Grocery Run

“Get in, kids, we’re going shopping!”

Setsuna’s mom, Tsubomi, made fun out of everything. That didn’t mean she made everything fun. He scowled as he got into the car, with Nagahisa trailing behind him. Elegy took the passenger seat today, as she did most days, unless their mom insisted on switching things up. But riding shotgun made Elegy happy, and of course, she’d rather have one of her three kids match her mood than none of them.

Summer rain battered the car windows, obscuring Setsuna’s view of the dozen parked cars in the driveway of their apartment building. No one would want to go shopping in another city of Tokyo in this weather, but mom always dragged them off to buy cheese, Spam, and whatever else caught her eye. To Setsuna, one plate of food was as good as any other, and Nagahisa was too picky to like the fancy stuff their mom bought.

So, as usual, Elegy won when they went out like this.

“We know,” Setsuna told their mom with audible annoyance.

Tsubomi turned the keys and started the engine with a big grin on her face. The car’s windshield wipers wheezed as they went from side to side, removing some of the rain on the front window.

“Are we going to buy some sushi rice this time?” Nagahisa asked.

“Sure!” Tsubomi replied. “See, was that so hard? Ask and you shall receive!”

“Oh…” Setsuna paused. He wasn’t one for smiling, but he had an idea that made him, maybe, happy? “Can we get less apples this time?”

“Fuck no,” Elegy snapped.

Nagahisa shot a meaningful glance at Setsuna, then chipped in, “half of the last batch went bad.”

“Hmm!” Their mom was distracted, fiddling with her phone to get a route to the store she liked, but she was listening enough to respond. “Well, we can get one that’s half the size.”

“Seriously?” Elegy looked back over the head of her seat to glare at the other two.

“Welllll, if we cut things like that out, I can get some pretzels and a six-pack,” Tsubomi explained. “So, we’ll try that out! Update the shopping list!”

“...we don’t have a shopping list,” Setsuna mumbled.

“Oh, right! Well, enough distractions! Mom’s got to drive!”

And Tsubomi did drive. Poorly.

“Oh, no…” Tsubomi groaned.

The mother and her three children stood under the cover of a bus stop as the rain poured down. Their car had suffered a fender-bender – again – and they all watched as an irritable crew towed both of the cars involved. The stumbling salaryman driving a Toyota, who Tsubomi had hit, swore at them before running off. Setsuna pitied him: he probably had somewhere important to be, at the very least at home so his wife wouldn’t get mad.

His mom, though, never made any appointments she couldn’t keep. And she couldn’t keep most appointments because of stuff like this.

“Oh, come on!” Elegy threw her head to the sky and curled her fingers like claws. “Again!? Again, mom!?”

“Well, you know what I always say,” Tsubomi waved her hand in front of her nose, “alcohol and water don’t mix! He shouldn’t have been so drunk! And if he HAD to drink and drive, he could’ve gotten away with it by avoiding main intersections!”

“No one has to drink and drive,” Nagahisa muttered.

“Also, you can’t drink straight alcohol,” Setsuna added.

“Yeah, mom. Are you stupid?” Elegy concluded.

Their mom probably recognized that her children had united to pick on her, a rare but terrifying battle formation, and she resorted to her usual strategy. “Well! You know what would make me feel better right about now? Some McDonalds! Or anything else, really! Where should we go?”

“Another grocery store, obviously,” Nagahisa muttered, keeping his voice low as if accepting that someone would speak over him. “What kind of grocery run doesn’t have groceries?”

“A good one!” Elegy popped off, puffing out her chest and crossing her arms. “Honestly, this whole grocery thing was dumb anyways. We should go get McDonalds!”

“No, we should go somewhere that won’t be busy because of the rain,” Setsuna argued, a stoic frown on his face. “Everyone’ll be in McDonalds. But the zoo should be open still.”

“Oh, sure! You just wanna pet the animals!” Elegy argued, without making a particular point.

“...so do I, actually.” Nagahisa concurred.

Elegy harrumphed. “C’mon! Be a man! Petting animals is girl stuff!”

“If you want someone to be a man so badly, you do it.” Setsuna took off his coat, dripping with rain water, and marched towards Elegy, who took a step back. “Here, come on. You be the brother, Elegy.”

“Ew, no! Get away from me! Your coat isn’t even rainproof!”

