Part 1 || A Girl’s Case
Valentin smoked frowningly for a few seconds; then, removing his cigarette, he said: “If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing, keep behind him. Stray when he strays; stop when he stops; travel as slowly as he. Then you may see what he saw and may act as he acted. All we can do is to keep our eyes skinned for a queer thing.”
—G. K. Chesterton,
The Innocence of Father Brown,
“The Blue Cross”
Part 1 || 1 | Momo
A Tale of Two Sisters
Muse Second Grade Momo Yume of the Muse Bureau’s Special Victims Unit bit her lip when Muse Inspector Nathaniel Coleman wrinkled his forehead as he read their reports. As the morning weighed heavier on her the longer she waited for his superior’s response, Momo started to regret changing the training program for Sakura Yume yesterday, turning a routine training case into a traumatic experience. One glance at her younger sister told her enough, from her undone twin tails to her steely gaze on the wall past Nathaniel’s shoulder. What’s more, Sakura had avoided her during the remaining office hours that day and had given her the cold shoulder at home that night.
Momo reached over to hold her sister’s hand, but Sakura brushed it off. Translation: Don’t touch me.
Momo bit her lip again and waited for Nathaniel to finish reading the reports. Since Momo had overseen the program that had earned Sakura her sidearm, she wanted to take back putting her sister through such an infamous case file. As such, on entering Nathaniel’s office, Momo had tried to break the ice with Sakura, asking her why she undid her twin tails, but wasn’t sure how to broach that question.
After Nathaniel finished reading their submitted reports, he told Sakura that what she had experienced was one of the Muse Bureau’s worst-case-scenarios, the botched Trevor Waltman case. He said that it was a case in which a pair of muse officers were sent out to investigate a routine disturbance, yet it resulted in the death of one muse officer and Trevor Waltman, while the surviving muse was institutionalized. He added that the Muse Bureau sometimes used this case to prepare the Special Victims Unit’s First and Second Grade muse officers for the more serious cases in their pay grades.
“With that said,” Nathaniel said, catching Momo’s eye with a gleam in his own eye, “why did you use that case for Sakura’s training program?”
With Momo on the spot, along with Sakura’s glares through sidelong glances, Momo said, “I thought Sakura needed to understand the risks of our profession, so I used the Trevor Waltman training program to expunge her flowery preconceptions of the job before she becomes a liability.”
“Break her now,” he said, “so she won’t break later on?”
“That’s the idea, sir,” Momo said.
“That’s harsh,” he said.
“I may have crossed the line, sir,” Momo said, “but believe me. I had the best intentions.”
“I’m sure you did,” Nathaniel said, “but Sakura’s only a Fourth Grade muse right now, not a First Grade or a Second Grade. Her cases won’t be anywhere near as harrowing as that, till she gets promoted.”
“And for that, I’m sorry,” Momo said. “Still, with all due respect, sir, I’m a Second Grade muse in charge of the more serious cases. If anything were to happen to me during one of my cases, even if I don’t die, it’s gonna be hard on her. I just want Sakura to be prepared, that’s all.”
Which had Nathaniel nodding his head and saying, “I see your point, but go easy on her. She’s still new here.”
“I will, sir,” Momo said.
He turned to Sakura, saying, “You sure you’re okay?”
“I am, sir,” Sakura said and folded her arms. “I just feel like she doesn’t trust me.”
“Sakura, it’s not about that,” Momo said.
“Then what’s it about, huh?” Sakura said. “Whatever it is, I’m not stupid. You don’t need to bash me over the head like that for me to understand you!”
“Then talk to me,” Momo said. “You’ve been—”
“Ladies, ladies,” Nathaniel said, raising his hands up in a placating gesture. “I can see that you’ve got some things to air out between the two of you. So tell you what: How about you both get two days off to settle things?”
“Wait a minute,” Momo said. “I have to—”
“I’m talking to your sister at the moment,” Nathaniel said, then back to Sakura: “What do you say?”
Sakura glanced Momo’s way for a moment, then said, “That’s fine by me.”
“Good,” he said. “Report back in three days. That gives you two days to blow off steam. Sounds good?” When Sakura nodded, he added, “Then I’ll see both of you on Thursday. I’ll have a case for you two by then. You’re dismissed.”
