“You two got some fan mail.”
Department Chief Soranaka grudgingly tossed a bundle of discs onto the desk. The messages were sent by hyperwave and then recorded onto the discs. And there were a lot of them. At a glance I would estimate there were around a hundred in the bunch. One disc can hold at least fifty messages, so this was going to be a real pain. It would take me the rest of my life to check every single piece of fan mail.
“What would you say if I took a little peek at a couple of these messages?”
The Department Chief looked at us with a suspicious interest. Both of his hands lay flat on the desk, and his head was tilted a little to the left. His lips broke into a well-meaning smile. But his eyes revealed an ulterior motive. Someone who didn’t know him might just have seen a balding oldster in his fifties, but Soranaka has been here since the creation of the WWWA, and had been an ogre as the head of the Crime Trouble Consultation Department for the past six years. I wasn’t about to be fooled by this soft-as-buttercream look on his mug. Even United Galactica’s Central Computer would have trouble figuring out what his real intentions were.
“Yes, well, I think it’s probably better not to,” I responded clearly. The content of our mail was really none of the chief’s business.
“I will look through them when I come back later.”
“Oh, c’mon. What harm could it do?”
From my side resounded a voice which had just dismantled my careful maneuvering. It was Yuri. She leaned with her cheeks resting in her hands, her big black eyes sparkling innocently.
“I want to hear at least one of the messages as soon as possible. Find one from a handsome young buck…”
“Aa—”
I almost died right there. I fell off of my stool, but caught the side of the desk before I fell. Knowing that the stool I sat on was simply a cylinder resting on the floor with no back support, why did she have to say something so asinine?!
“Yuri!” I said, still holding myself up using the desk and glaring in her direction. “We were called here by the chief to talk about work. We didn’t come here to check discs.”
“But…” Yuri squirmed back and forth as she sat precariously on her narrow stool. It was almost like she had practiced this move.
“Don’t worry. It’s fine,” the chief butted in. “In fact, it is perfectly all right. Young and handsome guy, right? Got it. I’ll pick out a good one for you.”
Really, you don’t need to. Stop, please. But there was no time to say what I wanted (but I probably wouldn’t have said anything, even if there was). He grabbed the first disc out of the bunch and quickly tossed it into a drive next to him.
I clicked my tongue and peered at Yuri from the corner of my eye. She sat there staring wide-eyed. The chief turned with his back to us and began to whistle a tune.
The wall behind him turned into one big screen, and flickered to life.
I mumbled a few choice words under my breath.
Make no mistake, it was a young, handsome man on the screen. On top of that, he was blond with a slender face. The only thing I didn’t like was the chief messing with our mail. In this case, I was more concerned with age over looks, as this kid was, at the most, ten years old. Even if I were to squint I couldn’t see a boy over the age of twelve. This is just a little child! What was going on here?!
“Chief!” My cheeks became flushed and my stiff back slumped. I could complain all I wanted, but we’d asked for young and handsome.
“Oh, did I make a mistake? I thought this fit into the parameters you were looking for,” the chief said innocently, even scratching his head for emphasis.
“This boy is so cute!” said Yuri, enchanted by the image on the screen. I almost died on the spot again. Since I was already hunched over, I almost fell off the table to the floor.
“To the ladies of Dirty Pair,” the boy on the screen began to speak.
“Wait! Isn’t he kinda young?”
Yuri finally focused. Blockhead! There was no response worthy of her idiotic question.
“This message is in thanks for solving the crisis in space. Thank you very much.”
What in the world… I thought. Wasn’t this supposed to be a typical fan letter? His monotone delivery made it sound as if he was reading it, and I didn’t really appreciate him calling us Dirty Pair, but, on the other hand, he was giving us proper thanks. The department chief gave a distasteful glare that really bugged me. What did I do?
There was no time to worry about the chief now. This young lad’s message was full of some very splendid statements.
“Thanks to you, our planet is completely free of bad guys. But it’s completely free of good people, too. My home is gone as well. Now I am calling on my relatives and I am being moved from planet to planet. I have a request to the ladies of Dirty Pair. Give me back my home. Give me back my school. Give me back my friends. Give me back the amusement park. Give me back my town. Give me back the ocean. Give me back the mountains. Give me back my life—”
I couldn’t take another second. I stood up, extended my hand to the chief’s console, and punched the switch on the disc drive. The screen went black.
“Hey, Kei! He was so cute!” Yuri whined. What goes on in her head is a complete mystery to me.
“That is really sad. That’s gotta be tough for him.”
The chief made an even bigger scene out of his statement, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping his nose.
“Chief, what is it that you are trying to get across to us?” I asked him sharply.
“Nothing special,” he said, feigning a look of innocence glancing in my direction. “Just, that poor kid, that poor poor kid—”
“So spit it out! What is it?!”
I took a step closer to him.
“When you think about it, Noguros was a real disaster,” the chief said with a sigh, as he slyly retreated to the sofa.
“It started out as a simple fender-bender, but then a case was filed with the WWWA and since the Central Computer chose to dispatch you two, the conflict was resolved by setting a city on fire, dropping a continent into the ocean, and then the entire planet’s atmosphere was contaminated with noxious gas.”
“Grr,” I muttered under my breath as a rumble formed in the back of my throat. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t refute what he had said. What had happened at Noguros was pretty much how Department Chief Soranaka had described it.
“Oo hoo hoo!”
Yuri’s face had fallen into her hands.
“Those poor people! The people of Noguros! Oo hoo hoo…”
As Yuri cried her shoulders shook (I see this quite a bit). Yuri is a better actress than I am.
“Every time the Central Computer chooses you two for a mission my life expectancy grows a little bit shorter,” the chief belted out, obviously frustrated.
“It truly makes me wonder why they dispatch TCs at all.”
“Come on, Chief!”
I had opened my mouth, but I hadn’t figured out what to say yet.
“Just wait…”
I wasn’t going to let the chief’s chiding get the best of me.