2025-12-22: Uchida-senpai Mostly Explains It All
- Log: Uchida-senpai Mostly Explains It All
- Cast: Tamaki Uchida, Maya Amano
- Where: Kuzunoha Detective Agency
- OOC Date: December 22, 2025
- IC Date: August 29, 2012
- Summary: Maya pays the Kuzunoha Detective Agency a visit. Tamaki natters her ear off about cognitive psience, one Sojiro Sakura, and some ancient history.
(|======================== Kuzunoha Detective Agency =========================|)
-=================================================== Sumaru City/Aoba Ward ====-
The first thing that greets visitors to Kuzunoha Detective Agency is a giant
golden lucky cat statue that, with its left paw raised, bids a hearty welcome to
customers and opportunities alike. Inspect it, and a mewling voice will ask for
donations: 100 yen from students and other children, and 1000 yen from adults.
A pair of dark couches that frame a coffee table have an excellent view of the
massive HDTV and dual stereos on the far right wall. On the far left wall are
shelves upon shelves full of books, none of which definitely can slide to one
side. A large desk with a lamp and computer stands in front of it. This is where
the portly older ex-gumshoe, Chief Daisuke Todoroki, makes his business, as...
blessed... by the agency's original owner. He investigates (and will spread) all
manner of rumors to find out the truth (and change reality), assisted by veteran
Persona User Tamaki Uchida.
The back room is nothing special; it has a stove and a sink, so it's a simple
task to always have tea ready for customers. There's a bathroom there too, but
it seems like it's always occupied. Don't ask who's in there, meow.
<Pose Tracker> Tamaki Uchida has posed.
Summer is officially almost over, as the end of August draws near. Sunlight streams in through the Kuzunoha Detective Agency's window.
Chief Todoroki sits at his desk closer to the back and occupies his attention with various forms of correspondence to his network of contacts, bouncing between phone conversations (both voice and SMS), emails, and faxes.
The Agency's maneki-neko statue looms at the entrance, the same as it ever does. It always watches for visitors to the Agency, nya~.
Tamaki has, by now, made her peace with summer's end. Her university courses resume shortly, and she'll have less time to focus on work as an assistant private investigator. Before that happens, she's taking some time to get her case files properly organized. Binders, pages and pages of notes, tabs and dividers lay strewn and scattered across her desk.
She's been at this for hours. Eventually, her attention dwindles to the point that she sits back from her desk to crack open some canned coffee and take a break.
<Pose Tracker> Maya Amano has posed.
Maya's hair is usually down, but today it's up in a ponytail. It might be nearing the end of summer, but it doesn't yet feel like it. Beads of sweat cling to her neck and she's grateful that the ponytail gives the skin there some room to breathe.
Maya really wishes that she had a pool she could swim in. Back during her school days (which were not that far behind her), she had fairly easy access to a pool. Now as an adult, she isn't even sure where she'd find one.
Maya gives the lucky cat's head a rub as she pushes the door to the Kuzunoha Detective Agency open. "Hey there!" she calls out before she's even confirmed the person she's here to visit is even there. She's just really friendly like that.
<Pose Tracker> Tamaki Uchida has posed.
The lucky cat statue meows pitifully, asking for donations in its usual manner, its tinny cry for 1000 yen coming emerging from what sounds like speakers installed in the statue.
Tamaki's first thought on hearing this is Oh thank goodness, a distraction. In a flash, she's up from her desk to greet Maya by the door with her sunniest smile. "Amano-san! So good to see you! What brings you here today?"
She leans in more closely as she peppers Maya with questions about her visit's purpose. "Got a rumor to spread? Need to track someone down? Some magazine sweepstakes entries you'd like me to submit? Oh! I won a full set of skill cards from Miracle, so if you need to borrow one, we could arrange something -- "
After a beat, Tamaki pauses, then glances back at her messy, in-the-middle-of-being-organized desk. "Iiiii've been trying to get my thoughts sorted before classes pick up again. Mostly having to do with the Joker Killer." Turning back to Maya, she adds, "I could get you caught up on what I've pieced together so far."
