Phil’s footsteps fell uncertainly amid the frozen world around them. Their frantic flight from the burning Blue Friday was long finished. The only sirens that could be heard were all collected near the club. Tilla’s abrupt strategy had worked, there was no doubt about that. But where next? Their apartment was no place to return to – the fire damage had made sure of that. Did the two men even have another place to return to aside from that?

  After a long silence, Phil and Jean's legs slowed. They looked up to see a parking lot covered in a thin blanket of white snow, beyond which was a familiar restaurant with a green roof, white awning, and crowned with a chef’s hat-wearing mustachioed burger. Somehow, even though it was extremely late at night (around two or three in the morning by Phil’s rough estimate), Burger World was still open.

  The shine of warm lights still spilled out from behind glass windows. Past the windows showed an interior almost completely devoid of people, other than one or two men who looked like truckers, a woman in a long pink coat who was entirely focused on chowing through a basket of fries, and the few workers trying to make it through the graveyard shift without falling asleep on their feet.

  Phil stopped. He let out a soft sigh. Going from the callous greed of Blue Friday, all the way to the warmth of Burger World. Even as he stood out in the parking lot, he felt like the two were completely different worlds. They had to be. The two were completely incompatible. Neither could exist in the same world at the same time. And in between the two was the buffer of the winter. Snow, ice, and freezing air scorched at his lungs and cooled his various cuts, bruises, and burns accumulated from the shadow duels and their rescue of Arthur Hawkins from the burning building.

  “It’s not a bad place…” Jean wistfully murmured while absentmindedly stroking his ragged goatee with a few fingers.

  “It’s warm.” Phil agreed. “We don’t have anywhere else, really. Not unless we want to bother the Muto family again.”

  “This late at night?”

  Phil gave a short laugh. “Yeah. My thoughts exactly. We’ve given them enough trouble. Dawn should spring up in a few hours. How about we chill here until then? After that we can make tracks for Kame Games to repay Arthur Hawkins.”

  “Je suis d’ accord.” Jean rapidly replied, following his agreement with a laugh of his own. “I hope Tilla will think to find us here.”

  “She’s a real smart cookie. With the apartment gone, I bet she’ll look here first.”

  From the other side of the window, Tea Gardner passed by and shot them a wave. Her eyes looked tired, but the girl was still working hard. Phil tilted his head slightly in thought. He couldn’t claim his memories of the manga were 100% accurate, but wasn’t she supposed to have been fired from Burger World by now? That was her reason for being a part of Death-T. She took up the job in the first laser tag stage to replace her old workplace. Then once she found out the truth about Kaiba’s intentions, she teamed up with the rest of the gang to rescue Solomon Muto.

  Yet, she was here. Long after she should have been fired and during the time Phil heavily suspected Death-T to be. Was his mental timeline out of wack… or was this the butterfly effect in motion?

  Any more thoughts on the matter were disrupted under the crunch of snow behind them. Phil and Jean both turned at the same time to see a bald, suited fella staring at them from the other side of the parking lot, about twenty or thirty feet away. The man was smoking like a chimney. He had total yakuza vibes written all over him. Not only that, but his eyes… Phil never claimed to be an expert at seeing people’s emotions through their eyes, but even he could tell that there was murder contained in the man’s look.

  “Oi. You two.” The man spoke through a heavy sneer. From the shadows behind him emerged five more men. Some were unarmed, but one held a baseball bat studded with nails and another clutched a switchblade in his hand. All of them wore suits, rather smoke-stained suits at that.

  “Oui?” Jean voiced his confusion with one simple word, but in Phil’s peripheral vision he could see the Frenchman’s fists tightening. Neither of them missed the fact that these men obviously looked like trouble.

  “You were at the club earlier. My boy here, Jimmy Rustles, says he saw goatee over there go back to our lab, and scraggy beardio climbed up to boss Guriko’s floor. Soon after that, the club caught fire. Rather suspicious, ain’t that right?”

  Phil gave a noncommittal shrug. “Dunno what you’re talking about mate. Sure. We were at the club. Just like a good fifty or so other people who were. I don’t know about any labs and who the fuck is Guriko?”

  Phil knew in his heart it was no use. To say the six men looked pissed would be an understatement. If they truly were yakuza from the club, then they’d just taken a heavy loss and were likely looking for just about anyone to vent their frustrations on. Forget flimsy excuses, they probably wouldn’t even need as much as that to take action. All they would need is a target. And who were better targets than two lone scraggly men late at night?

