Cafe Kizuna pt 3.

Ti looked around to see who startled him and Mona while they were watching the van. Behind them stood, Ei, the green-haired robotics scientist that tried to shut down their school! She doesn’t have anything to do with the two stealing the cafe’s supplies right?

Ei started laughing out loud.

“Why are you wearing mustaches, you look so ridiculous”

Mona pointed at the car in the alleyway.

“Be quiet, we are investigating a crime ma’am”

Ei grabbed Mona’s binoculars.

“Let me take a look!”

She looked at it for a couple of seconds.

“So they are taking stuff from a trash bin?”

Mona nodded, and they briefly explained what happened at Ti’s work.

Ei laughed.

“That sounds like a clever scheme… but what do you plan on doing with it?”

“What do you two have to do with it?”

Ti thought about it for a second and gave a passionate speech.

“My heart just couldn’t let them misappropriate the innocence of a maid for such an evil scheme. Cafe Kizuna is a special place for me, we cannot let them continue doing this!”

Mona nodded and added.

“I am just here for fun”

Ei sighed.

“So you want to report them to your manager? Do you have a plan for that?”

Ti hadn’t really thought about that. He looked at Mona who also looked a bit empty-headed.

“Ei, don’t you have some cool technical gadget we could use?”

“Like in a spy show? Tell me you have!”

Mona suddenly seemed all excited again.

“Alright.. alright… I think I have some things that might interest you, Mona”

Ei smirked.

“But it comes at a steep price”

“What do I need to do Ei, tell me!”

“Okay, okay, Mona quiet down, just visit me at my lab tomorrow at noon okay?”

Ei handed Mona a business card.

“I see you tomorrow, make sure you’re prepared”

The car started to back out of the corridor. Ti remembered to make a foto of the license plate, just in time before it disappeared.

Afterward, Mona and Ti met at the fast food restaurant again. They took off the disguises and went to order another round of chicken nuggets.

Ti was a bit worried about whatever Ei wanted Mona to do tomorrow.

“You don’t have to go, Mona, this is my problem after all”

“Let me go to your place, okay?”

Mona smirked.

“You’ll owe me something later Ti, don’t worry”

“Your time will come”

Ti certainly didn’t like this, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He accepted with regret.

“Deal Mona”

Ti and Mona shook hands.

“Anyway Ti, I need to go, I can’t miss my anime airing you know…”

Ti looked at his watch. He needed to work tomorrow!

Cafe Kizuna

“You look a bit tired today, Ti-chan. Did you manage to sleep well?”

The manager asked when Ti entered the cafe again for the next day's shift.

“It’s nothing manager, some bad nightmares that’s all”

She nodded.

“At least you were here on time, not unlike your colleagues”

The manager looked at the empty chairs where Mariko and Kentarou usually sat.

“Just remember that it can’t affect the guest’s experience right?”

Ti and the other maids started working an otherwise uneventful shift.

Until about an hour for dinner, Mona entered the cafe.

“Can you bring me an omurice please?”

Ti-chan obliged and went to the kitchen to get one.

When he went to deliver it to Mona, she put something small and metallic in her hand.

“Please hide this in the staff room okay? Make sure the two of them are in view”

“Hurry up, she whispered to Ti”

After Ti left for the backroom, he could hear Mona screaming.

“MANAGER! I WANT TO SPEAK THE MANAGER!”

Ti quickly finished hanging up the little device, which looked like a micro camera.

He then returned to the cafe.

“This omurice is cold! It’s disgusting! I am not an animal!”

All the employees had now gathered around Mona who was still screaming.

Ti stepped in and offered to bring a new one.

Mona agreed and the other employees left.

“I finished the job Mona, thank you for the distraction”

Mona winked at him.

She finished the omurice Ti brought her and then left.

“I see you tonight after work at MacDougles, okay?”

Ti nodded, he trusted Mona had come up with a good plan, like how she did in school a while back.

After Ti’s shift was done, Mariko started packing supplies into a trashbag again. But this time, the hidden camera was taping it all. After cleaning up, Ti left the cafe and met up with Mona.

MacDougles

When Ti arrived at MacDougles, Mona was already there, wearing the same disguise as the night before. Across from her sat a gentleman Ti didn’t recognize. He walked up to the table.

“Hello Mona!”

Ti looked at the gentleman.

“And who are you?”

But then, when looking into his eyes Ti suddenly recognized this was no gentleman, but Ei.

Mona and Ei looked into the other's eyes and did a high-five.

“The disguise worked!”

This surprised Ti and he stumbled.

“Ehh.. Ei I mean”

Ei held her finger before her mouth and said in a fake, deep voice.

“Stt.. that’s a secret!”

Mona lightly tabbed the bench next to her.

“Come sit down Ti, we show you something”

Ei rotated her phone towards Ti.