She casts another lingering stare back at her desk, getting lost in the maze of her own thoughts on that particular topic. A few moments later, she soon comes back to reality and excitedly waves a hand in the air. " -- Right! Sorry to get ahead of myself, you came in here and I haven't even let you say what occasion brings you here."
Tamaki presses her hands together and leans forward to Maya again and looks at her expectantly. "So! For real, this time: What brings you here?"
... That canned coffee's really doing a number on her today, huh?
<Pose Tracker> Maya Amano has posed.
"It sounds like you already figured it out!" Maya says with a laugh. Tamaki's pretty energetic today and it's rare that Maya finds anyone her age that matches her energy -- let alone exceeds it. It's pretty refreshing!
"I was hoping that you could fill me in on what you know about the Joker Killer... and maybe we could talk about Sakura-san, too." Maya wasn't sure if anyone really knew anything about him.
<Pose Tracker> Tamaki Uchida has posed.
Tamaki's got her ups and downs; every so often, her battery does drain. Talking to a person instead of staring at an organizational system is a nice change of pace for her right now, too!
She snaps her fingers on one hand and points at Maya. "One of those has a much shorter explanation than the other. I'll start with Sakura-san first, if you don't mind?" After this, she motions to the couches surrounding a table in the center of the office. "Take a seat, though, we might be here a while."
Tamaki leans forward in her seat on the couch and exhales, her demeanor growing more somber as she prepares to talk about Sojiro. "I don't know exactly if I'm at liberty to talk about every aspect here, so forgive me if I skip a few details."
"Watanabe-san was who I first started talking about this with -- I don't know how well the two of you are acquainted. We didn't start with Sakura-san, but more broadly, we figured we wanted to look into the topic of cognitive psience."
She gives Maya a pointed glance. "This ... isn't exactly my first rodeo when it comes to the supernatural stuff like this. There was a big flurry of activity in academia about the topic for about a year after something that happened in Mikage-cho, which both of us were present for. In the wake of that, this energy company called SEBEC took responsibility for what happened, SEBEC's stocks tanked, and the Nanjo Group buys it up."
"Then near the tail end of 2009, opinion sours on cognitive psience, and it gets derided as a pseudoscience. The government starts cutting funding for its research programs, publications in academic journals get retracted left and right, and soon there's nothing left of the topic anywhere except for maybe a few saved digital copies floating out in some very obscure parts of the internet." Tamaki briefly lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "If you ask me, I have a hunch that there's some causal relationship between what happened at Mikage-cho and the topic's popularity."
Tamaki sheepishly places the tips of her index fingers together and gives Maya a guilty smile. "I managed to get my hands on a copy of one of the earliest published papers on the subject. So through a ... roundabout way, I found out that Sakura-san wasn't one of these researchers credited on the paper, but someone who seemed to be well-acquainted with one of them."
The part that Tamaki isn't saying out loud is that Sojiro is now the adopted daughter of one of the now-dead researchers -- and over her blood-related family, at that. That's at least part of what she feels she isn't at liberty to talk about -- that's for Sojiro to tell, not her.
Tamaki had recognized 'Sayuri' in that photo in LeBlanc.
"So I bring up Sakura-san to Watanabe-san, thinking he's as good a lead as any on what the topic actually entails, if he managed to find out anything through the mother of his adoptive daughter. Watanabe-san asked him about cognitive psience and mentioned that I pointed her in his direction, it went very poorly, then a few days later, he comes knocking around here, saying that the topic's supposed to be scrubbed entirely from the web."
She rubs the back of her neck, then leans back in her seat, having nearly finished this topic. "We're still trying to get him to come around. He knows something about cognitive psience, he says nothing good can come of it, but I call bullshit."
<Pose Tracker> Maya Amano has posed.
