A Place in My Head- Chapter 3

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Cards were such stupid things. I didn't understand what was so entertaining about slivers of thin cardboard with weird drawings and numbers written on them, what it was that made Yohji go mad and Aya's eyes light up with money signs. Card gambling was stupid, I didn't want to put my fate into those pointless little things created by man to torment man, but I found my tounge sticking out of the corner of my mouth and my brows furrowed as I watched in excited concentration while my fingers lowered a card atop another that was atop another in a castle like formation. It wasn't sticks and glue and tweezers like the ships back home but it was defiantly more frustrating seeing as I almost knocked the computer sitting next to me onto the floor.

"What are you doing?" There was a slightly aggravated voice addressing me and I only seemed to hear it in the back of my mind. "Ken." My name. "Ken!"

"Shit, Aya!" I yelped as his fist crashed down on the table next to me making the cards fall and toss a vanilla folder to me, covering up the remnants of my kingdom. I looked angrily at the folder, it's dumb wannabe tan color, it's dumb little yellow thread that kept it tied shut and the dumb wrinkled papers from falling out.

"If you can sit and think enough about balancing cards on one another than surely your head is well enough to do some 'productive' work." Aya was snide and testing my patience. I crossed my arms, ala pouting child and bowed my head, glaring at Aya through my bangs as he did at me. A certain congregation of energy was building up between us. I'd always been somewhat hostile around Aya, not the calm cool Ken with a creamy nougat center. I was always on my toes, ready to bolt, or pounce, depended on how far he decided to push me.

"Fine." I grabbed the folder and opened it clumsily, letting a few papers slide out. I didn't want to be the hero today but I sure as hell was going to make a big ruckus while I still could, anything to piss off the stolid Aya. I looked down at my feet at the papers that had fallen. Oh no, not more photos. I narrowed my eyes and cautiously bent over to pick them up, afraid they might bite.

"Something wrong, Ken?" It was Omi's voice, sitting next to me on the couch, hands neatly folded on his lap over a pile of papers, his head cocked at me questioningly like a puppy. I wanted to squeal and hug him. Peeling my eyes away from Omi and shuffling the paper's around in my hand, flipping back and forth between the glossy 11'8 photos and the little footnotes scrawled out on notepaper and sticky pads, I shook my head.

It was a well built young man, in the photo that is. The photo was a mug-shot, a slightly yellowish light shining from the left corner lighting up the man's face and sending some jagged shadows out on the green backdrop behind him. He had dark, combed back hair, thin eyebrows, deep eyes and wore a finely pressed business suit with a powder blue shirt underneath. Someone's handwriting had scrawled the name Tsukima Tokui. "Where'd you get this one?" I looked up at the guys, gently slapping the picture back down on the table.

"What do you mean, Ken?" Aya's voice asked monotonously. I ignored him and looked back and forth between Omi beside me and Yohji at a table on the other end of the room. He was half buried in paper work, seemingly chained to the computer, and looked miserable.

I decided to address Aya's question. "He looks just like any other nine-to-five man in the city. Plus he looks too young to have anything to do with this. To find someone like this in a database and be suspicious enough to pull up a report on him then you all must know something more than I do." I looked around the room. Omi coughed and looked down at his papers, shuffling busily. "How'd you pin this guy?"

"Ken… we look young." Aya answered, seemingly ignoring my concern on the matter. "You've been away to long, you're senses have dulled." Aya tossed me another folder with the words Pi Corp. written on it sloppily. "Never expect your enemy to make the first move." He warned. "Suspect everyone."

"Yep." Yohji chimed in happily. "Great advice for people like Aya who'll grow up to be a paranoid old man living in an army tank and shooting at kids with a paintball gun." Aya grumbled as he snapped his view towards Yohji, and the tall blonde backed off, but kept a smirk on his face, obviously proud of his outburst.

