by Nisioisin
Nothing, some people would say, it just wasn’t something you did to your little sisters.
“Y-Your good parents?”
“Well, that’s a very polite way of putting it… No, my good parents are also out, that is, at work. Holidays, summer break─their jobs don’t have anything to do with those things. By which I mean they don’t have any of those things.”
“R-Really… Th-Then it’s just the two of us today, Big Brother Koyomi.”
“Hm? Well, since you put it that way, yeah, it’s just the two of us. Something wrong with that?”
“Of course not. Teeheeheeheehee,” Sengoku giggled adorably.
Finally.
Huh, I guess she was so tense because she was worried about my parents─other people’s parents are definitely a source of tension, that’s for sure.
I’d had a hell of a time with Senjogahara’s dad, and even if we don’t bring that in, I did run away from Sengoku’s mother. And while I’m totally used to it now, to the point that I’ll go hang out with them even when Kanbaru isn’t there, at first her grandparents made me nervous too.
“Well, first off, welcome, Sengoku.”
I poured juice into the two glasses I’d set out, and handing one to Sengoku, we started off with a toast.
“Y-Yeah! Nadeko is welcome, Big Brother Koyomi! Cheers! Happy birthday!”
“…”
My birthday’s in April.
003
“I see… It’s all taken care of. Nice, phew.”
Naturally, I couldn’t share everything about what had happened with the swindler, but as we ate our snacks and drank our juice, I told Sengoku everything she needed to know.
It seemed to give her peace of mind.
She was relieved─that is, it was probably a real load off her mind. Which made sense, seeing as her involvement with the case had gone one step further, one step deeper than any of the other middle school girls who were affected.
Thanks to Oshino─and also thanks very much to Kanbaru─she hadn’t gotten sucked in any further than that, but I’m sure she hadn’t been able to rest easy until just now.
“Maybe not ‘all’─from my perspective it’s got kind of a bitter aftertaste, it’s gray─or something,” I mused. “It’s a hazy, or a middle-of-the-road resolution.”
“But nothing else bad is going to happen?”
“Right… In that sense, I guess it can’t be beat.”
Though I wasn’t sure if it couldn’t be beat, or if we just couldn’t beat it.
Not sure in the slightest.
This might be a pessimistic attitude, or a straight-up negative one depending on how you look at it, but either way, in so far as things weren’t going to get any worse, a resolution was a resolution.
No, a resolution is a resolution, full stop─my little sisters got too big for their britches and got caught with their pants down, but I was never involved in the first place. Why should the peanut gallery have anything to say about it?
No one likes a backseat driver.
Holding this little victory celebration might’ve been ridiculous, when you get right down to it, but ignoring that little quibble─just that loathsome swindler leaving our town called for a toast, for me personally.
We’d made him promise never to show his face in our town again─so “when you get right down to it,” that alone was reason enough to throw one hell of a party.
“You said Tsukihi and Karen are ‘mopping up,’ but…hashtag how do you think it’s going?”
“Hashtag?”
Were we on Twitter?
I’d associated her more with Twister than Twitter…
“Oh, sorry,” Sengoku corrected herself, “how do you think it’s going?”
“Who knows.”
I felt bad giving such a lackluster response after making her go to the trouble of correcting herself, but “who knows” was the only answer I could muster─since unlike my little sisters, I wasn’t tapped into the middle school girl network.
Thinking about it that way really threw the peculiarity of what that swindler had done, had tried to do, into stark relief… Seriously, it gave me the creeps.
Intentionally spreading charms.
Curses.
Aberrations─
“Hmm…do you think Tsukihi’s mop-up involves rooting out those aberrations one by one?”
“No…I think that might be impossible. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s probably trying to comfort the victims, something along those lines─though maybe she’s trying to do some of that too.”
Trying to, maybe, but I think that’d be beyond her. At that point you’re completely in the realm of information warfare. That’d be too much to handle, even for the strategist of the Fire Sisters─no, saying “even for the strategist of the Fire Sisters” begs the question of just how formidable the Fire Sisters are in the first place.
“Th-The Fire Sisters are awesome, Big Brother Koyomi. Maybe it’s hard to tell because you’re family, but they’re really, really, really awesome.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Really, realty awesome.”
“Realty?”
Even if you took her words with a grain of salt, or with a whole handful, someone as quiet and modest as Sengoku insisting so firmly made me wonder if it might not be true after all.
