Alright, so this was going to be a long con. The most inherently risky of all cons, because you must place yourself in close contact with the mark for an extended period of time, which gives them a greater chance at discovering the ruse. A greater risk still when you consider that this was a yakuza family he was attempting to ingratiate himself with. One wrong step, a single solitary mistake could very well see him with a few missing fingers. If he was lucky.
Some might find themselves nervous with that sword hanging over their head by a mere horse's hair, but not Matsuhiro. No, no. He'd been dragged into this mess against his own will, so he was going to turn that risk into a crucial, critical opportunity.
Step one was simple: Impress the mother. They were sitting at dinner. Him, his new girlfriend Miasaka. Her mother. Though to reiterate an obvious point, Miasaki's mother was a yakuza boss' wife. Those tended to fall into one of two categories: Trophy wife with a brain like pudding and willpower to match, or a stern and strong woman who is able to stand up to her husband when he does something stupid and thoughtless, like husbands are wont.
"Young man, you seek to date my daughter?" Miasaki's mother asked in a tone like the grave. "I would like to know your intentions with her, so that we may judge your worth... appropriately."
His intentions with her daughter? Matsuhiro tilted his head upwards, and he thought for a moment about his intentions.
<i>Money money money money mone~ey~ey~ey! Everyone's got a price, everyone's gonna pay...</i>
A wistful sigh escaped his lips, and a bashful blush fell upon his cheeks. "I'm sorry, but imagining that future..." he sighed again. "It brings such happiness to me."
"Then it must bring happiness to my daughter as well," the mother said, and somehow her face pushed aside that pile of dough he was picturing. "I will not tolerate her being used by a man. Especially a man who is interested in only one thing."
"Oh mother, he's not like that at all!" Miasaki said, clinging onto his arm. "On the way here he didn't even once look at my shapely body, nor did he have that obvious face boys have when they think of something dirty and think they've hidden it well. He's not like those other boys at all!"
"All that proves is that he is good at hiding his intentions," her mother said. "When you have a body like that, it is only natural for a man to look, at least once. It's more suspicious that he didn't."
“To be fair, her bodyguard would have shot me if I did.” He said. “So I have dedicated myself to imagining other elements of a happy future with Miasaki.” Like money. So much money.
<hr>
"Aaargh! What is going on with my connection?!"
Oh, how sweet it was. That was practically a siren's song to him at this moment. Look now, it was that gun happy psycho bodyguard Rei, sitting at her desk in a room off to the side of the dining room, staring daggers at her laptop.
“Pardon me.” he said, standing up and bowing to Miasaki, The Boss, and her Mother, before sliding into that side room. "Something the matter?" he asked, voice practically dripping with sugary syrupy helpfulness. Rei turned, and if she'd been staring daggers at the laptop she was staring a Sherman Tank at him.
"Pardon me for saying so, but this is none of your business. Please enjoy your dinner with - hey! What are you doing?!"
"Fixing your laptop, apparently," Matsuhiro said, gently pushing by her to sit at the laptop. "If you're going to make those annoyed sounds, it will distract us from dinner."
"Feh! As if you know the first thing about -"
With a flick of his wrist Matsuhiro unfolded his degree. Yes he kept it on him at all times. For reasons. Fully legal reasons. A Masters in Computer Science at Kyoto University! Which, outside of university, more or less amounts to being asked by everyone under the sun to fix their assorted devices.
Sigh. he gently reached past Rei, scrolled the mouse towards the wireless settings, and made to switch it off.
"I've already tried that," Rei protested. Matsuhiro switched it off anyway. "It didn't work." Matsuhiro switched it back on, then cooly leaned against the nearby wall inspecting his fingernails. "Ah! It worked! How did you - But I - Never mind! Now I can work out my patrol plan."
"Patrol plan?" Matsuhiro casually asked.
"Not that it's any of your business, but as a yakuza I have a responsibility to ensure that our territory is carefully monitored in case of rival gang appearance," Rei snapped. “Especially since I’m Miss Miasaki’s personal guard. I've been trying to figure out the most efficient route.”
