POV Sasha
Sasha felt like her head was going to explode. The amount of information she had processed over the last few minutes would have fried her RAM—if she weren't so adorable, smart, adorable, and... adorable.
Did she mention she was adorable?
Probably not—she was always humble. And adorable.
It had been an hour since Dorio and Faelan had returned from dealing with the Animals and, apparently, an Arasaka contingent.
Only... it wasn't as simple as a corporate assault, according to them.
They were currently at Kiwi and Faelan's place—or, well, what counted as their place. A basement beneath Vik's clinic made of roots, glowing mushrooms, and tech blended with furniture straight out of the 80s. Sure, call that home.
Not gonna lie, the fact that the duo (who, it turned out, had been dating for three years!) had a place like this all to themselves made Sasha feel a tiny bit—just a little bit—jealous.
Yeah, she was definitely jealous of the place. Not of Kiwi for scoring the jackpot in the boyfriend department.
...Maybe it was time to fly the nest and live on her own.
How much would they charge for a room down here?
Wait—that wasn't the point right now.
Her mom was hugging Faelan while sobbing loudly, clearly making her best friend uncomfortable. Kiwi was busy bringing food from the underground garden (from which Sasha may have taken a bowl of strawberries), and Dorio was devouring it like she hadn't eaten in a week.
Viktor had been around—until the tears started and he suddenly remembered he had a surgery to perform. In a clinic that wasn't his.
Tch, the guy clearly wasn't built for sentimental moments.
According to the laws of physics, the volume Dorio had consumed should have burst her stomach three times over, even with reinforcement. But apparently, she still wasn't satisfied, so... to hell with the laws of physics!
"I'm so sorry!" Galina sobbed, tears streaming down her face. She had never shown such vulnerability in front of them, and Sasha was honestly shocked to see this side of her mother. "How could I not realize you were the boss's son? Your hair is identical, the shape of your face, the same age as Sasha—you even have similar mannerisms and habits!"
Yeah, breaking news: turns out her mom and Faelan's mom used to work together (well, more like boss and subordinate) in her mother's old job. The one she always avoided talking about, which turned out to be a special Arasaka task force under the direct command of Hanako Arasaka, known as Tasogare.
The Tasogare squad had been dissolved years ago after some incident, but it was once among the top 5 most feared units ever led by someone with the Arasaka surname.
That alone said a lot about the level of operations they were involved in.
Although, from the bits her mom let slip while crying, it sounded like she and Faelan's mom, Motoko Kusanagi, were more like sisters in everything but blood, rather than simply superior and subordinate.
They didn't just attend each other's weddings—they even got pregnant at the same time!
Sasha even suspected they were planning to pair up their kids just to become real family...
You could kind of tell how close they had been.
It was weird—but it made sense. They realized they'd never asked Faelan for his last name or full name. Her mom probably would've put the pieces together otherwise. To be fair, they'd assumed he didn't have one from the start; they both thought he was just another street kid, and the whole factory escape story only made the misunderstanding worse.
But for them to end up together as if bound by fate, and not realize it for years... that was just hard to believe.
Although speaking of misunderstandings—Arasaka had a pretty big one.
"So..." Kiwi sat down next to her, radiating a kind of calm analysis Sasha couldn't even dream of matching right now. "After Dorio finished wiping out another city gang using... that, the confrontation you expected with the Arasaka unit didn't happen."
"That's right," Faelan confirmed, managing to peek out from between Galina's breasts, which she was clinging to like a crying octopus.
"They mistook you for VK-17 because of your appearance, and that's what started this whole mess."
"Yup."
"But one of the higher-ups realized the mistake—and your connection to Arasaka through your mother's past—and..." She extended a hand, prompting him to continue.
"It was a disaster," Faelan managed to pull back enough to speak without his chin bouncing against soft flesh. "The guys who had guns aimed at me? A 90-degree bow of apology. The one who led the operation? Apparently he has a meeting with someone named Sandayu—"
"Oh, then forget he exists," Galina said, seemingly having gotten all her sadness out for now. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand, trying to look a little more composed. "Sandayu-sama doesn't tolerate mistakes like this, especially when the victim is the boss's son. Motoko saved that man's ass more than once, and I can assure you, that Ren guy is going to wish he were dead by the end of the day."
