[Tuesday, December 23]

I have an appointment with Mr. Daniels and his team this morning at 9. Admittedly, I don’t like the man since I consider him to be a con artist that pretends to be an unbiased journalist. Unfortunately, I have to deal with the snake or it’ll only create more problems.

No sooner do I get out of bed, than Mama taps on the door and comes in and whispers, “Good morning.”

“Morning, Mama.”

“Go take your bath, and I’ll pick something out for you to wear today. Then I’ll help you with your hair and makeup.”

I should mention that Mama has basically taken over buying and picking out my outfits for work. One of them I fell in love with the moment I saw it is a scoop neck, plum-colored Cashmere sweater mini dress. Long sleeves and it falls about to mid-thigh.

This is what she laid out for me, along with ultra sheer nude stockings and my beige, suede knee boots. Alongside that is some diamond stud earrings, a couple of thin silver bangles, one of the new watches that Dad finally got back, and a silver necklace with a diamond teardrop pendant.

She must have heard me get out of the bath since she came in and helped me dry off, then blow dried and brushed out my hair. She styles it in a messy updo and adds two diamond encrusted, silver hair sticks to keep it in place along with some hairspray. Then comes makeup. Afterward, she helps me dress.

Yes, the watch, bangles, and hair sticks were presents from my birthday. I’ve still yet to wear any of the rings, although Sofi has borrowed a few of them.

Walking over to the bed, I give the still sleeping Ryu and Chinatsu a light kiss and then follow Mama downstairs to eat. If you haven’t already guessed, Mama is coming with me today since she said she doesn’t trust Daniels. I doubt he would be dumb enough to try anything, and even if he did, Honoka would be right there with me and I’ve gotten really good at defending myself. Yes, Honoka won’t let me stop the self-defense classes. I may be tiny, but if I can hold my own against Ryu, I doubt that Daniels would pose much of a threat.

While we wait, I’m sitting at my desk reading a couple of progress reports. At the same time, Honoka and Mama are sitting on the loveseat watching something on her phone, and Yui is reading something in the chair beside them. Half an hour later, Akari announces that Mr. Daniels is here.

I tell her, “Please, show him in.” A moment later, she taps on the door and I call out, “Come in.”

Mr. Daniels enters, and I gesture to the seat in front of my desk. He sits, and I say, “Welcome to DTI. You already know me,” I gesture to Mama, “but this is my mother, Haruka Kobayashi, my sister, Honoka, and my publicist, Yui Andrews. They’ll be coming with us for your tour today.”

He looks at her and nods. “Mrs. Kobayashi.” He looks back to me and asks, “I thought it would only be you, me and my crew?”

I quirk an eyebrow at him. “I have no clue where you got that idea.” Leaning forward, I rest my forearms on my desk and ask, “Shall I be blunt, Mr. Daniels?” He nods. “You just did a hit piece on me and DTI. You and your ‘guests’ basically called me a liar as well. And then, you did it again during my video call with you.”

Yui surprises me when she stands up and interrupts. “Sora, may I?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

She smiles at me. “Thanks.” She looks at him and continues, “Mr. Daniels, I don’t think you did your homework very well. Do you have any idea who you tried to smear? How many people follow Sora every single day? Her social media accounts have over 15 million hits per day, and her livestreams have a minimum of 40 million viewers.” His eyes widen, and she nods again. “That’s right, she has three times the following you do on a daily basis.”

She hands him what she was reading earlier. “That is a report on what her followers thought of your attempt at smearing her reputation. 29.4 million said they didn’t believe a word of it. 23.8 million said they believed her, but might like to see further proof. 10.7 million said if she did mislead them it wasn't on purpose, and they would still follow her. The remaining 550 thousand or so were unsure of what to believe, had no opinion or just didn’t care.

“Mr. Daniels, in case you are poor at math, that is over 64 million people, most of whom could care less what you or your so-called experts believe. Personally, I think GNN is going to see a huge backlash over your story.”

She turns her back on him and sits back down. I pick it back up from there. “Well, Mr. Daniels, after all that, what reason do I have to trust you? As far as I can see, you set out to smear me and DTI from the very beginning.” I lean back in my seat. “So, tell me, why should I trust you?”

I can see the gears turning as he desperately tries to come up with something plausible. “You don’t believe people make mistakes?”

I smile wryly, “Everyone makes mistakes. That was, what did Jenny call it? Ah, yes, that was it, a hatchet job. Mr. Daniels, I have no idea why you’d do something like that, but it wasn’t a mistake. That was intentional from the beginning no matter how you want to play your hand. I would go so far as to call it slanderous.”

