All in all, the four weeks that had passed since the three assassins formed the True Noir had been relatively successful. As professional assassins, The Kindly Ones were steadily gaining a reputation in Europe as efficient, reliable contract killers, which greatly satisfied Mireille. She had prided herself on her reliability when she worked solo, and had transferred that same work ethic to her exploits with Kirika as the Professional Noir (she still bristled whenever Chloe called that outfit a “False Noir”). She was glad to see that this new venture was turning out much the same. Initially the Corsican was concerned with how Chloe would take to this lifestyle, as the swarthy Maiden had never actually accepted a contract killing for money—all her previous kills had been under Althena’s direct orders, thus she was a novice to the commercial aspects of assassination. Fortunately, Chloe seemed willing to defer to her comrades in these matters, which made sense, since she was far more focused on their actions as vigilantes—or to be more precise, their lack of action as vigilantes.
This, in turn, caused Mireille a great deal of headaches, and as the trio sat in a hotel room in Stockholm, it was apparent that another one was on its way.
“I just don’t see why we should wait until an opportunity comes to us. We’re talking about the reason for our existence, after all—if we can’t find an opportunity to vanquish the Darkness, then we are obligated to make one.”
“Chloe…”
The young assassin turned to her taciturn best friend for assistance in spurring their reluctant leader into action. “Kirika, help me out here.”
Mireille almost breathed a sigh of relief. Kirika was reasonable; she understood why immediate action would be foolish. At the very least, they needed to lay low until they didn’t need to live out of hotel rooms—once they established a base of operations, then they could think about saving the world. Of course, whenever the Corsican’s reasoning moved down this path, a part of her always countered that they did have a base of operations; namely, the Manor. Mireille was finding it increasingly difficult to ignore this inner voice, however.
Still, it was something of a shock to hear the Japanese girl’s entrance into the conversation: “I… I think Chloe is right.”
Clearly, this was not what the Hand had expected to hear from the more subdued of the two Maidens. “Kirika?! What are you saying?”
“I’m saying Chloe’s right. Mireille, we’re fortunate people in that we actually know what our purpose in life is—don’t you think we should start fulfilling that purpose.”
“But… but it’s too risky right now….”
“I know that’s what you think, Mireille, but is that what you feel?”
She just had to bring my emotions into this, didn’t she? The Corsican’s internal question wasn’t entirely one of exasperation; had she not followed her emotions, she probably would never have agreed to form the True Noir in the first place. Ever since that day, it seemed that her mind and her emotions had been struggling for supremacy, with the mind just barely retaining its place of prominence.
“Mireille, don’t make us use the Trance to get you to agree,” Chloe said. Granted, she wasn’t entirely certain how to initiate the Trance, but somehow, she knew she could do so with Kirika’s cooperation.
On the same instinctual level, the Corsican also knew that the Maidens were perfectly capable of bending her will to theirs… and that was something she didn’t want to experience unless it was absolutely necessary. “Okay. Let’s just think this through,” Mireille said.
“Are you going to try and reason your way out of doing our duty?” Chloe asked skeptically.
“No—I… I know we have to do this. It’s just that we want to make sure we send the right message to Soldats.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you recall, we have an unofficial agreement with Soldats at the moment. They leave us alone for a while, and we give them a chance to change their ways. But the problem is that Soldats is so widespread, so deep in the pockets of nearly every industry and government, that it’s difficult to know if a potential target is in Soldats. That’s why we have to be selective, at least for now.”
“Okay,” Chloe said. “I guess I can see the reasoning in that, though I think you’re overestimating the extent to which Soldats is directly involved in world affairs. They prefer more subtle, indirect means of control than simply issuing out orders to subordinates. But like I said, I see your point, so let’s not go after the big fish—let’s start with the small fries who aren’t big enough for them to notice.”
“In theory, I guess that makes sense,” Mireille admitted, “but there’s something else to consider.”
Chloe sighed and put her hand to her temple. “I should have known….”
Undeterred, the Corsican assassin continued: “We also need to make sure Soldats knows that we’re active, or they’ll think our end of the agreement is nothing more than an empty threat.”
“What?” Chloe asked in obvious confusion.
“I think I understand,” Kirika chimed in. “If we go after people Soldats doesn’t care about, they’ll have no way of knowing that we’re responsible, because they’ll have no reason to examine them closely. And if they don’t see any reason to be afraid of us, they won’t even consider changing their ways.”
