Conbinimonogatari

Shizune’s day had started poorly, but once classes were over things returned to normalcy. It’s been only four days since she got this part-time job at the Sanchopanza convenience store but to her that already feels ‘normal’. Even if her salary for this part-time job is unremarkable, she’s in dire need of income, and all things considered, the closing shift of a regular conbini fits with her schedule perfectly. Having a steady flow of money justified taking four hours of her time five days a week, because now that her very last savings before moving to Osaka had disappeared, she still needs to eat, but more importantly: save all the money she can.

-“It’s something” Shizune says as she always does in front of the mirror at the back of the store, putting the store’s uniform shirt over the black t-shirt she wore to school today and yesterday.
The first hours are uneventful, with only a handful of people coming and going to the store, buying things in silence and using the usual services without issue. It’s a small respite from her borderline penniless lifestyle and vexing school life, and although Shizune finds the idea of this little job being a respite almost ridiculous, she accepts it nonetheless.

Jagasaki has agreed to stay back at Shizune’s apartment, since she knows having a violent demon roaming around is just trouble waiting to happen. Luckily for her, that same demon is placated by ice cream, and the variety at her store helps her keep that leverage. It’s worth mentioning that as soon as she found out about his sweet tooth, she began considering how to avoid needing to pay for the sweets. Even a mere 100 yen is an investment she dreads.

Time moves on regardless of her monetary woes, and it’s now one hour before closing, which is usually the most barren time of the work day, so Shizune takes the chance to open her notebook to study a little. She found the level of Nantoka High to be far beneath her capabilities, so this notebook actually finds use as a diary of wraiths, youkai, demons and any sort of apparitions Shizune knew about or came across. At the moment, her study consists of compiling her notes on a recent find into something more cohesive and easier to use.

A wraith seemed to be roaming inside an art gallery that’s been temporarily closed after a part of the building collapsed, and Shizune theorized that was the spirit’s accidental doing. After a couple of days of surveying the place, she concluded the wraith had enough cognition to know how to avoid an Awakened like her, and already become adept at navigating the labyrinthine building, likely by learning how to use all the vents and even some art pieces to hide or transport itself.
The abridged version of her data mainly relied on that knowledge and her focus was on deciphering the specifics of the wraith alongside possible approaches, with the resulting notes looking half like insane ramblings, and half some sort of game design project.

Shizune’s current goal is preparing a bait to draw it out safely, hoping that she could fight it in the open where another Awakened could see her win. Perhaps that same Awakened could later induct her into one of their factions stationed in Osaka. She doesn't have a preference for any faction in particular, but she knows she needs to start working towards that goal in some form.

As she writes, the conbini door opens with the same sound as always, but this is new clientele that Shizune never wanted to have.
-“Dude, is that Mitsuki?” Baku says, looking dumbfounded at the person behind the register.
-“Holy shit that’s Mitsuki” Atsu says.

-“HUUH?” Ito grunts as he weaves from behind his friends and confirms what they said.
“Oi, the hell are you doing here?”
-“... It looks like she works here” Chou comments, saying what is plain to see, before grinning.
“... heh, that makes us customers, doesn’t it?”
The four look at each other, with their leader projecting an infectiously wicked smirk, immediately duplicated by his three friends, whose names Shizune already had the displeasure of learning due to their blustering group personality.
The girl’s right eye twitches, as she prepares for yet another episode of dealing with four loud fools that love making her life as inconvenient as humanly possible.
-“This is fine.”

Baku and Atsu start sauntering around like they own the place, both thinking what to buy and how to annoy Shizune without getting into trouble. Meanwhile, Ito and Chou approach the register and stand there for a moment, seeing Shizune’s head turned, pretending to look somewhere else. Ito then rests on the counter, approaching Shizune and tapping his bokken on the counter.

-“Where’s the Irasshaimassen? Huh? Not taking your job seriously, Mitsuki?”
Shizune turns her head slowly towards her ‘customer’.
-“Do you really expect that sort of greeting from a conbini?” she finally says, tiredly squinting and closing the notebook, which Ito snatches immediately, faster than Shizune can claw it away from his grasp.
-“Huuh? What’s this? Is this your love diary? Huh?”
-“Hey! That’s not yours, you jerk!”
With almost superhuman deftness, Ito throws back the notebook as soon as Shizune tries to grasp it, landing soundly in Chou’s hands.

Shizune’s first instinct was to snatch it with magic, but that would be caught on camera–even worse, all the goons here would see her and would question her about it to no end, but that made her think of using the environment to her advantage.
-“Give that back! Look, you know there’s cameras here, right? I can get you arrested,” she points at the camera stationed directly looking at the register.

-“Grabbing a notebook isn’t illegal… but you can get in trouble by being violent with your customers, Mitsuki-san!” Chou laughs with a bizarre almost mouse-like sound.
-“Oi” Ito corrects him immediately.
-“Mitsuki without the -san!” Chou corrects himself, and then calls out to another of his friends. “Baku, catch!”

