Episode 12. In the Safety of Darkness
It's evening, around 10pm near the harbor area of Tokyo. There's not a lot going on here at that time, only a few lamps light the roads that during they day are full of workers and fork lift trucks. Overall it's a quite scary place at night, but nobody would want to go there during such a time anyway. Only the sound of the nearby bay fills the harbor with a certain peaceful feeling.
Somewhere in that area is a man. We've seen him before, he saved Ai on that "highway." He leans against a wall, often looking at his watch and constantly trying not to be spotted. There are certainly things he is afraid of, but his reason for being there is of a different nature. He looks at his watch again and makes a worried face, then suddenly footsteps. They are coming closer, but it's still impossible for him to see anybody. There's a lightened area between him and the footsteps, but the footsteps are still in the dark behind that cone of light. He's starring into the dark and then the light finally reveals the incoming person. It's her, it's Junjun.
Junjun stops in the cone of light and looks around. A silent whistle shows her the way. It's only one more corner left and once she sees him, she immediately falls into his arms. "Hikaru..," she says in joy and looks up to him. He's a bit taller than her and so he has to look down to her. "It's been a while," he says and kisses her on her forehead. Junjun enjoys this moment, but she's been missing him too much over the last months and so she takes a short step back to approach him once again, but this time a kiss on the lips. She is aware of that they don't have a lot of time, but she don't want to hasten their meet-again kiss.
However, Hikaru has to push her back a bit. "We don't have time."
- Junjun was still lost deep in the kiss and therefore makes a gloomy face when it suddenly ended by her getting pushed away.
"Are you okay?" He asks and Junjun nods. "Be careful from now on, I have a feeling that something is up."
- She takes his hand and lets it fondle her cheek. "Something?" She asks.
"It's my third connect today already", he explains.
- "Third?" She asks half-aware of what it means and still enjoying his touches and smell. "Eh? THIRD?" Now she got fully aware and suddenly looks around.
"Can you sense them already?"
- "No, nobody here yet..," she answers relieved.
"There was this girl..."
- Junjun gets suspicious and wonders what he means with that now. "A.. girl?"
"No, not what you think.. she.. went through my connection, just like that..", Hikaru explains, but Junjun only makes an expression full of doubts. "Really!"
- "That's impossible! Nobody can do that! Not even we!"
"I know.."
- Junjun looks around again while Hikaru looks at his watch. "Still not any.., strange."
"I have one minute left.."
- "They should be here already, though."
"I know."
- "Maybe they don't detect us?"
"They do, believe me. I know the system and I haven't yet found a way to avoid being detected."
Both look into the surrounding darkness, worried about the unknown. Junjun then tells him about the search done. He first is shocked, but relieve that nothing happened and that they didn't got revealed either. However, he points out that she could have gotten its objective first before eliminating it, which makes her quite mad. They, Hikaru and Linlin always tell her that she should think more before acting. He laughs while she is mad, but that peaceful moment gets a quick interruption when his watch tells him that it's time to leave again. Surprisingly no bots approached his position up until now. He gives Junjun a good-bye kiss and disappears in the blink of an eye, just like that. Junjun looks around once more, but there really is nobody who could be dangerous. "Strange," she whispers and Hikaru who appeared at a totally different place again whispers it, too. "So many strange coincidences.. and I don't like coincidences." He turns to some kind of PC in a very dark and small room and looks at the screen. "The system has no coincidences."
Episode 13. I'm Sexy Girl~
It's still at night and Ai sits at her desk at home. She actually isn't struggling about all the strange encounters that day, she's doing her homework. That's right, they do have homework. It's no surprise that they have lessons for several stuff like dancing and vocals, but there are a lot more lessons they have to take throughout a week. The lessons are all done within the studio building itself, except of those who really still have to go to school. Ai and Risa have a special training this month due to their rapid expansion into more and more foreign territories, English. The creative staff behind the group decided that the two leading girls of Morning Musume should improve their English in order to accurately represent the group in non-Japanese-speaking countries. Risa is quite good at it and she even has the bonus to be able to speak Korean. Ai is the complete opposite. English is her first real foreign language and isn't really good at it at all. The two girls have one hour of English each day and today's homework is to describe yourself in English in a few sentences that shall also be written down on a note for further corrections.
And here she is now, struggling over the task at midnight. She really loves to move homework in front of her until midnight, only to end up not doing it anyway. Ai looks at what she has written so far, "Takahashi Ai". The rest of the sheet of paper is blank. She sighs and stretches herself, looks at her bed with the desire to sleep, but her motivation isn't completely gone yet. Ai starts to hum something, "wow wow chance oh yeah you'll get a chance..". Then it makes click. "That's English!" Ai kinda is surprised by that fact. "Maybe I can get it done by going through some of our songs." Sounds like a plan, a plan that's bound to fail. Anyway, once Ai gets an idea, she does everything to accomplish it and so she goes through the songs starting with Resonant Blue.
"Cry Cry.. Tonight Tonight.. Tonight is good!" She says and writes it down, but since one word alone doesn't make a sentence she has to search for more English lines. "HELP ME~ .. nah, not good." Thus she proceeds to Mikan and immediately adds the line the hummed before. "Tonight I'll get a chance. I don't know how that would fit in a personal description, but it's a sentence!" She smiles in a clearly happy mood. After that she adds 'life is one time' to her self-description. The next song with English lines is Egao YES Nude and the first line she adds from that piece of music actually is the first one that makes sense in her homework. "I'm lovely." Ai smiles. "That's something good, right?" However, she almost made the mistake to add 'I'm nude.' to it, but luckily she remembered what that word really means. Now she hums Aruiteru and wonders, "Is na na na na English?" She realizes that it isn't and continues to the next song in line. "I'm girls! I be ambitious!" Grammatically it might be wrong, but apart from that it makes a bit of sense. Ai starts to get exhausted. This is the most amount of English she ever wrote in such a short time, that's why she decided to only try one more song. "Sexy boy.. sexy boy.. hm.. sexy.. What was it again? Ah yeah, girl! So it's.. "I'm sexy girl! Yay!" She writes it down and looks at her finished homework full of proud. "I'm so good!" Ai praises herself, laughs and.. falls to the ground. While stretching herself she leaned too much back with her chair and fell down backwards hitting her head on the floor, "Ouch!", but nothing happened. Ai has a quite a bullhead, so it only was the first pain of the impact that made her yell out 'ouch'. What's strange though is that she doesn't seem to stand up anymore. Did something happen after all? No! When taking a closer look at her face you can see that she actually fell asleep immediately after falling to the ground. English must have been really exhausting for her. Her sleeping position doesn't look that comfortable, but that's her all over.