"Oho, is that all?" Matsuhiro chuckled. "That's similar to the Travelling Salesman problem from the sound of things. Almost certainly an NP problem, you won't find the most efficient route very quickly. Much more effective to find an 'efficient enough' route, because at a certain point the difference will be all but ethereal. Have you considered a Genetic Algorithm?"
Rei stared blankly back at him. Oh dear, she was wobbling in her seat. Matsuhiro nudged her aside, and then his fingers blurred across the keyboard.
"Hey! What are you - What is that nonsense you're typing?"
"It's called a programming language," Matsuhiro patiently said. "I'm writing a little program to help you work out an efficient enough route for your purposes using a Genetic Algorithm."
"G-genetic algorithm?" Rei asked.
Matsuhiro grinned. Oho, she went and asked that when his earlier comments had been enough to make her dizzy? Unwise! He took a deep breath.
"It is a search heuristic inspired by Darwin's Theory of Evolution. It reflects the process of natural selection by ensuring that the fittest individuals are selected for a kind of reproduction, to encourage each successive generation of possible answers to continually improve over time. Of course you also have to ensure that the possibility of mutation is included, otherwise you could get stuck in a blind alley very quickly. In this case, your solution must include every point in the route, and its fitness would be measured in how much time it takes to reach all of them."
There was more to it than that, but the bodyguard was already spinning like a top. If he went into the full detail, he'd probably kill the bitch. Not something he should do on his first day, unfortunately.
"Th-that sounds way too complicated!" she said once she'd recovered. Her sword was drawn and at his throat already. "Stop making fun of me, you'll never be able to create something capable of that!"
"Here you go," Matsuhiro said. "This is a good enough route that satisfies the conditions you'd laid out. I'd estimate that any routes that improve on this would do so by tiny amounts which would cost you more effort in finding them than they'd save you."
Rei boggled at the route laid out on screen. Oh dear, was the bodyguard weeping? That tough girl reduced to tears at seeing something so elegant and pristine? Well... it wasn't for things like this that he got into that degree anyway. He was actually considering ways to develop more advanced ransomware. Or spybots. Or, at the very least, becoming a security expert so that he could be hired to deal with those exact kinds of issues caused by other people.
"Huh... You do have a use after all," Rei sniffed. Matsuhiro smirked, saluted, then turned around...
And very nearly crashed into his girlfriend's mother. She was standing right behind him, and you know, it's funny. She wasn't actually that tall but it felt like she towered over him. Standing this close, it felt like he'd crossed the event horizon to a black hole.
"With me. Now."
Then she turned and left the room. Matsuhiro looked back to his 'girlfriend' who was looking on with a slack jaw as if she didn't know what was happening, or why. Nonetheless, his feet moved automatically. He couldn't stop them. If a black hole moves, then anything that's crossed the event horizon must move with it, and so he went.
Had he done something wrong? Had helping Rei like that been a faux pas? Had he insulted them, rather than impressing them and ingratiating himself? Had she seen through him? Was he on his way to an execution? Or something worse? He began to look around for escape - but found nothing. Everything that even looked like an exit had a guard on it already. Not just any guards either, big hulking apes that looked like they had no sense of humour. No, worse than that, if someone told a joke in their presence they'd rip the teller's arms off.
"Inside!"
"Yes ma'am!" he squeaked. He was dead! A dead man walking! What horrors was he about to find in here? What monstrous thing was he about to walk in on?
The answer, it seemed... was a room full of computer components. Wall to wall of different models of PCs on shelves across the room, from floor to ceiling. Monitors, keyboards, a variety of different mouse types, even some very obvious homebrew with a yakuza theme, which was extremely worrying because he didn't think that was really possible.
"Are these yours...?" he asked, turning around to the stern yakuza mother.
"Yeppers, these are all mine!"
Only to find a glasses wearing otaku chick where once that stern mother had been standing. Her kimono was hung up on the back of the wall, and it turned out that underneath she was wearing a Legend of Hilda t-shirt, a thick pair of glasses, and jeans with alternating 0s and 1s sewn into them.
