After climbing into his car and laying back in the chair for a few seconds, Elric pulled out his phone to start up a music playlist.
The first tab that appeared were demos that he had been working on with Ember, but most of them had barely been started.
Instead of listening to them in the car, he clicked over to a new tab.
'Hm, something happy for the ride would be nice. We'll go with some of the more upbeat stuff from a few decades ago.'
After putting on an older playlist that he'd heard his father listen to many times in the past, Elric left the parking lot and started driving home.
His head nodded along with the beat, and a small smile started to form on his face.
'Hah, back-to-back classics, and today has been productive, too!'
Elric turned onto one of the main streets, and his vision was immediately met with blaring red and blue lights.
Tearing through the darkening sky and slowing all of the surrounding traffic, a small cluster of emergency vehicles gathered around an accident.
'Hmm??'
Elric leaned forward in the driver's seat, craning his head to see out of the side window just a bit sooner. He didn't need to worry about driving too fast to see the accident, as the traffic next to it was barely idling along.
'Well well well. I guess Pops wasn't messing around when he said that little weighted chain was dangerous.'
The protagonist of the slow traffic and flashing lights was none other than the NexRu company van- the same one Angeline took to the bar to sing.
From the cleanup progress, it looked like ambulances had already evacuated the occupants of the vehicle.
The agency van looked to have veered off the road at a random spot, running the curb and crashing into a sturdy brick clothing store.
Elric wasn't sure how, but the crash had ended with the performance van on its side.
'Nice, I doubt any random people got injured by this.'
Elric's grin grew a bit as he passed by the accident.
He wasn't worried about the cops finding the weighted chain he had planted on the car's front left wheel. It was designed to look almost the exact same as a car part, and no one but a mechanic might recognize it to not be a native part of the car.
It would've gone flying during the collision, along with random parts of the car.
Accidents were messy.
'And even if someone did figure out the cause of the accident, I doubt they could successfully trace that thing back to me.'
It was the perfect way to get rid of a bothersome rival or pesty competitor.
The weighting chain would almost always cause an accident. If the driver managed to recover from the imbalance it caused, they would almost always overcorrect and send their car shooting off into the ditch, or in this case, into a brick building.
'I'll have to look for any news after I get home.'
Just as Elric passed by the accident and the traffic finally started to speed up, the song switched to one of his father's favorites.
The young man spent the rest of the ride bopping his head to old beats.
-
-
Time passed quickly, and soon it was the morning before Ember would be coming back for the start of the school semester. Elric had also spent some time preparing for his classes, as well as working on the mission that Eria had posted a few days previously.
He already had a computer and knew how to access all of the local area school databases, so it was fairly easy for him to find each school's track rosters.
When he saw that all 10 of the possible quest slots had been filled, Elric decided to go all out and spent tens of hours compiling a comprehensive analysis of each and every promising track runner he saw.
It was surprisingly easy to find info. Social media sites generally allowed searches for names, and a lot of people overshared online. Even if the runner themself wasn't one to share their entire life online, Elric could bet that there was at least one person close to them that would leak some info.
After compiling a list, he sent it over to the undercover girl. She thanked him for his hard work, and after a day, $200 arrived in his account. The other people who participated would also be taking a cut of the offered money, but it seemed that Elric had managed to provide more detailed or different info than some of them, and he ended up with a larger-than-average cut.
Elric was more than happy with the split, as it gave him ample money to purchase a gift for Ember.
He could distinctly remember her staring at a certain object of his a few times when she woke him up, and it gave him the perfect idea for a gift.
'Heh heh… I can't wait to see her face when I give her this! Now, she'll have to think of me every time before she goes to sleep!'
Peliston was out for business with the car, so Elric was forced to call for a cab.
The same driver showed up, in yet another different car.
After motioning for him to climb into the back, the driver made an exaggerated look around.
"Get dumped? Should've taken the chance when you were in the back of my car."
Elric's face curled in disgust, and he ignored the driver. When the man heard his directional instructions, though, he glanced back and smirked.
"Hmm, I see. It looks like there's nothing for you to regret, then."
-
-
Inside a brightly lit store, Elric held up the prospective gift.
"Hmm… I'm not too sure. I kinda wanted to get a color matching mine."
A salesman standing to his side nodded, then grabbed a different item from a shelf.
"How about this, then? It should roughly match what you described to me."
Elric nodded as he took the new item into his hands.
"Mm, I think this is the one, my girlfriend will love it!"
Deep down, though, Elric still had some misgivings about the gift.
'It's a bit bigger than mine… What if she makes fun of me because of it?'
After a few moments of thinking, Elric shook his head. Ember was way too nice and innocent to do something like that.
"Alright, I'll take it. Please bag it up for me, there's a perverted taxi driver waiting out there, and he'll definitely say something strange."
'Ember should be back soon. I'll rush home with her gift, I can't wait to see her reaction!'