ʜᴇʟʟᴏ ᴇᴠᴇʀʏᴏɴᴇ. ɪ ᴀᴍ ᴍɪᴋᴜ, ᴘʀᴇꜱɪᴅᴇɴᴛ ᴏꜰ ʜᴀᴛꜱᴜɴᴇ ᴍɪᴋᴜ. ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴇᴀʀᴅ ᴏꜰ ʜᴀᴛꜱᴜɴᴇ ᴍɪᴋᴜ?

There is a certain flower / house plant shop, in a particular corner of downtown Tokyo. Or maybe it'd be more accurate to call it the onyo shop; most people know it for the onyo plants.

On a certain day, the shop's owner did not appear on schedule. In their stead, a note was left on the counter.

To whom it may concern:

We are very sorry. The owner of this flower shop was urgently needed elsewhere. We cannot disclose any information about why this was necessary. We understand that this is frustrating, and regret the inconvenience to you. We owe you a large favor, if we ever have the opportunity, though we cannot make any specific promises at this time.

Ghidrur has asked us to request that their assistant take over the shop for the duration of their absence. We have transferred a stipend to said assistant's bank account to help smooth the transition. Please contact us if you need any further assistance. We apologize once again for any difficulties this may cause, and give the new manager of this flower shop our best regards.

— Hatsune Miku and the rest of Crypton Future Media

Yawn

idon'twanttogetup

ok, fine, she's getting up.

Rise and shine!!!

Ghidrur isn't here this morning, Vanessa wonders what's up with that. They usually get up much earlier than her.

Oh well, time to get the store ready for opening. She trots over to the counter.

There's a letter there.

What the heck, Miku???

Ok, so:

Technically, she is the assistant.

That does not mean she knows how to handle the logistics of running the shop by herself.

Aaaaaaaaa.

Alright.

Let's figure out what to do.

First things first, she'll check to make sure that the Open/Close sign is on the "Sorry, we're closed" side.

It is? Alright, that's good. Just making sure.

Next step!

Vannessa notes that the letter does not, in fact, specify how long the absence will be. If it's just a few days, she'll be fine (probably). If it's for a longer period, she's going to need to handle the logistics of paying for rent, utilities, getting new stock, negotiating with suppliers, which she has no experience doing! Because Ghidrur handled all that stuff!

Alright, she needs like, at least a day to gather more information and figure out what to do. She quickly writes up a notice.

Loyal Customers,

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Printure! will be closed for today, March 18th.

We hope to get the store up and running again by tomorrow, and we'll keep you posted with more details!

- Vanessa.

Ok, she'll... post that to the store website?

Wait, do they have a store website? She's genuinely unsure.

Also, now that she thinks about it, she's not a web designer. She wouldn't know how to make posts to their Completely Hypothetical Store Website, if said website does actually exist.

Vanessa's botanical intuition informs her that she can probably figure out whether or not the store has a website by searching something like "princture plant store tokyo onyos" in her search engine of choice. Google is a common default. (Crypton left it named the same thing when they acquired Alphabet.)

There does turn out to be a website! Ghidrur did not have the foresight to put the login info for managing it in the message.

It's probably possible to use us as a messaging service? Not very quickly, though, unless you can track down a Miku in person somewhere.

How long could she expect that to take? Would she be able to get the message out before the store opens?

She can totally find a Miku within the day.

No promises about how long she can expect the response to take. Pick your favorite probability distribution over the set of reasons that Crypton Future Media might urgently need your boss elsewhere.

Great.

Um.

Vanessa does not particularly expect it to be worth it to her to immediately go track down a Miku and try to message Ghidrur.

She'll just print out the notice and tape it on the front of the store. She feels bad about the customers who will get all the way here only to discover that the store is closed, but.

Well, time to figure out what to do. She'll track down a Miku to ask her boss for like, any information on what's going on and what she should do.

She looks around. Is there any sign of any note Ghidrur might have personally left her, other than the Crypton Future Media letter? Maybe her boss has an office where they keep all the documents the store needs and keeps track of store logistics? Any official-looking cabinets behind the counter where such information might be kept?

