Chương 23: Interlude: The Cleaner

Leah did not consider herself a supervillain. Yes, she did bad things… a lot… repeatedly… even though she knew she shouldn't… but she didn't hurt anyone! And most importantly, she didn't wear some kind of costume! No, she wore her normal clothes whenever she… admittedly acted like a selfish, thoughtless person… but she couldn't help it! There was just something different about singing in a wide-open, outdoor space as opposed to inside her house!

Sure, everyone claimed she sounded terrible when she sang, but that was their opinion! She thought she sounded great! At least she'd learned her lesson about singing in her own neighborhood, and her friends had eventually forgiven her for interrupting their sleep. They still didn't like her 'criminal insanity', and offered to help, but since they wouldn't get her parts for her karaoke machine anymore… Leah sighed.

At least her sentence working at the dairy farm mucking out the manure the cloned cows generated was over. It wasn't work that needed to be done manually—they had robots for that, so even buddies didn't need to do it—but it was still work that needed to be done, and was consistently unpleasant enough that it was undesirable, hence why it was used as a punishment during those rare times that a sister did something that deserved one.

Now she had plenty of time to go out of the city and gather resources so she can make parts for a new karaoke machine! She was going home with a bag full of knugrind scales for her to smelt down into refined metal only to find that there was a little sister waiting in front of her house. The little sister wasn't one Leah recognized, wearing a bright red coat and red fedora with a wide brim as she sat on Leah porch bench while reading a book.

Leah recognized the title as a volume of the new series of anthologies about Kaede that had been written for little sisters. While Leah had never bothered to read it—she could remember everything that had ever happened to Kaede, after all—it was popular among the younger ones, and she'd heard that reading it eased the integration pains of getting Kaede's Legacy for some newly adult sisters.

There was also some kind of push cart in front of the home workshop's door, which Leah assumed was the little sister's, because she didn't have one of those.

"Uh, can I help you?" Leah said once she was close enough to not need to yell, and hoped this wasn't someone her to try to 'convince her to give up her criminal ways' or 'punch sense into her'. it was usually little sisters doing the latter, since they didn't really have the full context for why Kaede punching Maria in the face to stop bullying Suzuko had worked. The little sister looked up, placed a bookmark to hold her place, and put her book in her back as she stood up.

"Are you big sis Leah?" she said.

"The supervillain?"

"I'm not a supervillain," Leah said reflexively.

"I don't have a costume." Instead of giving her a doubtful look, the little sister nodded in acceptance.

"Ah, I see. My mistake." Leah decided she was going to hear this little sister out no matter what she was here for. Even if it was trying to punch sense into her.

"So, what can I do for you, little sister?"

"Ah…" And now the little sister looked embarrassed.

"My name is Meiko, and this is my buddy Oscar. I… need advise for how to get poop stains out of something."

"And you're asking me?" Leah said, confused.

"Why?"

"Well… it's better to show you. Can I bring my cart inside your garage?" Leah frowned at the dirty statue that had been inside the cart.

"That's a statue of Nikaede." It was easy to tell because she had only one side-tail, which was cushioned by a bunch of stuff.

"Yes. Could help me lift it up?"

"Oh, sure. Why do you have a statue of Nikaede?"

"Ah, best to tell you when we've set her down." It was only when they'd put the statue down that her buddy Hunter told her something over their connection, and Leah suddenly found herself looking at the statue in horror.

"This statue was stolen," she exclaimed, pointing at the statue while she looked at the little sister incredulously.

"I was stolen two days ago from Hero Park! Why do you have a stolen statue?"

"Because I stole it," Meiko said as she took out some of the hard upholstery blocks from the cart and shook them out.

"Stole it?" Leah said, the words feeling foreign in her mouth. Stole it? Why would anyone need to steal something? Who'd— "Wait, that means… you're Dark Magical Girl Phantom Thief Night Raider! You're a… a criminal! You're a supervillain!"

"Wait, wait, wait!" Meiko exclaimed, waving her hands around.

"Please, don't call the Metro Rangers! I promise I have a good reason! Let me explain!" … she'd decided to hear this little sister out, hadn't she? Ugh, why had she thought that.

"Fine," Leah said.

"But if I don't like what I hear, then we're calling the Metro Rangers. Don't worry, my prison cell is very nice. And this is your first offense, so they'll probably just tell you not to do it again and why what you did was wrong." A wistful expression came over her face. Ah, those had been the days…

"Did that work on you?" Meiko asked.

"…a-anyway! You were going to explain why we shouldn't call the Metro Rangers?" This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

"Well, you see, it all started last year when we went on a field trip to Crashpoint City to see the Frilly Pink Fortress of Friendship…" They'd had free time after visiting the rebuilt Fortress, and Meiko and her friends had chosen to visit Hero Park to see the world's largest collection of sculptures of superheroes and magical girls (and boys).

The sculptures of Kaede and her friends had been in good condition, their paint so bright and artistically done they seemed life-like, and Meiko and her friends had made their respects and taken lots of pictures. However, when her friends had gone off to visit a big sister who lent out reproductions of the costumes of the more popular historical figures, Meiko had gone off to look for the statue of Nikaede to continue showing her respects.

When she'd finally found the statue, she'd been distress to find the condition it had been in. The paint was no longer protected by glaze and was flaking in several spots, much of the statue was stained by bird poop, and some parts of it were scratched from bird claws. Meiko had of course written a letter to the Administration branch, and had received a reply that they would be taking care of it. However, when Meiko had visited the park a few months later, she had found the statue in no better state.

