People of the Same Disposition (3)
"Deserted, as expected──."
"Well, yeah? It's still daytime."
A woman whose looks made it impossible to say whether she was in her twenties or her thirties, and a girl in a high school uniform with a name tag that read Sasaki Kisaki. They made a strange pair to be wandering about arm in arm. …Or they would have, had this been anywhere but a love hotel. Right down to the practiced fingers working the kiosk of the unmanned place, anyone who saw them would have taken the two for a compensated date.
"Come on, let's head up. Mii-san."
Humming to herself, the girl who had booked the room by the hour—Sasaki—led "Mii-san" onto the elevator.
"……."
"……."
Then the doors closed, and in the instant they were sealed off from everything around them, both women's faces changed at once. Away came the mask of the "client," oddly steeped in anticipation and thrill, and away came the mask of the "student," bright and up to no good. All that remained were two blank, businesslike expressions.
"So. Why have you summoned us? To parade your own failure up and down the street?"
Sasaki spoke first, inside the elevator as it began its slow climb.
"Ha. As if. One job's done, so I called this to double as a meeting on what comes next."
Mii-san clicked her tongue at the attitude. She set her back to the elevator wall and flicked a glance at the mirror hung there.
"I sent up the signal. This was never something I could finish on my own. I called you out of consideration, seeing as we're colleagues for the time being, and this is what I get……."
"Consideration? How precious of you."
Sasaki chuckled as she said it. The other had summoned them because she needed something herself, and still she spun such a fine-sounding tale.
"And do press a little closer, for now. I feel a heartbeat in the third-floor corridor."
"How many?"
"One. That prophet whelp, in all likelihood, though one never knows."
Mii-san sighed again. One arm went around Sasaki's shoulder, the other around her waist, and she buried her face against the nape of her neck, as if she had grown too excited to wait even until they reached the room.
"You have arrived. Mercury. Sulfur. Vulgar beyond all description today, as ever."
"Damn it. So it was you? You goddamn peeper."
When the elevator doors opened again and Mii-san found the woman waiting in the corridor, her expression crumpled.
"A peeper…? Are you quite certain it is not you who has the taste for being seen?"
"Well. Speaking from experience, there is a certain flavor to it, done out of doors. For my own part, I should prefer them a little younger, given the choice."
"Both of you, shut up. We're going in the room."
"So hasty? Do try to possess yourself of something one might call a mood."
"……."
Mii-san caught Sasaki by the nape and dragged her straight into the room they had taken by the hour. The woman they had called a peeper—or the prophet—followed after.
"Tch… Meet at a love hotel and it always turns into this crap."
"But our means of contact is a dating application for compensated arrangements. It can hardly be helped."
"Is there seriously nothing else? Some other way? Huh?"
"It is, in fact, the safest course. Who would ever imagine the masterminds of Vampire Syndrome gathering at a love hotel by way of a dating application?"
What the three of them had made was an organization unofficial, unauthorized, and secret—a triple crown of clandestinity. The name under which they presented themselves was Hermes Trismegistus. Hermes, thrice great.
"That… I can't exactly deny."
The reason Hermes Trismegistus moved in secret was simple indeed. They were an illegal criminal organization. Chief among their works, they were the true culprits of the recent Christmas Massacre.
Their identities had not yet been exposed. If they were caught, however, there would be no avoiding designation as the Church's highest-priority target for extermination.
The means of contact such an organization had chosen, for the sake of keeping its secrets, was a dating application of the sort commonly used for compensated dating. The application did not officially support sexual arrangements between adults and minors, of course, but a considerable share of its users were exploiting it in precisely that way.
Any ordinary messenger carried the risk of inspection by the government or the Church. No one, though, would ever think an application like this might serve a criminal organization as a rendezvous. Even if the conversations exchanged through it were to leak, all an investigator would see was the chat history of two people carrying on a paid relationship. At the most generous reading, it would be taken for a means of contact between a pair—never a method by which three might gather.
When Sasaki Kisaki and Mii-san set a meeting through the application, the prophet, she who peered into the future, would simply arrive of her own accord and join them. That was their method of concealment.
"Anyway. Straight to the point."
Complaining that her legs hurt, Mii-san dropped onto the heart-shaped bed.
"Let's start with where things stand. We've been flying the banner of Hermeticism, and harvesting a little faith off the back of it."
They borrowed a name famous in history and in the occult alike, and stole a portion of the faith offered up to it. A kind of anomalous parasitism, one might say.
"The trouble is that this means putting a hand into a limited pie of Hermetic faith. It would hardly be strange, by now, if the Church had worked out so much as our organization's name."
"We might have stayed hidden a while longer, had a certain someone not been caught by the tail before she even carried the thing out. Mm. I am well aware."
"Oh, come on—how the hell was I supposed to know two Apostles would pop out of a Comiket hall?!"
Mii-san slapped the mattress with her palm and shouted.
