Tap, tap, tap.
The sound of fingertips against plastic keys resonated through the dormitory room like the ticking of a clock counting down to an inevitable end.
Aisuru sat alone in the darkness, her roommate having already surrendered to sleep. It was the liminal hour between day and night—that space where the world held its breath and secrets could be excavated from the digital abyss without judgment.
Not that anyone in this city would question her anyway.
In a metropolis where indifference had crystallized into civic virtue, curiosity was the first casualty.
Beneath crimson locks that framed her face, Aisuru's eyes narrowed as she glared at the LCD screen before her.
"How... how could someone simply vanish like this?"
Her voice was barely a whisper.
"It was supposed to be an easy job."
Frustration gnawed at her consciousness like a specter perched upon her shoulder, whispering mockeries into her ear with each failed search result, each dead end.
The emotion was almost tangible. Almost real.
As if despair itself had taken form in the space beside her.
Yesterday—or was it the day before? Time had begun to blur—Marco had sent her a text message.
Her childhood friend.
Vague. Cryptic. An omen disguised as good news.
He'd finally found employment, he claimed. Something legitimate. Something that might even elevate him from the streets into Soliel Academy alongside her.
The message had carried the weight of hope.
Fragile. Precious.
And then—
Nothing.
As if reality itself had redacted his existence.
No responses to her increasingly frantic texts.
No answers to her calls that rang out into the void.
His rundown motel room—that decrepit space he'd called home for years—now stood empty, swept clean as though he had never existed at all.
Not even the accumulated debris of daily life remained.
It was too thorough. Too complete.
The erasure was absolute.
Still, Aisuru continued her vigil.
She scoured the endless expanse of the internet with the desperation of someone searching for a single grain of truth in a desert of information.
News articles scrolled past her vision like prayers that went unanswered.
Social media posts—those fragile threads that connected human existence in the modern age—yielded nothing.
Anything, anything that might prove Marco still walked beneath the same sky.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
He had become a ghost.
And worse—the entire circle of friends he associated with, despite Aisuru's frequent scoldings, had vanished alongside him.
As if they had all stepped through a door that only opened one way.
The sinking feeling in her chest—that terrible intuition that whispered of catastrophe—refused to dissipate no matter how many rational explanations she constructed.
Perhaps Marco had lied.
Perhaps there had been no job at all.
Slap. Slap. Slap.
The sound of her palms striking her own cheeks echoed in the quiet room.
A ritual of self-motivation. Of forced resolve.
"When I find that dummy," she muttered, "I'll give him the beating of his life."
Remotivated by the familiar anger that masked her fear, Aisuru navigated to the capital's police department website.
She clicked on the form for filing a missing persons report.
The page loaded.
And then—like a punchline to a cruel joke—a pop-up window materialized before her eyes:
"Please pay the 70 Jona fee to fill out the form. Please note that this is non-refundable."
"S-seventy Jona!?"
The shriek escaped her throat before she could contain it.
Her hands slammed against the desk with enough force to make the laptop jump.
Across the room, her roommate groaned—a sound of annoyance from someone pulled partially from sleep's domain.
"S-sorry, sorry..."
Aisuru bowed her head reflexively, even though her roommate couldn't see the gesture in the darkness.
Her thumb found its way between her teeth as she glared at the screen once more.
This time with the bitter recognition of her own powerlessness.
"Seventy Jona just to file the paperwork... I can't afford that."
The reality of it settled over her like a weight.
In this city, even desperation had a price tag.
After several moments of frustrated contemplation—of running calculations in her mind that all ended in the same deficit—Aisuru leaned back in her chair.
She threw her head back with a groan that came from somewhere deep within her chest.
Her hand reached out automatically, fingers closing around the familiar softness of her Clockie plush.
A stuffed dog with a clock for a head.
The mascot of the capital city.
Mass-produced cheerfulness. Commercialized comfort.
"What am I going to do, boy?..."
She hugged the plush close.
"The police have gotten too expensive lately. My allowance..."
Slap.
She struck her own face again, harder this time.
The sting was clarifying.
"No. It's Marco we're talking about here. If I can't afford the cops, then maybe I'll find someone who can help."
Setting down the plush with the gentle reverence one might show a talisman, Aisuru's fingers returned to the keyboard with renewed purpose.
Tap, tap, tap.
Private investigators—too expensive.
The Knights Guild—insufficient evidence to warrant their intervention.
Volunteer detectives—too unreliable, too scattered.
And then—
Her scrolling stopped.
A forum page.
A thread that seemed to exist in the shadows of the internet, populated by anonymous accounts discussing something that oscillated between urban legend and whispered truth.
A myth that supposedly walked the quiet downtown suburbs of the capital.
Talk of a Fixer.
Someone who operated in the spaces between the law, who dealt in solutions rather than justice.
Aisuru's eyes widened as she skimmed through the digital testimonials.
Fixers.
The lowest of the low in this city's hierarchy—or so she'd been taught.
They made their living by inserting themselves into the affairs of others, handling everything from the mundane to the illicit, from the trivial to the illegal.
They had no fixed rates, often charging more than legitimate businesses, operating according to their own inscrutable logic.
Fixers were what desperate people called upon when all other avenues had closed.
They were the last resort before resignation.
The stigma had been drilled into her consciousness from childhood.
Her parents' warnings.
Her peers' disdain.
Fixers were not to be trusted.
Fixers were predators who fed on misfortune.
And yet—
Despite everything she'd been conditioned to believe, the people on this forum page spoke of this particular downtown Fixer with something approaching reverence.
Not just satisfaction.
Actual praise.
She read further, absorbing the instructions that had been passed between anonymous users like some kind of digital folklore:
"Leave a description of your request on the back of a notice board and within an hour he will come find you. Best to bring sweets or confectionary to negotiate."
Sweets.
How absurdly mundane.
How strangely human.
"Well... no harm in at least trying."
The words escaped her lips in a soft sigh as she closed her laptop.
The screen went dark, leaving her in the embrace of night.
The decision had been made—or perhaps it had made itself, following the inexorable logic of someone who had run out of options.
"I'm sure I can make a trip to downtown and back tomorrow before curfew."
The words carried the weight of a promise.
Or perhaps a prayer to gods that no longer answered in this city where even filing a police report required payment upfront.
In the darkness, the Clockie plush seemed to watch her with its eternal, unchanging smile.
A reminder that some things remained constant even as the world shifted beneath your feet.
Tomorrow, she would seek out a myth.
Tomorrow, she would find the Fixer.
And tomorrow, perhaps, she would learn what price salvation demanded in a city that had commodified everything else.
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
The clock continued its march toward dawn.