Who's Going Around Causing Trouble Now?!

I woke up to the sound of a little ding on my phone. Who the fluff could it have been at this hour? The sun wasn't even out yet! It could have only been one person… Kaneko… He must have wanted me to come into work early or something. The last time that happened was when Chihiro got food poisoning at the Correspondents’ Dinner. Sakamoto always insisted someone was trying to sabotage the whole thing. I dreaded the possibility of what excuse it could have been this time.

I turned on my phone to see a text from… Aichi?! He had sent it two minutes ago. My first thought was… how (and when) did he get a phone? Asking him about it wouldn't have been fruitful in any way, though.

Woof I need you to do the summon hollow spell pls I think I'm lost

I snapped back a quick text.

Can't you smell your way home? You seem to know where you are just by sniffing.

Now I just had to wait for him to reply back.

I don't think I'm on Earth

What… Part of me wanted to ask what he meant by that. But also… did I really want to know what kind of trouble that pup had gotten himself into this time? I hesitated to respond, trying to get him to explain himself.

Nothing.

It looked like he really wanted me to ask.

What do you mean you're not on Earth?

It took him a whole minute to reply back. While I waited, I decided to watch and see if the sun was ready to peek over the horizon yet. It most likely was not that time yet, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to play that game.

The streets of Susaki were covered in a light layering of fluffy snow. Nearly every building in the city was decorated with lights. Lights… lights everywhere as far as the eye could have seen. Sure looked like Christmas to me. Well… almost.

Another ding on the phone.

How the fluff should I know

I was practicing my teleporting spell but I think I took a wrong turn at Albuquerque

I think I'm on Mars or something

woof

Those guys don't look so friendly

At that point, I decided I had enough of his shenanigans. Whether he was telling the truth or not… I wasn't sure if it really mattered actually. I was just tired of whatever he was up to.

“Summon Hollow.”

Aichi appeared in front of me looking quite dirty. Wherever he went, he had clearly been doing a lot of digging. Despite being a Hollow, Aichi still acted very much like a puppy, after all. This was the first time in a while he had gotten himself in trouble while doing so. I did not want to know what that was, but I had a feeling Aichi would tell me anyway.

“So, uh… Ayame,” Aichi said to me. “You're uh… ~woof… probably wanting to know where I've been…”

“Not particularly,” was my response. Now all I had to do was wait and see if he was going to bite.

Aichi looked about as nervous as a puppy could have. He really did not want to tell me. But I don't think he had a choice in the matter. Something was up and he wanted me to help. He just couldn't think of the words. The most he was able to muster for the longest time was some brief whimpers here and there.

But he had to break at some point.

“Hideaki's gone missing!” Aichi cried out. “I can't find him anywhere!”

What… That little bunny supervillain had been living inside a magic bubble in my closet for four months by this point. There was absolutely no way, I thought to myself as I ran over to the closet, that he could…

…

Escape…

He was gone…

“Aichi… where was the last place you saw him?”

“~woof, he was right there yesterday!” was Aichi’s immediate response. “He hadn’t moved from that spot since we defeated the King of the Yokai in the last chapter!”

“Are you sure about - Wait… last chapter?”

“Did I say last chapter?” Aichi asked back. “I meant to say last month.”

“October was two months ago,” I corrected him as I filed through the mess that was my closet. Sheesh, when was the last time either of us cleaned out this thing? Aichi’s spellbook, Aichi’s food bowl, the last four volumes of My Last Life as a Washing Machine Sucked, So I Got Reborn as the Most Powerful Man in the Universe… Seriously, why did Aichi insist on reading such things? None of that was important, though. We had a bunny on the loose.

Oh…

Oh…

“Ayame?” Aichi asked me. “You okay?”

“Aichi?” I asked back. I froze in place, the crippling realization of what might have happened rendering me unable to move. “Why do Hollows always put the bad Hollows in what basically amounts to magical hamster balls?”

“That’s the way it’s always been, Ayame.”

“And you’ve never had a problem with, say, Hollows escaping?”

“~woof, not a single one.”

“Well,” I replied, finally gathering the strength to get up and face him, “your brother just reinvented the wheel.”

Now, I would have really wanted to inquire further on the matter, realizing that Hideaki must have snuck out somehow. However, my inquiry was interrupted by yet another text.

This one was from Kaneko.

Tanaka, I hate to do this to ya, what with it being the 24th and all, but I really need you to come into work for a bit. Masuda called in sick again.

I glanced over at Aichi and said, “We'll talk about this later.”

“~woof, we need to talk about this now!” he shouted back. “Who knows what kind of evil he could be doing right now!”

“He’s a little bunny trapped in a magic ball,” I reminded him. “He probably snuck out while we were sleeping. He couldn't have gone far. Besides… I have to go to work.”

“On Christmas Eve? Booooooo!”

“Just let me know if you spot anything unusual,” I gave my instructions, the usual for when I had to head out to work. “You apparently have my phone number now.”

•

Work was, for the most part, uneventful, just what I had assumed to be the typical preparations for the last edition of the paper before Christmas. There were no monster sightings, no strange occurrences, not even a single crime, just regular life.

“So… About that new Prime Minister,” Kaneko was saying to Sakamoto, probably the first time I caught what anyone in the office was saying. “Didn't you say he was trying to introduce some law about nationalizing the newspaper industry?”

“Yeah…” Sakamoto agreed. “And I dunno how to feel about that. On the one hand, we wouldn't be stuck under Hedoro's thumb anymore. But on the other hand…”

“Switching one thumb for another?”

“Yeah,” Sakamoto replied. “Something like that.”

“Well, we could try to ride it out,” Kaneko suggested. “Worst comes to worst, we could always go indie.”

“Never thought I'd hear those words coming out of your mouth, Kaneko,” Sakamoto whispered. Those were the last words I expected to hear from Kaneko as well.

I would have eavesdropped on their conversation some more, but I was the first to catch a glimpse of a man walking in through the office door. He was a rather tall, spindly kind of man, with thick, curly white hair, a clean-shaven face, and icy blue eyes. The man dressed himself in a rather bizarre mixture of Victorian street fashion and amekaji. In short, this was a rather odd guy.

I could not hear what he and Kaneko were saying, but Kaneko pointed the strange man in my direction.

“The name's Claus,” the man introduced himself as he approached me. “Nick Claus.” Leaning over my desk, he whispered, “I believe you can help me track down my missing sleigh.”