Then he nudged his daughter a little, who took a step forward and bowed, saying in Japanese, " Thank you very much! Yui is my best friend! "
I felt much better about reciprocating the gesture with her, compared to the Tyger Claw goons last night, and said, "Oh, I'm very glad she was rescued then." And I was; it made me feel a lot better, that what I had done was not only necessary but came to a good conclusion.
Mr Jin shooed his daughter off, who left after giving me another large smile. I supposed he wanted to talk business. He said, "I can't thank you enough. They have been friends since she was a toddler. What can I do to repay you?"
In a different person, I would have felt that was a semi-rhetorical question, but I thought he was being very literal. I had already thought about this, I didn't need just money, and honestly, I didn't really need anything right now. Not in a pressing way, so instead I asked, "If you don't mind, how about a favour in the future?"
He scrunched his face up in consideration, but it didn't take him long to nod, "I can't say that whatever you ask for will be fulfilled, but I will do my best to see that it is. Is that good enough?"
"Of course, I won't ask for the world, but I can't help but think that a favour from your organisation might be worth a lot more than just some extra money," I told him, honestly.
He chuckled, "I agree. You'll probably have her father come around to thank you himself, as well. Maybe not today, but this week sometime. He is something of a peer to me, and he manages a couple of hundred people in... well, I guess you would say more traditional activities." Traditional gang activities? Probably street-level Tyger Claws, then.
We spoke a little more before he apologised about having pressing issues to attend to and excused himself.
I was interested in this girl's father owing me a favour. I'd know who to call if I ever needed someone rubbed out, then!
Oh, who was I kidding? If I wanted someone killed, I'd probably be invested in doing it myself.
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Absolutely nothing will go wrong!
"Run for your lives! It's Boom Girl!" cried one frantic man, a civilian who turned and started running away. He would call the police if he got out of my sight; it was just how this worked, so I frowned and narrowed my eyes behind my mask. Then, before he could get too far, a small explosion went off right in front of his face, causing a grievous wound and making him slump over and start gurgling grossly, so I sent a couple of more wasps over to finish him off with subsequent explosions.
I didn't like the name the NPCs, and a few players had given me, but I suppose it was my own fault for not picking out my own "cape name" before I got well-known. It was just that the number of appropriately heroic names for bug controllers was limited. And, if I was being honest, I wasn't exactly playing the hero role anymore. That hadn't lasted too long. I ended up joining Total Terror, but lately, I have been playing with Ruslan and Jean, who told me they played this same game as well.
I had gone in a weird direction with my powers. As you got better with them, you could develop them along certain paths; for example, I could have strengthened the number of total insects I could control, or I could have worked down a path so that I could control larger animals, as well as about a dozen different paths of advancement that the game's AI developed independently for each power. How the game managed to be balanced at all was a wonder, and honestly, parts of it were not. Although there was pretty much always guaranteed to be a way to counter certain powers, you weren't anywhere near guaranteed to have that counter be available to you, so some types of powers, especially Brute ones, ran roughshod, especially in the earlier parts of the game.
However, I worked down a path where I could issue commands to single insects. I didn't, obviously, have the multi-tasking ability to do so simultaneously, but the game gave me assistive technologies like; for example, I could set up control groups for certain insects and could issue a command to the total group or just one insect in the group, I could even give certain commands with some preconditions — and I assume it used a simple AI to assist me in this. For example, "attack anyone who attacks me" was a command I always gave my wasps.
After that, I spent most of the rest of my power points on an interesting passive ability. It seemed useless at first and was very inexpensive to buy, but it was a passive buff to the ability of any minions had on their carry weight. It wasn't a bonus to their strength they could use in combat, just how much they could carry. Eventually, it got to the point where my wasps could carry twenty grams of weight and still be as fast as they were normally. This was a lot of weight since a wasp weighed much less than a gram in the first place.
I, of course, used this weight to put twenty grams of high-explosives on each wasp. The game engine saw what I was trying to do and thought about it for a while before converting any wasp I did this to a differently named "Wasp (Hymenboomtera)" creature. This was great because I didn't even need to include things like a detonator or anything; the wasps could explode on command, which was not realistic at all. It wasn't realistic, but it was very fun.
