A night for Mana was spent alone.

Well, that wasn't entirely true, but it certainly seemed to be the case lately. It had to have been weeks since she called up Suzume or Kento for more than an idle text, but she wasn't just yet about to break that lull. Her night was spent disobeying the apartment's rules disallowing smoking on the balcony, a tradition she'd long figured out wasn't going to actually get her in trouble considering her neighbors' total lack of care.

After a simple meal, only half home-cooked, she went to bed, somewhat peaceful after her unusual encounter that day. Shaking things up, it felt, had given Mana a measure of happiness.

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If it were any other street, Mana might have given the benefit of the doubt that a group of thugs' yelling and posturing was just their way of scaring a proprietor out of billing them for a large meal, but here on Niimura...?

Mana kept to herself as she strode slowly towards the verbally assaulted shopkeep, maintaining a speed slow enough that the thugs would have left in time, but not so slow it seemed she was merely watching them. A hand slipped into her hoodie front pouch, and out came a deftly lifted cigarette which she popped between her lips. Cops liked to keep smokers staying in designated areas, but they wouldn't bother her here. That her scene was able to loiter on Niimura all these years was evidence enough of that.

The man who owned the storefront there had long since gone, his business failed and replaced with the next cheap house of merchandise. She didn't know the shopkeep's name, but carried herself as if she might as well have. She knew this place like the back of her hand, even as the placards on the front of the buildings came and went.

"What was that all about?" she asked of the storekeep, her voice a tad muffled by the cigarette planted in her mouth. It bounced as her lips moved, casting tiny bits of ash onto the ground.