Suzumi pulled out what seemed like a futon out of a cupboard while I sat on the nearby couch. I guess this was as close as sleeping on someone’s couch as I would get here. She grunted briefly with the effort of moving the heavy thing, and I wished that I was confident enough with my surroundings to be able to help her.

There was a thump as the futon hit the floor of Suzumi’s small apartment. It was all of three rooms, if you counted the open kitchen. It felt more like a hotel room than anything, lacking the space that houses back home had in droves.

We had ascended five flights of stairs to get to her floor, a total or one hundred and fifteen steps. Knowing that number would make it easier for me to get up and down with less assistance. I whipped out my phone and started to navigate it, the sound of a woman’s voice at eight times the normal speed sang out from the speakers as I navigated to my maps app and quickly input where I was staying using the braille keyboard, giving me a quick rundown of the stores nearby and the nearest train station.

There was silence for a moment, Suzumi having stopped moving, and even her ribbon tilting its end to the side, like a confused puppy. I laughed and looked at her, eyebrow raised. The ribbon shook itself free of its confusion.

“I’m sorry, I’ve never seen a blind person use a phone. Not like that anyway.” She said, flustered while returning to setting up a small space for me to be able to sleep on the loungeroom floor.

“No worries, I don’t think most people think we can even use phones.” She laughed awkwardly, obviously only just learning as much. She seemed to finish setting up the futon and plonked down beside me on the couch.

“Thank you again for allowing me to stay. I’d have had to find a hotel last minute.” She made a gesture that I assumed was waving the statement away.

“Honestly, it’s no problem. It was my own fault for jinxing it by talking about how the workplaces are getting better.” I laughed at that, and then was reminded to check my emails. After a moment of navigation, I ended up laughing bitterly.

“Received 6:22 AM.” The robotic voice of the text to speech sounded. Suzumi groaned, having caught on.

“Seriously? That’d have been only a few minutes before the flight!” The email sent from the company to tell me that the entire company had gone bankrupt had only been sent to me three whole minutes before my flight boarded.

“So embarrassing!” Suzumi groaned and seemed to be rubbing furiously at her face in rage and cringe. I just laughed at her antics.

“Oh well, what’s done is done. Maybe I won’t end up being in Japan all that long after all.” I sighed, resigned to simply being unlucky. But it seemed like Suzumi had a different idea. She quickly apologised before bouncing off of the couch and into the other room, which I could only presume was her bedroom, before running back out and launching herself into the air and landing beside me.

“Okay! I have my laptop. We are going to find you a new company!” I turned to her eyebrow raised.

“Would anyone even bother? It took weeks on weeks to set up a position in the other company, who wants to take a foreigner on this short a notice?” Suzumi shook her head, mirroring it in her ribbon and, like the ball of optimism she was she started to read out position after position.

A good half or three quarters of them were way out of my capabilities, being blind and all, but some that include simple rote tasks I had proven in other workplaces that I was capable of performing. And if I was allowed access to certain specialised equipment, I was able to pretty easily use a computer, having spent a fair share of my life desperately trying to use the computer for games to play with school friends.

The evening progressed into night, having only managed to send a few resumes to some of the larger companies. It slowly progressed to be more and more local companies, ones that both Suzumi and I had less faith that they would take me on. After discussing with her just how much work it’d take for a company to give me the ability to be an effective worker, we decided to apply to only the small businesses that I had immediately transferable skills in, like some retail jobs and simple rote learning.

There were a few cafes that were focused on disabled employees and we applied, not looking a gift horse in the mouth, but I secretly hoped that someone else would accept me first before I had to work in a place like that.

Not to stigmatize or anything like that, but it sounded like the job had its own challenges. Especially with the other employees, and I wasn’t sure that I was all that prepared for that kind of environment.

It’d been hours now and was well into the early morning. Why Suzumi was so committed to helping me out was totally beyond me at this point, even if she had no flights tomorrow. I was about to tell her to go to bed, after her downing a few glasses of wine, when she burst out in uncontrollable laughter. I had no idea what it was she was laughing at, but her semi-delirious laughter was infectious in the best sort of way. I couldn’t help but start giggling myself while desperately trying to get it out of her.

“What? What’s so funny?” I said, grabbing her shoulder and shaking her gently. She laughed louder at my touch before eventually calming down enough to speak.

“T-there’s a job posting for a candy shop and it sounds so macho!” She burst out in another wave of laughter before she started to read the listing in a bad manly voice.

“This job is only for those with the utmost limits of human physicality, striving towards strength beyond strength and willing to challenge themselves to their absolute ends. The weak will not be accepted. If interested, please send a letter to attached address.” At the end her voice cracked, releasing another fit of laughter, one I joined in on in earnest. In fact, it ticked us so much that in the next ten minutes that we spent giggling to ourselves, cracking jokes about how I was going to become the strongest person alive at this candy shop, we managed to print off my resume and envelope.

