It’s really hard to become a WWWA Trouble Consultant. Actually, hard isn’t quite the right word. You can’t just choose to become a Trouble Consultant. The WWWA chooses the people it needs, through its own scouts. I don’t know what the standards are myself. The United Galactica central computer selects people throughout the galaxy who have the qualities and talents it takes. Then it sends a recruiter to meet them. Once you’ve been scouted, you undergo a year of special training. After that the WWWA assigns you to the field your particular talents best equip you to handle.
The WWWA scout who showed up a few days before our graduation was there to scout us. Believe it or not, he wanted us to be WWWA Crime Trouble Consultants.
Our stomachs flip-flopped. The shock nearly took our breath away. Yuri really did stop breathing for a moment; she was fit to suffocate on the spot. I can remember as if it were yesterday how our advisor, Dr. Chiban, moaned and buried his head in his arms when he saw us floundering about.
All things considered, it was a natural reaction.
Neither of us had any particular talent (or so we believed at the time). As for our grades, well, to be perfectly frank, they weren’t exactly praiseworthy. If there was anything about us that set us apart from other people it was the fact that we were both (if I may say so myself) actually quite beautiful, with pretty good figures (everyone did say so!).
Yet that obviously had nothing to do with the WWWA’s selection standards. We were sure there’d been some mistake. We kept badgering the recruiter to tell us why we were being scouted. But that was one question he absolutely refused to answer. Later we found out that he couldn’t have answered us even if he’d wanted to; he didn’t have the slightest idea why, either.
In the end, we went along. WWWA Trouble Consultants are an elite. They’re at the very cutting edge of society. But even better than that, they’d come to scout Yuri and me together. By then the two of us had already decided that we would be inseparable when we went out into the real world (and don’t you get to thinking we’re lesbians, ‘cuz we’re not!). But the real world isn’t all roses, and we’d been fretting about whether we could really pull it off. And then, just at that very moment, along comes this incredible offer from the WWWA. If they’d scouted just me, or Yuri, we would have turned them down flat.
No sooner had we graduated than we were sent to the WWWA training facility on Shimogu. On Shimogu they stuff fresh recruits to the gills with new skills, from piloting spaceships to handling weapons or, as in our case, techniques of criminal investigation. We rolled our eyes at the thought of having to go back to school the minute we’d finished college. But we grit our teeth, and bore it.
So, at the end of the year we obtained our official licenses as criminal investigator Trouble Consultants and started on our new careers.
As for our job record, it’s not something I’d want to talk to strangers about. It’s not exactly, you know, bad. We’ve solved every case we’ve ever worked on. It’s just that the solutions weren’t always very pretty.
As I see it, there are two ways to solve a case. There’s the clean way, where you use peaceful means to bring everything under control. Then there’s the other way, where you have to use coercion to force a solution on a problem whether it likes it or not. I don’t know how economic Trouble Consultants go about it, but it seems to me that in our field, we always run into the gory second alternative. Even then, our cases have admittedly been just a bit too spectacular. An explosion here, an inferno there, and in the end we’re left with a mountain of corpses and, incidentally, a solution.
Now it’s my opinion that we always get cases that have the latent potential for turning out that way no matter who took them on. Public opinion seems to see it differently. Rumor has it that any case, even one as teeny-tiny as the point of a needle, will escalate to total war once we’ve been sent in. Of course that’s just nonsense. If it was true they would have taken away our licenses long ago, now, wouldn’t they?
A Trouble Consultant’s codename is usually taken from the name of her ship. Our spaceship bears the sweet appellation Lovely Angel. Naturally, we should be called that, too. And this was true at least, in the beginning.
Nowadays, though, nobody uses that cute little title. Based on our style of work, almost before we knew it, everyone had taken to calling us the Dirty Pair.
Fortunately (does that sound odd?), clients can’t pick their Trouble Consultants. The central computer sends the people it judges best suited to the task, based on a detailed analysis of the case at hand. If they could choose, I suppose our work would dry up overnight.
Wherever we go, the word has always gotten out already, and people greet us with the same old look of consternation on their faces. That really makes the blood rush to our heads. Inwardly we scream at our clients to stop their blithering. This time, we pledge, we’ll make a clean job of it. Though, somehow or other, quite against our will, it turns out the same as usual.
Nonetheless, starting off our investigation by sacrificing an entire civilian spaceliner carrying forty passengers and fifteen crew members—as we just had on Dangle—was a first even for us, the ill-reputed Dirty Pair.