The kids were getting taller, so Tsubomi had to reach up to plant her hands on their heads, one each. “Now, now! No arguing and no tormenting each other with cooties. I think the zoo is a great idea, even if they don’t let us pet the animals. After that, we can go to McDonalds! It’s been a while since I fed the birds.”

“You’re not supposed to feed the birds.” Nagahisa spoke as if reciting the text from a sign in front of him, and his mother, of course, ignored him.

“Wait, the zoo’s like ten miles away!” Elegy argued. It was more like one and a half, but exaggeration made her point better, and Elegy didn’t know that in any case. “How are we supposed to get there with no car?”

“Who said we have no car?” Tsubomi reached up and pointed a finger at the top of the Toyota dealership two blocks down, visible over a handful of shorter apartment buildings. “Well, we don’t, but we can always rent one, you know?”

“They’re not going to give you another rental car, mom,” Setsuna told her. “You totalled three this year.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that! I know a guy who knows a guy!” Tsubomi circled around to the back of the bus stop, behind the children, and began trying to push them out, using hands on a shoulder each for Setsuna and Nagahisa and the rest of her body to push against Elegy.

It was awkward and feeble, but the kids went along with it and back into the rain. They knew that struggling would just delay the inevitable.

What could they really do?

Every time Nagahisa got up and started pacing around, Elegy and Setsuna reluctantly pulled him back down onto his chair. They’d been waiting in the front room of the dealership for a while, but they’d seen enough of their mom’s so-called friend to know what was going on.

“He’s going to scam her,” Nagahisa muttered irritably as Elegy sat him back down.

“Of COURSE he’s going to scam her! We all know who he is!” Elegy could remember that pleasantly smiling face and that condescending voice instantly. He was in some of her earliest memories! And he was an asshole. They all knew that.

But he could also tell their mom what she wanted to hear, and that was a fast track to having her wrapped around your finger. None of the kids could think of any other way for her to get a rental car.

“Well, he probably won’t hold her to her debts,” Setsuna was still sitting down, with his arms crossed. “He’ll say, do this devil summoning work for me and I’ll reduce your debt by half.”

Nagahisa scowled and punched the wall. But not too hard, because that would be vandalism. “We’re just sitting here and letting Mammon of Greed exploit our mother…”

“Aaaand sold!” A man in a vibrant purple doublet threw open the door, with Tsubomi grinning like an idiot behind him. His masked face, depicting a pleasant smile, concealed what was no doubt a far more demonic smile of glee. “Bless your hearts, kids. You don’t hafta worry so much. Your mother won’t have any debt hanging over her head, see! In fact, she’s paying up front!”

Nagahisa perked up, Elegy sat up straight, and Setsuna’s frown grew at the edges.

The car Mammon had sold them was one of the smoothest rides the children had ever experienced. On paper, it was a silver 200X Toyota Opa – a name that made their mom cry laughing every time she mentioned it. In practice, however, all three siblings suspected that there was some kind of supernatural influence on it. When they launched over a speed bump, the car didn’t even buckle. When she hit the side of the highway, there was no grinding noise, just a gentle nudging back onto the lane. And even though it was still storming, the tires seemed to have perfect traction.

They were riding through the three-lane intersection near Gotanda Station like their mom wasn’t the one in the driver’s seat. They turned the corner near a tall white building with brown stucco windows, and the “AOYAMA” sign at its front never got perilously close to the car. In fact, they didn’t even hit the sidewalk once, and every other vehicle on the road kept a respectful distance!

“If this car is alive, they’re gonna be mad you keep calling them the ‘Toyota Oppai’,” Elegy said. Normally, she would be punching her siblings on the shoulder, fighting over game consoles, or whatever else she decided, but right now she was glued to the window, watching to see if they might go off the highway and start flying. That’d give the ordinary folks a good shock.

Their mom audibly gasped. “You can’t say that, Elegy! That’s a bad word! Besides, that’s the brand of the car. You know, like how we’re homo sapiens. The car’s name is Chris!”

Nagahisa blinked. “Chris… does that make the car a boy or a girl?”

The car buckled, and there was no speed bump below or behind them. A man in a freight truck next to them honked his horn, and their mom laughed like a kookaburra, letting her “wahahaha” trail off before turning to look at the kids, grinning.

“Offended, looks like!” she said. “Seriously, don’t make the car too mad. I don’t wanna lose the privilege of taking my eyes off the road!”

“It’s a demon,” Nagahisa hissed. “You shouldn’t be doing that anyways!”