Ghidrur must not have had time to personally leave a note—or maybe they were just too gobsmacked to think of it, could've gone either way. 

Ghidrur was not a whole lot of a papers person. Tokyo felt it was important that people be able to just run their shops however they like, without a huge bureaucratic load. Ghidrur was probably hoping to eventually find someone to whom they could explain all the details which they simply kept in their head, before they retired. Vanessa will have to simply figure things out with the sharp botanical intuition that Ghidrur must've seen in her.

There is a cabinet, but it just has the deed and a handful of notes Ghidrur wrote to themself, such as "IMPORTANT call with onyo people 4pm Mar 18" and "don't forget volleyball night again".

..."deed." Huh, ok, so Ghidrur owns the store, they don't just rent it.

"Important call with onyo people 4pm Mar 18-"

Today is March 18th.

Okokokokokokokok.

So she has a call with the onyo people this afternoon!

Good news: "Onyo people," presumably, are the suppliers for the store, or at least of the onyo plants. They can explain the arrangement, right??

Bad news:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Well, hopefully they will be friendly, nice people, and won't try to, say, take advantage of her status as the new manager to hoodwink her into signing over the store or something.

Ok, so what does she need to keep track of?

- Contact her boss, get the information and credentials she needs to run the business, like the website managing information, for example.

- Vanessa doesn't need to pay rent, apparently. She still needs to handle utilities and getting new products. She knows that every two weeks or so, new inventory gets sent in ("presumably from a wholesale nursery," supplies her business botanical intuition) and she has to go restock the shelves, but she's not entirely sure how that works. Would she need to put in new orders? What's the general plant rotation? How does she know how much to order?? Or is there a set amount that gets sent in biweekly??? 

Also, she doesn't know the phone number of the "Onyo people." Is there anywhere she would be able to find that? Perhaps she could go through the store telephone and check the call logs, if it displays that. And if not, hopefully they either are expecting to call her or are expecting her to call them but will call, confused, when they don't receive the call they expect.

So, the general plan is to try to find out that information, presumably by sending a message through a Miku (she needs to go track one down later today), and then-

It is dawning on her that she probably doesn't have access to the Printure bank account. She got a deposit into her personal bank account, apparently, but presumably that's just like, a bonus from Crypton, and not enough to actually run the store, right?

Actually, she should check that.

Vanessa will pull out her phone and log into her banking app. How much money was the deposit, and how much did she have before that?

If Vanessa were to look around the store, she would see something sort of like this:

Her botanical intuition tells her that this is a pretty normal distribution. If a customer wanted something much more exotic than this, they'd usually talk to Ghidrur about it ahead of time so they could make a special order.

If she looks behind the counter, she'll notice the onyo plants are missing. That's probably not good.

Her botanical intuition doesn't know exactly how much comes in at each order. Presumably either orders are already scheduled ahead of time, or she can look at what has been purchased by ordering time and get some sort of sense for what she needs to order.

...Store telephone? What is this, the 2000s? There's no store telephone. Ghidrur takes calls on their personal phone.

Okay actually that might just be a Ghidrur thing. Probably most competent businesses have a separate phone? Vanessa's botanical intuition does not know anything about phones.

Vanessa's botanical intuition reminds her that Google can help when she doesn't know something. Probably she can find the onyo people's phone number there. Well, if she can figure out what company supplies the onyos, at least.

And after having several sudden shocks of botanical intuition, Vanessa finally gets around to looking a the banking app on her phone.

She previously had about two million MikuYen saved up, and finds that she now has three million. That's probably about equivalent to a month of Printure!'s revenue.

Wow! Her botanical intuition is really coming in handy here. Guess Ghidrur was right about her.

Luckily, she has a few hours before 4 pm, the store opens at 9 normally, it's... about 8:45 right now. That should be enough time to track down a Miku and-

Wait, does she know Ghidrur's phone number? Or, like, is it listed on the store website?

I mean, it's not labeled "Ghidrur's phone number" but it's not clear who else's number it would be.

Excellent! That works perfectly. She'll open up her phone and dial it.

If it turns out there is in fact a store telephone and it starts ringing then she will never trust her botanical intuition again will assign a lesser credence to her botanical intuition.