In a bid to make it home before curfew, the four of us had quickly made our way back to the station and rode the train home after our close call. Unsurprisingly, Amai talked our ears off the entire way home, but to be perfectly honest, most of what she said went in one ear and out the other. My mind was a tad occupied.
I really should have thought this through. That's what was on my mind the entire way home. I had gotten carried away in the moment, proud of my deductive reasoning skills, but I was completely failing at the single most important thing I was supposed to do: keep a low profile.
My hubris had already caused me to have to abandon my previous fabricated identities, always drawing attention from the exact thing I was trying to escape. And what do I go and do this time? Throw a rock at the home of the most sought-after individuals in Tokyo. Imbecile.
If Amai tells everyone at school about this - and knowing her, she probably will - it could seriously blow up in my face. I can't afford to gain a reputation as the one who discovered the fabled magical girl secret hideout. I was gonna have to nip this in the bud here and now.
"Hey, Amai, reckon you could do me a huge favour?" I had no option other than to beg the girl herself.
"Hmm? What's up?"
"Reckon you could keep this discovery between the four of us? I don't wanna be known as the one who exposed the magical girl secret hideout. So can we just… keep this a secret?" I held my breath, trying to anticipate her response. Disappointment? Sadness? Complete disregard? I thought up many possibilities. The one I truly didn't expect, however, was…
"Huh? Of course we're keeping it a secret." Amai tilted her head in confusion, then continued when it was clear that she'd taken me by surprise. "We don't wanna be on their bad side, right? Giving out their address and letting loads of people swarm their home would just be mean, and they'd be super upset with us. The fewer people that know, the better. Duh."
That… was incredibly sound logic. In fact, I found myself momentarily reevaluating my perspective on things. I had wanted to hide the information purely to save my own skin, but I didn't even consider the effect that leaking the address would have on the magical girls themselves. The very idea was absurd.
I need to learn to stop underestimating Amai. She's far more socially aware than I give her credit for, and certainly more socially aware than myself.
"Besides, I have plans for how we can use that information to our advantage, hehehehehe."
Or maybe I was right from the start and this girl is a nutcase.
***
"Mai, what the hell is this?"
"A binder."
"Ok, let me rephrase that: why do you have this?"
"Isn't it obvious? So I can find out who that magical girl was!"
Two weeks had passed since the invisible hideout incident, and my anxieties over being found out had eased off. That is, until Amai dragged the rest of us to a small boba tea cafe in downtown Shibuya, to 'discuss something important.' No sooner than we had sat down did she confirm my worst suspicions.
From her bag, she had produced an enormous colour-coded binder filled with files on top of files of personal information on girls from our school. You'd be forgiven for thinking she had stolen the city census.
"It was pretty easy really. All I had to do was take everything we knew about the girl we saw and cross reference all of it with every third-year at the school. The ones marked by the red tabs have one or more features that immediately disqualify them as candidates, such as dyed hair or tanned skin, since we were able to see enough of her to determine basic features like that. Then there's the yellow section, who couldn't be entirely ruled out but seemed unlikely due to less obvious clashes, such as being significantly taller or shorter than average, as well as being outside the healthy weight range. Finally, the green section, the ones I had narrowed down as the most likely candidates. Well? Didn't I do a good job?"
The other three of us looked on at Amai and her ridiculous binder with extremely mixed receptions. Saki, rather unsurprisingly, looked almost as excited as Amai herself. Sunao looked at Amai with a sort of reverence that made my respect for her as "the level headed one" falter for a moment.
I, obviously, was utterly mortified.
"Y'know, Sora, now would be a good time to drop the tsun act and give me the praise I've ear-"
"Mai, this is so not okay." I cut off her bragging and gave her my completely honest opinion, deciding that sugarcoating wouldn't get the message across. "This is an enormous breach of privacy. There's hundreds of third years at the academy, and you compiled and organised personal details of every single one of them without their consent? That doesn't fly, Mai. If people found out about this they'd be livid."
I had known Amai's magical girl obsession ran deeper than anyone else's, but I didn't realise it ran this deep. I've never seen Amai so much as study for a test before. Hell, I'm not sure I've ever seen her read before. And yet she spent hours upon hours of her time documenting every detail of every third year girl in the school? A part of me was genuinely worried for my friend's sanity, and another part was scared of her newly revealed talent for information gathering.
"I… I didn't mean to violate their privacy…" I winced a bit as Mai's ecstatic expression quickly turned to disappointment and a twinge of hurt. "Everything I have here is public information, it just took some combing through the school's database. I thought it would be okay…"
She suddenly seemed very dejected, my scolding seeming to have soured her mood. Perhaps my words were too harsh. I hadn't intended to hurt her feelings, just to exercise a little tough love.
"So long as you're just taking easily findable information, I guess there's no harm done. But still, having a binder with the information of hundreds of teenage girls in it makes you look like a total serial killer, and with what's been going down recently that's not a look you want to have." Mai and Saki both titled their heads at me, seemingly both completely unaware of what I was referring to.
