One day at work, Rokkaku suddenly pulled Kurosawa into a quiet corner.
"Hey, it's your 30th birthday tomorrow, right?"
A mischievous grin played around his lips that Kurosawa found slightly creepy.
"Yeah, what about it? How did you even find out?"
Rokkaku waved his hand dismissively. "Never mind that. I heard a rumor a few days ago that if you're still a virgin when you turn 30, you'll become a magic user! Wouldn't that be super cool?"
He looked so excited and so serious that Kurosawa couldn't help but burst out laughing.
Rokkaku pouted. "Hey, you can never know if it's true unless you see for yourself, right? By the way, are you even a virgin? Someone like you must've already—"
"All right, let's go back to work now, shall we? If I remember correctly, you haven't finished the task I assigned you yet, have you?"
Rokkaku's pout grew bigger, but he nodded nevertheless and sulked off to his desk. Kurosawa followed him, still a smirk on his face.
However, on the next day, he couldn't laugh anymore. His 30th birthday held a surprise gift for him which he wasn't sure what to think of. Over the course of the day, he realized that he could hear the voices of others whenever he touched them, even when their lips didn't move.
At first, he'd panicked. Of course he had. If magic like this existed in this world, it should be wide-spread knowledge, he thought. Surely there were millions of people who were a virgin when turning 30, right? But however much he researched, he couldn't find any record of this happening to other people.
Then, he wrote it off as hallucinations. He had no way of knowing if these things were the real thoughts of those people after all. His head could be making all that stuff up, however improbable that seemed.
In the second week after his birthday, in the elevator, he heard Fujisaki thinking about her older sister who lived with her mother. She had just lost her job and was picking up a drinking habit. Kurosawa didn't even know that Fujisaki had an older sister to begin with, so he decided to take this chance to find out once and for all if this was magic or simply a delusion. He beckoned her into a private corner once they'd emerged from the elevator and asked her if she was all right because she seemed troubled. Fujisaki was bewildered at first, but after the initial shock, she was happy to share her sorrow about her older sister developing an alcohol problem. Kurosawa remained calm on the outside, offering words of consolation and then excused himself to the bathroom. There was no need to let anyone else know that he was having a mental breakdown.
He came to loathe this new power. It only confirmed his beliefs that many people who appeared nice on the outside were rotten on the inside.
However, Kurosawa had always believed in the good of man and so whenever he got confessed to, he gave that person a chance. He always asked them a very simple question: "Why?" It was incredible how no one ever replied that they liked him for who he was as a person. Some stuttered and said they couldn't explain it, and digging deeper only revealed that they were after his looks or his charms. Some said he seemed perfect to them but couldn't explain further. Some even admitted straight away it was because of his looks. Oh, how he hated being reduced to his looks.
He wasn't good at denying others help if they needed it, so when one day two of his female coworkers asked him to help with a problem, he didn't think much of it. But when they arrived at their computers and the 'problem' was just that they did not know how to operate a scanner, he put a hand on one of the girl's shoulders when he leaned towards the scanner.
