thenearshore | [closed] things that can't possibly backfire #42

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[closed] things that can't possibly backfire #42

Who: Shun and Ginia
When: March 4th or 5th, probably.
Where: Various cultists' houses and eventually Sensei's. It's basically Cribs but with cultists.
What: Custom mission, in which an attempt is made at tracking down Sensei.

[It's been a few months since the scouring of the surveillance footage from around Votelli's forest, and finally, they've got something out of it. A few of the names are ones Shun recognises - Saburo and Shinnosuke he remembers from the department store incident, so that's a decent sign they're on the right track here - but he doubts they're going to end up at the same place he'd previously investigated in connection to that. These, finally, are some actual details they can work from, instead of just temporary addresses and hastily-fled hideouts.

He knows Ginia is one of the people who's been investigating the cultists fairly extensively, and they've done this sort of thing before - he wants someone he knows is experienced with this sort of thing here, and he also wants as few people as possible actually investigating. Lacking backup isn't really an option when Sensei poses the kind of threat he does, but at the same time, more than two people is bound to draw far too much attention.

As it is now, they're perched on a rooftop just near one of the addresses, Shun eying the street below them.] I'm hoping Sensei keeping them all at arm's length is going to work to our advantage here. Last time I scoured a place these cultists were using, there wasn't any sign of them contacting Sensei, only that someone was contacting them.

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[Shun tries the second suggestion and just gets another refusal, so maybe a minute later, Ginia gets another message.]

Still nothing. And all the paper around here just seems to be letters. Someone could probably get into the laptop if we had more time, but I doubt we can do it here.

Have you found anything in there yet?

[He's probably going to join her in there in short order, but he's doing one last sweep of the kitchen area first.]

[The bed and drawers prove fruitless, so back to the bookshelf. Ginia thumbs through the edges of the book, pausing as an envelope slips free. She gingerly opens it and thumbs through the four flips of paper, pulling out the post-it note.

Long blonde hair, pointy ears. Silver hair, green eyes. Spiky blue hair. It's hard not figuring out who the list is referring to, especially as she shadowed that hand-off.]

Get in here now

[Once Shun is in the room, she hands the envelope to him.]

He's going to realize something if we steal it outright, but we can't let him keep these either.

[Considering the obvious urgency of the message, Shun's sweeping through the doorway within moments of getting the message. He initially raises a brow at the envelope when Ginia hands it to him, but once he opens it and starts reading what's inside, his expression becomes steely.

His gaze flicks to the charms before going back up to Ginia.] I'm wondering if he was planning to curse us as humans or as gods. Surely if they'd figured out we were gods they would've used these by now.

[She has a point, though, and he closes the envelope again, eying it.] Unless you can think of a way we can get rid of these without making it obvious, we might as well just take both. Something like this, he's going to realise is gone before too long as well.

I wonder how much they believe in all you gods as real thing and something less philosophical or theological?

[Votelli exists, powered by belief as is the way of all gods, but it doesn't make her any more visible. Ginia doubts she's met all the members of the cult and vice versa. It also feels unlikely Mitsui would have pinpointed the three gods as gods.

Eccentric teenager cosplayers more likely.

As for how to handle the envelope...]

Studying them and having other people look over makes them too valuable to have you destroy outright. We could make copies of everything, but either we risk leaving the originals or he's eventually tipped off when he realizes his are fakes.

Taking it outright might set him off immediately to some further action, but might also mean he's trackable to other people or locations.

There's always making it look like a casual burglary attempt. It'll allow us to steal a few other things like his laptop and the cloths at the risk of putting him at high alert. It may delay him from doing anything if he's tied up trying to identify what was stolen with the police, but still, very risky.

I'd say these more active cultists probably know enough to think we're "real things", even if they can't see us. Not so sure about the others. [Anyone lower than these few they've been looking at probably don't need to know that much, but the ones that are pretty extensively involved seem more likely to have that knowledge to him.

The suggestion of making it look like a burglary attempt is legitimate enough, though Shun glances out of the room briefly as if considering something.] Does he have any small valuables other than the laptop? It'll make for a more convincing burglary if what we take of actual worth outweighs things related to the cult. Even if it's risky, it's probably the best option that doesn't involve just leaving it all here.

[He definitely doesn't feel comfortable leaving the charms here, at least, considering they involve him to some degree.]

[Ginia looks around the room, gauging what someone would reasonably dig through or grab in hopes of reselling. Mitsui was never a flashy person; not a lot of personal accessories to speak of.]

Some of the older looking books someone might grab to resell, we could grab some of those and the ones around the enevlope to make it look accidental. There was some loose change on the nightstand, toss the contents there. A real burglar would be pretty disappointed, but would still make it worthwhile.

Grab the laptop and cables, scatter the papers around. If there are any small kitchen appliances, grab that too. Rummage through any other drawers someone might search. I'll handle this room.