At this, Sakura stood up from her chair and left the office, while Momo said after her, “Sakura, wait up.” Sakura didn’t, so Momo turned back to the Muse Inspector and said, “I still have to finish up my case on George Garland!”
“Ryder will handle it,” he said.
“But, sir, I—”
“This is your reprimand, Momo Yume,” he said. “You’ll still get paid for your efforts in that case, but Ryder gets the glory on that one.”
“Seriously?” Momo said and caught a glint in Nathaniel’s eye and a hint of a smile. “She’ll brag to everyone that she closed it by herself!”
“You worry too much,” Nathaniel said. “And shouldn’t you go after Sakura?”
Right then, Momo gritted her teeth, saying, “Argh, fine!” And she stormed out of Nathaniel Coleman’s office, passing the threshold of his door, and almost got zapped on her stomach. That zap hit the wall on the other end of the hallway, where a giant cherry blossom bloomed from it.
“What the . . . ?” Momo said, then faced the other way and spotted a smiling Sakura with her twin tails back up on her head and her gun aimed in her direction. “Don’t you dare! Don’t you fucking—”
Sakura fired her gun, zapping Momo on her stomach, and before she knew it, Momo was encased inside of Sakura’s giant cherry blossom, trapping her up to her armpits inside its enormous pale-pink petals.
“That’s payback,” Sakura said, then blew over the smoking end of her gun and twirled it back into her leg holster like a B-movie gunslinger. “And no, we’re still not even.”
Momo just gaped at Sakura, while she heard Nathaniel laughing in his office, but that’s when the ruse hit her over the head. Sakura’s cold-shoulder treatment since yesterday had been an act to fool Momo into falling into one of her traps, and that’s when she knew that Sakura was still the same Sakura she had always known her whole life, which made her smile. At least, her sister ‘trusted’ her enough to screw around with her, even if it was at Momo’s expense.
“Okay, okay, you got me,” Momo said and played along with a smile of her own. “Glad to know you’re back to normal. Now can you help me get out of this?”
“Sure,” Sakura said, then spread her legs with her hand just above the butt of her gun, a B-movie gunslinger staring down her opponent in a climactic B-movie gunfight.
Momo recognized her sister’s intentions, saying, “No! No! No! Not like that!”
But Sakura drew her gun like a whip and fired, anyway, zapping her giant cherry blossom into glowing smithereens, stripping Momo down to her bra and panties and leg-holstered gun. Now Momo looked like a gunslinging pin-up girl against a sparkling backdrop of cherry blossoms with her dark hair down past her butt. She felt her face flaring red as other muse officers opened their office doors and whistled at such great eye-candy in the morning.
“There,” Sakura said. “Gotta go.”
And Sakura footed it down the hallway, while Momo’s eyes flashed up at the culprit that was her twin-tailed brat of a sister.
Momo ran after her, yelling, “Get back here, you brat!”
And for the better part of an hour, Momo rage-played tag with her bratty sister like cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians, or space cadets and aliens. Yet for all her rage-playing, Momo kept missing her shots on Sakura, who juked left and right down the corners of the hallways like a certain cartoon roadrunner, while Momo ran after her like a certain cartoon coyote. So Momo kept making giant peach blossoms out of the walls and floors and unfortunate colleagues that happened to be there at the wrong place and time—
Which included the aforementioned Ryder, now encased inside one of Momo’s giant peach blossoms up to her armpits, her long twin tails curling up in vicious claws, her orange eyes flashing at Momo as she rounded the next corner after Sakura. Ryder said, “Watch where you’re shooting that!”
A Tale of Two Gunslingers I
Besides being muses, the Yume sisters were also gunslinger enthusiasts. Both had their favorite characters from B-movie and Spaghetti westerns, but both sisters rooted for the good guys. That changed after Momo joined the Muse Bureau’s Special Victims Unit at fifteen, when she introduced Sakura to multiplayer games with their first western title, The Legend of Billy the Kid. In that game, Momo played two sheriffs, Sheriff Brady and Sheriff Garrett, while Sakura played the title character of Billy the Kid, who shot Sheriff Brady at the start of the game and got shot by Sheriff Garrett at the end of it.