I shook my head at Yohji, letting my thumb scroll down the pile of papers inside the Pi Corp. folder and peeled it open gently to one page that seemed to be sticking out a bit further. On the page was the kind of writing and professional grammar used only to give people mind-bending headaches. Rows and columns of numbers and letters, codes and abbreviations scrolled through my mind and I sighed. "I don't…" I began slowly. Omi's finger intruded my line of vision and rested on a spot towards the bottom of the page. "Accidents?" I read aloud curiously. Omi's hand directed my eyes across the column. "Two hundred and forty?" Omi's finger banged down on the sheet twice. "Annually?!" My eyes sort of darted around the page craving more dirty secrets.

"Deaths." Aya spoke, leaning forward in his seat, reading from some charts he was scanning his fingers up and down on. "Four."

"Annually?" I asked, almost regrettably, almost intrigued.

"No." Aya answered. "Four since the Corporation opened in 1982. But with so many accidents a year, we believe there are more." Aya folded up the charts, shoved them in a folder and snapped it shut with one hand.

"Of course, we had to do some serious digging to find this information." Yohji added increduosly. "It was like hacking within hacking. The basic information, you know, the sugar coated stuff wasn't that hard to get to." I nodded, placing the folder back down.

"So this wasn't public information." I half asked, half concluded, even though I already knew the answer. They had sat poor Omi in front of the computer for two days straight and left him to haggle and bargain and search for everything we were reading now. "Alright, then what does mister Tsukima have anything to do with this Pi Corp.? President's son?"

"Bingo." Aya acknowledged.

"Oh, Cliché." I rolled my eyes and leaned back in the couch, a yawn splitting my head in half. "We'll break in, kill the corrupt dad for doing bad things, save the kid from his evil principles and be the sadistic heroes who the newspapers just can't seem to get a hold of." Yohji beamed and gave me a thumbs-up while Omi and Aya's expressions remained unchanged.

"Whatever the case is, we have until Monday to carry it all out." Omi said, always the one pressed for time. We all automatically nodded in agreement and I looked around at everyone's faces. They were content, determined and so humbly familiar. I smiled. We were a team again, was something that bad supposed to feel this good?

hi

I stood at the foot of my bed, scratching the back of my neck with the other hand resting on my hip as I surveyed the clothes that I would use on Monday night. A pair of knee high combat boots and a black undershirt who Yohji so graciously donated, a pair of deep olive green cargo pants and a belt from Aya, and a three-quarter sleeved shirt with a belt which matched the pants that Omi happened to have lying around in the back. It all made a decent outfit. It sure as hell wasn't any triple sweater set and jeans like I used to use but it would serve it's purpose and I'd look damn good too.

I reached into my duffle bag and took out some all-purpose 'black gloves' and set them in the proper spot of the invisible mannequin I was creating with the garb on my bed. Perfect if I didn't say so my self, I loved the way I improvised. A yawn.

I decided it better for me to do my part of research while I was lying down, cozy, and relaxed. So I wiped the clothes off the bed, tossing them astray on an armchair in the corner and slowly climbed across the bed on my knees. This was the only way to think, eyes closed and muscles loose while I sat motionless just thinking and feeling the smooth cotton sheets collect my body warmth and radiate it back into me. Yet… I sighed as the thoughts of the thing that brought me back here in the first place collected into a dark and gloomy brainstorm in my mind. I involuntarily groaned.

So this Tokui Tsukima kid who looked no older than Omi was supposed to be tied into evil doings such as that I had witnessed on the door of the fridge, hanging by a banana magnet like a good report card or a grocery list. The thing we weren't to sure of, although we had a hunch, was whether the boy was the damsel in distress or the cloaked villain. Frankly, I didn't really care. Just by the sinister look that kid gave me in his picture made me suspicious and want to kill him anyway, or at least punch him real hard, you know, in the beanbag, for good measure and all.

The more I thought about it, the more my brain weighed down on my head and made my eyelids close. Either that or the wound on the back of my skull hadn't healed yet and was just moaning at me. Whatever the side it took, it was making me tired and sleep was the only conclusion I could draw up in my exhausted gray-matter. Besides there were, what, eight days until Monday, so I had a long time to worry about that kind of official mission stuff. Until then I would let the other guys worry about it, cause after all I was technically handicapped, right?