Day 1
MON Safehouse
*bzzzzt* Hey girls, Smith here! Just wanted to let you know we're en route to deliver the package, so you'd better be decent and make yourselves look presentable! Toodles! *click*
The streets of Okayama-ken
Kyosuke Keita looked out the car window. It was a beautiful morning. The cityscape was bustling and full of life, the people were all marching happily along to the tune of their everyday lives, and the sun was rising bright and cheery in the sky with just the right cloud cover to make it comfortable without being blinding, but his thoughts were dark, stormy and turbulent. A dead man. He was a dead man.
"How the hell did this happen...?"
He thought back to how this had all started. He was just trying to keep his head down! Do a good job! He thought that maybe if he put in a few extra hours at the forensics lab he could get brownie points that'd help him earn his degree a bit faster or help get him a job, but instead he'd gotten caught up in a case involving the extraspecies mafia, and now they were trying to kill him! Someone! Someone was trying to kill him, Kyosuke Keita! Someone very powerful, very mean, and very, very well-armed. The thought of it made him sick to his stomach.
Now he was in protective custody, on the run from literal monsters from a fantasy novel who'd already tried to kill him once by blowing up an entire laboratory full of people. His life was in danger, and what had he even done? Run spectrographs on a few dud lab samples and just happened to figure out something he shouldn't have? How? How had this happened?! How was he supposed to have known?!
Deadened to it all after the fiftieth time he'd asked himself these questions, Kyosuke just kept staring forlornly out the car window, watching unfamiliar street signs and buildings fly by. So far from home... Somehow, all he could think of was "what was he going to tell all his friends and coworkers?" How was he going to cover this up? This could follow him for the rest of his career. The rest of his life, even! Assuming he even had that long to live…
The college sophomore sighed. It’s over. Just end it. Kill me now.
All joking aside, Kyosuke thought about the people he might be able to call for some encouragement, to calm himself down. Not lawyers or anything. Just, y’know, people. Special people. He’d been told that in times like this it was good to get back in contact with family and old friends. A person could usually fall back on their family for support and encouragement during times of stress, but he didn't have something as convenient as that. He lived alone, far away from his father, and his brother. His mother had died long ago, and he didn't know any of his relatives, or whether any of them were even still alive. That, and all his classmates had stopped talking to him after they found out what kind of people he'd gotten involved with (not that it mattered when they were all more than a city's width away). Right now, he was all alone, with no one to support him. Except for...
Except for her... he thought as he looked across the car at the woman in the driver's seat.
Ms. Smith. Bureaucrat. Government agent. Cultural coordinator. Possible American expat? He still couldn't tell.
Whether she was supposed to be helping him or not was a mystery to Kyosuke, considering she was the one who'd gotten him into this mess to begin with, but she was certainly taking his misfortune well either way, humming along to the newest song by ANM48. Reaching for her travel mug with the words “Serious Gourmet Shit” emblazoned on it in English lettering around a parody of the Starbuck’s logo, she took a sip and immediately spat it out the window, sticking out her tongue and pouting.
“Ech, it’s cold!” she whined in stereotypical “fake cutesy” behavior.
Is she… really a government agent? Kyosuke wondered. He couldn’t help but feel a little concerned for his future.
"Ummmm... Hey Smith?" he asked. "Where are we going?"
He didn't receive an answer though. He frowned. "Smith... Mis. Smith... Smith-san!"
"Hm?" she said, only now paying attention to him. "What is it, Kyo-chan?"
"Uhhh..." Kyosuke stuttered. He'd told her not to call him by that embarrassing nickname. "D-Do you know where we're going? I've asked you before but you've never said anything, and this looks way out of the way. Are we in Okayama prefecture right now?"
"Of course I know where we're going. What, you getting homesick already?" Smith asked teasingly. "I thought you were more of a man than that, Kyo-chan~"
Caught off-guard by the government agent's flirtatious behavior, Kyosuke blushed. "I wish you'd stop calling me that..." he mumbled, but Smith either didn't hear him, or chose to ignore him.
"It's a safehouse, designated property of Monster Ops: Neutralization," she said, suddenly becoming very serious. We're using it as our base of operations for the time being. You'll be safe there. Protected. At least until this whole thing with Boss Kairou blows over."
"And... how long will that be?" Kyosuke asked tentatively.
"Who knows! Could be never!" Smith said, far too cheerfully.
Kyosuke's face was drained of all color, and he went white with shock.
"... I think I'm about to have a panic attack, Smith-san..."
"Ah come on, cheer up!" she said, patting him on the back. "Being in protective custody isn't so bad! They give you free food and housing! You even get your own case manager, and since those shitty tightwad penny pinchers never give us any more goddamn money, we're going to get to spend a lot more time together! Now doesn't that make you feel better, Kyo-chan? Spending time with a beautiful older woman? A lot of boys your age would kill to be in your position!"