She also realized that many of the statues of the Mass Production Models were in a similar state of neglect and disrepair. Meiko had continued trying to inform the correct branch, but even so, nothing seemed to change. She had tried to clean the statues herself, but as she didn't live in Crashpoint, she had to go on weekends, and time to try and clean the statue was limited.

It continued to be exposed to the elements, and the shelter she had tried to build to keep the rain off had been removed as an unauthorized building. She had begun to feel frustrated and angry. And then, while reading the latest volume of the Memories Anthology, she'd read the story of how Kaede had encountered a Dark Magical Girl who called herself 'Phantom Thief Adler the 4 th'…

"Ah, I see what happened," Leah said, the incident in question coming to mind as it rose from the memories of Kaede's Legacy. That particular interaction had been a complicated one, and Kaede would have found herself outwitted and made into a patsy by the teenaged girl if it hadn't been for the involvement of fellow Outguarder Bloody Mary and the Magical Girl known as Blue Angel.

The former had been able to pierce through the web of lies Adler had spun around Kaede, while the latter had been able to figure out the truth of the matter, which was that Adler's thefts of sensitive government documents had been a cover to make off with certain personal effects of great sentimental value that a recently fired staffer had been unable to take with her when she'd been unceremoniously fired for knowing too much.

The three heroes had chosen to let the Phantom Thief go, only to discover that she had also made off with a large amount of misappropriated money a corrupt government official had been hiding in his emergency stash.

"And for some reason you thought that becoming a Phantom Thief was a good idea?"

"Yes," Meiko said determinedly.

"I came up with a plan! I'd become a Phantom Thief and steal Nikaede's statue in such a way as to draw attention to it. Then, I'd bring it home so I'd have time to clean it properly and repaint it. Then once it looks nice again, I'll bring it back. And because it got stolen in the first place, everyone will pay more attention to Nikaede's statue and the ones around her, and they'll realize they need to be taken care of as just as well as the statue of Kaede and the ones around her." It… wasn't actually a bad plan.

There'd already been shocked reactions to the poor conditions of the statues of the Mass Production Models, and a massive amount of guilt as some of the surviving buddies from the period had spoken of how sad they were that something intended to commemorate their first partner had become so forgotten.

A special team had been put together to try and locate Night Raider and the statue she had stolen, but the Metro Rangers had been quite free with the fact they had no leads, which had led to a massive discussion about the Metro Ranger's lack of mystery-solving capability, something that was cause for great concern now that the aliens had arrived and would someday be among them.

"And now you need help getting it clean of bird poop," Leah said. Meiko nodded. Leah looked at the ugly-looking statue. Kaede's Legacy had nothing on Nikaede. How could it? Nikaede was remembered in the stories of the Mass Production Models who had survived had told the next batch of clones. How she had embraced being Kaede's clone.

How she had done her best to hide the rest of the clones' existence even as they hid in the same space station that was full of magical girls trying to figure out who the strange magical girls who were tracking down and fighting the alien infiltrators weakening the Earth. How she needed to pass herself off as the real Kaede to other people who knew her, and would sometimes sit down and cry when she got back to the Fortress before she got back to work… Nikaede had never seen Surcease.

She'd died fighting at the side of the Outguard, the heroes still thinking she was the real Kaede since the Mass Production Models had been masked to hide their features. A sigh escaped Leah's mouth. She should really report this. Sure, she sang loud karaoke in the middle of the night, but she wasn't a thief. She made her equipment, and when the kinds of resources she was allowed to use was restricted, she'd gone out into the woods to collect them.

"Why me?" she asked.

"We've never even met before today." If she said it was because Leah was a 'supervillain'…

"Because I thought you'd understand why I had to do bad things to do something I thought I needed to do," Meiko said. … Leah let out another sigh.

"All right, fine. Leave it here, I'll get it cleaned up. You go home." Meiko blinked.

"You don't need to do that. I can do it myself, I just need to know how."

"Mei-chan," Leah said, "how good of an artist are you?" The little sister blinked at the seeming non-sequitur.

"Uh, I'm pretty okay. Why?" Leah pointed at the battered statue.

"Can you repaint that so it looks as good as Kaede's statue?" Meiko looked at where her finger was pointing and seemed to realize something for the first time.

"No," she said quietly. Leah nodded.

"So, while I'm cleaning the statue, you need to go and do two things. First, you need to learn to paint, otherwise all we're going to be doing is getting rid of bird poop."

"Oh. What's the second thing?"

"You need to figure out how we're going to put it back once it's clean without getting caught. If you're going to be a Magical Girl Phantom Thief, you need to do it right." Meiko blinked, staring up at Leah.

"We?" Well, she was committed now.

"Yes, 'we'," Leah said.

"I'm still a big sister, after all. I'm not going to leave you to do it all by yourse—" She suddenly found herself with a little sister hugging her midsection. Awkwardly, Leah patted the little sister on the head. She'd stopped volunteering at the cloning crèche a long time ago when she realized she was just… didn't find little sisters as cute as everyone else did. All that awkwardness was coming back now. Eventually, Meiko pulled away a determined look on her face.

"Thanks, big sis Leah," she said.

"Don't worry, I'll come up with a great plan to put Nikaede back without getting us caught. You can count on me!" … Yup, still not cute.