Chou throws the notebook at Baku, who surprisingly catches it despite carrying several treats in his hands. He has already decided on what he wants but has four more on him, just to waste Shizune’s time.
-“Oooi, employee-chan, how much are these? Can you check them?”
Shizune’s already thin patience runs out, first making sure her disgust was visible on her face, and then looking at the camera for a second. With an inconspicuous snap of her fingers, she enchants the device so that it records visuals that Shizune had in her head at the moment of casting; a simple routine of the four buying things and immediately leaving. Now she has some moments of freedom.

-“I’m going there,” she loudly declares, putting one foot in the counter and then standing up there
-“Yo! What about that?” Baku says, pointing at the camera with his pompadour, surprised that the girl would choose to do that
-“Yeah I just turned them off” Shizune nonchalantly tells them, vaulting forward from the counter and landing in front of the two farthest members, which would look worthy of respect if she didn’t have the store’s shirt on.  “Come on, give it back” she extends her hand as she approaches Baku, but Atsu is fast enough to take the notebook from his friend’s grasp and step away, making some distance from Shizune.

-“Bet it’s something juicy if you don’t wanna share–let’s see!” Atsu playfully says, opening the notebook on the first written page he finds, and then reads it out loud.
-“Monday 9, Kaedekura art gallery… hey, what’sa poly… kinetic… sentient…?”
Atsu squints at the notes he’s reading.
“Arch… charch… arachning...”

-“Arachnoid, and give it back” Shizune grumbles after approaching Atsu and almost grabs the notebook, but the delinquent immediately throws the book to Chou again, and the nerdiest of the four can actually read what’s there with ease.
-“Conceptualization of a high-sensitive wraith with polykinetic perception, ample signs of sentience and perhaps sapience, composed of likely cacodaimonic type B confluences and hyperchemical mutations in arachnoid semblances hidden within the walls of the Kaedekura Art Gallery.”
Chou says, after avoiding two of Shizune’s lunges and throwing the notebook back to Ito, but the bespectacled conbini clerk catches it mid-air.

-“Those were some weird words… is it something about spiders? Spiders are arachnids, not arachnoids” Chou mentions, grabbing his chin in thought.

-“You don’t know what half those words mean, just forget about it” Shizune dismisses Chou, as well as everyone else present.
-“Heh!” Ito gives a toothy smile, making sure Shizune can see it. “Sounds like the Ito gang is going to the art gallery and find out what Mitsuki is hiding” he yells, slapping his bokken on his palm, which is answered with a cheer from his friends.
-“Wait, no, don’t!” Shizune panics.
-“What, your boyfriend is there?” Baku says, smugly.
-“Why is that the first thing you think about?!” Shizune’s body language demands an explanation after that completely random question, but she realizes what’s going on here, and she changes strategies to dissuade them.
“Sure, go to the closed art gallery at dinner time. You’re just going to stand outside looking like idiots until you go home,” she says, with a rather insulting tone.

-“Ain’t no lock Atsu can’t crack” Ito responds, confident. “Right, Atsu??”
The young man in the red jacket smirks.
-“Nothin’ bad about a little urban exploration if we don’t break anythin’” he declares, giving an OK sign.
-“Damn it, don’t go!” Shizune spouts seeing that both her approaches backfired.
-“Dude, you’re just making us want to go more, right boys?” Baku says, and everyone -especially Ito- is now loudly excited to visit the thing, just because it would clearly annoy Shizune.

-“No, listen. It’s serious. I mean it. You can die if you go there. No… you will die if you go there.” The only thing she can think of is just telling them the consequences while she thinks a different angle to deter them
-“Oooh, is this some sort of curse?” Chou perks up, wanting to feel vindicated in his story about Shizune being the haunted Ghost Glasses Girl.
-“No, it’s real danger. You’ll find dangerous… things there.”
To explain what a wraith is and how this one is fairly abnormal in intellect would be both too long and too difficult for the four to understand. Even if they did believe something like that existed to begin with just with words, they are the last people on earth she would trust with knowledge of the world of the Awakened.

-“So you’re writing about a real monster there?”
Baku’s question leaves Shizune with a conundrum: Would they really be dissuaded if she made some sort of lie? What could she lie with? Wouldn’t it make it more enticing for them to go there if they noticed she lied? Even if they believed her lie, wouldn’t they just do the opposite of what she wants just to annoy her regardless?
-“Yeah. And it’ll kill you. It’ll kill all of you.”
She opts for utter honesty.
The group falls silent- Baku asked that as a joke, but Shizune’s answer is so genuine and overwhelmingly serious that it seems like everyone understands the gravity of the situation.
“So don’t go.”

