Arrest Complete: Catching the Exhibitionist Freak in the Men's Restroom ♥
Catching an exhibitionist girl red-handed on the spot.
Truth is, this is nowhere near as easy as it looks in all those countless fantasy stories that use the exact same setup.
If I'd gotten some kind of divine possession as a reincarnation perk, maybe. But when you're stuck with ordinary prediction, the limits are crystal clear.
That only applies when you barely know the other person, though. What if you already know the target you have to arrest pretty damn well?
No—what if you know her better than she knows herself? Down to how many freckles she has and exactly which habits show up whenever she lies?
Then pulling off something close to actual precognition wouldn't be strange at all.
Yeah. I can do this. If it's me…!
So what did I need right this second?
Fifteen-plus years of big data on the human being known as Lee Chaerin, stored in my brain, plus a solid dose of exhibitionist-girl thinking.
Alright. Let's think this through.
What kind of person is Lee Chaerin?
First off… the Chaerin I know has a filthy mouth.
She definitely wasn't like that when we were kids, but at some point she flipped a switch.
And yet, for all that, she still has this secretly timid streak. That's Chaerin for you.
If you took the phrase "tough on the outside, soft on the inside" and turned it into a person, you'd get Lee Chaerin.
Which means?
Even when she does outdoor exposure, she's far more likely to pick spots she personally considers safe rather than just anywhere.
Exhibit A: the backgrounds in those exhibitionist selfies shared through the cloud.
The Shop after every customer has left, and the park restroom.
Places where she can lock the door herself and cut herself off from the outside world the second she does.
And the park up on the back mountain is completely empty even during the day.
Why? Because of the height.
The facilities up there are actually pretty nice—but to use them you have to climb stairs until your thighs are ready to explode.
It's so high that even the local punks who love deserted spots wandered up a few times and then gave up for good.
So the restroom attached to Back Mountain Park was the perfect spot for a timid girl like Chaerin: she could savor every bit of the taboo thrill outdoor exposure gives without any real risk.
Looking at it now, Chaerin's been freeloading the whole time, hasn't she?
A real exhibitionist girl would shoulder the full risk that comes with it. She just cherry-picked the fun parts.
Once I started tracking her movements while fully immersed in exhibitionist-girl logic, I realized something.
What looked like a random pattern in Chaerin's outdoor exposure actually followed clear rules.
Rule one: Chaerin's outdoor exposure always happens on either Monday or Thursday nights.
Honestly, when I first spotted that rule I was pretty confused.
Why Monday or Thursday of all days?
If I remember right, those are the days the Supernatural Ability Department runs its own group training. Maybe it's connected.
Rule two: on any morning she decides she's going to do outdoor exposure that night, she always takes an R-rated mirror selfie.
Probably… a way of giving herself advance notice of what's coming that night. A kind of ritual.
So she can get her head ready ahead of time.
Well, who knows what's really going on inside that skull of hers.
And the final rule three: the intensity of Chaerin's exposure ramps up the more times she does it.
In the first exposure photo she was just barely tugging her bra down in front of a bedroom mirror—not even outdoors. The recent ones show her hiding in the Back Mountain Park restroom pissing completely naked, or taking selfies in the dark Shop looking basically nude. She's getting bolder every time.
Looks like repeating this abnormal outdoor-exposure habit has her chasing stronger and stronger stimulation…
After staring at those photos until my eyes were bloodshot and combining the patterns with everything I already knew about Lee Chaerin as a person, I roughly figured it out.
In other words… the place where Chaerin would try outdoor exposure next.
.
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Completely unaware that the net was tightening around her by the second, Chaerin was living her usual daily life.
Of course… it hadn't stayed that way the whole time.
The day her childhood friend Taeseong acted like he might know something, even she couldn't help getting a little spooked.
…What, so it really was just a joke?
She became pretty sure of that soon enough, but at least for that one day she was rattled.
And once the worry eased a bit… the dirty thoughts started creeping back in.
The reason was simple.
After spending a whole day drowning in anxiety that Taeseong might have figured something out, the next group training day was suddenly right around the corner.
Ha… I can't even skip training…
The third-year seniors skip all the time for "practicals" or whatever. Why do first-years have to attend no exceptions?
It's not like first-years don't go on practicals either.
…Should I just call it a day and do it then?
Just imagining it made her stomach twist a little.
The thought flashed through her mind, but she shook her head hard and banished it.
Sure… doing that might make her feel better right away.
But then it'd look like she'd completely caved to those bitches.
The ones who can't do shit to her face and just run their mouths behind her back—she'd gotten scared of them?
Her? Lee Chaerin?