“Assuming they change their ways at all,” Chloe responded pessimistically.
“Whether they change or not is their problem,” Mireille said, “but this way, they can’t say we didn’t give them a fair chance at avoiding judgment.”
“Fine,” Chloe relented. “So, we need a target prominent enough to get the attention of Soldats, but not so prominent that we end up killing a member. Now how on earth are we going to do that?”
“Well, I’d hoped that Jeanette would be able to help us out there when she returned to Soldats, but I’ve only heard from her once since our meeting in Andorra.”
“So we’re putting this off until she gets back to us?” Chloe asked. The swarthy girl did not seem too enthused at this prospect.
“No. We don’t have any way of knowing if or when she’ll return to the organization, and we can’t put this off much longer: this may sound corny, but I can feel the compulsion to begin our mission building in my mind, and if we wait too long, I have a feeling our Noir instincts will kick in, and I’m not entirely certain we’ll be able to be as selective when choosing our targets when we’re acting collectively.”
“So what should we do?” Kirika asked plaintively.
“Exactly what I said: we’re going to use our reason to figure out who we can target at this early stage. We need to think of some area of life, either in the public or in the underworld, that exploits the souls we’re trying to protect, but which is also unlikely to have a large percentage of Soldats members closely involved.”
“How about the organized criminal syndicates?” Chloe suggested. “If a prominent boss was killed without Soldats’ prior knowledge, surely that would get their attention.”
“I don’t know…” Kirika said. “A crime boss is likely to be well protected—and while I’m sure we can easily cut through any such opposition, doing so would increase the likelihood of hurting someone in Soldats, since it’s likely that the boss’s advisors would include someone with connections to the organization.”
“And that’s assuming that the bosses themselves aren’t members. If you’ll recall, my parents ran the largest crime syndicate on Corsica, and both of them were full members of Soldats.”
“Oh… that’s right.”
“Well, how about something less general, then?” Chloe suggested. “If it’s too risky to go after the people influenced by Soldats, what about the people influenced by those people?”
“Interesting… any suggestions?”
The silence that followed lasted nearly thirty seconds before it was broken: “What about drugs?”
“What do you mean, Kirika?”
“Well, the distribution of drugs doesn’t seem like something that Soldats wants to be directly involved in; most of its members are ‘upstanding citizens,’ after all, and something like that could tarnish their image if exposed, and that in turn would lower their power.”
Mireille was still dubious. “Are you trying to say Soldats doesn’t have a hand in illegal drug trafficking?”
“No… just that if they do, it’s probably the less disreputable aspects of it, like money laundering. The distribution end of things, on the other hand, seems like the kind of thing they’d want to avoid.”
“That’s actually not too far from the truth,” Chloe said, her eyes visibly brightening as she considered her best friend’s proposal. “In fact, it was actually one of Althena’s pet peeves. Whenever we talked about hypocrisy, she almost always mentioned how Soldats tended to look on drug dealers as the scum of the earth, even as they made their own fortunes laundering drug money.”
“Althena said that, did she?” Mireille asked.
“You… you’re not going to shoot down this idea just because of what Althena thought, are you?” Chloe asked, almost panic-stricken.
“It’s just that I don’t want us to be viewed as her disciples—if those entrenched in Soldats think we can be controlled, it’s going to mean a lot more trouble down the line. Still, removing a prominent person in the drug trade would definitely get their attention, if only because it would interrupt their flow of money to be laundered.” The blonde woman closed her eyes in thought for a few seconds before speaking again. “How loudly did Althena complain about this within the organization?”
“I’m not certain she did so at all—she actually told me she suspected that members of our own faction engaged in money laundering as well, but she never bothered to follow up on those suspicions.”
“No doubt because she didn’t want to attract too much attention while preparing for the Grand Retour,” Mireille said. Arguably, Althena’s inaction made her just as hypocritical as the hypocrites she was criticizing—and in a perverse way, this thought made the whole situation potentially very satisfying for the Corsican. “Very well… if there are no objections, we’ll focus our efforts on drug traffickers.”
There weren’t any objections, so the discussion moved to the next phase: “Where do we start, though?”
Mireille shrugged. “Pick a country—no matter what it is, I guarantee that they’ll have a drug problem.”
And so, after a short discussion, made their (somewhat arbitrary) choice:
Read the comments on this episode
See other episodes by Kwakerjak
(Posted Thu, 16 Aug 2007 02:55)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.