  “Jimmy ain’t a liar. Right, Jimmy?”

  One of the other five men stepped forward. He was wearing a smoke-stained suit like the others, but under that suit poked a crumpled Hawaiian button-up shirt, and around his neck was a thin gold chain. His hair was styled in a rather long pompadour haircut, to the point that it extended out past his head for a good two feet in total length. How the hair stayed together in that fashion, Phil did not quite understand.

  “I ain’t no fucking liar.”

  “See?” The first man continued speaking. “Jimmy ain’t no liar.”

  “Yeah.” Jimmy said.

  “You callin’ my friend Jimmy a liar?”

  “I think he did.” Jimmy growled.

  The man looked around at his compatriots. “Well, that just makes me mad! Boys, does that make you mad too?”

  Another man stepped forward. This man was the one who had the nail-studded baseball bat. His hair was cut into an extremely spikey mohawk haircut, making him almost look like some puffed-up rooster strutting about a snow-filled chicken coop.

  “My name is Rooster. That makes me mad.”

  Phil and Jean shared a look, both men mouthing ‘Rooster?’ to each other simultaneously.

  The first man nodded sadly. “Rooster, as your friend, seeing you mad makes me sad. It also makes me even madder.”

  “Call me mad squared, because I’m extra mad on top of that. Ain’t no one got the right to call my brother Jimmy Rustles a liar.” The yakuza with the switchblade bit out between clenched teeth.

  The fourth man raised his hand. “For the record, I’m not mad, nor do I care if Jimmy’s a fat liar or not. I just find the idea of beating you two bums to a pulp and throwing your unconscious bodies in a ditch to be a pleasant way to spend the rest of this night.”

  The first man nodded sagely. “That’s okay Rick. I’ll be extra mad for you!”

  “Thanks.” Rick acknowledged with a dip of his head.

  Without any further words the six men spread out in a loose semi-circle and began to advance. Phil and Jean shared another look. Behind him he could hear Lumina’s fists clenching and unclenching. They stepped back. The yakuza inched forward. In their faces was a sense of anticipation and glee at the thought of what they were about to do to a pair of bums no one cared about.

  What to do. Phil knew he and Jean had no chance in a physical confrontation even if the numbers were even. They could probably clutch a 2v1 in their favor, but anything past that would be difficult considering how skinny they still were from their homeless days and the built-up exhaustion of the shadow duels. D.3.S.? Unleashing the frog was an option, but there were normal people in the Burger World behind them. Phil didn’t want to traumatize Tea with the sight of a massive frog eating six scumbags alive.

  Lumina? She was still recovering her magic. She’d already had to go corporeal recently to finish off Chet. Could she manage for however long it would take for her to deal with six opponents? Otherwise, Phil had no doubts in her ability to handle the yakuza. He had a feeling she was already mentally doing the math to figure out how fast she could blitz through those guys before she ran out of juice.

  The back of Phil’s secondhand shoes bumped against the curb. The doors to Burger World were no more than a few feet away. They couldn’t back up any further. Not without bringing the fight into the restaurant. Doing so would not be acceptable. It would drag innocents into the fray.

  “Run?” Jean whispered the suggestion to Phil. True. They could run off to the sides. They’d already spent who knew how long that night running from the cops. Why not add fleeing from the yakuza to the list? Heck, if he could lead them to a deserted place, maybe he could finagle the events enough so that D.3.S. could intervene without breaking any of the vague rules the giant frog was so fond of.

  “Oi.”

  It wasn’t the yakuza speaking this time. Phil risked a glance backward. He recognized the voice, but a part of his brain didn’t quite believe it. It was a boy with a messy shock of dirty blond hair. A dark green jacket was wrapped snugly around his shoulders, and a white shirt poked out from underneath. An expression of utter confidence was on his face, along with quite a few scuff marks and bruises that spoke of a recent scuffle or two. It wasn’t just his face, though. His full posture spoke of a boy who was at perfect ease in a fistfight, a very violent fish in a set of very violent waters.

  Joey Wheeler. And next to him was Tristan Taylor, his hair as always in that strange pointy hairstyle. Unlike Joey, Tristan was still wearing his blue school jacket.

