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CHAPTER 6 

Gossip and Real Talk at the Salon 

Fourth Friday of April 

Chirp-chirp, came an electronic noise. 

It was the automatic door’s chime going off several times. 

“Hmm? Oh, a customer.” 

“…Yeah, so peel your eyes away from that game, stupid shopkeeper. I’ll traumatize you until the words service industry are seared into your mind.” 

The twin-tailed brunette, a young lady by the name of Kuroko Shirai, spoke under her breath. She leveled a glare at the beautician who was utterly devoid of enthusiasm as soon as she stepped into the place. Several young men on the staff immediately came out from the back and began bowing profusely to Shirai in apology. 

Why on earth are the newbies who just got hired three months ago more worried about the shop than he is? Shirai was appalled, but the manager was good at what he did, so she couldn’t complain too much. She entered a space partitioned off by a cloth screen, like in the nurse’s office, then was led to a chair that looked like it was from a dentist’s office. That’s where she sat down. 

The unenthused manager went around behind Shirai, his fingers—unusually slender for a man—undoing the ribbons tying her hair up. 

The manager, Michibata Sakashima, rubbed his beard for a few moments, then said, “I’ve been hooked on different ways to use curling irons recently. How about a fourteen-loop ultra-drill style I’ve been testing? Want me to croissant it up, just to see? You can be overbearing sometimes, so I think it would be perfect on you: mademoiselle-style vertical rolls.” 

“I’ve always had frizzy hair. Stow the sleep talk, clean up the ends, and give me a straight perm.” 

“Right… An Afro, was it?” 

“I said, straight perm!!” shouted Shirai, her eyes nearly popping out when Sakashima tried to put a hemispherical bowl machine on her head. 

“Okay, okay, jeez, so boring,” muttered Sakashima. “I’ll clean up the ends first.” He took out a pair of thin-bladed scissors, then said, “You must have it as rough as the rest of us, Shirai.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Tokiwadai Middle School is an elite supernatural Ability Development academy. You need your teacher’s permission to pick out a place to get your hair cut, don’t you? Not that I’m not grateful, mind you—getting chosen by the school like this has been earning me money hand over fist. But it must be pretty stifling for the students.” 

“Well, if I complained about that, I’d have to complain about a million other things. Hair and blood are the archetypical bundles of genetic samples. They wouldn’t be able to bear it if our DNA maps were secretly harvested and analyzed.” 

“Hmm.” 

Holding several metal combs in his left hand, each with different tooth sizes, the manager looked up. Countless cameras, big and small, looked back at him. The excessive number of them had not been installed by a security agency but Tokiwadai Middle School. 

Sakashima pinched a tuft of Shirai’s hair between his fingers and said, “Come to think of it, there was talk about them getting some grants to help with their teleportation Ability Development research. It must not be popular with scholars, having to think in terms of eleven-dimensional coordinate relationships.” 

“…It’s mostly quantum theory when you get to eleven dimensions. Schrödinger-level stuff. But it’s not that. It’s just that there aren’t many teleport espers, and the higher-ups seem to think it’s some kind of crisis. I don’t know why they don’t get it—some talents more easily manifest in espers than others, that’s all.” 

“That’s a mystery in itself. First graders don’t get electives, right? They all go through the same curriculum, but some of them start shooting fire or wind, branching out into all sorts of abilities.” 

As they continued their conversation, Sakashima trimmed Shirai’s hair back about five millimeters. The tips of his blades, positioned at exactly the right angles, cut through the hair cleanly without destroying any cells. 

“I do have to wonder why they bother developing all these supernatural abilities, though.” 


“…I’d rather you not deny Academy City’s most fundamental reason for existence.” 

“I mean, I can understand it has its draws. But it makes me think whoever’s behind it has dreams of immortality, or world conquest, or high offices in politics.” Michibata cracked his neck a few times, still snipping away with the scissors. “I have to wonder if students like you would be mentioned in ability-related texts. There was that Cold War thing a while back—supernatural Ability Development was all the rage back then, too. The U.S. and the Soviets were throwing their budget into it just to try and one-up the other, like children… I mean, it ended in failure, but still.” 

