Web of light. Part 1-7

And, of course, on Saturday, a young psychologist from the screening committee wanted to settle there — she liked the office.

Interlude 16. Suzuhara Mikuru, a psychologist from the Social Committee. Junior secondary school number 209

Suzuhara was very worried, because today was her first day working with children — before that, she had mostly been acting as a secretary. Despite the recommended specialized education and the fact that she was a second-generation magician, having been born to two weak magicians accepted into the Jinguji clan, she was released "into the field" only when the branch was checked by an inspection from the central office of the Social Committee. Identifying disguised spirits is her job, and eliminating the effects of contact with spirits in ordinary people. The education of a psychologist was required to erase or change the episode of the meeting between yokai and the man in the latter's memory. Often it didn't even require magic — a small conversation, and the victim himself believes not in supernatural causes, but in a combination of circumstances.

But Mikuru was taken care of in the department — with her wave of brown hair, fragile figure and big naive eyes, they were afraid to let her go to real work... and they did it right. But because of the stupid commission for work with schoolchildren and students, everyone was torn away from chairs and "solitaire". The emergency as it is.

While the school commission was checking something about chemical reagents and whispering with the chemistry teacher, the streams were driven one by one to the assembly hall... and the hellish work began. Children! Who came up with the idea of catching "atypical behavior" in this fumbling, whispering crowd of sitting "chickens"? It's good that their inspection included as many as three psychologists... and that the commission, by a strong-willed decision, rejected the verification of flows under ten years of age. And they will also listen to the lecture on the school broadcast.

As a result, the lecture turned into a real torture for Mikuru — try to see who in the sea of heads... Even if there are only ninety people, it's all the same. In the end, Suzuhara just ignored the observations and decided to call on the list. And to start with the "difficult" boys. The boys were called one at a time, and she was pretty exhausted trying to get the teenagers to talk-shy of strangers, class, and surroundings... and a pretty-looking girl. About kami, to question children again during puberty... The horror!

After ushering the last "problem" out the door and looking at the clock, Suzuhara discovered that it was already four o'clock in the afternoon. And she decided to launch the girls en masse.

"...You're kidding me! Mikuru thought, looking around at the customers. "Or someone at the top of the school hates girls with glasses." The three visitors were in uniform, wearing glasses and about the same build, only the hairstyles were radically different. And they didn't look like any kind of "fuses", rather, on the contrary, they looked like "nerds".

"I wonder if this is a chauvinist director who hates smart women, or did the head teacher try her best?"

The girls greeted each other, introduced themselves, and sat in a semicircle on chairs that had been pulled out in advance, and Mikuru began to "talk." She was also haunted by one of the students' last names, but she couldn't figure out which one. After quickly "driving through" the topic of "blowing up is bad" and making sure that the topic of the students was not interested in any way, Suzuhara habitually turned to the topic of domestic violence. And that's when she got sick!

Kaname saw nothing wrong with domestic coercion, considering it an integral part of life. The looks are more like those of a cynical middle-aged woman, but to hear such a thing from an eleven-year-old? It's a nightmare!

Chidori treated violence evenly: it was bad, and she planned to "stop" it towards herself. She said this with such cold indifference that the impressionable Mikuru immediately formed the image of a little girl with a scythe, right in her school uniform from a rooftop position "suppressing" violence with a sniper rifle. The "picture" turned out to be so organic that it's just awful!

As for Yu, she said that she does not consider domestic violence as such, but only unreasonable attempts to impose her opinion. Because reasonable attempts can be not only not harmful, but even the only true one. And she told she a couple of cases from the history of plane crashes. "Was she looking for them on purpose?" — poor Suzuhara broke out in a cold sweat, listening to the distraught Yu, who climbed onto her second favorite hobby, "flying". The psychologist, as already mentioned, did not complain about the lack of imagination.

