Chapter Nineteen: J-Pop Panic!

It’s not every day that you exit, pursued by the Portuguese Mafia. Still, I gunned the Vespa at high speeds. We only had one helmet, which Yuki hastily put on.

I checked the side-view mirrors on stalks. We did not appear to have a tail. I slowed down but kept moving, wary of the perceived tracking devices.

“The Teixieras aren’t a terribly big family,” I explained as we angled towards downtown.

They’d be hard-pressed to organize a manned pursuit with the cops bearing down on them, is what I meant.

The road turned bumpy. Yuki☆ shuffled closer with her hands around my waist.

“W-why did you go for a Vespa instead of a motorcycle?” Yuki asked, her voice vibrating with the bumpy road.

“Well, y’see, there’s this anime…” I began.

“Oh, I know the one!” Yuki said. “It was still really popular back when I was at MIT.”

“Yeah, just the original though.” I turned a sharp right, then a left, then went straight through an intersection and another hard right before continuing. “… not those new ones they made decades later.”

Yuki scrunched her face up. “I never even got through them at all.”

I nodded understandingly. Me neither. Those were pretty bad.

We raced into a more populated, pedestrian segment of town, closer to Malibu. The plan was to get somewhere with lots of witnesses to make any pursuers think twice about trying to whack and/or recapture us.

A wide touristy boulevard awaited. Despite us being dressed in relatively unflattering plainclothes, Yuki☆ was spotted almost right away.

“Hey, it’s her!”

“Twitter said she had a new boyfriend.”

“Ooh. Is that him?”

“He looks like an average joe.”

“My beautiful Janaeki fic!” This person punctuated this with a sob.

“I mean, we should be safe here,” I said.

… not so sure about your reputation, went unsaid.

“Eh, ignore them,” Yuki said. “Once we get the all-clear, we should double back and hear from Janae.”

I glanced around, duly noting that I didn’t exactly have my phone with me.

“How are we going to do that?” I asked.

Yuki slipped a hand into her pocket. She pulled out a small burner-device-looking thing.

“She slipped me this as we ran,” the starlet said.

“Wow.” I slowed the Vespa to a stop.

“Mmmhm. We have an entire, elaborate system. There were drills involved when I first landed here.”

It was awfully fortunate that Janae’s charge still remembered these emergency drills. I didn’t say that though.

“So, we just have to wait for the all-clear, and…”

A low buzzing sound drowned out Yuki☆’s voice.

“Uh-oh.”

I looked around. The buzzing sound continued, joined by many more. Yet, there was nothing at street-level.

A few pedestrians noticed it first. They looked up into the sky, and I followed their gaze.

Familiar white-shelled, sleek craft with four rotors on stalks hovered above us. They had cameras in bulbous glass encasings along the undercarriage of their shells. One had that familiar gas-canister delivery system that we’d been well acquainted with back at Yuki’s house.

I shifted back into gear and turned a hard left, cutting across traffic.

“None of them appear to be armed, at least,” I said the drones picked up the pursuit. “You could put a gun on one and fire it remotely. That would be bad.”

You could also put explosives on a drone and program it to home in on whatever it detects as a target. A red Vespa, for instance. It doesn’t even have to be piloted; it just has to acquire a target and automatically lock in. I didn’t mention that, lest it cause Yuki to panic.

Murmurs came from the crowd as everyone saw Yuki zip away on the back of a motorized bike-scooter thing, pursued by a fleet of drones.

“This is…” I checked behind me. “… These are the things that were spying on me at the taco truck.”

So those drones were there to keep tabs on little old me. Everything fell into place. All the random drone sightings of the past few weeks were here to keep dibs on me. Here we thought they were just paparazzi drones.

The crowd around us was still unaware of this fact and presumed these were, indeed, paparazzi drones. They weren’t aware of the circumstances we’d been thrust into over the past day or so.

Still, we zipped through traffic and drove on an erratic route. The drones didn’t have to deal with traffic or topography, so were always just on our heels. Many pushed ahead to try to cut us off. I swerved.

