Having structured days off from work hit differently without an actively ongoing PhD dissertation to work on. Before, even during the extended mental health leave he’d wound up taken before purifying, his research had hung over his head on the days he didn’t need to go to campus. When he’d avoided working on it, it had taunted him. When he
had worked on it, he’d wound up not really feeling like he was getting a day off.
Then again, days off from working at Puppy Paws
did have Other Things demanding Kiyoshi’s attention. Namely, keeping up with posts on the old social media accounts he’d cleaned up and repurposed for the sake of his drag. By no means a perfect solution, Kiyoshi would admit. If he’d had his own way about things, Magdalene Yotsuya Wilde would have immediately slotted right into Sayuri Kurobara Disobedience’s old positions at Scandals and in the Destiny City scene for drag, burlesque, and miscellaneous queer performing arts. If he’d had his way, Kiyoshi would’ve spent days off working on new numbers to be performed on stage, before a live audience, as every remotely theater-adjacent deity had intended.
But it was too risky. Showing up as Magdalene and bearing too much resemblance to Sayuri, so soon after she’d “mysteriously gone missing”? Far too risky.
At least Kiyoshi had very quickly discovered an unexpected benefit from his
“let Kaifeng decide we are friends in order to farm favor with Helene” plan. Namely: Liánlí hadn’t been kidding about being on Youtube and working on social media. Asking for help didn’t come easily to Kiyoshi under any circumstances—but fortunately, all he had to do with Liánlí was mention that he was struggling with the whole
content-creator mindset (among other things). Doing so had swiftly made an adventure out of shopping for makeup together (Liánlí’s skin being so much fairer than Kiyoshi’s necessitated this; Liánlí might’ve come out looking like a
ganguro girl in Kiyoshi’s foundation, and nobody wanted that).
“So, I know it’s all kind of a lot to get used to,” Liánlí explained as they walked together. The bags from Ulta, Sephora, Beauty City, Urban Decay, and Throw A Little Shade happily clack-clack-clacked as he bounced through his steps.
“But trust me, just putting up those clips of you giving opinions on products you’ve used before? That’ll go a long way to help get you going. People on Beauty-Tok love stuff like that.”“The last thing I saw out of Beauty-Tok was some a*****e nagging the clerks at different stores for free stuffs so she could do some ‘whole face of free samples’ challenge.’” Kiyoshi frowned and made a dismissive, grossed out sound to communicate exactly what he’d thought about that.
“Bad enough that, at first, I thought ‘Oh, maybe she’s like fourteen and doesn’t know any better’? But Miss Thing was, like, twenty-seven.”He glanced around quickly, then lowered his voice and leaned in closer.
“She was almost old enough that a Mauvian couldn’t awaken her as a senshi anymore. And she was going around, harassing service workers like that. Can you even believe?”“Oh, wow,” was all Liánlí could manage to say for several moments. In truth, he
could believe that people acted like that—TikTok seemed to bring out the worst in people, just in a very different way from Twitter—but that didn’t make hearing it any less jarring. When he opened his mouth to speak again, though, he found a new reason for stunned silence.
Namely, Kiyoshi gently tugging him away from their path to the next stop by the wrist. Liánlí didn’t put up a fuss about it, just went willingly. Still, he didn’t quite understand what was happening? As Kiyoshi frowned intensely at a poster about a lost cat? A lost cat who had a weird scribble on his forehead. A note had been added to the poster as well.
“‘Sorry, this is a very, very old photo,’” Liánlí read it off, nerves starting to itch from the lack of talking.
“‘Cat may or may not have a star-shaped bald spot.’ ……That’s so sad, what the Hell. They lost their cat and don’t even have a more recent picture they can share? I wonder if they lost the pictures, too?”He could easily imagine that happening. If whoever had lost the cat had experienced a fire or a major hardware malfunction on their phone, computer, external hard drive, or wherever they stored their photos? If things weren’t properly backed up somewhere? So many precious memories with their little guy could’ve disappeared in an instant.
“I don’t know anything about the pictures,” Kiyoshi said softly,
“but I do know that cat.”How could he
not recognize someone who’d helped him out before?
And as far as he’d known, Tama-sensei had just……been attached to Team Faustite. He’d known back then that Chaos Mauvians existed—Soya-hime had been one after all, and she’d been present for his Awakening into the Dark Mirror Court—so it hadn’t even occurred to him to question that Tama-sensei had been one, too. He hadn’t even thought to ask if someone else might have been looking for Tama, because……well, Tama was one of Team Faustite’s cats. That was simply the state of things.
Only after tearing off one of the little contact slips did Kiyoshi look up and notice: it hung on the door of the very café that it said to contact.
“We need to stop here, come on,” he told Liánlí, taking him by the wrist again and tugging him into the line.
After waiting behind a few other customers (and having some fluffy, creamsicle-colored cat who radiated No Brain Cells Energy come over and meow at them until he got Liánlí’s attention), they got to the front.
“Hey,” Kiyoshi said to the barista,
“we’ll order too, I promise, but—the sign on the door? About the lost cat? Who can I talk to if I’ve seen him?” 
