spirits_and_such_offices | Recent Entries

Serizawa's fingers trembled as they hovered over his cell phone screen. He bit his lower lip as growing perspiration gathered at either temple. He swallowed, hard enough that he almost felt like he was choking, then pressed the pads of his fingers against the screen.

Have any of you been married before?

His fingers moved nimbly across the screen when he finally built up the resolve to type the words out, but now, his fingers hovered over the Send button just as they had hovered over the screen for a full minute a few moments before.

This time, he punched his pad down before he had the chance to regret it. The message went out to the Claw group chat. Desperate to not think about it any further, he shoved his phone deep into his pocket and went back to working on his homework.

mp_strikinglyblessed

They had hit a lull and Mob was fussing.

Of course it didn’t look like fussing to anyone else, but Reigen was fine-tuned to Mob’s nearly-invisible displays of emotion. A tiny line on his forehead or by his mouth conveyed deep befuddlement, and all of it was aimed at his phone which he hadn’t put down for the last fifteen minutes.

Reigen would have ordinarily been inclined to have him do something more useful with himself, but this was unusual enough that he gave it a few more minutes of observation, glancing up from behind his screen, before saying something.

“Is your phone on the fritz or something?” ’Please say no.’

minegishitoshiki

Minegishi was in the greenhouse. They spent a lot of time there, even when they weren't practicing at using their powers. They felt more comfortable, somehow, being around plants rather than people. Not that they were particularly fond of the people they had surround themselves with.

Minegishi flipped a page int their book, only to glance up as they heard someone approaching. They were hardly surprised when they saw who their visitor was.

"What is it?" they asked. They should probably set their book aside, but they didn't particularly care to. And even if they did, their visitor wouldn't be able to see it anyway. With his eyes, anyway.

mp_simplyacommoner

Shige! Send.

I get the cast removed today ( ◡̀_◡́)ᕤ Send.

my appointment is at 10AM. Send.

um Send.

if you have school off today too... Send.

can you come with me? Send.

mp_npc

Even though it was nearly 6pm, the sun was still relatively high in the sky compared to just the month prior. The days were getting longer and the air was getting warmer. With the heat brought energy--especially in the particular stretch where Teru had asked Mob to meet up. It was in the southeastern district of Seasoning City, an especially dense urban stretch near the freeway bordering on the industrial part of the city.

Factories and and their smokestacks were in the near distance. Workers in uniform were shuffling about with purpose, disappearing in and out of the narrow alleys that snaked through that part of town likes veins. The scent of street food was strong. There was one food stand that Teru asked Mob to wait near in particular, one with especially good yakitori. A gust of wind carried the delicious smokey glazed scent of it--along with laughter and jeers from one of the alleyways just behind Mob.

"Hey, ain't that a Salt uniform?" A boy jeered as his friends formed a loose-but-coordinated semi-circle behind Mob. Their own uniforms were a rusty red with enormously tacky gold buttons down the center.

spiritsandsuchtrainee

Mysterious flickering lights, circuit breakers tripping, and outages were all affecting the Seasoning City metro line for weeks. The trains weren't on time and neither were the people of Seasoning City. Timely bosses who usually chided their salarymen underlings for their tardiness were huffing and puffing as they raced from the subway in a desperate attempt to make it to their desks before the clock ticked down to 8 AM.

They weren't the only ones huffing and puffing, though; Mob and Reigen had chased their target down and cornered him before he could make his way to another train line and the two were exhausted. It was nothing short of a miracle that the two of them had managed to make it to the last train of the night before the doors closed behind them.

Mob collapsed one of the train's empty seats, his damp palms pressed down atop the poly-cotton blend of his gakuran slacks. It was only by sheer miracle that they weren't soaked through. Sweat seemed to be pouring from every pore on Mob's body.

"Sorry," Mob said apologetically. "If I had been faster, we wouldn't have had to do so much running."

mp_simplyacommoner

Hey, I've got a few minutes of downtime Send.

Just let me know when you get here Send.

Do you need directions to the gym? Send.

mp_simplyacommoner

It was 7:50PM. Teru had gotten bored of studying and broke it up with his nightly stretches—he had decided it was going to be an early night to bed. He had already decided he was going to sign up for the next basketball roster and it was offseason practice time.

As it turned out, he couldn’t tolerate a lack of things to do after school for long.

Cooling down from his trunk rotations with some Kamizawa Water, he checked his phone and paused mid-sip. There were a few notifications from Mob that he opened right away. There were a few pictures of what was undoubtedly the long-awaited kaiseki meal…though they were a bit blurry. Oh, one was actually decent in quality. There was also a blurred person in the background of one without much food—even with the lack of clarity it looked like they weren’t expecting to be caught on camera. Had he meant to send that one, let alone take it? Oh well, didn’t matter.

that mukōzuke Send.

