not an island

Mikoto's day starts off like it always does. Breakfast, a morning run, and then she sits down at her desk and pulls up the list of questions she's been given for the day. As always it's quite a long one.

It's mostly the usual mix of questions about resource locations and the viability of investments, which are probably the type of question she hates the most. If people can afford the frankly obscene rates the Black Swan Project charges for her services they don't need the extra money.

There's also a few requests to find missing persons from desperate families. Hopefully, none of them have paid an arm and a leg just to have her find a corpse this time and that whoever they're looking for doesn't have good reasons for not wanting to be found.

She kind of hates this life. Stuck in a gilded cage, selling miracles to the highest bidder. She'd never tell anyone this but sometimes she feels like she understands why subject Ψ left.

Speaking of which she should check on him. She fills a glass of water and puts in three drops of ink to watch them diffuse.

She frowns at the glass thoughtfully. That can't be right.

She should double check this. It's true that she's never been wrong before but she'd hate to raise a false alarm.

She gets her pencil sharpener and empties it onto her desk. Nope, still the same.

Every time she checked the esper's location before this he's been in the same remote location in the south eastern Pacific ocean, except for a few times he's ventured out into areas closer to the coast. Every time until today, that is.

Today he's in a suburb of Tokyo.

Her superiors are not going to be happy to hear this. Honestly she's curious what they're plan for this situation even is.

They have to have one, right? Otherwise why have they been asking her to do this?

She isn't afraid.

That's strange isn't it? The threat of subject Ψ abducting her has been brought out as a bogeyman for the last four years whenever the Black Swan Project needed to justify more control over her life.

Maybe it's gotten to a point where she wishes he'd just get it over with and take her already if he's going to.

*

Sora's noticed her big brother has been happier lately.

Since his miraculous return from his presumed watery grave he'd been almost brooding.

Mom had said that it was because he'd been through a lot at first and later, when she began losing patience with his sullen state, that he must just be at "that point" in his adolescence.

In Sora's opinion how much Mom has been smothering him since he got back probably hadn't helped.

These last few weeks though he's been more energetic, laughing more and smiling more too.

Sora wonders what's had this effect on him.

She'd consider the possibility of a secret girlfriend if she didn't know her older brother is a strong contender the least suave guy in the entire world. Even in the astronomically unlikely case where a girl was interested in dating him, there's no way he he'd be able to keep his new relationship a secret given the way that he turns into a blushing, stammering, even-more-awkward-than-usual mess at the slightest thought of getting involved in anything romantic.

Maybe he's wasted a bunch of his money on one of those kits that claim they can awaken your latent supernatural powers again?

If that's the case, gloomy Shun should be making a comeback soon enough, once he figures out that this one is just another scam as well.

How long will he keep falling for this sort of thing?

Whatever, it's not Sora's problem if her brother wastes his money on useless junk. She's got better things to worry about such as, for example, her highschool entrance exams. Sora's never understood her older brother's weird obsession with the paranormal. The revelation that psychic powers are real, shocking as it was, had never been something she'd cared much about.

Sure, it had been scary when it looked like a huge war might break out over the esper and later on when the esper escaped the Black Swan Project but since she couldn't do anything about stuff like that she eventually decided that it was pointless to worry about it. Better to focus on the thousands of tasks she needs to do to earn herself the life she wants. That way, as long as the world doesn't end, she'll have a bright future where she can achieve her dreams.

And if it does end, well, hopefully it'll be in a way that's swift and complete enough that she won't have long to regret all the time she wasted preparing for a future that never came.

*

Kaidou Ayumi has three bright, well-behaved children, a husband with a well-paid, respectable job (albeit one that keeps him overseas much of the time), and a roomy, well-kept house in a good neighborhood.

She like to thinks that she earned herself all these wonderful things by doing everything right.

She clings desperately to the belief that if she just keeps doing everything right she can keep it.

The loss of the house or the husband would be humiliating and financially devastating but it's the prospect of losing her children that scares her the most.

She'd already almost lost Shun once and the creature that gave him back could take him away again at any time.

Well, it will have to take Shun over her dead body.

On some level she knows that no matter how intensively she monitors her son's comings and goings it's useless against a creature to whom distance is no object.

Even so she has to do it because the only other option is to admit that there is nothing she can do to protect her eldest son.