“Well, anybody who gets run over by a haunted car probably had a bad atmosphere about them, right?”

“No! That’s not right! This is why we never talk about morality.”

Setsuna spoke up. “I thought that was because of Elegy!”

Elegy’s head snapped away from the window to look straight at Setsuna. “No, it’s because of you guys!”

Nagahisa wanted to scream, but instead he just let a groan die in his throat. His family was good at arguing about matters that, to him, were solved. Like, for example, whether or not it was okay for demons to kill the occasional person. He was pretty sure that his mom was joking when she said that it’d be fine for the car to run someone over on its own… but he wasn’t one hundred percent sure, and that bothered him. Not as much as his siblings did, though.

“So… where are we going?” Setsuna finally asked.

Elegy snorted, and Nagahisa breathed out. When she was too impatient and he was too demoralized to ask their mom something, they waited for Setsuna to draw the short straw of his own accord.

“Well, our first destination is the Shinagawa Prince Hotel!” Their mom’s response was uncharacteristically straightforward. Was she nervous about whatever Mammon had asked her, or just invested?

It had to be one or the other, because she kept talking. “That’s where we’ll meet our contact.”

“What, old Uncle Mammon was too good to give you the job himself?” Elegy asked.

“Oh, no, no. Actually, he wants to stay out of it, and that’s why! It’s a dispute between summoners, and demons really hate getting involved in those.”

Nagahisa cut in. “They don’t like being boxed in with one summoner or the other. They prefer not to have strong loyalties. Right?”

“Most of them do! And for those ones, you could call Mammon a patron saint or something!”

“Except for the part where he’s a demon.”

“Yeah!”

In theory, the drive from Gotanda Station to the Prince Hotel should have been a short one. They just had to follow Road Route 317 east through Sony Street. There were four lanes and little congestion, so it should have only taken them about five minutes to get to the hotel.

The problem, of course, was that only two of the lanes were for driving on. The other two, one on either side, provided easy parking. And because it was a major road, all kinds of interesting buildings were a glance away.

So the three siblings sat texting each other, placing bets on how long it would take their mom to get distracted, pull over, and drag them somewhere else. In total, they put 2,000 yen on the line. Whoever got closest without going over won.

Nagahisa bet 25, Elegy bet 30, and Setsuna, succumbing to optimism, bet 40. Nagahisa won cleanly, at 28 seconds.

The car stopped in front of a tall but largely nondescript building with eight floors, not that many by the standards of the shadowed street around them. There was a narrow walkway to one side and several narrower doors along its front. Its most noticeable feature, though, was a colourful green shutter adorned with cartoon art, the sort you’d see rolled down over a storefront after closing.

“Oh! Look, everyone! It’s a zoo!” their mom declared. She rolled down the window and pointed at the repeating decal on the shutter, which depicted a huddle of animals including a yellow bird, a brown dog, a blue rabbit, and even a pink dinosaur. The text next to the decal did indeed read “ZOO”. Before any of them could respond, their mom threw off her seatbelt.

“Wait! There’s no way that’s really a zoo,” Setsuna pointed out. “We’re in the middle of the street…”

“Plus, it’s ZOO in capital letters. That’s it. Not even like, ‘Sony Street Zoo.’ Seems like a trick to me.” Elegy agreed with Setsuna, quite possibly because she’d just lost a bet to Nagahisa.

Nagahisa groaned, but said nothing. Instead, he took the scuffed-up bills sitting near his seat, put them in his pocket, undid his seatbelt, and stepped out of the car.

Elegy swore quietly enough that their mother wouldn’t hear her, and Setsuna stomped his foot. The floodwater on the road was about half as tall as their shoes, and every step was like entering a new and particularly aggressive puddle. It hadn’t stopped raining either, of course. Why couldn’t their mom just keep herself in check until they had a nice parking garage to stop in, Elegy thought?

But their mom had already stopped in front of the narrow red door left of the shutter. “Hmm…” she made that noise especially loudly, as if to make sure the kids could hear it. “Looks like this doesn’t go to the zoo! But how do we get in?”

“We don’t, right now,” Nagahisa called back, running onto the sidewalk. “You know what a shutter is for, mom. The… zoo… is probably closed.”

Tsubomi whirled around and grabbed Nagahisa by the shoulders, eyes wide.

“That means the animals are stuck inside while it’s flooding! We have to help them, Nagahisa! Oh, maybe we can take them all home and look after them until the zookeepers get back!”