What... the shit is this now?
"Oh man, you have no idea!" she said, grasping his hands. "Someone else to talk to about computers! When I try to talk about them with anyone else here their eyes glaze over like Reis does. I've been trying really hard to teach them, and a few of them don't die anymore when you try to explain diagonalisation, but -"
"Mooom! Stop geeking out in front of my boyfriend!"
You know, for a moment there he would have sworn that this was backwards. The mother looked like a teenager, and the young woman looked like she'd aged about twenty years.
"Oh, no, this is quite charming!" Matsuhiro chuckled. "A mutual interest like this can only mean we'll get on better over the years."
"Ah! He's a keeper!" the mother said, shaking his hands and jumping up and down excitedly. "A keeper! A keeper! You've made your mother super duper happy! Yay!"
... Alright, you can't even call this new personality a geek, it's more like a little kid at this point. This was going super well so far in spite of his 'girlfriend' being embarassed, so he might as well impress her even further. Get settled into this yakuza family, and he'd be rolling in money in no time flat!
"Here's my phone by the way," he said, puffing out his chest. "Cool, huh?"
"Eh? A Cyborg?" the mother asked, tilting her head. "I thought all the young kids these days were buying Bananas?"
"Bananas?" Matsuhiro scoffed. "No thanks, those customers are on the verge of becoming cultists. Haven't you ever noticed that? They'll pay through the nose for the tiniest upgrade, what a waste of money. Especially when there's not actually anything special about it. Half the cost is going into the logo! Hahaha!"
Deathly silence swept the room. A trembling hand fell upon his shoulder. Miasaki? Weird, she had that whole 'can't see her eyes' thing going on.
"How fast can you run?" Miasaki asked.
"Uh?" he answered, and then he was being hauled out of there so fast that he thought he might break the sound barrier.
"My mother's a Banana cultist, you fucking clod!" Miasaki yelled. Huh? Huh?! Matsuhiro looked back and - Holy shit were they being chased by a bear carrying a katana?! No, wait! That was the mother! Back in her kimono and with a face that made her stern expression from earlier look like a happy clown's in comparison.
"You will know the joys of the Banana!" a voice roared. A voice that was originally going to be in zalgo text, but it scared the zalgo away.
"Ah, now I see what you mean," Matsuhiro said, and then promptly went to mach two, dragging Miasaki behind him instead. To his surprise, she quickened up her pace to match his. Huh. Not many people can do that.
"Running won't help, we need to hide!" Miasaki said, then grabbed his collar, slid to a halt and threw open a closet. "Alleyoop!"
Alright then. Now they were stuck in a really tight closet, with very little light and not much to look at but one another. Miasaki put her finger to her lips, and outside they heard what must surely be a meteor shower hitting the corridor outside in a slow, steady row.
"Banana!" a demon whispered outside the closet. It growled hungrily. "Banana products are superior! Well worth the price! Efficient, safe and easy to use!"
That could have gone better. The meteor shower continued on its way. Of all the things to nearly get killed by a yakuza's wife over, a brand dispute!
"She'll calm down, but I wouldn't bet on her approving of you anymore," Miasaki whispered.
"Hrm... I'll figure something out," Matsuhiro whispered back. Man, this was tight. He could barely move. Especially with her pressed up against his -
...
Huh. You know, he hated to admit it but he could sort of understand why she was making those comments about her body. Now that he had very little to focus on but her... damn, she had all sorts of good things going on.
"I think she's gone, we should be okay to sneak out for a bit."
A fine plan. Except, for whatever reason... the door jammed. Meaning he was stuck in here. In close quarters. With a yakuza boss' daughter. Where they could almost, but not quite, get far enough apart to not rub up all over each other. And the only possible escape was that one of the household staff opened the closet door.
Yep, no doubt about it, he was going to die today.
- They get stuck in there overnight.
- Rei finds them. She's also a banana fangirl.
- Mother finds them.
- Father finds them.
- Something else
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