"You mean… the Toukyouto disappearances? The ones that have been on the news recently?" Sunao seemed to catch on to what I was alluding to. At her words, a lightbulb seemed to switch on in Saki's brain for once too.
"Ohhhh, yeah, I heard about that. Bunch of girls at Toukyouto High went missing all at once, right? I heard they still haven't found them. Weird to think about stuff happening to girls our age." The usually perky Saki had a sombre expression. Then again, it was a sombre topic of discussion.
Yes, high school girls at a neighbouring school seemed to be turning up missing at random recently. The press didn't specify the exact number, but they did say that none have been found yet. All things considered, it was a grim thing to think about.
"…I guess you're right. Sorry, I should have thought it through more." Mai's expression had also darkened quite a bit. However, her smile at least partially returned as she flicked to the very back page of the binder. "But on the bright side, I'm pretty sure I've found our girl. Have a look-see, ladies."
The other three of us all leaned in to read the file, even myself falling to the curiosity of what Mai's prime suspect was like.
Appearance-wise, she seemed to be very average in almost every aspect. Black hair, average height, average weight, average skin tone for a Tokyo kid. I hate to say it, but it's incredibly impressive that Amai was able to narrow down her search so much when the one she was searching for had such common features.
The rest of her file also had nothing particularly exceptional, except for a short note about her winning silver at a regional archery competition. Quite impressive, and would coincide with the bow-wielding magical girl team, Tranquil Arrow. However, the thing that really caught my eye was…
"Aya Shiko… now I see why she's your prime suspect."
"Ahh, you've a good eye. As expected of you, Sora." Mai gave me a thumbs up and a grin, though I'm pretty sure she's mostly proud at her own work and is just glad I'm recognising it.
"Aya… that's the name the other girl said at the invisible hideout, right?" Saki had also caught on, and the four of us all looked between each other, silently affirming our opinions. This girl was almost definitely the target.
"Okay, so we've figured out who she is. What do we actually… do with that information?" I asked the question, but I had a bad feeling that I already knew the answer.
"We meet her and ask her to introduce us to the other magical girls, of course!" Amai immediately confirmed my anxieties.
"Honestly, Sora, I thought you'd figure that out on your own." Saki rubbed salt in the wound without an ounce of self awareness.
"It-It does sound like it could be fun…" said Sunao, going along with what Saki wanted. Again.
"Hate to burst your bubble, guys, but we don't know where to find this girl outside of school. And we can't exactly walk up to her in a crowded hallway and say 'hey, we're big fans of your carefully hidden secret identity, can you show us into your highly secretive invisible hideout?' in front of the entire school, can we?" I was hoping those words would be enough to dissuade them, but my swift disappointment was hardly even a surprise.
"Worry not, dear Goto, because I have devised a plan!"
"That's never a good sign."
"I'll ignore that. Y'see, after I decided on Shiko-san as the target, I looked a little more into her, and gathered this."
No, unfortunately my eyes were not deceiving me. Amai did, in fact, pull a second binder filled with personal information out of her school bag. This one filled with only information about Aya Shiko.
"I got a lot of useful information from my sources. For example, she often leaves the train alone at Ginza, her walk home from the train station is reasonably long and quiet, and she lives alone with her mother. She's actually half an inch shorter than school data suggests, she currently intakes about 1400 calories a day, and her three sizes ar-"
"Ooookay, I think we get the point, Mai. But, how exactly did you obtain all of this information?" There was way too much in here for her to have simply used legitimate publicly available information like the school website.
"Uhhh… a good friend of mine knows Shiko-san, so I asked her about it?"
"Which 'good friend' would that be?"
"Uhhh… Nakayoshi?"
"Your good friend… Nakayoshi…"
"Y-yeah! Yuu… Nakayoshi…" she trailed off as she realised her bluff wasn't working.
"…you stalked this girl, didn't you?"
"It was not stalking! It was information gathering! Private investigation, a completely legal and legitimate practice! I won't accept this libel to my name, Miss Goto!"
"Libel is written, slander is spoken. And you're not a PI."
"Okay, okay, fine, maybe I did some light stalking. But it was for you guys too! I want all of us to get to meet real magical girls! My intentions were pure, honest!"
I put my palm in my face. I'll have to teach this girl what 'pure' means at some point.
"I'm gonna have to apologise to this girl to her face for your actions, you weirdo."
"I'm not a weirdo, you ass! Wait, to her face? Does that mean…"
"Yeah, yeah, I'll hear your plan out. Mainly because I know you'll do it without me otherwise, and I don't like the idea of you three getting into trouble."
"Yesssss! Sora, I love you!" She looked positively giddy that I was willing to hear her out. Still, if I get to hear that every time I entertain her absurd ideas, maybe I should try being a little more open minded with her. "Anyway, ladies, listen closely. The plan is simple."