Nagahisa startled. Not because of how his mom had grabbed him, of course. This was a garden variety reaction for the most eccentric devil summoner in Tokyo. No, he was surprised that she almost sounded like she was making a good point. Almost. If the storm continued, the building could get water damaged, and then the animals… well, the animals were probably on elevated surfaces. Right? So they would be fine. But still, especially if some were in kennels on the floor, they…

And off mom went. She’d dashed off to the nearby alley, and Setsuna and Elegy were sloshing after her.

Nagahisa sighed. Well, he could entertain the moral argument at least. It made him feel a little better about whatever would come next.

The gutters of the building were overflowing, and their mom was now wet-haired but no less energetic as she stood in front of the ZOO’s glass window. Setsuna was looking dubiously at the ground, no, at the base of the window. While it was surrounded by brick on either side, the window itself was supported only by plaster or something, and it looked old and worn.

In other words, Nagahisa thought, the building looked as waterlogged as their mom was starting to, running around like a toddler in a raincoat. Enough flooding and some might actually seep into the building.

“Well, here’s where we can get in!” Their mom announced, and Elegy was the only one who smiled at the prospect of vandalism.

Nagahisa came up beside the others and looked through the window. It was big enough to walk through, true, and his family loved nothing if not walking through their problems. Cat trees were the first thing in the way, with several up against the windows, but they appeared to be for sale and not for use by the animals, so that cleared up the possibility of disturbing the animals.

Now the only problem, as ever, was that they didn’t really have a plan.

“So… are we going to grab all of the kennels, stack them in the car, and drive them to our apartment? Even if there’s just ten boarding here, we can’t look after that many. Or FIT that many.”

Their mom waved her hand dismissively, smiling. “No, no, of course not! I know a vet who just loves animals! Why, they’re basically a god of animals!” She winked with one eye, then the other, and Setsuna groaned.

“...and they’ll bring the animals back here, where they’re supposed to be, after the storm?” Nagahisa questioned her, almost looking more sour than Setsuna did. “Some or most of them have owners, you know.”

“Don’t worry, Nagahisa! I only associate with trustworthy and reliable demons!”

“Like Mammon?”

“Yes, exactly like Mammon!”

Elegy grunted like an irritable beast moments from baring its fangs, but said nothing to argue with that. Setsuna, who was frowning, did likewise. Ultimately, Mammon was straightforward and transparent compared to many of his accomplices from the upper echelons of the demon world. But that didn’t mean the three teenagers had to like it.

“But you’re not taking the cats to him.” What Nagahisa said toed the line between question and statement. They could all imagine Mammon charging exorbitant rates to return someone’s pet to them.

“No, no, of course not! Although…” Tsubomi took out her Devil Riser, broke the window with the handle as if pistol-whipping it, and cleared the glass shards away with her shoes. “Oh, watch your step, kids!”

“We know!” Elegy practically shouted.

“At least finish your sentence,” Setsuna mumbled.

Using her summoning device as a hammer of demonic material, the Kai matriarch tore down the window with a couple more swings. When she was done, she craned her head into the store through the hole she’d made. “Okay, there ARE aquariums inside!”

Nagahisa turned back to his mom from looking out of the alleyway, satisfied that no one had seen them. “Which means?”

“We’ll need to visit a couple different demons! Don’t worry, there’s a local mermaid who’ll just love to take care of these little guys! I bet she’s out with her friends right now!”

Setsuna froze. The last time he’d gone to the beach on a rainy day, he’d had two of those mermaids fawning over him, talking about how handsome he was. It wasn’t an experience he was eager to repeat.

“I don’t want to visit the beach,” Setsuna said, truthfully. “It’s not a good day for it,” he added, only technically true.

“Oh, that’s okay! She actually hangs out at Yoyogi National Gymnasium! You see, she’s a fan of strong people, so she loves to stay in a pond near there and watch whenever they’re using it for practice! I think she’s also looking for a boyfriend or a girlfriend. She said she really wants an Olympic swimmer!”

“From Japan?” Elegy clicked her teeth. “She’s gonna be waiting a while.”

“I know!” Tsubomi pointed at the air. “I told her China’s right over there, but she’s gotten attached to the sushi.”

“Isn’t that cannibalism?” asked Nagahisa.

“Only if it’s mermaid sushi!”

“Well, ANY-way!” Elegy tried to call attention to herself as if to end the sidetrack, getting a somewhat dirty look from Setsuna. “How are we gonna get into the Yoyogi Gymnasium like this? Isn’t it going to be closed as hell?”