"Sandayu-sama?" Sasha repeated, fishing for more details about her mother's secret past.
"Uh, some habits are hard to drop," Galina realized she'd added "-sama" again, like in the old days. "Sandayu Oda is Hanako Arasaka's personal bodyguard. He only answers to her—not even Saburo could order him around. He's the kind of man who takes honor to the extreme. A loyal death soldier."
"How is my mom connected to Hanako Arasaka?" Faelan asked, the question burning in his mind since all of this came to light.
SAV had really dumped a mess in his lap—he just wanted to use those names as a personal joke!
"Tasogare, the unit the boss led, was responsible for helping Hanako-sama secure no less than half the wealth and influence she had back then," Galina explained. "And that's separate from the advantages of being an Arasaka by birth. These were personal accomplishments that brought 'honor' to the family. Kei-sama respected her a lot for it. Michiko-sama was also somewhat influenced, though Yorinobu was always wary of Tasogare's existence."
Sasha caught the detail.
"Don't you mean 'Yorinobu-sama'?"
"That bastard didn't deserve our respect. He thought money could buy our team's loyalty with a snap of his fingers, and his gang nonsense with the Steel Dragons was ridiculous." Galina scrunched her nose in disgust at the memory. "Even now, I suspect he orchestrated the disbanding of Tasogare—but I never found any proof, which only deepens my suspicion. He just wanted revenge for... things in the past."
"Revenge for what?" Dorio asked, her mouth full of food.
Dinner and a show!
Galina hesitated, glancing at Faelan.
"Did my mom do something to him?" he guessed.
If his mother had been a carbon copy of Motoko Kusanagi...
"You could say that," Galina rubbed the back of her neck with a nervous laugh. "It's possible that, on a day when she was in a particularly bad mood... she scared Yorinobu so badly he pissed his pants right before a very important shareholder meeting—right in front of the meeting room door." Galina looked away as everyone stared at her wide-eyed. "Yorinobu didn't have a spare pair of pants, and canceling or delaying the meeting was impossible, so he took his secretary's pants and... well, let's just say there were rumors the next morning that one of Saburo's sons had come out of the closet."
The room fell silent.
Yeah... that might be a decent reason for revenge.
"We're getting off track," Kiwi clapped to refocus the room. "Fae, once again—how did everything at the gym end?"
"Oh," Faelan realized they really had gotten sidetracked—they could dig deeper into the backstory later. "We're going to get a substantial compensation transfer for the damage and misunderstanding. Also, I have a video call scheduled with Hanako Arasaka in a week."
"Yeah, I doubt Hanako-sama would miss the chance to see the boss's son," Galina sighed. "But there's more to it than you're saying, isn't there?" she asked, staring at Faelan knowingly. "Hanako-sama has an insanely tight schedule—at least, last I checked. For her to make time for a video call so quickly is incredible... is it about your company?"
Sasha blinked and looked at her mother, confused.
"A week counts as 'quickly'?"
"Even her father needs to sync schedules a month in advance to see her," Galina said, waving a hand. "After all, being at the top of Arasaka takes a lot of time to handle countless affairs. It's a bureaucratic nightmare, really."
"In fact, you're right," Faelan raised an eyebrow, genuinely impressed—Galina really was informed. "She seems extremely interested in the effects of X-27 and C-65." He tapped briefly on his Pip-Boy, and everyone around received a redirected file. "Turns out she's considering opening a wildlife reserve on Shikoku Island, northeast of Kyushu, for the last remaining Japanese green pheasants."
"I know the place," Galina commented while reading the file. "It's the quietest region in the country—lush nature, beautiful rivers, amazing onsen. Tasogare used to vacation there to blow off steam. They even had real vodka!"