"Now I think I'm gonna throw up..."
MON Safehouse
After some fresh air and two stops to empty his panicking stomach all over the side of the street, they finally pulled up to the safehouse, a new but so far unfinished and unfurnished studio apartment, large for its size but still rather small for something that was supposed to hold five plus people.
"You good now, Kyo-chan?" Ms. Smith said, still patting him on the back.
Kyosuke coughed, his mouth still sour with bitter anxiety bile. "Yeah, I'm feeling much better now. Thanks, Smith-san."
He wiped his mouth off on his jacket sleeve. How long had it been since he'd last had an anxiety attack like that? Two days in and this "trip" to the country-side was already ruining him.
"By the way, Smith-san?" he asked. "I've been curious about this. Ummm... what kind of people are these MON guys? You haven't told me anything about them. They must be amazing, right? To go up against extraspecies criminals with such scary abilities... you know I saw an orc flip a car on the news once, right? A car!"
Smith considered this. "Well they're certainly amazing, and unique. We wouldn't have picked them for such an important job otherwise. Though I'm beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea giving them to you..."
"Yeah, but I've been wondering. The Interspecies Exchange Bill says that humans can't harm extraspecies. So how does MON operate then?"
"Oh, didn't I tell you?" Smith smiled as she opened the door. "MON is all extraspecies girls. That's why we call them 'Monster Ops'."
"Wait, what?!"
"Yup! So why don'tcha get in there and meet 'em!" Smith said, grabbing his wrist and tossing him through the doorway like luggage. He tumbled to the ground, rolling across the floor. Such brute strength!
"Sorry I can't stick around for introductions but they need me back at the office! I'll see you later, Kyo-chan! Toodles!~"
"Wait! Smith-san!" he yelled back. "Smith-san! You didn't say anything about-"
But the door slammed. And that was it. Kyosuke reached for the door with his hand outstretched like some tragic war hero in a movie.
Damn you Smith-san!!!
Kyosuke turned around slowly to face the seemingly empty apartment. He swallowed hard, dry saliva passing a lump in his throat with an uncomfortable motion. He didn't like to think of himself as a prejudiced person. He didn't want to judge them harshly without even getting to know them first. But that didn't, couldn't change the fact that, in that moment, Kyosuke was afraid.
The last three years had not passed him by unnoticed. The ways the world had changed... he'd seen it all on the news, or through the internet. Of the kind of damage and violence, intentional or otherwise, that extraspecies could inflict. He briefly remembered the day he'd passed by a crime scene on his way to the lab and thought to himself that a bomb must have gone off, only to later learn from one of his coworkers that it had been the result of a scuffle between law enforcement and an out-of-control draconewt that had resulted in the deaths of five people. Stories like this were commonly passed along by mutual friends through word of mouth in parts of the country where extraspecies exchange students weren't as common. It was second-hand information to be sure, but it told him enough. Intentionally or not, extraspecies had the capacity for incredible acts of violence against baseline humans, and against each other, and once it started, it was hard not to get swept up in it.
He got back up on his feet, trembling with trepidation. He felt his heart-rate and breathing rise as a dark pit grew in his stomach. Images of unspeakable carnage, both real and imagined, played out in his head. This was bad. He tried to get a grip on himself. Relax, Kyosuke. You're having a panic attack. Just relax. They're here to protect you, not hurt you. That's why Smith sent you here in the first place. You wouldn't be here if they thought you'd be in any danger or that they wanted to hurt you.
His eyes darted frantically around the room, completely out of control. They don't have to want to hurt you, they just will. Between extraspecies and humans, it's just unavoidable.
Shut up! This isn't helping!
You're a dead man, Kyosuke. They're going to kill you. Monster Ops, Night Parade, it's all the same. You're going to die if you stay here. You're going to be killed by monsters.
No no no! Stop thinking about this!
But he did. He wanted to run. He wanted to run outside and demand Smith transfer him somewhere else. Anywhere else. It wasn't because he was racist, he told himself, but because he wasn't used to extraspecies.
Kyosuke took a step forward, then a step back. A step forward, then two steps back. He closed his eyes and remembered to breath, rhythmically trying to soothe his frayed nerves before they consumed him. He just had to do this. Compared to what he'd already been through, everything that had led him up to this point, this was nothing. Just breathe. He just needed to breathe, and to take a step forward.
Kyosuke stopped backing up and walked forward, still gripping his coat, one step at a time. Soon he was back where he started. Then, past that. Still no sign of the team, but that was okay. Maybe... maybe they'd like him more if he said something first?
"U-Ummmm... hello? Is anybody here? This is Kyosuke..."