Momo had no clue that playing this game would change Sakura’s favor from the good guys to the baddies, in which her younger sister took it to B-movie levels of caricature that would make even the game developers blush. Case in point, during the Lincoln County War arc of the game, Sakura kept mashing the buttons of her controller, making Billy the Kid shoot down Momo’s deputies in a suicide run across the main street right in front Momo’s POV as Sheriff Brady.
And Sakura was like, “There! There you go! Suck three thousand rounds of cock right there!”
And Momo gaped at her. She was like, “What the hell? Why are you mentioning ‘cock’ all of the sudden?”
Yet Sakura mashed more buttons, and Billy the Kid started thrusting his hips with a crotch chop for added emphasis on screen in Momo’s side of the split screen.
And she was like, “Because there’s three thousand more rounds where that came from.”
And Momo was like, “Ewww! Don’t be disgusting, you little perv!” And Momo’s Brady went after Sakura’s Billy down the street into one of the alleyways, gunning down Sakura’s posse in the process. “Get back here and taste three thousand rounds of justice up your bratty ass!”
And Sakura was like, “Look who’s talking. At least I’m not the one with the ‘ass’ fetish.”
And Momo was like, “Well, you’re the one with the ‘cock’ fetish. So there!”
At this point, Sakura’s Billy gave Momo’s Brady the slip and ended up shooting Brady in the back somewhere in the alleys, finishing up the Lincoln County War arc with a pop up of the loading screen. Then Sakura pumped her fist in the air, while Momo threw down her controller in gamer-rage.
Momo was like, “You suck!”
And Sakura was like, “And you suck three thousand rounds of cock!”
And Momo was like, “Ewww! Then you’re a cock-freak!”
And Sakura winced. Then she was like, “Oh, yeah? Well, you can catch three thousand rounds of cock, but you can’t catch me!”
Yet just before Sakura got out of range, Momo leapt across the couch at Sakura and tackled her and tickled her into a laughing puddle of girly tear-filled giggles, till Sakura writhed beneath Momo’s tickling assault. With Momo laughing and their bodies moving like wrestlers over the cushions of the couch, anyone passing by their house at that moment might have mistaken their frivolity for something hot and sexy, which sometimes prompted a ding dong of the doorbell at the front entrance.
Such occurrences were rare, but they happened often enough for the Yume sisters to dial back their rage-playing into something more appropriate in later years. In fact, it had been four years since Momo bought that game as a present for Sakura’s eleventh birthday. Now her little sister was all grown up at fifteen, while Momo was twenty. Four years was long enough for Sakura to grimace at her eleven-year-old fixation on the word, ‘cock,’ which Momo used against her in their current playing duels of other western-themed gaming titles. Games such as Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, A Chinese Sun-Dance Kid, Gun-fu Gunslingers, and For a Few Tokens More comprised but a few of the many games on their shelf beside the TV, all of them well-played.
So, to make up for what happened, Momo played with Sakura on all the games she wanted for the next two days. It was the least she could do, because Momo was more proud of her sister for her courage during the Trevor Waltman training program than Sakura knew. And she chose to show it by trolling Sakura with her own lines in their playing duel of Gun-fu Gunslingers, beating her sister three times in a row. And for the fourth time, when Momo’s Judge Fang ducked a shot from Sakura’s Dead-Eye Mugen, she had Judge Fang baseball-slide between Mugen’s legs and sink a round between his eyes, bringing the victory shot of Judge Fang up on screen.
And Momo was like, “There! There you go! Suck three thousand rounds of cock right there!”
And Sakura was like, “Why do you keep harping on that?”
And smiling at her flustered sister, Momo was like, “Because it’s fun seeing you light up.”
And light up she did, Sakura’s face turning redder by the second, reversing her role from victim to attacker. As such, Momo received Sakura’s flying tackle on the couch and endured her sister’s tickling assault. Yet Momo was the grandmaster at countering Sakura’s moves, because she was the one who taught her those moves in the first place. So she grabbed one of Sakura’s arms and hooked her leg up and over her head, placing her sister in a triangle choke.
And Momo was like, “One. Two. Three. I won!”
But after she let her sister go, Sakura was like, “You suck!”
And Momo was like, “Not as much as you at this game,” and she smiled again, daring her sister to give it another shot.
And Sakura was like, “Bring it on!”