He loses a shade or two of color. I shrug. “You aren’t the first, and I doubt you’ll be the last to try to stab me in the back. The ones that have tried so far learned that it wasn’t a very smart thing to do.”

Indignantly, he asks, “Are you threatening me?”

I laugh. “Certainly not. You came here for a tour and demonstration. That is exactly what you’ll have. For now, let’s call this letting you know where you stand with me. By the way, Athena disabled your lapel mic and camera. I’d be well within my rights to call the police and have you arrested for trying to sneak a hidden camera into DTI. Mr. Daniels, I have no idea who you think you’re dealing with, but we’re not stupid. Whatever, though. I have other things to do today, so let’s get your crew and begin your tour.”

Yui activates our livestream camera and then follows all of us out of the office. Mr. Daniels glances at it and then asks, “Why are you recording?”

Yui laughs. “Do you really believe that I’d trust you not to edit footage or something? Hardly. This way, we’ll have another copy to show everyone if you try anything stupid. By the way, this is date and time stamped. The record time is done down to a microsecond, so just try to pull something shady with us, and I guarantee that Sora won’t have to sue you and GNN for slander, Torchlight will on her behalf.”

Yui might be a lot smaller than him, but it’s obvious that she intimidates him.

We’ll be following the same route I took during the live stream, and while the viewer count on this live stream is low, it’s beginning to pick up as the word spreads. As we exit the admin building, the count is already up to 28 million.

I look at the camera, wave, smile and say, “Hello, everyone. I know this is an unannounced stream, but thank you for joining us. As you can see. We’re joined by Mr. Daniels of GNN, my mother, my sister and as always, Yui, who you rarely get to see since she hides behind the camera.

“Today, we’re proving to Mr. Daniels that I didn’t mislead everyone during my live stream the other day. By the way, I heard what you folks thought about his accusations. Thank you for believing me. I apologize, but for many of you, this will probably be a little boring since you’ve already seen what I’m going to show him. Although, some of this will involve demonstrations, so that should help.”

We enter the power generation building and walk to the back. There, we meet up with Mr. Takaki from Tokyo Electric. I introduce him, and he bows.

“Mr. Takaki is here to verify my statements.” I pause and look at him. “Mr. Takaki, you know what I said about the cold fusion reactor and how much it can generate. So, would you mind explaining things from your side?”

“Certainly. DTI has taken over power generation for all of Tokyo prefecture. At present, TEC has no running power generation facilities because we shut them all down when DTI was able to develop this 100 terawatt reactor.”

Mr. Daniels asks, “How do we know that this isn’t just another nuclear reactor?”

Mr. Takaki looks at him like he’s an idiot for a moment before gesturing to the reactor. “Have you ever heard of a nuclear reactor this small? Let alone one that could produce 100 terawatts? Then there’s this little aspect.” He holds up a radiation counter next to the reactor, which barely twitches from the background radiation. “As you can see, no radiation. If we were this close to a nuclear reactor, all of us would have received a lethal dose already. Cold fusion is a fact, not a fantasy.”

I look at Daniels and ask, “Are you satisfied with his answers?”

He doesn’t bother to answer me, and instead, he asks, “What are your qualifications to be making these statements?”

Mr. Takaki simply shrugs and states, “I have a masters degree in nuclear engineering, and I have to take a test every six years to prove my knowledge or I lose my certification to work at a nuclear plant.”

I hear Yui mutter, “Amazing. He’ll ask him for his qualifications, but his so-called panel of experts? ‘Eh, whatever, I’ll just take your word that you know what you’re talking about.’ Sheesh!”

I snort and cover my mouth to keep from giggling when Daniels glares at Yui. “Thank you for being here, Mr. Takaki, I know you’re busy.”

He laughs for a moment. “I’m happy to help, Ms. Kobayashi, but I’m not as busy as you might think anymore. All thanks to Mr. Ohta.”

I again look at Daniels. “Satisfied?” He nods reluctantly, which makes me think, ‘He’s only digging his own grave even deeper by acting this way.’ I glance at the number of people connected and see that it’s at 37 million. “Alright, let’s move on to the inertial dampening lab.”

I lead a quiet group of people over, and we enter the building. There, we meet up with one of the engineers responsible for actually building the dampener, Alex Bouchard.

Smiling, I offer my hand and say, “Hi, Alex. It’s good to see you again.”

He shakes my hand lightly. “Nice to see you too, Sora.”

Turning to Daniels, I state, “This is Alex Bouchard, he’s the chief development engineer for the inertial dampening project. Alex, this is Kevin Daniels. I mentioned him to you.” He nods.

Daniels offers his hand to Alex, who looks at his hand for a moment, then asks, “So, what can I do for ya?”