Fine by me. [Shun goes to head back into the kitchen, closing the laptop and bundling the cables together with it. He sets it aside for the moment, though, so he can stir up the papers on the table, sweeping one arm side to side through them as if someone just tried to go through the whole pile at once to see if anything valuable was hidden underneath. Any of them that look like they might be related to finances get hastily ripped out of envelopes and strewn around, to replicate a burglar looking for account details and tossing them aside when they failed.

Going through the cabinets, he doesn't find all that much, but there's a small kettle that he swipes, and he opens the cutlery drawers haphazardly and grabs one or two of the classier looking things, which is mostly the fancy kitchen knives. Obviously Shun needs more of those in his life.]

[Ginia shrugs off her backpack and grabs a section of books around the envelope and few more books that look older or rarer. She rifles through the rest of the books, skewing the shelf as if someone had swept through looking for something hidden behind them. She makes quick work rummaging through the dresser, tossing a few things aside but mostly rummaging through. The two silk cloths are taken as well as the nice one under the bonsai plant. The handful of change and tossed receipts and business cards on the nightstand (mostly for new restaurants or bars) are swept into a large ziplock bag from her backpack, the drawer rummaged through and left askew. She lifts up the mattress and lets it drop onto the frame.

She doesn't upturn the altar, but pours the water into the bonsai planter and takes the porcelain cup. Loading the books, envelope, and silk cloths into her backpack - a meager but reasonable load for a thief - she heads out to join Shun.]

{Shun's doing one last scope out of the kitchen when Ginia comes in, but he glances over towards her when she does. It seems that he's borrowed a garbage bag to toss his own items into for the moment.]

There's not that much in here that's a size it would be easy for a thief to get away with taking, but the laptop and a few other things is probably enough from in here anyway.

[The laptop is definitely the single most valuable item, so it'd be a bit weird to waste too much time taking less convenient and less valuable things after finding that, he thinks.] Do one more sweep of the rest of the apartment and then leave, you think?

I agree.

[Logically, if there wasn't much to take in this area, a thief would sweep the bedroom and then get out. They have enough to deflect the fact they were targeting cult-specific things in the apartment.]

Anything I should grab pictures of before we go? Also before we leave, we need to break the sliding glass door, make it look that's how someone got in.

If you've got the cloths and the charms, I don't think there's much else we'd need pictures of. If we've got the actual items, that's fine for now.

[Especially since he imagines that even if he had a shrine set up, it's probably been screwed up by their taking vital items from it at this point. Might as well not waste time.]

I can handle the glass door, though it'd better wait until we're both outside. [Other than it probably being a bit obvious if the door was smashed from inside out instead of the way it should be, no sense risking someone getting hit with flying glass.]

I grabbed the cloth with Mt Fuji, I thought grabbing both would be too suspicious, though I also got the cloth under the altar. With those two, we might be able to find the maker. With the laptop, we should be able to find more than whatever notes he has laying around. I'll ask the IT department at Ebisu's temple to break into the laptop.

[Ginia looks around the space, considering if there's anything else worth documenting. All things considered, they're walking away with a fair amount of information to look over plus everything to cross-reference with the other cultists.]

Don't worry, I figured we'd break the door on the outside. Let's finish this and move on.

We already have that picture you sent me of the other cloth, anyway, so that's done. [It means they don't have to double back and do it before they leave, at least. Shun checks over the room as well, just to be sure - it looks like there's some herbs on the windowsill, but if they're anything, he figures they'd just be spell ingredients rather than important in their own right.]

That's probably it, then. We might as well get this over with if we'll have to do something about all this before we move on to the next place. [He indicates his own bag of stolen items.] It might be worth stopping back on the Far Shore to leave this somewhere safer before we go anywhere else.

Shinnosuke is the last person before Sensei himself, right? Let me see if Ebisu has a shrine close to him. It could save us some time if we're going back to the Far Shore.

[The advantage of serving a long-established God of Fortune is there are plenty of shrines to use to get around. Ginia looks up the cultist's address and checks the area.]

We'll still have a bit of running, but there's shrine we can teleport to. Drop things off in my room at the temple, teleport from there?

[Shun checks the map himself so he has a bit more idea of where they're going to be going, but it sounds like a better idea to him than doing it via his shrine, since that's a pretty good distance from here/]

Sounds fine to me, though if we're doing it that way, it might be better for you to show me one of his shrines we can use to get back to his temple so I can take us there now, instead of having to go back through mine.

[Ginia consults a second map and finds a minor shrine to Ebisu in a nearby shopping street a few blocks away.

With business in Mitsui's apartment taken care of, all that's left is leaving and breaking the sliding glass door from the outside. She leaves Shun to it as she maps out their route. It's an easy run across the rooftops and signs to get there. It's almost harder finding the shrine itself, a small thing set up by the shopping street's association in a gap between two buildings. But a shrine is a shrine and with one hand on Shun's arm and the other on the shrine, they teleport back to the Far Shore and to the front of the skyrise of Ebisu's temple.]

Give me your bag, it'll raise less questions if I go up to my room alone.

[Because the temple sure loves its gossip. Ginia won't keep Shun waiting long either, taking only a few minutes to drop everything off and swap her camera's battery for a new one before returning. Then it's back to the Near Shore and another run to Shinnosuke's apartment.]

