My Normal Life Now Has A Wacky Scientist

“You see this!? It’s amazing—it’s beautiful, elegant, exactly I’d expect of our turncoat genius Pleasa!”

“The same one who killed our friend,” Sarine stressed, eliciting shame from the scientist next to her.

“Oh—right, right, sorry.”

Izumi plopped a display of beakers onto her miserably messy workstation, littered with documents, photos, and charts. Charts Tama tried and failed to understand before resigning herself to waiting until Izumi stopped talking in circles and got to the point.

Dispatching of all the captured Nachts took a a week—turns out the spell Chiho used to dispel them came with a considerable energy cost. Sarine lent her power to speed up the process, though the accumulation of monsters still left them winded. But while they worked to destroy the creatures for good, Society Prime dedicated various magical scientists to studying the creatures, trying to work out through the raw materials which constructed them where they might’ve been synthesized.

The existence of a Nacht began in a Dream Seed, of which various methods existed to create them depending on the resources available to the crafter. Many of the needed materials had already been harvested out of existence in Japan, narrowing down the options. Still, if they wanted to be sure, they’d need all hands on deck.

The Head of Society assigned Izumi to the task—a former intern under Pleasa’s wing, who’d taken her former position when she betrayed Society Prime. Though Sarine expressed a fair amount of complaints regarding it, Izumi’s closeness made her the best candidate to finagle Pleasa’s location.

“I swear, if she’s also working with that bitch—” Sarine grumbled in Tama’s ears. Tama scrambled to shut Sarine’s mouth.

“She’s not, otherwise she wouldn’t be here, idiot,” Tama said. “She’s weird, yeah, but she seems like she knows her stuff. Can you lay off for like, a second?”

“…Ugh, I can’t believe you’re telling me to lay off.”

“Hey, I’m serious.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“’S cool.” Tama released Sarine, who stretched her wings and sighed. Izumi, checked out of her surroundings, hunched over her desk and thumbed through a freshly printed report, glancing over chart after chart with a wide smile. Her messy, jet black hair nearly obscured her eyes, labcoat two sizes too big for her.

“Ahhhh, these Nachts are so cleanly synthesized. No wonder they’ve been such a pain. Pleasa picked the best of the best materials to make these things.

“Buuuuuuut…that’s also the problem, isn’t it?”

Sarine blinked. “What?”

“You see,” Izumi said, slapping her sleeve against a table listing terms and percentages neither human nor faerie could hope to understand, “I had a feeling, but Pleasa isn’t using local materials to make these Nachts. She either arranged for a delivery, or took a stash of materials with her when she fled Society Prime.”

…Of course.

Tama kicked her feet. “Damn it—so we’re at a dead end?”

“Nnnnope, no, not yet.” Izumi licked her lips. “We will be if she has a supplier, but if we still have options, I say we look into them, right? Right?”

Izumi threw an arm out, gesturing to the room around them—a laboratory filled with workstations and idle projects of all kind, not beginning nor ending with Izumi’s materials. “If she stole the materials from us, then we might be able to trace it. Society Prime logs inventory if a bug leaves a box; if she stole from us, we’ll know, even if it’s not tied to her name…yet, you get it? And from there, we can rely on some good ol’ clairvoyance to trace where she took them, getting you two to her general location!”

“Uh.” Tama blinked, then shook her head. “Yeah, okay.”

"How general?” Sarine said. “It won’t mean anything if you throw a dart at a board and expect us to wander around wherever.”

“You seriously think she’s gonna be secretive about it?”

Izumi scoffed, crossing her arms—if anything she seemed offended. Which made sense. If she worked so closely with Pleasa, she understood the woman better than the Tama and Sarine did combined, ten times over. “She’s showy. She loves prestige. She still budgets for good outfits even when she’s homeless. I think Pleasa’s holed up in some abandoned, elegant mansion, castle or something. Just my theory. But I still gotta prove it—that’s what science is all about!”

“Right…” Tama said. “So. Mind if I ask you something? Before we start?”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Do you…miss Pleasa?”

Izumi’s smile dropped. Sarine put herself in front of Tama just in case Izumi turned out to be a mole, another one planted by Pleasa to ruin their lives, break them down until she could digest them in the guttural machine of her demented research. Sarine would kill her. Sarine would turn her into a husk—all by design.

…The faerie felt sick.

“No. Not at all. I wish she’d jut die already.” Izumi sighed, long and deep. “A long time ago, she was my world. Everything I aspired to be—the pinnacle of scientific genius.”

She splayed a hand to the side. “Buuuut, she turned out to be just another power-grubbing idiot. Too distracted grabbing the golden carrot, she doesn’t even think about why it shines!”

“With that in mind,” Izumi continued, hungered eyes aimed towards Sarine, “once this whole mess is over, I wanna make an offer. I’m sure you have some idea ‘bout what I mean, but maybe letting an actual researcher look into your case could give you some peace of mind? Consider it, ‘k?—later, I mean. Hee hee.”

Izumi turned towards the door, pointing like a general sending her soldiers to war. “We’ve got some records to check! Items to find missing! Psychics to consult! And, saving the best for last, a fraud to hang at the gallows!”

“This place has gallows?” Tama said. Sarine hit her in the shoulder.

Sarine dragged Tama forward, burning passion driving her. “What are we waiting for!? We have to get her before she targets anyone else—especially the Ohzora’s.”

Tama tensed, and nodded. They risked so much emerging from the shadows—now they had to strike, before it became too, too late.