Marionette

Cosmos, Chapter Twenty One - Kyōgō suru rieki [競合する利益]

(For all of those confused about this chapters appearance, it was in the bottom of an April fool's prank just removed lol. Enjoy)

It turned out that there was more to the obsession of Sweets than Amaya could have hoped to imagine.

After she had managed to escape Karma's interrogation torture, everyone set to work getting Kayano's Assassination Plan underway.

There was the science of gelatine and agar composition, combined with different melting points and many other things that just bewildered and confused Amaya beyond what she'd thought possible. By lunch-time they had gotten a good half of the pudding combined together, along with small pockets of fruit flavor wrapped in edible wafer paper. By the time they had filled the whole giant mold, the sun was low in the sky, and if it were a school-day, it would be overtime.

As Amaya had expected, everything reeked of the sickly sweet scent of pudding, even in its most incomplete form. And what was worse that with all the work helping out to the best of her abilities, the scent of sweets had practically adhered to her skin. No matter how hard she scrubbed her hands in the girls washroom, the smell wouldn't leave her reddening appendages.

By the time she had given up and re-emerged from inside, the sun had begun to set over the horizon, and nearly everyone had already left.

The only ones left were Kayano, Nagisa, and Karma.

They were standing on the slope leading down to the schoolyard, with the pudding right in front of them. They appeared to be discussing something, so she decided she should probably leave them to it – She wanted to get home and try and get rid of this pudding stench after all.

And since she hadn't planned what she was going to be cooking for dinner, she guessed some take-out would be okay.

Some healthy take out, that was.

She hadn't missed the fact that Yuta was outvoted Thursday night, and Reiko and Samuel had ordered desert pizza for dinner, which was something peculiar to Amaya.

She never even realized there was such a thing.

'I'm going!' Amaya called out just loud enough to be heard, earning the closest one's attention. 'See you guys later!'

Which, just so happened to be Nagisa, as he turned his head to look at her departing form.

'Oh! Have a good evening, Amaya-san!' He responded, earning a lazy wave over one shoulder.

The walk down the mountain was uneventful, her surroundings dulled out with the sound of her music ringing softly through her headphones.

Her thoughts were absorbed with her to-do list, and the painful knowledge that she had to go back to tend to the giant pudding tomorrow, along with everyone else.

Takebayashi had been elsewhere for the first half of the day, putting together the bomb that was to be placed in the bottom of the pudding. And just before the pudding mix had been poured into the mold, the bomb had been painstakingly installed by the bespectacled boy, surrounded by a film of Ant-sensei BB's, which themselves were enveloped in an air-tight seal so the pudding mix didn't contaminate them.

Watching it all being put together had Amaya understand that it was a well thought out plan, though like always, she had apprehensions on it working.

As Terasaka had said before, there had been attempts involving food and Anti-sensei BB's that fell straight through.

Her thoughts and inward planning were cut short upon arriving at the main campus however, just as she noticed a familiar form standing at the closest exit out of the premises.