Shizune is already considering knocking them out with magic and simply erasing their memories of this encounter, but with her spell already altering the camera, she’d need to dispel it in order to affect the delinquents, and the camera would see her using magic. It’s a lose-lose situation and her best option is to try and reason with them first, even if Ito puts some additional resistance.
-“Who’re you to say what I gotta do, eh? Mitsuki?” the delinquent leader says, tapping her on the shoulder with his bokken. Despite the provocation, Shizune maintains her posture.
-“Because I know things you don’t. A lot of them, actually.”
Shizune’s own provocation came out almost unconsciously, but after taking a breath and rolling eyes at herself, she recovers her solemn tone, in one last attempt to reason with the most unreasonable person she’s ever met.
“You need to promise me you won’t go there.”
-“You have some nerve to ask that” Ito says, scowling at her.
-“Listen to me for once in your life, dumbass– I’m trying to save it.” She palms the bokken away from her.

Atsu decides to speak up again after paying attention to all that’s been said before Ito and Shizune get locked into a round of back-and-forth insults like other times.
-“Okay, we promise. You have my word.”
Shizune looks at the young man in the red jacket, and her surprise is radiantly visible, alongside a bit of hope she starts to feel.

-“I don’ know what’s goin’ on but I can tell you really mean it so… I won’ go. None of us is gonna go, right guys?”
With one arm on Baku’s shoulder, and the other on Chou’s shoulder, they both look at him and seem convinced.

-“Yeah bro, it’s not like I care what’s in there.”
Baku is very carefree, and Chou at least tries to appear as the most reasonable of the bunch.
-“Well, I have more important things to do.”
-“Yeah, we can do more fun stuff somewhere else,” Atsu reassures them.
Seeing that all his friends have accepted, Ito meets their expectant gazes, and Atsu nods at his friend.
-“Right?”
The young man with the wooden sword takes a moment to observe all his friends unanimously agree on something.
-“...Right” Ito concedes, if only slightly, while looking away.

-“We won’ go there, Mitsuki. If you say we’re really goin’ to die then it’s a gamble, ain’t it? I'm not a gambler” Atsu says, giving Shizune a thumbs up, which Shizune responds to by sighing in relief.
-“Heh… good… that’s good. Keep it that way. It’s better for everyone if you keep it that way.” She finds some amusement at his choice of words, but the topic is solved as far as she’s concerned, reciprocating Atsu's thumbs up after some delay. There was some level of understanding there.
With the situation pacified the four begin to go their own way, amicably walking out from the conbini. Yet Shizune is hit with a sudden realization:
-“Wait, you have to pay for those!!”

The four delinquents about to exit the store look at Shizune, then look at all the ice cream packs Baku is holding, then look at each other. No more words need to be spoken, and the four begin a sprint immediately, having just been told the cameras were off as enough reason to believe they can just get away with it. But the main reason, certainly, is that it’d annoy Shizune.
Without proof of this burglary thanks to her own gambit, she is left in front of the store seething in anger. Then she realizes she’ll have to pay for those out of her own pocket and grabs her head, anticipating the wallet pain she’s soon to feel.

Once at a safe distance, the four stop to catch their breath and continue walking, now about to enjoy their treat and congratulating each other on such an awesome bout of sudden delinquency. Ito puts the chocolate and cream sandwich in his mouth looking ahead slightly contemplative, which makes Baku curious
-“Oi boss, what’s up?”
-“That thing Mitsuki was writing was pretty fucking weird, wasn’t it?” Ito considers out loud with the dessert still in his mouth.
-“Maybe she’s crazy” Atsu reasons.
-“Bet you she has like, twenty cats” Baku jokes.
-“For sure… Eh, I’ll see what’s that all about tonight.” Ito shrugs.
-“Eh? Boss, you’re going anyway?”
Ito turns to the group and opens his arms, swallowing his ice cream sandwich in the same motion.
-“Of course I’m going. I ain’t gonna let anyone tell me what to do. Especially Mitsuki.”
“But you promised-” Chou tries to retort.
-“I didn’t promise shit. You guys can stay out if you want.”
Ito looks forward and walks on his own with his characteristic threatening slouch. Before long, he takes a turn and leaves the field of vision of his gang.

-“… And Mitsuki-san was so serious about that” Chou comments, disapproving but also admiring Ito’s self-determination.
-“Come to think of it, she said it was a monster, didn’t she? That can’t be, right?” Baku takes a lick of his ice cream quizzically.
Atsu scratches his head at what Baku just said. To him, just getting asked not to do something the other person doesn’t want and doesn’t take any effort was enough for him. Believing Shizune’s explanation never factored into his promise.
-“Maybe there’s still somethin’ dangerous there… like… some sort of sick animal, or some violent hobo.”
The three now put their shared braincell to work to decide what to do.
-“What if she said that because she knew Ito would want to go? Maybe there’s something involving the police there.”
-“Dude, Mitsuki wouldn’t do that” Baku says, although Chou’s theory does make sense in his head.
-“It’s not like we know her...” Chou shrugs.

The three stand there eating their corresponding treats with the same level of paused enthusiasm in silence, until Chou speaks up.
-“... We’re gonna end up going to make sure Ito doesn’t get in trouble, aren’t we?”
Atsu finishes his ice cream and throws the wrapper at a nearby garbage can. Despite missing, he doesn't pay any mind to it.
-“Yeah, we are.”