On the front, as a joke, Suzumi wrote ‘To become the Strongest’ on the front of the envelope, making us giggle even harder, before there was a bang on the roof from the apartment above us, reducing out giggles to snickers.

After a long moment, having finished out almost thirty-minute-long giggle fest, Suzumi and I sat on the couch, tiredly gazing into nothingness.

“Thank you for this.” I said, after a long moment of silence. She didn’t bother to try and reflect the genuine thank you, just nodding her head in a subtle response. I couldn’t help but wear a comfortable smile on my face. Something that I swear I hadn’t worn in months. Maybe a year at this point.

“Well, I think I should go to bed.” She said but didn’t move. Subsequent moments passed, and she still didn’t move. I turned towards her, and I could only assume that she was looking back at me. I smiled and wrapped my arms around her, holding her tightly for a moment, breathing her presence in. Those few moments were glorious, and then I pulled away, getting up myself and carefully navigating around the coffee table in the centre of the room, eventually laying down on the futon.

“Good night, Suzumi.”

I’m not sure that she ever moved back to her own bed.

There was a long, drawn out hum from a strangely dressed man sitting on a stool in front of a large and even stranger machine. He pressed a finger to the machine and it growled to life, before a high pitched screeching noise started to emit from it, a piece of paper being printed with rapidly fluctuating statistics.

The man himself growled, taking off his hat and scrubbing his unruly blonde hair. He rarely ever got frustrated while working, but this machine had been annoying him for the better part of a few decades. It’d always been a little off, some interference here and there, but this was ridiculous.

As it was, the machine was practically unusable. In theory, the machine was perfectly stable, he must have checked every part and every element thousands of times, replacing them just as many times with more and more advanced parts. It was undoubtedly the most advanced and the most sensitive Soul Reader ever made. As far as he was aware anyways, that bastard always ended up cribbing his stuff and doing crazy things to it.

As far as the man was concerned, he had created the most soul sensitive device ever, and it was going haywire for no apparent reason.

But the man knew himself too well, planned too well, to let ‘no apparent reason’ slide. Just because the reason was not apparent, didn’t make it any less insanely dangerous.

He had always considered the possibility that it was a captain class being, or maybe beyond captain class in the orange haired brat’s case. But it was too consistent to be that way. It was always reading the same, and all other variables would shift. Even when major powers would end up here, the readings would always be the same.

It took years for the realisation of that fear to kick in. Something was lurking in the shadows and he had no idea what it was. Not knowing at all was a new kind of terrifying to the man. A special kind of fear that he hadn’t truly experienced in a long, long time.

He had always had pieces of the puzzle, at least a few. But this was the only one he had, and it was just downright confusing.

The keening wail of the machine suddenly began to grow louder and louder. The man’s eyes widened, before he turned to the door of his lab, rapidly picking up his cane, whose length disappeared to become a sword. He hastily pointed the sword at the door, as it flew open to reveal a tall, muscled man with tanned skin, hair tightly pulled into small braids. There was a moment of silence between the two before the sword was lowered and the large man pushed his glasses further up his nose and coughed gently, before holding out a letter.

Immediately the screeching machine started to burn, shocking the large man, dropping the letter on the floor and making him take a step back.

The blonde man coughed and spluttered as he desperately turned the machine off and waved away the fire and smoke with a hand. After the fire died down, the two men were left looking at each other quizzically.

“I’m going to go tend to the store.” The muscled man said factually, before turning on his heel and closing the door behind himself.

As soon as the large man left the room, the blonde-haired man picked up the letter on the floor. There were words written on the front, “To become the Strongest”. The man’s scepticism rose, apprehension filling every moment as he slowly pried the clean, white envelope open to reveal it’s contents. He hesitantly allowed the envelope to empty itself onto his lab table, watching the paper fall to the table, waiting for something to happen.

A moment passed, then a second. He nodded to himself and evaluated the probability that the contents were a trap and found it exceedingly unlikely. Even still, he decided to lift it off the table without the use of his hands, slowly floating the paper into the air and unfurling it while it floated far enough from his face that he was able to create a simple barrier in time for a possible explosion or other external effect.

As the paper unfurled in the air, a look of consternation passed over his face. He read and re-read the contents of the paper over and over. Even looking at it pinged his wariness and going so far as to hold it in his hands made his mind almost frantic with thought. He looked for clues, codes, anagrams, secret messages, signals, anything.

But there was nothing. No hidden trick or clue, no mysterious threat or bargain. Just a simple…

“Job application?”