I walked.
That was the plan. That had always been the plan. Walk through Basedland, experience whatever Basedland decided to offer, continue the search for Ey. Simple. Achievable. A plan so modest that it should have been impossible to fail.
All according to Keikaku… maybe.
The street past the market narrowed slightly before opening into a smaller square—cobblestoned, less busy than the main one, with a well in the center that appeared to be full of something orange. A few people sat around it, eating… yeah, something weird. Anyway, nobody was looking at the well with any concern, so I decided not to either.
Progress—
"OOF."
I was almost through the square when I walked into a man.
Not into him in the sense of a slight shoulder collision. Into him in the sense of full frontal impact—he had stopped completely in the middle of the cobblestones with the specific quality of someone so preoccupied with their own problem that the existence of other moving bodies hadn't occurred to them.
We both staggered.
"Sorry—" I started.
"YOU!" The man turned. He was young. Genuinely young—maybe twenty, twenty-one at most, with the specific panicked energy of someone who had been looking for something for a while and had just found, if not the thing, then at least a person to blame for its absence. He pointed at me with the commitment of someone who had made a decision. "YOU DID THIS!"
I looked behind me. There was no one there.
"Me," I said.
"You!" He jabbed his finger toward my chest. "Where is Digimigi?! What have you done with Digimigi?!"
"I don't know who—"
"Don't play dumb with me!" He was almost vibrating with accusation. His eyes were wide, his hair was going in several directions, and there was—fuuuuucccckkkkkk—a distinct smell coming from his saggy pants.
"I genuinely do not know anyone named Digimigi." Holding my breath, I said.
"LIAR!"
"I arrived in Basedland this morning," I said. "I talked to a mayor, sat on a bench, watched a bottle fly into the sky, and was walking to—"
"The bench." He seized on this. "You were at the bench near the market."
"Yes."
"And?!"
"And I sat on it," I said carefully. "There was a girl there. Her father came back. They left."
This did not help. The man's expression moved through several stages before settling somewhere between accusation and despair. He grabbed my shoulders.
"Digimigi!" he said into my face. "My child! Gone! Missing! Because of you, probably!"
"Digimigi is a girl?"
"HE'S A BOY, YOU FUCKING IDIOT!"
I looked at him. I couldn't focus.
I looked at his trousers, briefly, then back up.
I thought about asking. I thought about not asking. I thought about the fish telling me not to overthink.
"What is your name?" I asked instead.
He straightened. He released my shoulders. He drew himself up with the dignity of a man whose name was a point of pride.
"Myname Yourname," he said.
I stood very still.
Somewhere in my memory, Ai's voice: Myname is the guy who shits his pants every day.
I looked at his trousers again.
I looked back up.
"Right," I said. "And Digimigi is your—"
"My child," Myname said. "My precious child. Gone." His voice broke slightly on the last word, with the genuine grief of a parent, and something in me felt briefly, genuinely bad for him, right up until the next thought arrived.
Digimigi, based on the name, was almost certainly not a small child.
"How old is Digimigi?" I asked.
"Forty-eight," Myname said, without any awareness of what he had just said.
I processed this.
Myname was twenty-one at most. Digimigi was forty-eight. The mathematics of this were not possible and yet here we were, standing in a square with an orange well, and Myname was looking at me with the raw devastation of a young parent whose middle-aged child was missing, and I—
Don't overthink.
"I see," I said.
"He was here this morning," Myname said. "Then gone. Just—gone. And I found this—" He reached into his coat and produced a handkerchief. He held it out with the trembling hands of someone presenting key evidence.
I looked at the handkerchief.
"Did someone—"
"BITTEN," Myname said. "Someone bit the corner off. Digimigi never bites his handkerchiefs. He only eats them whole."
I opened my mouth.
I closed it.
"He only eats them—"
"Whole," Myname confirmed. "The bite mark is not his. It belongs to the culprit." He pointed at me again. "Possibly you."