"Mooom!"
"What? Just saying."
"The thing is, that was the initial plan," Faelan explained as he sent over a batch of images—devastated areas, polluted and riddled with toxic waste. "But setting up the reserve would be very costly, and space is limited—not to mention the environment isn't ideal for the pheasants, which makes recovery and repopulation a much slower process," he added. "So she wants to discuss purchasing a quantity of X-27 and C-65 as a means to rehabilitate some of the lands she owns, and relocate the reserve somewhere closer."
"Is that... Honshu?" Galina visibly flinched at the photos. "Damn, time has absolutely wrecked that place!"
Kiwi, on the other hand, had something else on her mind.
"Will you be able to produce as much as she'll need?" she asked her boyfriend with a worried look. "From what I can see, the area they want to recover isn't small. This isn't something you fix with a hundred or two hundred liters—the order will probably be measured in tons."
Knowing the process, that was a lot of work.
"It'll take a bit, but a week is more than enough to make a decent batch if I focus on it exclusively," Faelan said, doing some quick mental math. "Though I'll need you two to handle the reconstruction—"
BAM!
The sound of Dorio's head smashing into the table cut the conversation short.
"Dorio?" Sasha called out in concern, seeing her friend's face planted squarely into a watermelon.
Snore.
"Let her sleep," Faelan glanced at the unconscious musclehead. "From what I gathered, the Animals' leader really rattled her for some reason she didn't want to talk about. A long nap is exactly what she needs to recover from the side effects."
Everyone nodded in understanding.
"Just two more questions," Sasha took her turn to ask.
"Shoot," Faelan grabbed a tissue and began wiping off the tears Galina had soaked into his skin.
He could shower now—but if he waited until the others left after the talk, maybe he could convince Kiwi to join...
"So if there was no actual fight with Arasaka..." Sasha's optics flickered as she tuned into the news feed, which was displaying a massive tree. "Then why the hell did another 'Tree of the Damned' show up at the Animals' HQ?"
The media was going crazy over it.
"Call it a message," Faelan shrugged. "The gym was abandoned, practically falling apart due to the gang's shoddy reinforcements—they only ever patched the areas they used, and that really hurt the structure. Once the Arasaka team cleared out and only the Animals' corpses were left, I contacted the legal owner of the property and bought it before planting the tree." He chuckled. "Strictly speaking—legally speaking—all I did was re-green land I owned."
"How much did it cost you? Oh—and that doesn't count as my second question."
"Two-thirds the price of the All Foods compound," he replied. "And that's because I paid double what she asked for the property."
"Why'd you pay more?" Kiwi asked curiously. Her boyfriend wasn't the type to waste money without a reason.
"Because unlike the All Foods guy, the woman who owned this place told me everything about how the Animals squatted there—she didn't hide a thing. She even warned me it might be a bad idea. How could I take advantage of someone that honest?" Faelan said. "So I just sent her double the price she asked."
"Yeah, that sounds like something you'd do," Galina smiled.
Her boss had been the exact same way back then...
"Alright, second question—the one that's been bugging me since we got here," Sasha pointed at Faelan as he adjusted his sunglasses on the bridge of his nose. "WHY aren't you wearing your hood? I'm not complaining—I like the change and being able to see your face—but it's not like you."
Faelan idly ran his thumb along one of his horns.
"...I guess I'm just tired of hiding," he murmured.
His rookie, vulnerable phase had ended—he didn't want to keep going around with his head covered.
As long as he wore his glasses, he didn't have to worry about SCP–166's strongest effect. He even had spares on him, just in case.
Besides, summers with the hood were a damn nightmare.
"By the way, since we're all here—take this." He reached under the table where Dorio was still snoring and pulled out a small wooden box. Inside were several straw dolls. "Let me explain how they work..."
But even as he explained the function of the straw dolls, Faelan's mind drifted elsewhere—to other information he'd recently acquired.
Kawatatsu... and Faraday's whereabouts for the next two days.
He hadn't forgotten those debts—not even for a second.