"You mind if I take notes?" Maya asks as she takes a seat. She pulls out her mobile. Most reporters were still taking notes the old-fashioned way -- with a proper pen and notebook -- but Maya found it much easier to use a smartphone. Plus she could record things if she needed to, so she wasn't relying on shorthand notes to re-construct a conversation. Of course, this wasn't a proper interview and Maya didn't want to give the impression it was, either, so there'd be no use of the recording app today.
When Tamaki gives the OK, Maya's fingers move at a breakneck pace as she opens up her Notes app and starts typing. Somehow, Maya manages to keep her eyes up during most of Tamaki's explanation, only briefly glancing down to ensure that her fingers hadn't unintentionally shifted on the keyboard screen and spelled out a bunch of gibberish.
"Once something's on the web, it's pretty tough to scrub it off. I always save anything I find during my investigation immediately, just in case it gets pulled." And sometimes it did. "Do you know anything about him personally? Beyond the cognitive psience stuff, I mean."
<Pose Tracker> Tamaki Uchida has posed.
Tamaki's 'OK' for note-taking comes in the form of this: "Long as we're off the record for anything journalistic. This shit would get Public Security angrily breathing down Coolest's neck."
Her own note-taking style is a good old-fashioned pen-and-paper notepad, but that's mainly due to the Dark Hour being a thing that she's had to contend with for almost five years now, and Tamaki's cell phone doesn't quite work during those times!
"Yeah, when it's out there, it's out there." Tamaki scratches behind an ear. "He seemed to be a little bit confused at that notion, thinking that the project was top-secret from the get-go, but to be fair, they've otherwise done a good job of cleaning it up. I had to go through some real obscure channels to get just the basics of the basics, real Intro to Cogpsi 101 stuff. I don't blame him for getting mixed-up, either: from the sounds of it -- this is speculation on my part, I don't know for sure -- when an interested party's knowledge on the topic advanced far enough, I'd guess that it suddenly became top-secret after the fact."
Tamaki hisses an intake of breath at Maya's last question. "Ooooh. Yes, but, mostly they're the kinds of things I'm not at liberty to say. Uhh. He runs a curry and coffee shop called LeBlanc -- no, you were there, you know that now." She drums her fingers against each other. "Let's see, let's see ..."
"I've mentioned he adopted the daughter of a researcher who died. He's the guardian of another kid, too, though I don't know the details there. Past that ... Sojiro Sakura isn't his original name or identity, and I'm not telling you what it originally was, but my impression of him is that he's someone who very much wants to just run his curry shop in peace and obscurity and leave an unfortunate chapter of his life behind ... himself ..."
Tamaki's head droops as she finally says that last part out loud. "... yeah, I can relate, honestly."
<Pose Tracker> Maya Amano has posed.
Maya nods her asset. She doesn't intend to report on any of this for Coolest. Right now her focus is on the Joker Killer. Anything else not directly related to it that lead her there was completely off-the-record.
Besides, top secret research and government conspiracies weren't exactly the primary interest of Coolest's typical reader. Kismet had other magazines that covered conspiracies and the paranormal and they didn't have many teenage readers.
Though with how strange things have gotten over the last half-year, Maya was surprised that the readership for those magazines hadn't significantly increased. It wasn't as though she was the only one looking for answers, either.
"Does that mean you have something you want to leave behind too?" Maya sets her cell phone down on the couch face-down. This isn't research.
<Pose Tracker> Tamaki Uchida has posed.
Tamaki twiddles her thumbs together. "Yeah, and I've been successful so far. I've already been a part of two supernatural incidents. The second one was that SEBEC scandal in Mikage-cho that I'd mentioned. Watanabe-san and Kirishima-san -- the lady in the jumpsuit that came with me -- were both there, too. Out of all of us, Kirishima-san knows the most of what happened there."