Maeda Shinnosuke has a very messy bachelor apartment, with old work pay stubs from the Yamada department store construction site, a pair of hiking boots still caked in forest mud, a couple handfuls of paper charms of the same design as the ones in the forest tossed on his kitchen table with his junk mail, and a black robe (also muddy) draped over his sofa.

[Shun has no problems with avoiding unnecessary gossip, so he does what they need to get out of the area of Ebisu's temple quickly and back onto the Near Shore. Shinnosuke is one of the cultists Shun's investigated before, so when he looks in the window and sees the mess that's in there, he looks distinctly unsurprised.]

This is about the state the other apartment with this guy's name on it I investigated was in, though he'd fled that one as soon as he got the chance.

[Ginia winkles her nose a little at the mess, but it works in their advantage. If something goes missing here or there, harder to track down in the mess.]

Some people never change. Let's get inside.

[With an easy teleport inside, Ginia surveys the space. She takes a rapid set of photos covering the area, honing in on the muddy boots and robe. Well, well. She pulls out gloves and a sandwich bag from her backpack, handing Shun another fresh set of gloves.]

I'm going to grab samples off the shoes. There's a chance the mud is from Chichibu National Park, but it could point elsewhere too.

[After taking the gloves, Shun heads into the kitchen area like he had with the previous apartment, eye immediately drawn to the paper strewn across the table. He can see charms among it, but he doesn't want to risk picking them up considering what they probably are, so he takes a picture and heads back into the other room to show it to Ginia.]

Does this style of charm look familiar to you? [If that mud is from the national park, these could be from the forest, which means he wouldn't have seen them intact.]

[Ginia is carefully scraping mud into a bag and trying to make it less obvious the shoes were disturbed when Shun returns. She recoils lightly at the picture, gazing past toward the kitchen. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing you leave out casually, but Shinnosuke's sloppiness is their gain?]

Yeah, those were the ones plastered everywhere in the forest. I could use clean samples to study. Hold on, let me get you something to put them in.

[She rummages through her backpack, pulling out a stiff file folder and handing it over.]

We're going to have to store those somewhere before going elsewhere. In hindsight, I think they had a mild back luck effect too.

[That explains why it's not quite familiar to him personally, and he grimaces slightly as he takes the folder.] So it's sounding more and more like this bastard had a big part in that forest. Though considering he did the department store as well, I shouldn't be surprised.

[He's going to have a bit of a time of getting those letters out from between the charms, but on the other hand, that'll probably make it easier not to touch them.]

We definitely don't need to risk having these with us going to the last place.

The fact he still has these charms after all these months makes me wonder if there's another use or location. Keep an eye out for ink and paper. I've always wondered if there was anything special about them or a maker to track down.

[Worst case is the ink and paper aren't anything special and it's a dead end. Best case is there's a specific maker they can possibly find more cultists through if they all use the same materials.]

Look for dried straw too and anything relating to the sigils. Diagrams or anything.

[Ginia finishes bagging the dirt samples and writes a note on the bag before throwing it back into her backpack. Beginning a careful search of the place, she finds the old pay stubs and takes pictures of them. Might be worth looking into the company's employee records to see if a few more cultist names pop up. Ginia stares at the stubs a little more before whistling to get Shun's attention.]

Why was that department store was targeted in the first place? What was so special about it?

It wouldn't surprise me. If they were to help protect the forest from outside attack, they could even use them on their own locations if they were careful about it.

[They probably wouldn't want bad luck magic anywhere near an actual building they were operating from, but on the outskirts of the area? Potentially a lot more useful.

Shun's returned to the kitchen to gather a few of the charms by the time Ginia whistles for his attention, and he sticks his head back through the door so he can see her signing.]

I don't know, honestly. It was big, but that was about the only significant thing about the store itself. The name "Fujisaki" has come up before then, though, associated with sabotage to the Heavens. When I looked into it, the actual Fujisaki company who was supposed to have been part of the project claimed they never gave permission for their name to be used on that building, and hadn't been involved. So it sounds like they might have something invested in that company or that name, and maybe that building was just convenient to use because they knew it'd draw a crowd.

Why use the same name though? Why leave an obvious tie between the two events? There's something strange about it, don't you think? Granted, it happened well before I arrived, but it doesn't seem connected to everything else.

[It's not an attack on gods or Heaven, at least not overtly. It doesn't seem like they were draining people of energy or testing out ayakashi.]

I suppose they could have used that as a test for the bad luck charms. Maybe it went as planned or maybe it escalated too much? But I'm not seeing how it ties in and that worries me because maybe we're all overlooking something. I think after this, it's worth giving that company another look over.

[For now, it's more digging. If he still has old paystubs, maybe he has other memos or notes from the company too. Receipts and anything else that can sketch out a rough timeline of his activities too. And of course, keeping an eye out for paper, ink, or anything else someone could make a straw doll or bad luck charm out of.]

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Clue request

Clue for Shinnosuke's apartment

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