"I have never eaten a handkerchief in my life."
"That is exactly what someone who ate a handkerchief would say!"
I had no answer to this.
The commotion—Myname's yelling, primarily, which had the sustained volume of a man with something to prove—had begun to attract attention. People were drifting toward the square with the relaxed appreciation of Basedland residents who had identified entertainment and were making their way to it without urgency.
Then I heard footsteps. Quick, deliberate, self-important footsteps—the kind that had somewhere to be and wanted everyone to know it.
"Stand back," said a voice. "I played this game before!"
I turned.
A man cut through the gathering crowd with the specific energy of someone who had rehearsed every entrance he had ever made. He was tall, morbidly obese, dressed in a coat that had seen better decades, and wearing on his face the expression of a person who had already solved the problem before being briefed on it. Behind him, with the resigned composure of a man who had accepted his role in the universe, walked Ai.
Ai and I made eye contact.
"Wait, aren't you the mayor…"
His expression did not change. He continued walking.
I continued standing.
We had both decided, silently, to not acknowledge our prior interaction.
"Shitlock Homer," the fat man announced to the square at large. "Detective. You definitely heard of me before, homies."
Nobody confirmed this.
"I have been hired," Shitlock continued, producing a small notebook and opening it with a flourish, "to investigate the disappearance of one Digimigi, aged forty-eight—"
"Huh? He's forty-eight? And I thought he was ninety-six," someone in the crowd said.
"—of Basedland. This is my assistant." He gestured at Ai without looking at him.
"Ai," Ai said. To no one. As information.
"Now—excuse me for a second." Shitlock took a second to let out a loud fart. Then, he turned a slow, theatrical circle, surveying the square with the intensity of someone reading a text that only he could see. His eyes landed on the well. On the cobblestones. On a pigeon breakdancing on a nearby windowsill. On me. Back to the pigeon.
He crossed to a spot three paces left of the well and crouched down. He examined the ground with a magnifying glass he produced from somewhere inside his coat. He stood. He produced a banana from his other inside pocket. He looked at the banana. He sniffed it. He appeared to reach a conclusion.
"The banana," he said, "was peeled at thirty-seven mississippi watts."
The crowd murmured with the appreciative quality of people hearing something they didn't understand but respected.
Myname grabbed my arm. "You see?! The evidence!"
"I—that's a banana," I said. "And watts is a unit of—it doesn't measure—you can't measure peeling in—"
"Thirty-seven," Shitlock said, raising a finger. "Not thirty-six. Not thirty-eight. Thirty-seven mississippi watts. Do you know what that means?"
I did not know what that meant. Nobody knew what that meant. It meant nothing.
"It means," Shitlock said, turning slowly to look directly at Ai, "that the culprit is my assistant."
Silence.
Ai stood with the complete stillness of a man absorbing something.
"I," Ai said, "am your assistant."
"Yes," Shitlock said. "A cunning cover."
"I have been with you for the past three hours."
"A malibibi,'" Shitlock said, with the tone of someone finding this very interesting. "Convenient."
Ai looked at the crowd. The crowd looked at Ai with the assessment of people watching a legal proceeding go in an unexpected direction.
"I did not kidnap Digimigi. I did kidnap Bowie, Huhu, Mahi, Dawei, Dafuq, Maga, Megamind, Lala, Iooo, Ewww, Kekw, and Jotalin, but not Digimigi." Ai said.
"That is what someone who kidnapped Digimigi would say," Shitlock said pleasantly.
Huh? That mayor just said—
Myname released my arm. He turned to Shitlock Homer with the desperate hope of a man who had found a professional.
"Can you find my child?" he asked.
"I have already found your child," Shitlock said.
The crowd leaned forward.
Myname's eyes went wide.
Even I leaned forward slightly, despite my better judgment.
"Digimigi," Shitlock announced, "is in the stomach of a forty-two-year-old fish who lives in the well."
Everyone looked at the well.