  “Evenin’ lads.” Phil greeted them with a roguish grin. Joey and Tristan grinned back. While he wasn’t extremely close to the duo, neither were they strangers. Simply by using Burger World as their usual hangout spot, Phil and Jean had ended up naturally playing many a game of Duel Monsters (and pinball) with Joey, Tristan, and Yugi over the week. He supposed it probably also helped that they were on good terms with Tea.

  “Six against two?” Tristan smirked. His hands were resting easily in the pockets of his jacket. Like Joey, he projected an aura of absolute confidence. Neither boy even considered the possibility that the six yakuza before them was an impossible force to overcome.

  “I don’t know…” Joey clenched his fists. His face was set in an easy grin. “Looks more to me like six against four, don’t you think buddy?”

  Tristan let out a wild laugh. “I think you’re right!”

  Before the yakuza could even get the chance to respond and tell these two random high schoolers to buzz off, Joey and Tristan launched themselves forward. Joey was on the man with the switchblade before he could even react, tackling him to the ground to send the blade clattering across the parking lot. Tristan moved with similar speed to catch the yakuza with the baseball bat in a bone-crunching punch to the jaw that saw the man crumple stunned into the snow.

  The door to Burger World opened once, then twice. Phil had dipped inside the restaurant just long enough to grab the closest chair to the door. Brandishing it over his head in both hands, he let out a spurt of maddened laughter, running forward to bludgeon the first yakuza over the head with it. Jean was close behind him as well. The Frenchman, as skinny as he was, still had a body filled with a wiry sort of strength often seen in men who lived very active lives. He ducked and weaved around Phil's back, striking out with his fists and an almost animalistic ferocity to keep the other yakuza away from Phil, who was still beating the first yakuza to a bloody pulp with a steel chair that was gradually becoming more dented with each vicious blow.

  The door sprung open again. From it came not an authority trying to stop the pitched brawl in the parking lot, but instead a skinny man in his 20s with a 5 o'clock shadow on his chin and an apron snugly tied around his chest. His pupils were heavily dialed, which suggested some amount of stimulate abuse. On his arm was a dark green tattoo made up of three words – ‘Mordre, Death, Cook’. Phil had no idea if the man knew or even cared if the first word of the tattoo was spelled wrong.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It was the line cook from the Burger World kitchen, a man who hadn’t even shared a lick of conversation with Phil or Jean, but had come out to help nonetheless. The man looked like the spitting image of a bored cook high on cocaine who’d been praying to his deity of choice for a fight to start so that the monotony of the graveyard shift could be broken. Behind the line cook was the dishwasher, a stocky man who also sported dilated pupils in his eyes. In his hands was a broken beer bottle brandished as a makeshift weapon. He hardly needed any sort of weapon, though, as the dishwasher also possessed a set of rather impressive muscles littered with shiny burn marks from the scalding hot water he worked with every day.

  In seconds the precarious balance of the parking lot brawl was heavily shifted in favor of team Burger World. Joey was on top of a fallen yakuza, mercilessly raining down blows with his clenched fists like a jackhammer falling onto concrete. Tristan was no less impressive as he picked up the fourth yakuza to slam headfirst into the asphalt in a brutal German Suplex. Phil finished brutalizing his own target with his steel chair, leaving the man unconscious on the ground and turning toward his next victim, but by this point there was no one else. The line cook stood victorious over his opponent, having caught the suited yakuza in a savage lariat to the throat. The wrestling move had downed the yakuza in one hit.

  Meanwhile the dishwasher menaced his mark with the sharp end of his broken beer bottle. No matter how the restaurant employee drunkenly swayed, the yakuza facing him could not escape. Front, left, right, each move the yakuza made, the dishwasher was right there stabbing away into thin air like a man fighting his invisible demons and winning. This too swiftly ended with Joey leaving his now-unconscious opponent lying limply in the snow to catch the dishwasher’s opponent in a wrestling move of his own, a jumping tackle that drove the yakuza into the snow hard enough that his bones crunched on the impact. Phil mentally nodded. A spear. That’s what the move was called. Nice.

  The brawl was over in less than a minute. All six of the yakuza were sent packing, the ones that could still move picking up their fallen friends to limp away under the jeers of Phil and the rest.