“It’s an indoor gymnasium,” said Setsuna.

Elegy slumped and frowned. “Oh.”

“Come on, you three! I know you love drilling holes in your mom’s plans, but sometimes I swap out the plywood for steel!” Tsubomi pumped a fist, and then turned her attention back to the inside of the ZOO. “Just like this. We’re going to stand in a row leading back towards the car, and when I pass a kennel to whoever’s behind me, you pass it along until it’s in the car. Sound good?”

All three of them pondered for a moment if there was a quick way to say no to that.

Tsubomi clapped her hands. “Great! We’re going with my plan, because time’s a-wastin’, and if we get any more soaked out here, our clothes’ll be heavier than the cats!”

Nagahisa’s head was propped up against the car window, and the rest of his body against the door. Elegy didn’t know how he stayed asleep with the sound of raindrops slamming into one ear.

“Mom, give me the picnic blanket,” she said, leaning forward towards the driver’s seat.

“Oh, are you and Nagahisa going to cuddle up?” Tsubomi’s grin was practically audible, even as she – mercifully – kept her eyes on the road. She tossed a checkered red-and-white knit blanket between the front seats, and Elegy caught it.

“Of course not. He’s already asleep. He gets maybe twenty-five percent of the blanket.”

“Adorable! It’s just like when you were kids!”

“We agreed not to talk about that,” Setsuna butted in.

“Oh! Right, sorry.”

They were stuck at a four-way intersection underneath an overpass, one of the larger streets in all of Tokyo. Mostly they were surrounded by brick buildings and glass skyscrapers, none of which stood out to their city-dwelling eyes, but looking north, there was a small park on the left and a FamilyMart, dressed in its green bands, underneath a cinderblock six-story apartment complex.

“No,” Setsuna said from the back seat.

“What, you’re not hungry?” Tsubomi took her hand off of the driver-side door and put it back on the wheel. “There’s so much traffic, nobody will mind if we dash out to grab some Famichiki!”

“I have to speak for Nagahisa, since he’s asleep,” Setsuna said. “Everyone will mind. We don’t want to go to the police station again.”

“Well, you two wouldn’t mind, would you?” Tsubomi turned over her shoulder to look at her other kids.

“I’d mind the consequences,” Setsuna said dourly.

“I wouldn’t!” Elegy said. Then she leaned back and put her feet forward, kicking on the back of Tsubomi’s seat. “But this is seriously not the time! We’d just run back out, get the car – a demon car – soaked, and the chicken wouldn’t even be hot!”

The car’s engine rumbled.

“Fine, fine. I’m outvoted.” Tsubomi threw up a hand, but didn’t look too upset. “Even Chrissy can have a vote! Actually, Chrissy, do you think maybe you could fly? Like that one scene in the novel about the kid wizards!”

Setsuna blinked. “You mean H–”

The front of the car tilted upward like a plane during takeoff.

As usual, it took the pedestrians and other drivers a few seconds to react. By the time people had pulled out their phones, Chris was already starting to level out in midair, flying about parallel to the fifth story of the building the FamilyMart was in. That was enough to fly over a delivery truck up ahead without opening its roof like a can, and to brush the top of the next stoplight without knocking it over.

“What the hell are you doing, mom?” Nagahisa cried, surging forward against his seatbelt with still blurry eyes.

“I’m not doing anything!” Tsubomi protested, maybe a little too glibly in tone. “Maybe Chrissy just got bored of waiting?”

“Just great! Why did Mammon have to give us a demon car?”

The speakers on the dashboard crackled, and Mammon spoke from them. “I notice that Chris has activated a magical feature. Young Nagahisa, please consider the efficiency this lends to your mission!”

“Efficiency? The entire town knows we’re doing this!”

“They would know eventually, you see? Stealth is not a skillset your mother is hired for, bless her heart. And thanks to Chris’s ultra-photosensitive adaptive windows, every photo and video of your car will show pitch black windows. You’ll never be identified! Celebrities across the world only wish they had a car as useful as Chris.”

Nagahisa threw his body back against his seat. Elegy glared at him.

“But this won’t be a problem for you or us, will it?” Setsuna asked, pursing his lips. Mammon didn’t gamble; after all, that risked losing money.

“Oh, course not. Don’t underestimate people, Setsuna, they have this glorious ability to just move on or explain things away. Now, if Chris had been caught on a traffic camera, that might be trouble.”