The well was full of orange liquid.
There was no fish visible.
"The orange well," Shitlock continued, "is the fish's tea, which it has been drinking since the third season of the year of the long grass, which predates Digimigi's disappearance by—"
"SHITLOCK!"
The voice came from the edge of the crowd, high and frantic. Heads turned. It was the same man whose daughter, Never Abandonned Boy, went missing due to Smooth Criminal.
"Whaddup, Areyuok Annie?" Saluted Shitlock Homer, with a cocky smirk.
Areyuok Annie growled as he burst through the gathering with the committed energy of someone who had been trying to be heard for a long time and had decided that bursting was the only remaining option. He was still slightly disheveled from whatever had happened to him since I last saw him — running off after Smooth Criminal, apparently without success. He was pointing at Ai.
"How many doofus times must I tell you, Shitlock?!" Areyuok grabbed Shitlock by the arm. "I need you to come with me! It's about Smooth Criminal! He's taken my child! Never Abandonned Boy—"
"Smooth Criminal?" Ai mumbled, "Oh, isn't he the father of Never Abandonned Boy?"
I froze. What is going on?
"Smooth Criminal took my—hold on," Areyuok then stopped, scratching his head. "Never Abandonned Boy is…"
Areyuok then suddenly licked Shitlock's finger, with his eyes twitching weirdly.
"What is this taste?"
All of a sudden, the subject changed as if he forgot what he was saying a second ago.
"Toenail."
"Not bad."
""Hahaha!""
I was trying my best to process what was going on here.
"So Never Abandonned Boy… left with Smooth Criminal." I, at last, muttered.
Annie turned to look at me. He blinked with the rapid quality of someone encountering a contradiction.
"Her father," he said slowly, "is Smooth Criminal."
"Her father," I said, "is—" I stopped.
I thought about the man who had walked off with Never. The unhurried pace. The hand extended. Never sliding off the bench and taking it without hesitation, with the practiced ease of someone who had done this many times.
So Smooth Criminal was just the name of Never Abandonned Boy's father? What the fuck?
And then the panicked man—this man, Annie—arriving seconds later holding milk, asking where his child went.
"What is your name?" I asked.
"Areyuok Annie," he said.
"Are you okay?" I said, before I could stop myself.
"That is my name," he said, with the exhausted dignity of someone who had also given this explanation before and had not yet developed a groove with it. "Annie. Areyuok Annie. And I've been hit by Smooth Criminal, who has my—has the child—I need—"
He pulled at Ai's arm. Ai stood immovable. He was being pulled in the direction of Annie. Shitlock had simultaneously placed a hand on Ai's other shoulder, steering him toward the orange well.
Ai looked straight ahead.
"The fish," Shitlock was saying, "has a digestive cycle of approximately four—"
"Smooth Criminal was last seen near the eastern market—" Annie was saying.
"—days, which means Digimigi has approximately—"
"—and if we move quickly we can still—"
"—seventy-two hours before he is—"
"—intercept him at the—"
Myname was still pointing at me. His other hand was on his stomach.
I looked at the crowd. The crowd was looking at everything simultaneously with the delighted attention of people who had expected one proceeding and received three.
I looked at Shitlock, who was explaining something to the well.
I looked at Ai, who was being pulled in two directions with the anchored composure of a man who had made peace with impossible situations.
I looked at Myname.
I looked at Myname's trousers.
I looked at Myname.
"Never mind," I said, to no one in particular.
I picked up my cloth bundle. I began walking toward the edge of the crowd, slowly, with the practiced casualness of someone who had somewhere to be and was simply going there.
"YOU!" Myname's voice followed me. "Where are you going?! We are not done here!"
"The culprit," Shitlock announced behind me, "is attempting to flee. This confirms the banana reading."
"It does not—" Ai started, and then apparently decided it wasn't worth finishing.
I reached the edge of the crowd. I stepped through it.
I'm getting outta here.
I made a run for it.