Maybe the Fire Sisters were awesome.
“They are! So awesome that Nadeko gets to be the big man on campus just because we’re friends!”
“Do you really act like the big man?”
Not a chance.
For this tiny little girl to be the big man…
“N-No,” ahem, Sengoku cleared her throat.
Even that was cute.
“But seriously, no exaggeration, being friends with the Fire Sisters means Nadeko’s got enough influence to rake in some money.”
“Sounds like the wrong kind of influence…”
That’s exactly how swindlers are born.
Were my siblings being used to pitch fraudulent investment schemes or something? I’ve heard it said that too much justice breeds crime, and maybe the Fire Sisters had reached that point.
Though I’m sure nothing could be further from their intentions…
“Speaking of which, an imitation group called the Cold Sisters debuted recently.”
“That’s a pretty obvious fake.”
Well, if you ask me, my sisters are the fakes─or no, that’d be going too far. To me, they’ll always be the kind of slovenly little sisters who strut around the house naked, but to Sengoku they’re old friends, and nothing’s going to change that. I’m sure she’s not interested in hearing them slandered, even by a member of their own family.
“Doki doki! Fire Sisters also came out.”
“That just sounds like a special, to fill the gap between seasons.”
That or a whole new show.
Huh, so my sisters aired their final episode without my knowing it…
“Now, whether my sisters can handle it or not, rumors only last for seventy-five days, as the saying goes. I think the right way to handle the ghost stories that swindler spread around town is to leave things alone, watch and wait, not do anything rash.”
“It’s all so complex… Do you think there’s anything Nadeko can do? To help Tsukihi and Karen… Actually, Nadeko was hoping to talk to them about that today.”
“If there’s something you can do, it’s to bounce back from that snake case and stand on your own two feet, I think─though I’m not sure things will ever go back to the way they were.”
“…That makes it sound like Nadeko was standing to begin with. But it feels like Nadeko was crawling even before that. Slithering along the ground, like a snake…” she brooded. Then, with a sudden “A…awawa,” she grabbed a handful of popcorn and crammed it into her mouth. Just like she’d said she wanted to earlier.
Like a squirrel─or very much like a snake.
Though she didn’t swallow it whole. She munched it t
o bits.
“Wh-What the hell,” I said, thinking at the same time how cute everything she did was.
Munch munch, munch, she finished eating the popcorn before answering, “Um, lessee, Big Brother Koyomi. In Nadeko’s case it’s clear, but how did Mister Swindler…”
It was charmingly typical of her to say “Mister” Swindler, but as someone who’d actually met and spoken with “Mister” Swindler, it rubbed me the wrong way, somewhat.
I’d have told anyone but Sengoku never to call that bastard “mister” again.
“How did he spread those rumors?”
“Hunh?”
“Those rumors, or charms, or ghost stories…that occult stuff… How─”
“Oh, well, it was like a get-rich-quick scheme─he spread free trial charms around the middle school girl community, then waited in the wings to sell them charms that actually cost money…”
Come to think of it, it was such a current sales philosophy.
Give out the basic version for free, then sell the optional add-ons… He was right on trend, just as you’d expect from a man who’d devoted his life to the career of a con man.
Nah.
Being a con man wasn’t a career, it was a crime.
“No, no, Big Brother Koyomi. Nadeko is asking ‘how,’ not ‘how come’…”
“Hm? You want to know more about his methods, not his goal? His methods─” I started out like she was asking something obvious, ready to launch into a big lecture on the subject as her dependable “big brother” if that was what she wanted. When I actually tried, though, nothing came out.
Oops.
Methods?
He spread rumors targeted at middle school girls, vaguely speaking… But yeah, seriously, how do you go about doing that?
As an expert, Oshino made his living collecting tales of aberrations─urban legends, the word on the street, secondhand gossip; that’s what he came to this town to gather, and then he left.
Whether that actually constitutes a profession is another question entirely, and we’ll leave it aside once again, but in some sense it’s straightforward─what he does is put out his net and catch whatever rumors are floating around, whatever stories are circulating.
He’s in the position of observer, poacher, recorder, you might say─in other words, he’s on the listening end of things, so it might not be easy, but it’s still the kind of thing anyone could do, at least to some extent.
You can go out and hear the stories for yourself, you can opt to go more contemporary and search for them on the internet─there are plenty of methods available.
But what about the opposite?
Urban legends, the word on the street, secondhand gossip.