  “Yeah! Fuck you, and fuck your mothers!” Phil neatly set aside the dented steel chair so he could raise his hands and send the yakuza off with both middle fingers raised high. Then he turned, slapping palms and bumping chests with the rest of his newfound battle brothers one by one, each accompanied by several manly whoops and shouts.

  “Hey guys!” Tea Gardner’s voice interrupted the very manly post-fight ritual before it could go on for the hours it seemed it would have naturally lasted. “When you’re done out there, why don’t you come back in out of the cold?”

  Her head was poking out past the door. An exasperated smile was on Tea’s face, as if she seriously didn’t approve of the fighting one bit, but was glad that the danger had passed and all the guys were alright. Phil shot a double thumbs up toward her, and after one more round of firm backslaps, the six guys strolled into Burger World while still on that sweet, sweet adrenaline high.

  None of the diners inside the restaurant had left or even seemed to care that there was a large brawl right out in the parking lot. They all seemed to be absorbed in their own worlds. Nothing outside of those worlds, other than a coffee or fry basket refill, could jolt them out of it, and any distraction would only be for a moment before they returned to their thoughts.

  The line cook and the dishwasher disappeared back into their stations in the kitchen with one final laugh about how stupid and weak the yakuza were. Phil, Jean, Joey, and Tristan claimed a booth. The former two still had no place to go at this time of night, and the latter two were more than happy to continue hanging out all night at their favorite spot, as most teenagers were oft to do.

  “So, what were those losers chasing after you for anyway?” Joey leaned forward with his question as Tea dropped by with a smile, alongside a big pot of coffee, two mugs, three baskets full of steaming french fries (compliments of the line cook), and two ice-cold glasses of soda. Phil took a long, grateful draught of his coffee, while Joey and Tristan chugged away at the fizzy drinks in front of them.

  “Right mates, it’s been a crazy night for sure!” Phil gleefully leaped into the tale, taking care to avoid mentioning any of the bloody or sad parts and embellishing the funny bits. He knew the boys could probably handle it since they’d seen their share of dark shit, but for some reason Phil couldn’t bear bringing up anything dark under the almost sunny lights of Burger World. It would just be… wrong. This was too happy of a place for shit like that.

  Two of the three french fry baskets were empty by the time Phil’s tale ended, even with the parts Jean enthusiastically jumped in to describe further. Tea’s shift was finally over, but the girl didn’t leave. Instead, she bodily pushed Joey and Tristan over to sit at the booth with the rest of the guys, with a glass of iced tea in front of her. In her hands was a tray full of piping hot food. Lumina, who was lounging on the windowsill like a cat under the sunshine, shot the girl an approving look for her choice of drink. The duel spirit didn’t seem bummed at all that she hadn’t needed to participate in the fight. She’d stayed back the entire time, watching the brawl while being practically doubled over in laughter the whole time.

  “Gator says this is his payment for making the graveyard shift fun for once.” Tea said with laughter in her voice.

  "Gator?" Phil had to struggle to keep his amusement tampered down over the name.

  “Our line cook. Gator’s saving up for a motorcycle, so he’s been working 24-hour shifts whenever the boss is willing to schedule him. The poor guy’s been awake for 48 consecutive hours now by my count.” Tea smiled. She began to divide up the towering stack of burgers, giving each person in the booth (other than herself) a total of five each, along with two more baskets of french fries, seven frothy strawberry milkshakes, a nearly overflowing plate of hashbrowns, and enough chicken nuggets to practically feed an army.

  Phil couldn’t respond. He was too busy inhaling the food in front of him. His speed was nowhere near Jean’s, and both of them were put to shame by how fast the food in front of Joey and Tristan disappeared.

  “Crazy week all around!” Joey said through massive bites of his third hamburger. Tristan nodded, but his mouth was so full of fries that he couldn’t get a word out. Tea let out an exasperated sigh.

  “No kidding.” She groaned, flopping her head right onto the table.

  "You guys managed to pick a fight with the yakuza, meanwhile we had to deal with that Kaiba jerk! Yugi's gramps was still put right into the hospital!"

  Phil’s bites slowed. He looked up to Joey. “The hospital?” By his count, Solomon had been hospitalized by Kaiba during Death-T in the manga. Did it actually happen, then, and just his timeline was wrong?

