Part 1 || 2 | Sakura

A Tale of Their Next Case I

Well then. Sakura and Momo’s two-day vacation of rage-playing video games began to wane on the afternoon of the second day. Both girls were sweating and huffing and puffing in their shorts and T-shirts, their hands jittery on their controllers, their eyes glued to the TV screen showing Chen Wu’s gun-fu victory pose and Chinese catch-phrases. Momo was positively wasted on a long winning streak, smiling like a devil at another of Sakura’s losses, while Sakura’s face was red and scowling, and her ears were blowing out steam. Sakura gave her sister sidelong glares, gritting her teeth in a grimace.

Out of their head-to-head duels in Gun-fu Gunslingers, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, A Chinese Sun-Dance Kid, and For a Few Tokens More, Sakura had won just a third of her gaming sessions against Momo. And Momo kept getting underneath her skin about it during each of her losses, meaning that Sakura wasn’t too keen on getting her pride assaulted with 3,000 more reasons to resent her elder sister’s underhanded strategy of exploiting one of her childhood foibles.

So she wrapped the cord around her controller and handed it to Momo, saying, “I wanna do something else.”

“Is that so?” Momo said and took the controller.

“Yes, that’s so,” Sakura said. And to hammer it home to her sister, she added, “For real. I don’t wanna play video games right now.”

“Can’t take the heat?” Momo said, but Sakura gritted her teeth and stayed firm about her decision, no matter how much Momo prodded her into another gaming session. “Okay, okay, we’ll stop for the day.”

So Momo got off the couch and rolled the cord around her own controller and placed both controllers next to the gaming console beneath the TV. She then crouched and opened the tray holding the disc of For a Few Tokens More, took it out and popped it back into its CD case. She placed that game next to the others on the shelf besides the TV and faced Sakura.

“What else do you wanna do?” Momo said.

“I wanna talk,” Sakura said.

Momo paused. “About the training case?”

“Yeah,” Sakura said, looking down on the floor, thinking, thinking . . . She hadn’t a clue how she felt about the whole ordeal of that debacle of a case, let alone how to ask Momo why she did things that way.

“Are you sure you can take it?”

“Yeah,” Sakura said, keeping her eyes on the floor, even as Momo came over and sat beside her on the couch. Sakura pulled her legs up against her chest, crossed her forearms over her knees, and caught Momo’s gaze. “I know you, Momo. There’s no way you’d switch up the training program without a damn good reason. So why’d you do it?”

Silence reigned for several moments, but Momo stayed quiet. Sakura kept her eyes on her sister’s and caught her looking through her with a faraway gaze. Whatever Momo was seeing through that gaze, Sakura thought it was something uncomfortable for Momo to talk about, at least with her younger sister. At such moments, there was only one thing she could do.

She waited, letting Momo collect herself.

And waited. And waited.

Then Momo said, “Do you remember taking your entrance exam for the academy?”

“The Judy Windermere case?” she said.

“That’s the one.”

“What about it?” Sakura said.

“Ryder and I were finishing up on the George Garland case,” Momo said, “when the Muse Inspector informed us that the Chief wanted to see us before the end of our shifts. We went to his office and listened to what he had to say. The Chief said that he’d received reports of Judy’s disappearance from the muse officers conducting this year’s entrance exams for prospective muse cadets into the academy. They all said that Judy disappeared during the examination period and reappeared five hours later. After receiving these reports for a week, the Chief had them reassign their examinees to another case for their exams and placed Judy’s case on hold pending an investigation. He wanted three available muse officers on her case. One from the upper Grades: that’s me. And two from the lower Grades: one is Ryder, and the other one the Chief left for my choosing. I wanted you, but since you were still a cadet, I had the Chief arrange an impromptu training case to prepare you for our investigation of Judy’s. Do you understand now?”

Sakura gaped at the lengths her sister had gone to prepare her for it, going so far as to assign her one of the most difficult cases in the Muse Bureau’s backlog of solved simulation cases: the Trevor Waltman case.

“No way,” Sakura said. “Is Judy’s case that dangerous?”

“Not as dangerous as that, thank God,” Momo said, “but I want you prepared for this one. That means no messing around during work hours, and I mean it this time. That stunt you pulled on me back there, turning me into a damn cherry blossom and taking off my clothes, won’t fly with the Chief. And since I’m recommending you for this one, I expect you to be professional at all times during the case, got it?”

“Okay,” Sakura said. “I get it.”

“Good,” Momo said and got up off the couch as Sakura stretched out her arms and legs on the couch, then turned back to her with a wry smirk on her face. “Are you sure you don’t wanna play another round?”

“Nope. Not happening,” Sakura said and entered the hallway.

And Momo followed, saying, “What do you wanna do then?”