If it came to that, she'd rather charge straight through and blow off the stress separately.
This was going to be the real last time anyway. Might as well go all out one final time and finish it properly.
Yeah. That was the way.
Just one more time, and the second it was over she'd wipe every photo she'd taken so far. Then no one would ever know she'd been doing that kind of thing behind the scenes.
That was a clean ending, right?
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Thanks to a certain someone, I'd spent three straight days opening that sketchy app every morning to check whether any new photos had been uploaded.
After a weekend that barely felt like a weekend, the second Monday morning hit I checked the cloud first thing—and smiled bitterly with my phone still in my hand.
Because there it was.
A naked selfie of my childhood friend, the morning sunlight beyond the mirror looking so vivid it practically proved she'd just taken it.
Joy that my guess had been right?
None of that.
Far from joy, my head was a mess I couldn't even put into words.
Still… I had to do something.
Sitting around doing nothing until the penalty activated would be worse than trying anything at all.
My body felt especially heavy today.
I forced it up and left the house because I genuinely believed that.
First stop: Back Mountain Park.
My body already felt like waterlogged cotton, and the thought of climbing a mountain on top of that was pure hell, but I had no choice.
If my prediction was right, Chaerin would show up here tonight.
Maybe it was the combination of an already deserted place plus Monday morning.
You'd expect at least one or two people out for a walk, but the park built on the summit of the back mountain was completely silent—not a soul coming or going.
That let me finish the handful of "preparations" I'd planned without worrying about anyone watching.
Once I'd taken care of everything necessary, come back down the mountain, and sat through every lecture… the time finally arrived.
The time when the group training run by the Supernatural Ability Department Chaerin belonged to would end.
Maybe because they'd been grinding since morning until the surroundings had grown this dark.
Every face walking out of the indoor training hall attached to the Supernatural Ability Department building looked completely soulless.
That was probably why none of them seemed to care that some guy who wasn't even in their department was hanging around near the training hall.
…Not yet?
Ah, there she is.
Unlike the ones who'd come out first, maybe she'd stayed behind to clean up the seniors' share too.
Even accounting for that, Chaerin's face as she left the building looked rough.
Her steps were different from usual too—dragging and lifeless. Something must have happened during training.
Was she going to skip everything today and just go home…?
Maybe.
No—not maybe. She would.
No matter how addicted she was to that stuff, there was no way she'd go do that kind of thing in this state.
A feeling that was almost pure relief.
It had just started welling up slowly from deep in my chest when—
She stopped short—
Chaerin, who had looked like she was heading straight home, suddenly froze in place.
Then she just stood there for a long time, like someone wrestling with a decision.
How many minutes passed like that?
Around the time people walking by started giving me weird looks, Chaerin started moving again.
In a completely different direction from before.
And at the end of the path she was walking… stood the hiking trail that led to Back Mountain Park.
She stood in front of it and zoned out for a bit longer, then finally began climbing the trail at a slow pace.
If I follow right away she'll notice, right…?
Until now, if it looked like I might get spotted I could just duck behind a signboard or into an alley. On the hiking trail that was impossible.
From here to the summit there was nowhere to hide. The second Chaerin casually glanced back I'd be caught.
The trail itself was a problem too.
I'd been up this morning and knew—the stairs were all wooden decking, so every step made noise.
Pretty loud noise.
That was probably part of why Chaerin had chosen this place as her personal exhibitionist spot.
If anyone ever tried to follow her, she'd hear them coming right away.
So for those reasons I left a little gap.
Not much—about fifteen minutes?
But—
If I actually ran into her up there, what expression was I supposed to make?
And what the hell was I supposed to say?
I was sure I'd already picked out lines and faces in advance… but for some reason I couldn't remember them.
While I was fretting over that I reached the summit.
And inside the park I'd arrived at, Lee Chaerin was… nowhere to be seen.
I wasn't particularly surprised.
I hadn't expected her to be out in the open in the first place.
I crossed the park—so quiet it was almost eerie—and headed for the restroom building tucked in the corner.
The entrance split left and right.
Left for the men's restroom, right for the women's.
Someone else might have hesitated here… but my feet naturally turned left.
Crunch—
Apparently people did use the place sometimes after all.
Grains of sand that must have hitchhiked on someone's shoes all the way here crumbled under my soles, the sound echoing off the restroom walls.
At the same time a tiny inhale—hup—came from somewhere, but I ignored it and walked all the way to the last stall at the far end.
Then… I shoved the closed door hard with my hand.
If it had been locked from the inside the move would have been meaningless.
But… it wouldn't be locked.
I'd already taken care of that this morning. No way it was locked.
"Hey, you crazy bitch."
"…Hic?!"