It’s easy to see that Alex made him angry by refusing to shake hands, but he says, “I’d like to see a demonstration of this inertial dampening.”

Alex nods again. “Sure. Do you want to be the subject, or?”

Daniels shakes his head and smirks at me. “Seeing as how Ms. Kobayashi has such confidence in your machine here, I’d rather she did it,” which instantly makes me hold up my hand to stop anyone from saying anything.

“No problem. Alex, if you would, please? Explain to him what this is and what you’ll be doing.”

He murmurs, “They’ll kill me if anything happens to you, Sora.”

Smiling at him, I pat his arm reassuringly. “I believe in you and your team. I know what you’ve done with this, so I’m not worried at all.”

He blows out his breath, looks at Daniels and points to an enclosed cart on a track that circles the whole building as he says, “This is our test vehicle and it’s capable of 50 g’s of acceleration. 50 g’s would kill you in less than a second. We are simply not built to take that kind of acceleration. Our little machine takes the energy from acceleration, converts it to heat and then disperses it.

“I’ll do a test run before we have Sora get in, and you can see the g-forces the vehicle is subject to yourself.

“After that, we’ll accelerate the vehicle at 15 g’s for 1 second, which would normally be enough to knock her unconscious, but she won’t even feel it due to the dampening effect. She will only feel the normal 1 g that we all do. We can’t do more than 15 g’s in here due to track length limitations, but even then, Sora will be moving at 400 mph. That’s right. 0 to 400 mph in a second, so all you will see is a blur.”

Mama taps me on the shoulder, and I look at her, “Mind your skirt, Sweetheart,” which makes me giggle.

“Mama, it’s enclosed so that the wind doesn’t hurt you, so we don’t need to worry about my skirt.”

He walks over to a console with Daniels in tow and points to a g meter. “Keep your eye on that because this time, we’ll have the dampener off.” He turns a switch presses a button, which sounds a buzzer, and calls out, “FIRING IN 30 SECONDS! Alright everyone, put your hearing protection on.”

I look at Yui and mouth, ‘Mute the audio,’ and she nods. A few seconds later, he again calls out, “FIRING!” and presses a button. Even through the hearing protection, it’s loud, and the vehicle immediately blurs.

A second later, all you can hear is a quiet rush of wind and then Daniels yell, “50.7 g’s!” A couple of seconds later, Alex presses another button quickly followed by a loud squeal, and Daniels yells again, “Negative 49.9 g’s!” The vehicle stops at the platform, and I walk over to it with Alex. Alex helps me inside and buckles me in, while another engineer double checks the belts when he finishes. They close and lock the doors, and we go through the same process again. No muss, no fuss, not even a hair out of place when they help me out.

I might be dizzy as I hold onto Alex’s hand while descending the stairs, but I grin as I quirk an eyebrow at Daniels and ask, “Well? Still think it doesn’t work?”

Daniels stands there and looks at the vehicle seemingly astonished, so I look at Alex and say, “Thank you. That was a lot of fun. I could see something like that as an amusement park ride, but with a longer track.”

He laughs and quips, “What do you think we do when we’re stuck?”

I snap my fingers in front of Daniels’ face several times. “Wakey, wakey…” He finally looks at me and I ask, “Do you want to try it? Only to make sure it isn’t a trick, mind you. Not because it’s fun or anything like that.”

“Is it alright?”

I nod and then Alex says, “We can even make it more interesting for you by varying the dampening so that you can be sure that it’s actually working. Let’s say, no more than 2.5 g’s? You look fit enough to handle that.”

Suffice it to say that he takes me up on the offer and comes out beaming.

Once he’s down from the platform, I ask, “So where to next? Do you want to see the system drive in operation or do you believe that one actually works?”

“No, I believe that one works since I saw the images of it operating on Captis and Muse. Is there any way you can give me a walkthrough of the new ship you just built?”

I think for a few moments. “I can, but Athena gets to review the footage from it. Anything she deems classified gets blurred out. Agreed?”

Needless to say, he agreed, and I gave him the walkthrough as I answered what questions I could about the ship. Athena ran back through their footage and luckily didn’t have to blur anything.

And, finally, we watched his broadcast the next morning, where he showed the video and apologized to not only me, but DTI as well, for his first piece. He also thanked me for reminding him what a true journalist should do.

Me? I’m simply happy that it all worked out in our favor without having to go to court over it, and my fans… Well, fans being fans, they went nuts over the live stream, and we peaked at 63.2 million viewers. In the 24 hours since Yui posted it, it’s had a total over 142 million views, which I find amazing. When I told Yui that, she merely smiled and shook her head as she patted my shoulder.