( ੭ ˘ ³˘)੭‎°｡⋆♡‧₊˚ Send.

divine looking Send.

mp_strikinglyblessed

Texting was a pretty neat function. It was widely adopted by every teenager except the one he, Reigen, had so generously gifted a phone to do it with. Mob was diligent to a fault about picking up his calls, but texting? Still a work in progress. Mob was getting better, though. After all, how else was Reigen supposed to give him a heads up about big jobs before the end of the school day? Excepting the occasional friendly lunch break chat.

That was of course assuming the phone was still intact. After their chat last night, Reigen wasn't so sure. It wasn't like Mob made a habit of texting him first.

Reigen squinted at the clock on his second-hand laptop he'd just replaced the shattered one with. 12:05PM. He had found a decent deal on one in a flea market but there was something off about the graphics. Parts of the screen were always slightly out of frame and most of his day had been spent trying to uselessly dink with the display options until it was righted, but instead he just ended up with a resolution that was too small.

'Ugh. New laptop, and if we're really unlucky, a new phone? I'll just garnish it...' Reigen pulled out his phone and fired off a text to his pupil. You didn't get washed away, did you? Your phone's still working, right?

mp_npc

God, was there some planet in retrograde right now? Everything was so…gray. Tome usually would have been able to cite a specific planet but she had been too oddly deflated all day to speculate.

At least she wasn’t the worst one off. No, not by far. That honor went to the pompadour’d thug who did nothing but sulk in the corner of their shared club space now. Her own club mates who were always too scared of him to even approach even tried to offer him one of their honey chip bags out of sheer pity. Tome, usually quite stingy with the resources (especially now they didn’t actually have funding anymore) didn’t even object. ‘How the mighty fall.’

Goda had spent some time trying to cheer Onigawara up. That boy was too nice for his own good. Him AND Kageyama. Tome didn’t know what Goda had been trying, exactly, since she was too engrossed in (or rather numbed by) her video game to listen but she could guess. The Body Improvement Club had one solution for every possible human ailment. It was exactly why she didn’t risk complaining today.

Tome glanced at the clock—it was getting to be that time, wasn’t it? The time where everyone finished their club activities up. Ah. Orwell was calling her name once again.

spiritsandsuchtrainee

"Are you okay with this?" Mob sat on a bench with Tome, the head of the Telepathy Club. Mob wasn't part of the Telepathy Club, but he had a good relationship with the members since they shared the room with the Body Improvement Club (which Mob was a part of). So naturally, when Tome aggressively insisted that he help her hunt aliens or telepaths or telepaths that were also aliens, Mob felt like he had no choice to agree.

But unfortunately, despite having four investigative meetings (this one was number five), they had thusfar failed to find anything.

Maybe aliens or telepaths weren't as common as either one of them thought.

"Maybe it'd be better for us to try again later in the year. Maybe aliens visit only during certain seasons." It didn't at all seem implausible to Mob. People always hoped for the weather to be a certain way when they went on vacation. If aliens were even a little like humans, Mob was sure they'd feel the same way when they vacationed on other planets.

mp_strikinglyblessed

'For the site of such a big job, it's surprisingly accessible.' That was what Reigen Arataka thought as he reviewed the map at the train station and he couldn't help but thank his good fortune. It was just a half hour away by bullet train with a straightforward 15 minutes walk through the woods. The more infamous places were usually at least an hour or two away even by train; the mysterious abandoned cabin deep in the forest, the cursed shrine up on the mountain, or what have you.

What was this job? Why, it was big of course--that's what he'd tell anyone who asked. The Shichi-mi Hotel. Of course everyone had heard of it. Hell, even his disciple who was pathologically out of touch knew the name... even he had only heard of it through the grapevine of his occult-obsessed classmates. Mysterious disappearances. Bodies never found. Yep. This one had everything. It still came up as a topic on the supernatural-focused image boards...and all the other completely valid insider's metrics for assessing these things.

His clients were a pair of high schoolers. Girls in their 12th year. They were pretty and well-to-do so it was that much more of a shock when they practically shambled into his office. They'd lost a bet to some of their classmates and that's how they ended up taking the last train to the abandoned Shichi-mi Hotel to stay the night. 'Christ, high schoolers are ruthless,' was Reigen's first thought. Usually this kind of hazing was reserved for your first year of college--girls needing to offload the stress of entrance exams, maybe? Whatever the case was he could tell right away they were sincere in their fear over whatever they went through.

And what was that? What did the stipulations of a high-school bet demand? That was the money-maker.

A single cursed elevator that takes you to another world.

So, that was his job today. Investigate the elevator and purge whatever horror it bore.

Well. His and his disciple's--his disciple who was taking his sweet time getting there.

Reigen pulled out his phone and his quick fingers went to well-worn speed dial button automatically. A few rings and he was patched through. "Hey, Mob, we're about to miss the train. Are you almost here?"