What about spreading them rather than collecting them?
As the teller, not the listener─what would your methods actually be?
As transmitter rather than receiver.
And if you’re not just transmitting but also controlling the subsequent course of the transmission─we’re getting into seriously difficult territory.
Setting a trap instead of a net─how would you go about it?
“Sengoku. You tried to deal with it yourself, didn’t you? The rumor, the ghost story that the swindler put about.”
A snake.
A snake aberration.
“Y-Yeah. But it didn’t go so well.”
“Doesn’t matter if you succeeded or not─you tried to use something you found in a book, right? Rather than buy anything from him.”
I’m pretty sure that was the case.
No doubt about it, really, since I’d seen Sengoku from behind at the bookstore, doing research─everything about that swindler’s grand plan was abominable, but nevertheless, if there was one saving grace.
If I had to find one saving grace, it’d be the fact that she’d avoided direct contact with him. If that bad omen personified, if he even was a person, had laid eyes on Nadeko Sengoku, who looked even more helpless than a chihuahua, she would never have come out of it unscathed.
Even Karen had such a terrible time of it.
If it were Sengoku…
“Y-Yeah. Come to think of it, Nadeko probably could’ve gotten in touch with Mister Swindler with a little effort… If only we’d met up,” she said bravely, “Nadeko could’ve tied him up and handed him over to the police.”
“No chance,” I let a typical retort slip out.
That aside─it wasn’t as if finding out now helped in any way, and Sengoku probably wasn’t asking me for any pressing reason, but I’d be lying if I said my curiosity wasn’t piqued.
That swindler.
How had he spread those rumors?
“Who did everyone hear them from in the first place? It wasn’t from the swindler─himself?”
“As far as Nadeko knows, how people answered when Tsukihi asked around was─a whisper on the wind.”
“…”
The wind?
004
“Urban legends are a kind of folklore…the kind of thing that happened to ‘a friend of a friend.’ But if you actually try to find that ‘friend of a friend,’ you’ll come up empty─”
On the subject of the swindler himself, I had nothing more to tell Sengoku─that is, nothing more that I was able to tell her, so I decided to pass the time with a discussion of this new topic until Tsukihi and Karen got home.
Calling it a discussion might be a bit of an exaggeration, since it was just for fun─I had no illusions that it would prove useful down the line.
But leaving aside the rumors disseminated by that swindler for a moment, I was pretty sure I remembered something similar from back during spring break.
It was already months ago─at the time I wasn’t studying for exams yet, nor had I had any dealings with aberrations. But the very first time I talked with Hanekawa, before we were even in the same class, she told me a rumor that was going around about a “vampire.”
A blond vampire.
An iron-blooded, hot-blooded, yet cold-blooded vampire.
Overpoweringly beautiful─and as I recall, that rumor, too, spread mostly among girls.
The charms cooked up by that swindler and the rumor of the “vampire” were alike in that regard.
It didn’t necessarily mean they had some common denominator, though. Maybe girls─that is, females, just like to gossip more than males do.
I’ve heard that it’s women who create the trends at any given moment─so isn’t it possible that folklore, too, comes out of such a community? It would explain why that swindler chose to target girls.
“Though maybe this kind of ‘talk’ is a type of rumor as well…since there are girls like you, Sengoku, who are outside the rumor mill, and I heard about the vampire even though I’m a boy.”
“Totally. So instead of a narrow focus, Big Brother Koyomi, we should question the question of how rumors spread more generally, more broadly.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Question the question sounded pretty odd, but Sengoku seemed to be as linguistically hopeless as myself, so I let it go. This was no time to be pedantic about semantics. “The process by which rumors spread─or should I say the process by which rumors are spread? How did that swindler make it happen…”
The propagation of urban legends.
The spread of secondhand gossip.
“…The thing is, if he could wrap his head around something like that, I feel like he wouldn’t have to stoop to something with as poor a cost performance index as swindling.”
“Not everyone is motivated by cost performance, though, are they, Big Brother Koyomi? Nadeko never actually met him, so it’s hard to say…but from everything you’ve said, it seems like he’s the kind of person who just enjoys deceiving people.”
“Well, you’re right about that…”
But I don’t think it’s even a question of whether or not he enjoys it.
It seems more pathological or…like it’s his karma or something.
So maybe swindling w
asn’t a career he chose of his own free will─maybe it was the only path open to him.
Which means that he’s a victim too─is something I would never think, though, not ever.