We fled to the beach. Even in this early spring, the ever-fair weather of Southern California attracted quite the crowd.

“Hold on tight,” I said. “Got an idea.”

I gunned it into a half-pipe, mercifully unused by skaters at the moment. We flew at high speed up the other side of the half-pipe. In an instant, we were in the air, gravity giving us a tug downward.

Those drones that had moved ahead to cut us off were well below us now. They swerved around, trying to find where we went as the Vespa fell right upon them from above.

The front wheel smashed one of four drones right in the middle of its chassis. The drone burst into a million pieces as we landed on the sidewalk and continued onward.

“Okay, so that’s, what?” I checked backward again. “Three more left?”

The buzzing sound grew more persistent as the remaining drones moved in closer. I began to suspect at least some of these had a human pilot.

“Hmmm. A manned drone ought to be easier to lose,” I said.

Just then, a buzzing and vibration sensation occurred at my back. It was that burner phone. Yuki pulled it out.

“Mosh—Hello.” She said, the two words melding together seamlessly.

There was a pause as I pulled us onto a wide avenue. Narrow streets would only be to the drone’s advantage.

“It’s Janae. She’s in pursuit of that Mister Teixeira guy. Apparently he has a fancy setup in a bullet proof Humvee-looking thing.”

I nodded. These days, you’d really only need a VR headset to control a single drone. Maybe three laptops for the current pursuers.

“Tell her to spin him out or something,” I said.

Anything that could cause our pursuer to lose control of his drones could help us out.

Yuki relayed this request. I took us onto a long straightaway where the drones could move in quickly, get greedy.

I heard a great crash of twisting metal over the phone. The drones in pursuit spun out, their remote controller suddenly sending them reeling about every which way. Two crashed into each other and fell to the ground in a heap. The last spun around wildly, then began to idle.

I ensured we wouldn’t be followed by any further reinforcements, then pulled up slowly to the drone. I picked up a rock and hit this final drone out of the sky. Only then did we breathe sighs of relief. The day was saved.

+++

“Well, we busted up a minor mafia family,” I said.

“That we did.”

We slowly drove back into Yuki☆’s neighborhood. The gate guards were gone, replaced with guys wearing mirrred shades and fancy suits. Must have been from Janae’s bodyguard agency. The house, similarly, was overrun with a cleanup team doing a deep-dive for any potential compromised assets or bugs. They’d be at it all night.

“So, Yuki☆,” I began. “Uh, where am I supposed to drop you off?”

We dismounted the Vespa.

Yuki giggled. “You’ve started pronouncing it correctly. With the ☆.”

“Guess I have.” I nodded, rubbing my neck bashfully.

Janae was in route. I was planning on staying with Yuki☆ until she made it there, at least.

“Hey, uh, about all those rumors online?” I asked.

“What of them?” Yuki frowned. “Eh, let ‘em talk.”

There was one last thing that I needed to know.

“So, Miss Yuki. About your name.” I spoke slowly. “I’d heard your surname was Nijima. I assumed that was Yuki☆ Nijima. But this Mister Teixeira called you something else.”

“Oh, that?” Yuki☆ leaned in slyly. “Well, Yuki☆ was always a stage name.”

I nodded. “Yuki means ‘snow’ right? I’d learned that on an app somewhere.”

“That’s true.” Yuki nodded. “My actual name is Romi. Romi Seung. I guess the Teixieras found that in a background check? It’s not that hard to find… anyway, Nijima was my mother’s surname. You see, my father was of Korean descent.”

I nodded understandingly. Were it but for want of a nail, this J-pop princess could have been a K-pop princess. Funny how that works out.

Yuki—or Romi, rather—leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. I gasped.

“If the internet rumor mills are already going to think we’re dating.” She winked. “Let’s just run with it, eh?” 

+++

Yep, that's my life now, and how I wound up with rumors about dating a J-pop idol turning into actually dating a J-pop idol. Of course, there's more I didn't get around to. Really scandalous stuff--real 'dear light novel readers, I didn't expect it would happen to me...' scenarios. But that's a tale for a different medium. Until next time~