Another Form of Power

Mid-Game

Nemuri's contacts hadn't been able to give her much on Kakurete. Most of them had never met him and those that had really didn't have anything incriminating to say. The man was their boss, nothing more. He occasionally came in to approve a particular advertising campaign but for the most part his duties as a Representative took precedence. They all reported that Kakurete wasn't much involved with the companies he owned. He ran Kunshu, and allowed Kunshu to run the other companies.

But one of her contacts had whispered something to her about BioSimip. It wasn't about their QERI program, but about something before that. BioSimip made sleeping pills that they claimed were derived from natural ingredients. The mag had tested the pills and agreed they were natural ingredients, but they had found something else. They had isolated what BioSimip claimed was a quirk based ingredient. It was only found in the high end sleeping pills. The lower quality ones used a synthesized variant. Her source had wanted it investigated further but no one ever did, except for now, when there were people asking questions. Nemuri had tried to find out who else her source had told but he'd shrugged, and told her he'd given the information to anyone who asked. She'd focused on the information after that. Who else knew only became important if she had something.

By itself, the incorrect listing, wasn't anything that bad. What made it noteworthy was that the ingredient wasn't actually registered. Not properly anyway. The registration had holes in it. It wasn't like someone had forgotten to sign a page or something. The source had not been filled in on the registration. The source always had to be filled in to ensure that they were being properly compensated for their contribution. The fact that the source wasn't listed was odd and could mean a few things.

One, the source wasn't actually a quirk but was something BioSimip had synthesised completely. That would cause a bit of a scandal if true. The testing regime on a quirk based drug was different for that on a laboratory created drug. If BioSimip had listed the compound as being quirk based when it wasn't, they could be in trouble for that. Another possibility was that the source wasn't one they wanted to admit to. And that, with BioSimip's link to Kakurete could be a link to the League.

Her contacts told her they believed the compound was quirk based. Through the years, they had made several observations that led them to that belief, but Nemuri wasn't interested in that. She was interested in the fact that they had managed to confirm that a young man with light brown hair made a biological delivery each week. It was a smallish canister. The routine was so established that he simply delivered it to the receptionist, who handed over an envelope and he went on his way.

Apart from the fact that it was a completely improper way to accept what was a potential biohazard, Nemuri was interested in the description. He sounded like Mustard.

And wouldn't that be interesting, if Mustard was producing the quirk based ingredient BioSimip used? It would provide a direct tie between Kakurete and the League, though Nemuri was not so blind to realise it would be that easy. Kakurete could claim he didn't know. But if they could tie BioSimip to the League then that would cause problems.

She sighed. They had enough information to cause Kakurete problems but nothing big enough to bring him down. It was getting to the point when they should just release their information. Giving him problems was not their goal but at the moment, it might be all they were capable of, and you never knew which problem would be the one to snow ball into the thing that did bring him down.

That's why she was following the young man who had made the delivery this week. If not for the missing teeth, he might have been called handsome. He had several tattoos on his forearms, but she couldn't see much more. He'd taken the envelope and shoved it into his pocket before leaving BioSimip. Then he'd walked back to a train station.