  “What a jerk!” Tristan shouted out, pounding his fist on the table for good measure. “This guy, Seto Kaiba, he was at our school for a bit. Stuff happened and he tried stealing a card from Yugi. More stuff happened and he disappeared. After that he goes radio silent for I don’t even know how long, and then out of the blue we get an invite from the dude saying he wants to make amends! He wants to patch things up by inviting us all over to his house! Well, it turns out it was some freaky ruse to put us through a literal death theme park! He called it Death-T for pete’s sake!”

  “Stupid name! Stupid name!” Joey chanted, taking a vengeful bite out of his fifth and final burger with each chant.

  “So we go through it right? Didn’t have a choice at all since the dweeb had Yugi’s grandpa right in his palm! He hired a freaking axe murderer to try and chop our heads off! Who does that? We get through the next bits, then it turns out Kaiba has this freaky duel box that makes all the monsters look real. He forces Yugi’s gramps into a duel and dang near gives the poor guy a heart attack.”

  With each word spoken, Tristan’s voice grew ever louder. Tea just seemed tired from where she was slumped over the table and Joey was tearing through his strawberry milkshake like it had personally wronged his entire family.

  “Still. All’s well that ends well. Yugi’s gramps is alright. He’s at the hospital overnight. We were too, but the docs forced us out. Said it was family only. Good thing it’s only a block away! We can hang out here and wait for good news!”

  Phil shot a glance out the window. He’d never noticed it before, but Tristan was right. Peeking right over the skyline was the top of the Domino City Hospital. That explained why Joey and Tristan were here this late at night. Was that why Tea was working a graveyard shift too? Was she using the work to distract herself from her worry, while also getting the perfect excuse to let her friends loiter around Burger World into the wee hours of the morning?

  “Well shit!” Phil exclaimed once the boys finished ranting about how much of a jerk Seto Kaiba was and all the crap they’d had to go through. “Solomon will be alright, I know he will! He’s a strong man. I bet this time tomorrow he’ll be walking out of the hospital like nothing’s happened, going all ‘ohohohohoho’ like he does!”

  He really did believe that. Solomon Muto, while getting on in the years, was definitely still strong enough to withstand what Seto Kaiba put him through in Death-T. It was interesting, though. Phil had figured Death-T was either close or already happening, but it was a bit of a surprise to hear it was already finished, albeit recently.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  Tilla did not appear until almost five in the morning. Her eyes were tired but the rest of her seemed normal. The police hadn’t caused her any trouble, only taking her statement before letting her leave. They seemed to have bought her act. She only briefly mentioned what had happened after they’d split up, being far more interested in Phil and Jean’s brush-up with the yakuza. Yugi Muto showed up around seven in the morning, departing with Joey, Tristan, and Tea for school after giving the welcome news that his grandpa was awake and steadily recovering.

  Even after the high schoolers left and the breakfast crowd ambled in, Phil, Jean, and Tilla still hung around the restaurant for a little bit longer. It was like an oasis of calm amid the turbulent waters of the past day. Still, they couldn’t stay there all day. There was stuff to do, people to see, and places to be. Kame Game was their first stop. Arthur Hawkins was there, though Solomon Muto was still in the hospital. The old gentleman was in high spirits despite his house being half-burned down. It took several attempts to get him to accept the money in Phil’s bag. The man stood firm until almost the end, when Phil and Jean both kneeled to the ground and heartfeltly begged him to take the money, even if it was just to ease the shadows on their hearts for the trouble they caused. Only then did Arthur Hawkins relent.

  As Phil expected, Arthur’s house was temporarily not fit for human habitation. Both the main floor and the upstairs apartment were heavily damaged by both smoke and fire. It was Arthur's plan to stay at his old friend Solomon's apartment above the game store for the time being, at least until he could find a hotel room to live in while his house was repaired.

  At this point Yugi's mom, a kind lady by the name of Tamako, had offered Phil and Jean the option to sleep on some pull-out futons in the living room. The offer was made with a calm smile, surprising both men with how naturally it was made. She seemed genuinely concerned about them. Over two simple acquaintances of Solomon and Arthur.

  It felt like every day Phil found himself pleasantly surprised by the kindness some people could so naturally display.

  However, they already had a place in mind. Or rather Tilla did. On the walk over, Tilla had asked – nay, demanded, that they stay at her place, that she wouldn’t accept them living on the streets or under the bridge due to their idiotic pride (which admittedly had been their earlier working plan). When they’d expressed their plan to Tilla, one of her eyes had visibly twitched.