She was the one who had plotted an attack on the crowded Comiket floor, and yet it had never once occurred to her that Apostle Bartholomew and Apostle Matthias would be on the scene. Because of that, the "sample" had been seized before the attack could even begin.
"Matthias… I'll even give you that damned axe woman! She at least has a record of showing up at summer Comiket the year before last! But Bartholomew…!"
"Do you not watch Mary's streams?"
"It's a stream run by an acquaintance of Bartholomew's. If I hear she's turned up as a guest now and then, I glance at the reactions online. That's as far as it goes……."
"And this is why ordinary folk will not serve. That Bartholomew—Sister—is a terminal Mary otaku; a handful of clips is enough to tell you so. Would it not have been proper to keep in mind that she might appear at a Comiket where an Anathema Production booth was present?"
Sasaki leaned against the wall and let out an exaggerated sigh, as though taking her to task.
"Ha. Sure. Must be real nice, being an otaku yourself──."
"Difficult as ever. Have I not told you, time and again, that neglecting to gather intelligence is your shortcoming?"
"Well… on that point, I agree with Mercury as well. Sulfur was careless, at least in this."
"Huh? So this is the part where I'm getting lectured?"
The prophet, who had been listening without a word, took Sasaki's side.
"One might set aside the Visitor, Matthias, and the Pulverizer, Thomas, now that they have returned home. Bartholomew, however, was dispatched to Japan for no reason other than our organization. We stand where a collision cannot be avoided until one side or the other is extinguished. It is only proper to have that opponent's information in hand."
"Tch. Like you gathered any intel either, when you can just look at the future. Peeper."
"No? I did, in fact. Gather information. Her true name is Han Seoyeon. Her baptismal name is Margarita. An orphan out of Korea, taken in by that poison frog, Han, and by the Pulverizer. She is the goddaughter of the current Pope as well."
Mii-san had been ready to heckle her, but the information gliding so easily from the prophet's mouth left her nothing to do but twist up her face. She knew I'd grill her like this. She dug it all up on purpose, just to get one over on me. Convincing herself of that was all she could manage.
"Her characteristic miracle is the resurrection of the dead. The titles granted her as a Gravekeeper are Arbiter and Guillotine. Her record of participation in the resolution of scenarios stands at eleven: the Millennium Project; the subjugation of Georgi Popov; Operation Reverse Heaven; the thwarting of the Second Siberian Traps; Operation Saint Barbara; the subjugation of Quetzalcoatl; the defense of the Conclave; the Sheol Civil War; the subjugation of Bartholomew Evaristo; Operation Latch; and the resealing of the Unreachable Point. Do you require any further explanation?"
Having said that much, the prophet paused a beat and steadied her breath.
"The woman we must face is a woman of that sort. There is no such thing as too much preparation."
It was not because their own side was weak. Not in the least. With the upper ranks of the Onmyoryo, Japan's bureau for countering the anomalous, tearing into one another in an infighting little short of self-destruction, and with even Shuten-doji retired, there was at present virtually no organization whose capability exceeded their own—setting aside the Church, which had to be counted an exception. Their opponent was simply strong. Far too strong. The enemy before them was that very Church, the one they had just left out of the reckoning.
"Anyway, forget that! Our name getting out was only a matter of time… hell, it's probably already out. So this plan was to spread it up and down the street that Hermes itself was the mastermind of the Christmas Massacre, and see if we couldn't inflate our faith that way……."
"…Bartholomew again, I take it."
"……Well. This one, I shall acknowledge: an unfair loss."
Apostles were monsters whose very existence amounted to plausibility itself, and yet this time she had all but tumbled out of empty air. Sasaki had raked her over the coals for the failure and the rest of it, but even she knew that it had, in truth, been unavoidable.
"Why did that woman have to show up there…!"
"By the look of things, it would have been personal business rather than Church work… she was likely accompanying Mary Tepes on a visit to her family home."
"I wasn't asking because I actually wanted to know?!"
"I answer, and still she finds fault. What a petty little creature."
Sasaki let out a deliberate, heavy sigh. That the gesture raked Mii-san's nerves all the worse went without saying.
"Haaah… Why is my life so wretched……. The world torments me. All I want is to see people suffer."
"Then the Inquisition… no, that is no longer the name, is it. In any case, could you not simply join some office on the side of interrogation?"
"What are you talking about! What I want is the suffering of innocent people!"
And that would be precisely why, would it not.
Well. That would be precisely why.
The two of them had arrived at the very same thought, and they had just enough sense not to put it into words.
"Enough of your grievances. Since you are seated there anyway, you may as well lend me your lap for a pillow."
"What—where is this nonsense coming from?! I said my legs hurt!"
"Ah. Might I take my leave now? I have just confirmed the whole of this meeting through precognition."
"Damn it, what are you trying to pull now?!"
Which was not to say, of course, that they had refrained from remarks that grated on Mii-san's nerves.
It was winter.