Sakura thought about it as she ascended the stairs towards the bedrooms, feeling her itchy trigger finger grasping at an invisible gun. She yelled back over the railing, “52 pickup with guns. I’ll get the guns and cards.”

“All right,” Momo said. “I’ll prepare the gun range. Which setting do you want?”

“Your choice,” Sakura said and entered her bedroom on the second floor hallway, where she took up a pack of playing cards off the shelf and put it in the waistband of her shorts. She took up her holster and gun hanging from the hook of her door, then entered Momo’s bedroom next to hers and took up Momo’s holster and gun from her door, as well. She went back out and down the stairs, where the neon light of a hologram scanned across the lower part of the staircase along the wall.

A holographic version of Momo’s voice reached her ears, saying, “It’s all set up. Come to the basement.”

“I’ll be there,” Sakura said, rounded the post of the stair rail, and headed towards the end of the hall, where there was another staircase beneath the soffit of the stairs above her. She followed it down into the basement into the holographic haze of Momo’s domain, where she crossed the threshold and heard the snap of Momo’s fingers.

A Tale of Two Gunslingers II

And before she knew it, Sakura was encased inside of Momo’s giant peach blossom, trapping her up to her armpits inside its enormous pink petals, filling her with a sense of déjà vu.

“That’s payback,” Momo said. “Now we’re even.”

Sakura just gaped, remembering what she had done to her older sister at the offices of the Muse Bureau two days ago, and looked down at her feet. A giant seal of Momo’s peach blossom inscribed her inside its circumference, and that’s when she cursed herself for falling for one of Momo’s traps. That’s when she knew that Momo was still getting under her skin, whether it was the art of playing video games or the art of payback. And that’s when she deadpanned and gritted her teeth, then clenched her hands into fists and flailed her arms, saying, “Do you have to rub it in like that?”

Momo winked at her, saying, “Just keeping score.”

Which pushed Sakura into rage-mode. Her face turned red, and steam blew out of her ears and fluttered her twin tails, making her look like a peach blossom-shaped fire hydrant letting off steam. All the while, more steam built up inside of the giant peach blossom encasing Sakura’s body, making it grow bigger to the point of popping. Then, when it blew into a flutter of cherry blossoms, it ruptured the holographic haze and revealed a massive dojo with sliding shoji screen doors and paper lanterns floating overhead. As the blossoms settled, Sakura had both holsters around her legs and both guns cocked and aimed at her mischievous sister, fingers on the triggers.

“Welcome to the gun range,” Momo said, then raised her hands when Sakura refused to drop her aim. “Are we playing 52 pickup with guns or tag with guns?”

Sakura lowered the guns but kept her eyes fixed on her, saying, “Nothing more from you, or I’ll tag you.”

“Fine,” Momo said and manifested her gun in her hand, making one of the guns disappear from Sakura’s. She looked down on her left leg and found Momo’s holster missing, then looked back at Momo and saw the leg holster around her sister’s right leg.

“How did you do that?” Sakura said.

“I have my ways,” Momo said. “Where’s the deck?”

Sakura took it out from the waistband of her shorts.

Which caught Momo’s eye: she said, “Are you trying to give me cooties or something?”

Sakura deadpanned, saying, “My pockets are too small.” She then slid the cards out of the box, leaving the Jokers inside. She discarded the box and riffled the rest of the cards into the air, saying, “Which suit?”

So Momo drew her gun and shot the first one that hit the ground, where a peach blossom grew out of it with the card’s suit. “Diamonds,” she said, then shot it again and revealed its rank. “It’s the Jack of Diamonds. That’s the general. Sakura, are you ready?”

Sakura took out her gun, gripping it with both hands, and nodded at her sister.

So Momo said, “Game, start!”

And the game of ’52 pickup with guns’ began with Sakura and Momo running to one of the shoji screens of the dojo and hiding behind it, while the rest of the cards glowed neon pink on the tatami mats and turned into more of Momo’s peach blossoms. The ‘general’ of the deck, the Jack of Diamonds, transformed into a dashing long-haired teenager, while the three other Jacks of Clubs, Spades, and Hearts all turned into long-haired handsome men as his lieutenants. They all wore berets on their heads, doublets on their chests, and trews on their legs. Then the rest of Momo’s peach blossoms dissipated from the ground and manifested as dual revolvers in the hands of the four Jacks.

“Thou hast challenged me, the Jack of Diamonds, to a battle of 52 pickup,” the ‘general’ said. “I’ll give thee the first crack at me and my—”

“Come on, boyo,” the Jack of Spades said. “No need to be all formal-like.”

“You’re too stiff, lad,” the Jack of Hearts added.

“You’re hopeless with that attitude,” the Jack of Clubs added.

Sakura and Momo sniggered behind the shoji screens, and Sakura wondered if the Jack of Diamonds harbored a crush on one of the Queens. She then caught Momo’s wave of her hand as her sister said, “Fire on the count of three. One!”

