Some stuff had already been deployed; things that would help protect the factory from trespassers. I needed something to watch those millions of dollars in dinosaur bones, after all. It had only been a day, so it wasn’t unreasonable that Lily’s people hadn’t come to get them yet.

By the time I walked back out of the factory, there was a car waiting for me. I couldn’t wait until I was driving my car, but for the moment, it wasn’t bad to be driven everywhere. The ride was a fair distance away. I found us leaving the city and heading for a place outside of town. This private hospital clinic seemed to be out in the countryside.

As I drove, I checked my email, and that was where I found that Mizuki had sent me a warning about this. The note was rather short. Mizuki merely apologized that she would no longer be able to help me with my business venture. She merely stated that there were family matters. Then, she sent me all of the stuff she had set up for my business so that I could take it all over. It was as short and direct of a goodbye as I had ever seen. That’s when a thought occurred to me.

“Cecelia, you’ve been keeping things from me.” I frowned.

“How can that be the case?” Cecelia responded.

“You have access to eyes all around the Ascension headquarters. You could have given me a heads up on when the caravan was approaching. Right here, you see my emails as soon as we transfer back to my world. You could have warned me about Mizuki, but you left me to find out when I made my call.”

“M-master… I can’t possibly pay attention to every detail, and what I do pay attention to, if I told you every single thing that I saw, you would never have any time to process it!”

“Cecelia, in the future, if there is something that I need to know about, tell me. You’re supposed to be a learning program, so learn when news is important to me or not!”

“Yes, Master…” Her voice had quieted in my earpiece slightly, and she sounded a bit pouty at being scolded, so I left it at that.

We finally pulled up thirty minutes later in front of a large mansion-like building. It reminded me of one of those wellness retreats where a group of people went out to get away and detox. The location looked pretty expensive. I could believe this was the place Mizuki’s father had sent her. I bid the rideshare driver goodbye and left the car. It wasn’t my intent to storm right in. I was going to survey the location first, and see if there were any easier ways to get inside. These were classic scouting rules from someone from the apocalyptic world. Only someone looking for death would storm into a location that they hadn’t properly surveyed yet.

Yet, a moment later, the door opened and several men in sunglasses and suits walked out. They had radio pieces in their ears that were a bit more obvious than my own. It was too dark in this wooded area to need sunglasses, so it was clear that these were security. Since they were walking straight toward me, my only conclusion was that the father had anticipated me going to find his daughter and had called them in advance. Why would he have assumed a young guy would have even been able to find where his daughter was, let alone head immediately there? That guy was nearly as paranoid as me.

“Daniel Miller?” The leader of the group stopped right in front of me as the rest formed a half-arc around me, blocking me off from the building. “Come with me.”

“Are you taking me to Mizuki?”

“Mizuki is not seeing anyone right now.” He sneered. “We’re holding you until someone can come and get you.”

I looked to see the man’s hand hovering over a stun baton at his side.

“I see…”

If I was going to see Mizuki, it appeared to be apocalypse rules all around.