World of Heroes was set in the late 1980s timeline. I assumed this was selected so that they could keep it much easier to simulate, as there were a lot fewer computers at this time. There were simulated computers, and as far as I knew, they even ran something similar to the operating systems that were common in the eighties, but their processing power was minimal-things like spreadsheets, word documents, and clunky command lines.
As a result of the era, though, all I had access to was regular plastic explosives, not the more serious metallic-based explosives that could be made in the 2060s, but that was still sufficient. Twenty grams of high explosives wasn't a lot; in fact, a hand grenade had over seven times that amount. But twenty grams exploding right by your eyeballs? It was sufficient. Especially considering I usually had at least two thousand wasps surrounding me most of the time.
And that's how I got my name. I wasn't sure if it was one of the players or the NPCs, but now I would see articles in the newspaper with headlines such as, "Boom Girl strikes again!" It was a little annoying, as I had finally settled on the cape name "Ephemeral," based on the fleeting nature and beauty of explosions, but I got stuck with "Boom Girl."
As I sent a couple dozen or so wasps to crowd near where I knew the hinges would be on the other side of the armoured door, but then I jumped in surprise as Ruslan's character sidled up to my side. In the game, he had a seriously overpowered ability; it was a Stranger power. It made it so people would not recognise him as a threat, almost until he attacked them. NPCs could see him attack someone else, and they would assume he had a good reason or that it was a misunderstanding. It was very similar to the power that I thought Nice Guy, a famous serial killer villain in my old world, had.
Obviously, it couldn't work that way on players, so instead, it just changed his avatar into a different one if you lost line of sight on him, and it wasn't random either; it usually picked an NPC avatar that you would be unlikely to want to attack, like a policewoman in this case. It also always made him look like he wasn't carrying a weapon, even if he was, so he could walk up to a player, pointing a pistol at their head, and they wouldn't know as the game faked plausible arm and hand motions, although always with empty hands. It was a really strong power with how long he had spent levelling it up, especially against NPCs. It was strong enough that the NPCs hadn't ever given him a nickname because they mostly never realised he was there.
"You ready?" he asked, his voice not sounding right from a small Asian woman's body. I guessed he hadn't gotten his power to the point where it mimicked different voices, as I was sure that was an option.
I nodded, though, "Yes." The big issue with my power was that I used up explosives and wasps every time I used my ability. I had lots of areas in the city to get wasps, and thankfully for game-balance reasons, they all froze in time when I was logged off, acting like they were in my inventory, but explosives were a bit harder to get. That's why we were raiding the National Guard armoury today. Ruslan could usually use his ability to steal small things with impunity, but we were taking a truckload today. Literally, we had already stolen the military truck.
He wanted a lot of explosives, too, as he wanted to see if he could sneak in enough explosives, a little at a time, to blow up the equivalent of the local Protectorate headquarters, which was in a skyscraper downtown. I didn't think it would work, personally, and even if it did, they would have it repaired in a week, but he wanted bragging rights.
Jean's ability was a pretty straightforward Brute power, and it made him super strong and pretty much invulnerable unless these guys had a Carl Gustav. He was going to run through the door as soon as I "opened it." I made a stylish flourish, and the door to the armoury blew off its hinges.
We ended up stealing over two tons of explosives and automatic weapons, but we almost got caught by a responding hero. Thankfully, it was an NPC Hero, and while Jean and I were hiding behind a wall from the hero incinerating us with some sort of pyrokinetic ability, which unfortunately cooked any of my wasps that got near, Ruslan casually walked next to him and shot him in the head with a fifty calibre anti-material rifle.
Once we got away clean, I logged off and got dressed in one of my semi-professional outfits. Mr Jin wanted me to go to his office to meet his friend, whose daughter I had helped save. It had taken a week, after all. Apparently, he wasn't out of the country and couldn't fly back until a couple of days ago, and after that, he spent his time with his daughter. Not unreasonable, I thought.
