God Of Crafting

"Shut up, man, it's about to start!"

Holding back the tears of joy and powerless fury at the same time, Claire wiggled in her chair, trying her best to stay inconspicuous while also escaping the tickling of my fingers.

Coming to this place, we both had a pre-established perception of what we were to expect from this… meeting. And now that we came only to end up waiting for the police officer who requested this meeting to be squeezed right into the middle of our extremely busy schedule…

Playing around while waiting for the man of the hour to arrive was simply the least I could do to milk the most out of every second I had on my hands! .net

"Sorry for being late, everyone," a man called out right as he made his way past the doors, only to drop a heavy suitcase right atop a small, teaching cathedral before spreading his arms, grabbing the cathedral's edges, and leaning forward as he scanned the conference room-turned-classroom with his squinted eyes.

'Everyone? I understand using the word, but is it really necessary when there are only four of us here?'

It was already a surprise to learn that Claire and I weren't the only ones taking part in this debriefing. A slightly less of a surprise to learn who was in charge of conducting it… but all the more surprising when learning who the other two were.

"First of all," the policeman, the very same high-ranking officer that Chihro so happily included in the whole situation before turning the man into a point of contact between the clan and the government, spoke. "First of all, this isn't school, so stop acting like spoiled and bored children. I'm not here to waste your time, so I hope you two will do your best to focus and get as much out of it as you can."

For a moment, the man simply stared us down in silence, the look of dissatisfaction in his eyes enough to freeze and then smash into pieces all of our desires to keep playing around.

After all, he was right. Messing around, as surprisingly fun as it could be, was ultimately just another form of wasting our time. And again, just like the man said, time was currently way too precious for us to waste like this.

"Okay then, moving on," the officer rolled his eyes at the sight of Claire's and my focused faces. He then grabbed a small remote before pointing it backward and pressing some of its keys.

In an instant, a small sheet of some sort of white material—most likely plastic—slid out of a small, barely visible slit in the room's ceiling, dropping all the way to the point where the small bar at the bottom of the screen reached as low as the policeman's hips. As the movement of the screen stopped, it flashed with light… only for this strange, white material to suddenly grow extremely dim.

It was a piece of technology I've only heard about, but never really had the chance of interact. Some sort of insanely detailed mix of hollowed-out plastic sheet with an engraved mesh of electrict patterns. A modern technology that used the imperfection of ways human brain recognized colors to cast an illusion only a human brain could properly interpret.

An invention created with the sole purpose of obscuring any sort of recording by creating visuals in way that simply didn't work according to the principles digital cameras operated.

Next, several points flashed up on the material, slowly coalescing into what I easily recognized as the home screen of the most popular PC software in global circulation, one that I was way too familiar with from my nerdy times to fail to recognize.

But this home screen was just a stepping stone, for a mouse soon appeared on this fancy screen, only for the major to quickly open one of the files and, in perfect government fashion, open what appeared like a simple, crude slideshow.

"To begin with, the situation, for now, is… manageable," the man explained as he opened up the first slide containing several pictures of the devastated power plant with a series of excerpts likely taken from some sort of confidential report.

"We've managed to contain the spread of the information about the disaster, effectively blocking the truth from coming out. We've also planted quite a lot of misleading, false evidence for the spiritual inquisition to find, get interested in, and go down the rabbit hole trying to figure it out. And the important thing is, for now…" the officer took a momentary pause to let the sense of urgency build up a little, "from what I've seen, it appears they took the bait."

This time, the pause was there to let the four of us—Claire, me, and the two servants of Chihiro I could vaguely remember seeing by his side in the past—absorb and process the info he provided both with his explanation and with the images on the slide.

A moment later, the man pressed something on the remote, switching over to the next, extremely information-dense slide.

"This here is nothing more than just a bunch of guesses… But rather than just random bits, it's all educated analysis of the material provided by an agency I consider to be quite capable at their job. And those statistics," the man pointed at several pie and line charts filling most of the slide's page, "reveal just how likely it is for the inquisition's investigation to show any kind of results that we might consider… harmful to our project."

Noticing a certain discrepancy between the man's words and the images he was pointing at, I leaned forward, sitting down at the very edge of my simple, wooden chair.

"Excuse me," I called out while raising my hand, fully giving in to the school vibe of the meeting, "is it just me, or do all of those charts imply it's only a matter of time before the inquisition gets to the truth?"

Judging by the officer's words, I expected the most likely case to be about the spiritual investigators finding absolutely nothing amiss within the whole disaster. That was also the entire purpose behind delaying…

"Oh…" I made a small sound as I realized the true meaning of what the officer said, right as the man opened up his mouth to explain.

"No matter what sort of delaying tactics we implement, it only serves to bring more heat to the case," he revealed. "In that sense, leaving the power plant as it was when we took control of it would give us the best chance at avoiding attracting additional attention, but…"

"It would come at the cost of leaving the results of their investigation to an unfavorable chance," Claire mouthed off silently, most likely intending it to be nothing more than an offhand comment, her take on the situation so far.

In the end, however, she commented on the case just loud enough for the officer to hear her… and smile.

"That's right. If we left that place as it was, it would be only a matter of a day or two before the inquisitors would figure everything out, down to the tiniest details. And with that happening, it wouldn't take them a week to uncover just how your clan was involved, why it was involved, and ask one extremely important… No," the officer shook his head, "extremely scary question."