Nagahisa looked out the window. There were a lot of people with their phones out, filming, but nobody had a real camera. The average flip phone couldn’t even get the stripes on a cat. So those videos would join the pile of “proof” that demons existed. And as for real proof…

“Doesn’t it cost you money to have that stuff deleted?” Elegy asked, brushing her cheek and looking aloof. “You must really care.”

“Japan has taxes, Makai has taxes, and even living in the human world as a demon has taxes,” Mammon replied. “Keeping up the masquerade is a public service for us. I’m just paying into it like a good citizen.”

“Sure. A public service for people who manipulate the public,” Nagahisa spoke quietly, but not so quietly that he couldn’t be heard. “We should all be glad you haven’t taken over the government.”

“Taken over? Now, that’s downright unkind. You see, Nagahisa, some of the candidates for next prime minister are what you’d call demons. But! We’re letting the election play out. The way I see it, if a demon can offer a better platform than their competition, why not let them win?”

Nagahisa stood up straight. “Don’t tell me… are you running for prime minister under another identity?”

Mammon chuckled, causing the speakers to crackle. “Hells below, no. There’s no money in that. All that control over fiscal policy won’t budge the needle for the real underworld. I’m just trying to educate you. But don’t you worry, we’re not trying to replace humans or nothing. We need to coexist with you! I mean it, we literally need that.”

Nagahisa crossed his arms and looked sullen.

Tsubomi scratched her cheek, both hands off the wheel. “You know, Mammon, you’re making it sound like I don’t educate my kids!”

“Of course not, Buddy. But you’ve got them on a limited curriculum. Little Nagahisa’s gotten it in his head that demons are bad, of all things!”

“Well, they definitely are bad when they stick their nose in things and go from weird uncle to nagging mother-in-law!” Tsubomi turned her nose up at the speakers.

At first, the kids had been a bit concerned about how they were now travelling at the speed of a bus through the air just barely above Tokyo. Now, there was no more welcome distraction than watching as they passed closely over buildings to the tune of Chris’s engine. It was bad enough when their mother and Mammon were in agreement; their disagreements were like being called into the dentist three weeks in a row.

“So be it, but don’t you reckon your kids would be better off with a more complete knowledge of the world?”

“They have that! I told you, Nagahisa got an A in World History. And Setsuna and Elegy weren’t that far behind!”

“Fire!” Elegy shouted. Sadly, she’d already tried this once. Neither Tsubomi nor Mammon believed her.

The car dipped lower towards the ground, about four stories up, into the shadows of the taller buildings behind it. The engine grew quieter, sputtering, like a person trying to finish a sentence. They were approaching a residential road, and Chris was probably trying to be quiet and to cast a shadow over less of the town.

“Hey, that one has a really big pool,” Setsuna pointed at the most prominent of the houses on the street below.

“They could build another house in that spot,” Nagahisa said. “Wouldn’t it be better to have that?”

Elegy shrugged. “Well, summer’s always getting hotter, no thanks to the inhabitants of Hell dragging fire and brimstone out with ‘em.”

“Lotta demons don’t like fire,” Setsuna pointed out. “If they all did, only the dumbest and weakest demons would spew or use fire. But it’s actually a pretty respected element.”

“Okay jackass, so maybe I wasn’t actually correct.” Elegy glared at Setsuna and pinched the air near her eyes as if adjusting a pair of glasses. “But the demons that hate fire are going to want a pool too, right?”

The pool they were arguing about vanished beneath the rooftop of an old, rickety two-story house with wooden walls. A moment later, the car buckled as it hit the road once more. Theirs was the only car moving on this tiny two-lane street; the few others they could see were parked in driveways.

“It’s always weird how Japan can go from riches to rags in a couple blocks,” Elegy said, graciously letting the previous argument drop now that she had something else to scrutinize.

“No, this is still a rich neighbourhood,” Nagahisa pointed out. “The house with the pool is just left at the next intersection. Quiet is one of the most valuable commodities in Tokyo… unless you’re mom.”

“What can I say?” Tsubomi, in the front seat, had her hands off the steering wheel and behind her head. “I like the hustle and bustle! It goes great with my morning coffee!”

Elegy threw her hands up, curled into claws, at either side of her, baring her long, sharp teeth. “Ugh! You guys are impossible! All I’m saying is that if you’re going to live it up, you should look the part!”