The Jack of Diamonds huffed, and Sakura took a peek past the edge of her shoji screen door. All three of the Jack of Diamonds’ lieutenants were looking back on him, giving him advice on how to pick up women without sounding like he was reciting Shakespeare in front of a schoolmarm.

“Unless it’s the schoolmarm you’re after,” the Jack of Hearts said, which got the rest of his cronies laughing.

“Oh, shut up!” the Jack of Diamonds said.

“Two!” Momo said.

Then the Jack of Diamonds (poor lad) went on a tirade about his tastes in women being different from theirs, a taste for more refined women, not the wenches they’re after. Which got his friends laughing again, because he was sweating and blushing like a bastard in heat.

“Don’t sweat it,” the Jack of Clubs said.

“We completely understand,” the Jack of Hearts added.

“Older ones have their charms, too,” the Jack of Spades added.

And just before the Jack of Diamonds went balls-to-the-wall berserk on his cronies, and before Sakura could burst out laughing at their shenanigans, it was go-time.

“Three!” Momo said.

Sakura and Momo charged from the cover of the shoji screen doors, laughing like Jokers with smiles on their faces, raising their guns and firing off zap after zap on their practice foes. Fluttering petals of cherry blossoms and peach blossoms exploded off the backs of the three lieutenant Jacks, turning them into two giant peach blossoms and one giant cherry blossom, while the Jack of Diamonds cried out, “Foul, foul, foul! You’re not supposed to shoot people in the back!”

“Put a sock in it,” Sakura said.

And she leaped and rolled over a hail of retaliatory gunshots leaving holes in the shoji screens and tatami mats, which then turned into playing cards. Momo circled around the remaining Jack and fired shots at his unprotected sides, while Sakura circled the other way and managed a shot at his head, both girls turning their practice opponent into a giant peach blossom with a smaller cherry blossom for his head.

Now all four Jacks were engulfed up to their armpits in giant blossoms, and they all said in unison, “You’ve defeated us, fair and square.”

Yet the voice of the Jack of Diamonds sounded muffled, so they turned their flowery bulk around and laughed.

“‘At’s ‘o ‘unny?” (What’s so funny?) the Jack of Diamonds said, and more laughter ensued amongst the Jacks of Spades, Hearts, and Clubs.

“Nothing much, boyo,” the Jack of Spades said.

“Just enjoying the view,” the Jack of Hearts added.

And Sakura and Momo accompanied the laughter with their girlish giggles of glee at the sight.

“And ‘at ‘iew ‘s ‘at?” (And what view is that?) the muffled Jack said, moving his revolver from side to side, aiming at his unseen tormentors, and getting more laughter for his efforts. “‘Ell ‘e! I ‘are ‘ou ‘o ‘ell ‘e ‘o ‘y ‘ace, ‘ight ‘is ins‘ant!” (Tell me! I dare you to tell me to my face, right this instant!)

“Don’t sweat it,” the Jack of Spades said.

“Wearing a crown isn’t that bad,” the Jack of Hearts added.

“Unless your crown’s broken,” the Jack of Clubs added.

And both Sakura and Momo broke out laughing, bowling over in gut-busting hysterics, both girls adding to the uproar shared with the three maniacal Jacks at the expense of one of their own. And as the laughter grew, it filled the whole dojo and reverberated through the holographic simulation, dissipating it back into the form of an empty sound-proofed basement. And left laughing up a storm were Sakura and Momo, both hugging their sides with grimacing faces and ruddy cheeks. It was the kind of laughter that bordered on insanity, tempered by sleep and the power of dreams.

After a while, Momo stopped laughing, and Sakura followed suit soon afterwards. Momo said, “You pick up the cards, while I’ll make dinner. Deal?”

“Deal,” Sakura said. After Momo headed up the stairs to do just that, Sakura spent the next five minutes picking up all 52 cards off the floor. When she found the four Jacks, she saw three of them (the Jacks of Hearts, Spades, and Diamonds) encased inside of Momo’s peach blossoms and the Jack of Clubs encased inside of Sakura’s cherry blossom. She singled out the Jack of Diamonds with a cherry-blossomed head and said, “Don’t worry. The effects will wear off by sunrise.”

The Jack of Diamonds sighed, while the other three started sniggering again.

“Now, now,” Sakura said. “Be nice.”

“We will,” the three Jacks said in unison, though the Jack of Diamonds kept muttering to himself about his cronies being flowery frat boys or something like that.

So Sakura found the box and put all the cards back inside it, then placed it back in the waistband of her shorts.

“Sakura,” Momo said upstairs. “Are you gonna stay there?”

“I’m coming,” she said and stalked her way up the stairs, sniggering to herself at the shenanigans she’d seen with her sister. Yet Sakura and Momo weren’t the only ones who saw, for another girl would bear witness in the next few pages.

TBC