The early part of the day was very quiet. Two people rushing in with panicked expressions raced in and snagged travel sewing kits meant for quick repairs. The relief on their faces… well, it felt pretty good to be able to provide what they needed on the spot. I smiled, pointed to the card reader, and wished them luck.

I got some funny looks, as well I should, given that they lived in this complex. The pair, one young man, one young woman, each wearing old suits that didn’t quite fit with the times or fit with their bodies, had clearly borrowed the clothes for job interviews and saw disaster in the form of a sudden and unexpectedly discovered tears in the old cloth.

If the Toriyama store hadn’t been there? Well, I doubt their day would have gone as smoothly. ‘No wonder she likes running it.’ I thought with a little smile on my face while I watched the wall clock continue to move forward one minute at a time.

I stopped clockwatching to go wipe down the counter by the bento. There was a sink and a soft cloth there waiting for use, and given the circumstances I figured… ‘Why not? What else is there to do?’ There were no customers for a fair bit, which wasn’t that surprising given the hour.

Kids were at school, most functional adults were at work, and nonfunctional ones tended not to have much in the way of money. The warm water felt good on my hands and before long the clean counter was cleaner than before.

From there I thought… ”Now what?” And I put my hands on my hips to look around the store. I looked toward the doors. ‘Still nobody.’ I thought, and went to check the inventory of things that were currently on the shelves. Dried seaweed was low… so I went to the back room behind the register to check the stock of goods… and frowned.

‘Alright… that’s not good. No, that’s bad, that’s very, very bad.’ The thought ran through my head as I looked within what was clearly the storage area for restocking… which was instead a sad sort of place, clean, like the rest of the store.

But that is what made it sad. See, I’d never held a real job on Earth, but I did know enough from movies, t.v. and manga that if you wanted to show that a place was dying, whether it be a restaurant or a store or whatever, the best way to do that was to show that it was damn near empty. ‘I’m out of… we ran out of… sorry, we don’t have…’ Whenever you heard that phrase in entertainment media, it was meant to show that a place was not doing well for itself.

There should have been multiple big boxes on pallets stacked way up, with just… all the snacks, not to mention all the cleaning supplies and prepackaged food and…

I had a sinking feeling. This was just the dry goods, the stuff that was plastic wrapped and packaged and so on.

There was a side door in this area, heavy and metal, it opened into the freezer. I cracked that door open and went inside, the icy chill hit my skin all at once and I wrapped my arms around my body and gave an audible shiver. “Brrr!” I said to myself as I ventured within.

This place should have had stacks of meat and drinks meant for the refrigerated section, all the basics that kept people going through that last hour or two.

But instead there were only a handful of boxes along the wall, none were higher than two deep up and two deep out, each aligned according to the product on the shelf.

But most of the produce shelf had just plain nothing.

My mind turned back to the two thugs who’d come into the store, and I spun on my heel, striding out of the deep freeze and venturing back to the register.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Still nobody was coming in, so I opened the register, checked for the paper envelope and cracked it open. There, I started counting.

Human money confuses me to no end. Every country has its own, and every country values every other country’s currency at a different rate from their own. Even the rate at which they valued their own currency didn’t actually match what was written on their damn stupid pieces of paper.

All I could do while I counted was grumble. “Damn stupid confusing inefficient barbaric primitive nonsensical absurd ridiculous daft temple to madness, forget why… how in all the hells of all the gods in all the Universe does anyone do anything this way?!”

I managed to get a count of the money within and tried to work out the relative cost compared to what I spent on things.

“So… let me work this out…” I mumbled and began drumming my fingers on the counter next to the register, “I pay that for a pizza… and this is like a few hundred pizzas so…”

My mouth dropped. “This is like a thousand pizzas?!” I shrieked with shock and horror… “No way?!” I couldn’t believe my own math, so I went to the far office. I’d seen through there sometimes when the door was open, and I knew Suki had a desk in there.

I tried the handle, it turned, it wasn’t locked. The wooden door swung inward when I pushed, and my eyes were greeted by a dizzying array of scattered papers, notebooks open with various numbers that were just… just dizzying to behold.

It was the exact opposite of the neat and orderly existence outside. I hesitated, fingers still curled around the doorhandle, my NEET brain screamed ‘Flee! This is an unholy land filled with math and confusion!’ But I did not flee.

I did not turn away.

I did. Not. Run.

I stepped within, leaving the door open at my back to both hear incoming customers and to ensure I could easily flee if the numbers assaulting my brain began to overwhelm me.

I did feel a little guilty, enough so that I couldn’t bring myself to actually sit in the cracked leather chair. The poor thing had clearly seen much better days, it was tilted slightly where one wheel was broken, once smooth brown back was tilted in such a way that suggested it was probably broken and couldn’t be leaned back in without it falling apart entirely.

There was one thing that perhaps saved my brain from a meltdown.

When you’re late paying a human organization, they really want you to know it. So a lot of the papers I saw were stamped ‘late notice’ or some variation thereof.

‘If she’s paying protection money to some yakuza baddies… no wonder she can’t pay her bills.’ My frown deepened as I began looking at one paper after another, just what was in that one single envelope was enough to pay most of the bottom numbers on the bills I picked up, and based on the dates, these were cumulative months.

“With that? She’d be just fine…” I mumbled and dropped the papers to fall like feathers in the breeze back down to the desk. I narrowed my eyes down at the desk.

Nobody needs to tell me that I can be sort of lazy. That’s the whole point of my vacations. But I really, really, like being a Painter. It’s not just that I’m good at it, I really see value in what I do. I hate dictators, they don’t just take lives, they take happiness. From where I’m sitting… standing, that is, these guys are just small scale dictators, leeches.

They were exactly the sort I do not like.

I heard the ding of the door as a customer walked in and hastened out to meet them. “Welcome to Toriyama’s.” I said with a smile as I stood in front of the register. I kicked the pants of the two petty tin pots out of my way, and started planning what I would do when my day was done.