Unlimited Psychic Squad....Bit different

First Meeting

Yugiri was hungry.

It had been two days since she had left the orphanage with all the other kids and the nice lady. She hadn’t wanted to stay, too afraid she would hurt someone, like at the place she had been before. But she didn’t know where else to go, and she was hungry.

Delicious scents of sugar and fried treats startled her to a stop in the middle of the street. There was a portico to the side, and beyond it, she could glimpse booths with games and food, colors, puppets and balloons. Children ran in the alleys, laughed, begged their smiling parents for ice cream.

She stepped forward, as if hypnotized by the sight.

“Ah,” a woman in a booth nearby tried to call to her, “wait sweetie, you need a ticket…”

She cut herself off as the portico lit up a deep red and produced a loud, angry buzz.

Yuugiri jumped and cringed. The door to the attraction park stayed closed before her. People were staring at her and backing away with anxious whispers.

She stayed frozen, unsure what to do, until a scary-looking man in uniform approached her, the woman from the booth wringing her hands in the background.

“Where are your parents, kid?” he said brusquely. “A girl like you shouldn’t be alone in public.”

Oh no. Last time someone had asked her about her parents, she had ended up in the orphanage. She didn’t want to go back! She kept silent, panic rising in her.

“You won’t answer? Don’t tell me you ran off…!”

He caught her arm, and the too-tight grip and rising voice were enough to send her over the edge. With a cry, she pushed.

*meanwhile*

Andie angled her phone to take another picture of the beautiful stucco façade of the city hall. With a pair of sunglasses masking her eyes, a baseball cap perched on her head backwards and her favourite jacket back at the hotel, the better to feel the warm summer sun on her skin, there was nothing to make her stand out from the dozen or so of tourists doing the same in the vicinity.

Certainly, no one would notice her inching the camera to the side until she captured the unassuming next building over and one of the discreet ECMs installed on and around it. This country wasn’t the most tolerant for espers. There were ECMs in plain sight all around the city hall plaza, but that building’s only official use was mundane administration and paper-pushing; hardly crucial enough to warrant such an expensive security system. She could see why her clients were worried there could be more to it.

Not that she cared much. Andie hated espers just as much as normals. Neither cause was hers. But the belived mistrust on both sides, she could use. It made for well-paying jobs, the kind of jobs she was the best-equipped to deal with. Normals hired her to infiltrate esper-only meeting places, espers paid her to go where they couldn’t go without ECM-induced headaches. The plaza security had no effect on her.

She had enough pictures. She put her phone back in her pocket and turned to go. Tonight, she would attempt to get in and see what she could dig out. In the meantime, she would go back to her hotel room and send what she had to Yoh.

Making contact with P.A.N.D.R.A. had been a fluke and she was still not sure the money was worth the risk of associating herself with such a high-profile terrorist organisation. What was strange was that she didn’t get the vibes she would have expected from hardened international criminals from them at all. Well, sure, Magi was kind of grim and she could easily imagine him being paranoid and dangerous, but she had only seen the guy twice. Mostly, she dealt with Yoh, who behaved more like a teenager than anything. He was generally cheerful and irreverent, with the odd bout of bad-tempered grumbling. He called his boss “the old man”, for Christ’s sake.