Leaving my apartment, I walked the short distance to Clouds and was let in unescorted to Mr Jin's office. It seemed like I was becoming more of a fixture there. Knocking on the door, he bid me to enter, and I saw him, not behind his desk, and sitting on a couch in the corner of his large office next to another Japanese man who looked about his age; they were clearly in the middle of laughing when I walked in, several cans of empty beer on the coffee table in front of them.
I raised an eyebrow; it was clear these two were friends. "Taylor, Taylor! Come, sit! This is Kobayashi Daiki, Yui's father. Sorry, we go way back and have been looking back on old times."
I looked at the new man as I walked over to a comfortable chair catty-corner to them. He didn't precisely look like what I was expecting a manager of a bunch of gangsters to look like. He was in casual but high-quality clothes, not the suit that Mr Jin was wearing, and he didn't have flashy hair or jewellery. Before I could sit down, he rose up and held out his hands and grabbed mine, saying, "Ryuichi told me what you did, I can't thank you enough for helping save Yui-chan. She's all I have!"
I felt a little uncomfortable. Honestly, I didn't think they would have been successful at extracting the data that I had done, even if they had secured the support of one of the better surgeons in the city. The brain drive was designed to resist such efforts. It was possible I was wrong, but in either case, I didn't really want to make a big deal out of it. I nodded, "Of course. I was able to help a little bit, but I imagine it was your people who did all the heavy lifting."
He seemed to realise what I was saying and didn't push it too much further than that, letting me sit down. Mr Jin was smiling and said, "Kobayashi here is an honest-to-goodness Miyadaiku, so he actually has to travel extensively for his job. He wasn't able to come back until the day before yesterday. Otherwise, he'd have seen you sooner."
At first, I was expecting that unfamiliar word to mean assassin or something, but the auto-translate system subtitled the word as "traditional Japanese carpenter." Wait, what? When Mr Jin had said this man was involved in "traditional activities," I had an entirely different idea in mind. I brought up a screen with an encyclopedia article about Japanese carpentry while I floundered a bit, "Uhh... when you said traditional activities, I thought you meant traditional Tyger Claw activities..." I stammered out and continued, "I was expecting him to have a crew of two hundred leg breakers or something. Surely there can't be that much demand for traditionally built shrines and the like in North America that he would need a team of two hundred... right?"
From what my encyclopedia said, traditional Japanese carpentry used a lot of interesting joineries that minimised or entirely eliminated the need for fasteners like nails or glue. I guessed because while trees were pretty common in ancient Japan, iron was not. It looked very complicated and pretty labour-intensive, and I thought that the only reason it might still be done was aesthetic and bragging reasons by the ultra-rich. Certainly, today, the bottleneck would be wood and not metal fasteners.
Mr Kobayashi laughed heartily at my misapprehension and shrugged, "I mean, I did a little bit of that in the past, and it's true we have a number of no-show jobs for our brothers or sisters who just got out of the system, the ones who have a parole officer anyway." Well, he was just quite up front, now, wasn't he?
He chuckled, "But you'd be surprised at the demand for traditional architecture; I have been working non-stop in Pacifica and Watson lately... high-end tea rooms, mostly, but you're right. I only have about twenty actual helpers and apprentices. I guess I'm also a supervisor of a number of more legitimate businesses that we run, as well." He just shrugged, "It is what it is."
I looked at him oddly and let something pop out of my mouth that I immediately regretted, "Don't you ever feel bad for all the terrible things the Tyger Claws do?"
Mr Jin blinked, surprised, but instead of seeming offended, instead, he seemed amused.
"Uh, not really. Not in the way you seem to be implying, anyway. There are a lot of things that I believe we shouldn't be involved with, but as a whole, I think we're doing much better than the alternative," Mr Kobayashi said quickly and looked at me as if I was a little weird. Then he shrugged and asked, "Who do you suppose is our, the Tyger Claws, biggest competitor?"
I tilted my head to the side, glad I hadn't offended him at least. "The Valentinos are the biggest gang in the city," I said, curious as if the answer was obvious.