“You mean the Stargate project, right?” 

“Oh? You know it?” came his befuddled voice. 

Shirai sighed. “We learned about it in history class. They did all these grand experiments following theories that were way off the mark. And they didn’t even know what result values might indicate success or failure. It was a bunch of bourgeois scientists gobbling up the national budget while fumbling around in the dark. Or something like that.” 

“Hmm. On the surface of things, the project was for finding military uses for psychics, but I wonder if it was actually for something else. I can’t help but think personal, emotional, subjective motives were at work. A really lame desire of some kind—like someone in love with the idea of special people or chosen ones,” said Sakashima as he ran a comb through Shirai’s hair and pinched another tuft. 

Shirai hated to admit it, but the sensation didn’t feel half bad. 

“…But what was it, I wonder?” continued Sakashima. 

“What was what?” 

“Oh, I mean, the Cold War–era psychic power development. The only ones who succeeded at researching supernatural powers to the point they were usable was Japan’s Academy City. But that leaves the question of where the U.S. and Soviets got their hands on samples of psychics.” 

“If they said there were zero successes, they’d lose authority over the people paying taxes for it. They were probably just bluffing.” 

“But you see things every once in a while—you know, on TV and stuff. Former elite investigators and the like taking on unresolved incidents. I doubt everything is a bluff. At the very least, if nobody gave eyewitness testimony to having seen something like that, they’d never have wanted to try and make it themselves in the first place.” 

“…Have you heard of the fraud of alchemy in the Middle Ages? Do you think the royals and aristocrats and everyone else believed alchemy was real because they’d seen the actual thing?” 

“Ugh. Unfortunately for you, I believe in alchemy—and UFOs and the New Jersey Devil.” 

“……” Shirai flashed him an appalled look. The guy wasn’t about to claim fast-food chain hamburgers had earthworm meat in them, was he? “What, then? Are you saying some of Academy City’s technological information was leaked to the U.S. and Russia during the Cold War?” 

“The Soviet Union, you mean. And no, that couldn’t have happened. Academy City’s technological level is twenty or thirty years ahead of the rest of the world. Even if literally all of its information was leaked, they wouldn’t have the technology to break our more advanced encryption, so there’d be nothing they could do. I doubt they could have gotten there that way.” 

“Supercomputers on the outside at the time couldn’t even run the latest portable video games,” added Sakashima with a laugh. “They wouldn’t have been able to read an Academy City disc if we’d placed it right in front of them, much less decrypt anything.” 

“Then what are you trying to get at?” 

“Well, Shirai, haven’t you heard about Uncut Gems?” 

“……” 

“Oh, does it make you angry?” 

“Of course it does. Scientists make us polish our abilities day in, day out, using electrodes and drugs, delivering shocks to our brains, and even resorting to hypnotic suggestions—and then you bring that up.” 

“I figure it’s only the difference between man-made diamonds and natural ones,” said Sakashima, working his scissors along her bangs. “As long as we can consistently recreate a specific phenomenon artificially, then assuming the right factors occur in the natural world to make an environment exactly the same as one of our research facilities, the same phenomenon should happen even without human assistance. If the diamond example doesn’t suit your fancy, maybe an analogy with Tasers and lightning is more to your liking?” 

“It’s all a theory,” countered Shirai, unamused. “I’ve never seen one in the wild. And even if they do exist, samples must be extremely rare. So rare they’d be mistaken for errors in the data, and you’d get a display that returns a grand total of zero.” 

“Hmm.” Sakashima narrowed his eyes and gave a pleasant smile. 

Suddenly, he stopped his scissors. He said, as if to challenge his customer: “Lightning does strike fairly frequently, you know.” 

“It hitting you in the head is a much less common occurrence, though.” 



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