She half-closes her eyes as she averts her gaze from Maya. One of her hands finds its way to idly fiddle with the choker comprised of six coins adorning her neck. "What I want to leave behind has to do with the first incident. More accurately, if the public caught wind of the full story, they'd ... reduce it to some narrative where I was the hero and the person responsible for causing it was unquestionably a villain."
Tamaki swallows hard as she considers her next point. "What's more, I shudder to think of the evil acts that someone more ambitious could commit with what the ... 'villain' did. If whatever group behind the Joker Killer were able to do that at a larger scale, we would all be well and truly cooked."
She gives Maya an apologetic glance. "So if anyone else outside of our little circle of contacts asks about me, I had a perfectly normal high life."
<Pose Tracker> Maya Amano has posed.
"Got it," Maya says, giving Tamaki a firm salute. "If I was going to be known for anything, I'd rather it be for my reporting than anything I did with my Persona." This was 100% true. Even though Maya was fairly open with other Persona-users about being one, she didn't want to be the subject of a story; she'd rather be the one reporting it!
"Though... I'm thinking that I should call you Uchida-senpai now," she teases. "It sounds like you've been involved with the supernatural a lot longer than I have. I just discovered I had a Persona earlier this year."
<Pose Tracker> Tamaki Uchida has posed.
Tamaki hangs her head -- though this time, with a comedically-exaggerated air to her movements. "I've been getting that a lot, recently ..."
She pulls herself back upright and huffs in irritation. "Seriously, though. Imagine taking care of the Joker Killer once and for all, there's as happy of an ending that you're going to get, that chapter of your life ends, and then ..."
"And then it doesn't, actually. You experience the Dark Hour every night. More incidents keep happening. You get a new job, move somewhere else, move onto something new, but something similar happens in your new life. That gets resolved, so then surely that's the proper end of things, right?"
Tamaki sighs and leans back on the couch, her expression now forlorn. "Then it just keeps happening more and more, with seemingly no end in sight. That's ... what it's like."
She's silent for several more moments, but she eventually continues. "I can ... intimately understand Sakura-san's temptation to start fresh somewhere new and try to hide from some powerful people with malicious designs on the world. I've very much wished I could do the same, but ..."
Tamaki casts her gaze back to Maya, a ferocious determination once more showing in her eyes. "I can't just look away from everything I've seen. I don't have the luxury of turning a blind eye anymore."
<Pose Tracker> Maya Amano has posed.
"That's how I feel, too!" Maya says, nodding. "There are so many teenage Persona-users. I can't shield them from their new reality --" And they probably wouldn't want to be shielded, either. At least not all of them. "-- but I want to do what I can to keep them safe."
Maya rubs the lobe of her ear, the way she always does when she's thinking. "That's why I want to deal with the Joker Killer quickly. There's a lot of teens that aren't taking it seriously and are calling their number on dares or out of curiosity. You can't stop teenagers from doing stuff like that --" Maya had done her fair share of stupid things as a teenager. "-- so all you can really do is stop the cause of it."
Maya places her hands on her lap and bends forward, lips curled into a smile. "I think the two of us are going to be good friends, Uchida-senpai."
<Pose Tracker> Tamaki Uchida has posed.
Tamaki nods at Maya's sentiment about protecting teenagers. "You and me both on that count. The way I phrase it, I want to be the person that I could have used as a kid when I didn't have anyone."
Her expression shifts uneasily as she thinks of other teenagers who definitely don't want to be shielded. Like Tatsuya. She can give him some material aid here and there, some first aid kits, replacement motorcycle leathers, but ... that's about all. He'll go off on his own no matter what she says.
She glances at her desk of notes that still need proper organizing. "Aw, hell. Explaining things about the Joker Killer is going to take a bit more of a ... prepared speech, let's say. In other words, I've got to arrange that mess together into something coherent."
Tamaki stands up and stretches her arms. "I get the same feeling, Amano-san." She gives Maya a level stare, then smirks lightly and quirks an eyebrow. "Careful, there. Don't push it, or otherwise I'll think of a fitting nickname for you in revenge."