Feverishly scribbling five pages in her notebook, Mikuru was already considering whether to immediately call her parents to the committee or first submit an official petition to the joint commission on schools of the city, when the most short-haired girl got up from her chair. She stretched. She looked at Suzuhara with a satisfied smile. And, addressing the other girls, she said:

"I still lost to my mom! She said that Mikuru-chan would definitely attack me, you, and Shizuka with a long diagnosis, and I thought she would recognize me right away."

"From... How do you know me?!" the psychologist jumped up and, bumping into the girl's cold squint, shuddered.

"Mi-ku-ru... san. Did my last name remind you of anyone? Perhaps, for some reason, it looks like the name of the head of the IT service? Hmm, probably because I'm his daughter..."

And then Suzuhara remembered. The Kaname couple repeatedly attended the Committee's corporate events (as is customary for employees, they brought their "soulmates" — after all, the Social Committee was and remained a fairly closed organization). It was this woman, Kaname, who, having slightly taken on her breasts and hooked tongues with Mikuru, first made her believe in a conversation that an experienced contract killer was sitting in front of her, at least an international terrorist, and maybe Saddam Hussein, who had deep facial and chest surgery. And then, in the same five minutes, she proved that you need to be able to interpret facts using completely truthful words and that generally accepted positions are not always correct. And now, slowly breaking out in a cold sweat, she peered into the familiar squint her daughter had taken over from her mother.

"Let's start with that," Kaname said in the tone of an experienced psychologist, "First of all, Mikuru-san, you needed to clarify the information about the parents and the occupation of the subjects themselves. For example, the tranquility of the Sidz... Chidori is related to the fact that she has a lot of martial arts experience and can really fight back in case of violence. What's not scary isn't fearfull, is it? Well, you probably guessed about me, but the fact that Yu's father worked as a test pilot is probably news to you? It's simple, isn't it? I'll have to tell Dad to print out the report on our school and give it to Mom to read-that's it..."

Then Mikuru's nerves broke down, and she did something that violated two points of the instructions of the Social Committee at once.:

Then Mikuru's nerves broke down, and she did something that violated two points of the instructions of the Social Committee at once:

First, she used magic, casting an area spell on the girls, which discourages "fast" memory for the last fifteen minutes. It was quite an overload for her weak gift, but the girl still had experience...

And secondly, she stormed out of the classroom without even bothering to make sure if the spell had worked or not... and why rays of light are hitting the ceiling from a plastic parody of a medieval goblet.

Luckily for Mikuru, she was the only magician in the entire delegation... and, unfortunately, she didn't know that Hiroe's compact camera was snuggled behind the neat pots, from which the shorn-haired woman was already pulling out a mini CD.

"Don't worry. And he won't write a report either — such a slip in front of outsiders!" Hiroe stroked the disk. I bet a couple thousand yen, if Yuto brings this to the Social Committee, one lovely psychologist will just be buried... to the archive, to scan the papers until the end of days. By the way, can you explain why you did this?"

"I don't like it when people try to mess with someone's brain... And it's so rude, you know!"

"Er... was it magic?" Yu finally managed to get out of herself. "Have you seen it too?"

"Have you seen what?" Kaname batted her eyelashes innocently.

"We're not magicians," Shizuka continued to match her tone, and the girls nodded to Yu, took the camera and left the door.

For a while, Shimomuro tried to put the events in her head, then for another fifteen minutes she tried to decide whether it was her imagination or the fountain of light was really there. She spent another ten minutes telling herself not to look at the goblet, but she did. Of course, there was no powder there, just a black coating on the walls. And all the way home, Yu was thinking hard, is it good if magic really exists, or should she close the club from sin and focus on flying? Doesn't the school have an airplane modeling and piloting club?

Part 25.

Chapter 118

Honestly, I expected a relatively large but provincial city from Polytech, a picture I knew from business trips "there" — small cozy buildings, everything is drowning in greenery, students are in no hurry (if not a session)... But it seemed — I got somewhere in the Moscow StanKin (Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys)! Three twenty-storey academic buildings, hangars, a huge area for crowded Japanese cities for its own small park and sports area. There is a separate exhibition pavilion building — I shouldn't have gone to the exhibition with the guys in the spring. The buildings are gleaming with glass trim, and students are wandering around the park and the area between the buildings in couples and groups, sitting and hurrying. Someone is clearly learning something. Damn it! What is everything... dear!