  More specifically, the place she offered was rented from a fellow Duel Professor by the name of Reiko Kitamori. Tilla, being the smart woman she was, didn’t give Phil and Jean the option to refuse.

  It was less of an apartment and more of a creaky multigenerational home that housed the entire Kitamori clan, Tilla, and now Phil and Jean. What had once started as a standard wooden house had been added onto throughout the years. Some of the additions were well done, while others were blatant health and safety hazards that swayed in the breeze ready to drop onto someone’s head at any given moment. The house itself was almost three and a half stories tall and took up not only the original plot of land it was built on, but the adjacent plot as well that Reiko’s father had bought in the mid-1960s when he’d seen his already large family grow to an utterly alarming size.

  In Phil’s point of view, the fact that the house still stood was a miracle in of itself. Compared to the orderly Kame Game, the Kitamori house was more like a suggestion of a normal house mixed with a near-schizophrenic series of remodels and add-ons. Well, it had character. That was for sure.

  After departing Kame Game, Tilla wasted no time before leading them to the Kitamori house. Reiko met them outside. She was a rather hesitant girl by nature, with long brown hair, a set of spectacles perched neatly on the end of her nose, and a rather neat sense of dress about her. Once the brief introductions were over, an unspoken conversation seemed to take place between Tilla and Reiko, one that ended with Reiko announcing in a mischievous voice that since the house was rather bustling, Jean could share Tilla’s room and Phil, if he didn’t mind, could take the living room couch for a night until her dad could finish clearing out the storage room. Before Phil could even ask, Reiko then mentioned with a knowing smile that the rent would be 15,000 yen a month (~$100).

  Phil opened his mouth in confusion, noting internally that it was even cheaper than what Arthur Hawkins had charged, but one icy glare from Tilla was enough to shut his mouth at record speeds before he could voice his thoughts.

  “She really knows how to handle you two now~. Just don’t even give you two the chance to say no!” Lumina fell into a fit of giggles upon seeing Phil's reaction and how Jean also stayed quiet other than to bow in thanks to Reiko.

  “Well, ain’t my first time couch surfing." Phil shrugged and went off to help Reiko's father in clearing out the storage room. He knew his assistance probably didn’t matter too much, but his inner ‘love guru’ senses were yelling at him to give them some space. Jean and Tilla sharing a room? That meant assuming nothing came out of left field, a proposal might be around the corner! Of course... he would have to make sure Mr. Chivalry wouldn't decide to sleep on the floor...

  Ah, what was he thinking? There was no way Tilla would let that happen. She knew precisely what she wanted and knew precisely how to get it.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” Lumina said with a blush, following behind Phil and casting a few glances over her shoulder at the lovebirds between sips of tea from her thermos.

  "Hell to the yeah," Phil smirked. “Jean the professed ‘lover of all women’ has been firmly ensnared by Tilla. You think we have enough money to scrape together for Jean to get her a ring?”

  Lumina shrugged. “All your mortal money is the same to me. Scraps of paper, you know that.” Then she took on a considering look. “Though, when you two go shopping, I’ll help you out. Things like that need a lady’s touch added to the mix in my opinion.”

  “Cheers to that. Never been ring shopping before. Doubt Jean has either.” Phil murmured, reaching the end of a rather disorganized hallway to the storage room in question. A large, bearded man was in front of it, considering the mess visible past the half-open door like a warrior about to make his last stand in the face of impossible odds. Reiko’s father, he assumed. They looked nothing alike.

  “Fuck me that’s a lot of crap.” Phil reflexively swore. The storage room was filled to the ceiling with all sorts of useless junk.

  “Ain’t that the truth.” The large man sighed. He was wiping at his hands with a rag that was stained black with engine oil. Traces of oil still covered part of his palms no matter how hard he scrubbed away at them with the rag. “You must be one of the strays Reiko and Tilla picked up. My baby girl has a habit of doing that.”

  “I guess so.” Phil hummed. He rolled up his sleeves. Stray or not, uber cheap rent or not, there was no way in hell he wasn’t going to pull his weight here. He already had a strong feeling Jean was doing the same somewhere else in the house. Hah. In the span of not even eight hours, he'd gone from executing a yakuza boss to helping Reiko’s dad clean out a storage room. Life sure could be odd sometimes.

  “Let’s get to work.”

  https://discord.gg/jfRn8j5GaE!