On the phone screen, he could see the cafe’s staffroom, on the other half of the screen there was a view of the dumpster.

“Let me reverse a bit in time”

Ei scrolled her fingers across the screen. She then stopped once Mariko entered the video.

“We have videos of them stuffing the bag and putting him in the trash”

Mona added while smiling.

“Now the only thing we need to do is catch them redhanded”

Ti thanked them for their work.

“And what do we do now Mona?”

Mona sighed.

“... a lot of waiting around”

After they had something to eat at the fast food joint, Ti and Mona waited at the same bench as the day before, wearing their weird disguises.

Ei sat in her car which was parked nearby.

And they waited…

And they waited…

But then, at about the same time as the day before, the car stopped at the alley again.

“Bingo!”

Mona called Ei on her phone.

The car started backing into the alley. When the two of them had opened the container, Ei quickly turned on her car and moved it horizontally before the entrance to the car of the thieves was blocked from leaving. In the meantime, Mona had gone to the front entrance and triggered the alarm. Ti could hear the sirens wailing. He was instructed to wait on the bench until Ei had blocked the entrance, and then confront her colleagues.

With his heart beating a million beats a minute, he wormed himself past Ei’s car and entered the alleyway. He could make up two figures, both wearing hoods covering their faces. They were clearly panicking from the alarm, but with Ei’s car blocking the alleyway, there was nowhere to run.

Ti raised his voice and shouted at the robbers.

“Who are you two?”

The robbers dropped the trash bag and hold up their hands.

“Alright, the gig is up”

A male voice slowly said to the other robber.

He removed this hood and was revealed to be Kentarou, Ti’s coworker.

By now, Mona and Ei had entered the alley and stood next to Ti.

“We caught everything on camera - since the alarms rang the manager will be here any minute”

Mona confidently said to them, while pointing her finger. How could she do all of this with so much confidence?

Kentarou then said with a big smirk on his face.

“Well I have an unexpected surprise for you three”

He moved over to the other robber and pulled up the hood revealing a familiar face.

“Manager?”

Ti was quite confused. He could Mona whisper in his ear.

“Plot twist”

Ti started panicking, he certainly hadn’t expected this. The manager turned out to be all in on this.

“What fools you are, sticking your noses in other people's business like this!”

The manager seemed not amused. She pointed at Ti.

“I thought of you as a perfectly cute decoy, but I guess I underestimated you”

The manager had an evil smile on her face.

“But sadly for you, you weren’t smart enough to see the entire situation here”

“It’s such a shame, if you’d only stick to your instructions…”

The manager seemed to grasp for something under her belt. But before she could, Ti’s eyes were blinded by a bright flash coming from beside her.

“Ahhh!!!”

He could hear Kentarou and the manager scream in agony.

After the flashing stopped, Ti could see both of them had fallen down to the ground. A rod stuck to both of them. The rods let to some strange device Ei was holding. It looked like some kind of taser.

Both Ti and Mona were in awe.

“I’ve always wanted to try this out.”

Ei said enthusiastically, totally unfazed by the situation.

In the distance, Ti could hear the sound of sirens getting louder.

“Sora Tsuchida”

Ei said with a cool voice.

“A soughed-after mobster known for her talent in money laundry”

The manager looked awfully pale.

“How classic, using a maid cafe as a front”

“Who even.. are you?”

The manager stuttered.

“Just a woman with a fake mustache”

Ei laughed.

The police sirens had become a lot louder so Ei grabbed her phone and used it to move her car back to unblock the alley.

The police agents came over and arrested Kentarou and the manager. They handcuffed them and put them in the back of the police car. After that, they thanked Ti, Mona, and Ei for their help.

After the police were gone, Ei offered Ti and Mona a ride home. Ti still couldn’t believe what had happened to them. Had he really been working for mobsters, running a maid cafe as a front? What would become of Cafe Kizuna now, with half of its employees arrested? Ti couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty about it. He shared his thoughts with the others.

“I guess this is the end of Cafe Kizuna…”

Mona patted Ti on the back.

“I know how much it meant to you Ti-Chan.”

“This is like that time I reported a bug in my favorite game and they then took it down…”

Ti sighed, classic Mona.

Ei mixed herself in the conversation.

“I’ll see what I can do for you girls. I think I owe you something after all of this”

“You put us in some real danger here Ei, were they drawing guns?”

Ti asked with a bit of panic in his voice.

“And those tasers… they looked really dangerous, you could have easily hit Ti or me”

“He he, just don’t think about this too much okay?”

“This was just a fun adventure for you guys… just like when you busted me at the conference right?”

“I am still trying to recover from that PR nightmare…”

Ei sarcastically in a sarcastic tone.

“Just take a good rest tomorrow, and I’ll see you later okay?”