"There" I really spent "half my life" in such places, if you count only my conscious age. First higher education, postgraduate studies. Work as a laboratory assistant. An unsuccessful PhD (or rather, an unsuccessful research assistant). The second highest, I've already taken over. New scientific work... which is why I got here. There was everything — I worked as a subordinate in the hospital, and adjusted experimental machines at the factory, I even had to become an employee of an LLC on a part-time basis with a free schedule, which makes and installs alarms with special functions (such as covering extended perimeters with laser emitters "at the intersection" or volume/weight sensors to organize an electronic analogue of the legendary "strip" from the loosened soil on the border). This particular job was especially informative in terms of communicating with people — from locksmiths and drunken electricians who put up two months of work before handing over the facility (and it still needs to be handed over in an hour!), to communicating with customers (as a technical consultant to determine how much it will cost), then in uniform, either in suits for my two annual salaries in the lab (and do it like a pond with ducks, since you're going to dig a hole anyway), or ordinary men whose garage cooperative is being robbed every day.

At second glance, the Japanese university differed from the Russian one somewhat more strongly — less noise, students sitting right on the floor, or even lying down (!), some — right on a specially dragged sleeping bag (!!!), but at the same time — more identical clothes, although there is no uniform. Many have T-shirts with the university or faculty logo. The shrine to the "spirits of reason", with smoking incense sticks, paper amulets and notes like "successful retake of the assembler test", which was also completely demolished right in the corridor of the department of computer science. о_О! By the way, judging by the notice on the door, the transfer is just underway. Rino-sensei, after rereading the inscription after Taizo and me, convulsively shrugged his shoulders, lit and stuck a new incense stick into the stand, prayerfully folding his hands. Wow, is this already a "holy place" for more than one generation? Yeah!

The Department of Precision Engineering was hiding at the far end of the corridor on the 12th floor, where we finally got after ten minutes of a confusing route. For some reason, all the buildings of educational institutions larger than schools seem to be an analogue of the Cretan labyrinth at first glance. Great. My seven-kilogram backpack has already weighed down my shoulders, not counting the laptop bag in my hands: again, I forgot about my not-so-old age... But he didn't dare to use magic. Even then, after the battle, when I saw that all the structures of the ferry had simply disappeared, I was pretty shocked... and I postponed finding out the reasons for later — there was no time for that. But then... It was a good thing it was a small storage device. It's good that I chose a place in the skin of the abdomen for its implementation, under which there is no fat layer... And it's good that I sleep on my back. The burn hurt a lot. However, Mizuchi brought him to me after all... with a loud hiss and comments about where I was thinking: after all, in order to overload the protection of my amulet, she had to fully unleash her aura and put her strength into a full-fledged combat blow that could cut an elephant. At the same time, the protection of the house was checked — Rinko was looking outside through glasses.

What it cost me to prepare everything in five days — it's better not to even think about it. Of course, it's not about protecting spirits from spirits, and it's not as stressful as taking a vassal oath, but everything had to be done "quickly to make it work." Suffice it to say that we completed the last details on Friday at school at ten o'clock in the evening. If it was still somehow familiar to me, then Taizo was just nervous. Well, yes, it's useful — it's better to start a "collision" with the "adult" world carefully in advance...

I liked the head of the department — a world-class man, with his own mind, of course, a stocky Japanese man with the figure of a sumo wrestler and the intelligence of a chess player. After talking with Rino-sensei for a while, he switched to us. He began to ask, unobtrusively pushing for revelations, who encouraged us to do such interesting things, are school teachers really? I had to come up with a trump card:

"Goro-san, nowadays almost any information, especially if you don't need to search for complete information, is easy to find online. The main thing is curiosity and the desire to do something, as Rino-sensei teaches us (a bow to sensei, who really blurted out something like that a year ago). May I demonstrate? Thanks! Taizo, help me!"