Her eyes lock on Akira's.

"That is far more convenient than girls like us ever live to see, at least without getting involved. If he was afraid of an existing police investigation he wouldn't have called them at the assembly. It must have been something else."

Akira shakes her head.

"I was there at the assembly. He seemed very genuine in his contrition. I agree that the man I had encountered didn't seem the type, but if it was a performance it was a stellar one."

She tilts her head. "There was an odd incident, however. Someone posted leaflets around the school with an accusation on them, saying that they would 'steal his heart and make him confess.' People dismissed it as a prank, but then it really came true... Isn't that strange?"

Takemi's gaze sharpens. "Something doesn't add up. He's not the type, but you're not lying when you say his confession was genuine. Stealing hearts shouldn't be possible, but people have talked about impossible phenomena for a long time."

She leans forward.

"What did you do?", she demands.

Akira's face goes serious. "Nothing, of course. I'm on probation, remember? I take my guardian's opinions very seriously: he's the first person who's ever cared about me in a real way. The thought of disappointing him after all this time puts serious fear in my heart."

She runs a hand through her hair. "Nonetheless, the conclusion I've come to about the whole thing is that whoever wrote the message — the "phantom thieves of heart", whoever they may be — have a way to actually change people. What it is, I can't say. Somehow I doubt it's something as easily explainable as threats or blackmail."

"Nothing, hmm?"

She looks skeptical, but shakes her head. 

"Tell me in your own time, then. Meanwhile, what did you overhear? You obviously arrived before the cop left."

"It sounded like he was hassling you for no good reason. He even called you "the plague." What's that about?"

Takemi looks down and sighs. "That's a long story, and not one I enjoy telling."

"Certainly not to someone who's keeping secrets of her own," she adds with a cocked eyebrow. "Trade?"

... Oh, damn it. 

Akira sighs.

You are so hilariously bad at lying, you know that?

Go on then, tell her, you know you don't want her to not know. Not when you're thinking about dating her.

"Fine," she says with a huffed exhale. "You got me. Think mine's a bit bigger than yours, though, so you go first."

A faint, rueful smile crosses her lips. "I used to work at a university hospital. I was developing a new drug to treat a rare and under-researched autoimmune condition called Crawford-Ende's disease. One day, I was abruptly removed from my position, with the Medical Chief of Staff taking over. He rushed the drug to completion to treat a patient named Miwa. Chief Oyamada had the new drug administered to her, but Miwa-chan had a poor reaction and lapsed into critical condition. The chief panicked and blamed me, called it a grave medical error. Now I'm blacklisted and called the Plague."

She shakes her head. "I'm still working on it, trying to refine the formula, fix what caused Miwa-chan's reaction so she can be cured. It's hard without access to the hospital's pool of test subjects, though."

Akira nods seriously. "To abbreviate a very long story... I woke up one day with an app on my phone that lets me enter people's... personal realities. It only works on people who have seriously distorted views of the world, to the extent that they're divorced from everyday reality... but if you do the right thing in one of those personal worlds, you can make it go 'pop' like a soap bubble and cause the truth to come crashing back in. That's what happened to the gym teacher: I, along with a couple people I trust, infiltrated his mind and took away the justifications he used to explain his shitty behavior to himself."

"Quite the story, Akira-chan. I don't feel like you're lying to me, but it's a little hard to believe."

"I wouldn't believe it either if it hadn't happened to me." 

She takes out her phone and shows Takemi the Metaverse Navigator. "This is the app. It takes three pieces of information — the name of the target, the place that they've distorted in their mind, and the thing they think it is. It needs physical proximity too. So for the gym teacher, I put in his name, the school's name, and that he thought it was his castle. Actually a friend of mine got all three by accident — the app takes voice input all the time, as far as I can tell — and I ended up blundering into a completely different reality without a clue what was going on. We got arrested by the castle's guards and almost died. Like I said, I'm leaving a lot out."

"Hmm."

She examines the app carefully. "And this is how you changed his heart? This and I presume a fight on the other side, since you mentioned guards?"

"Yeah. More of a heist, though — there's a linchpin in the alternate world that, if you take it out, makes the whole thing collapse. When I said I took away his justification I was being literal: in the other world it can be made to manifest as a physical object."

"Huh." She hands Akira's phone back and drums her fingers on her desk. "How can you tell if someone's distorted enough?"

"If you have their full name, that's enough for the app to check if they have a personal reality or not. And if they're only a little distorted, it's theoretically possible to find them in a place called Mementos and change their heart there, but I haven't been there so i don't know how it works."

"Shoichi Oyamada."

A soft thrum of purple energy washes over the scene.

"Candidate found."

Akira looks at Takemi seriously. "They have one."

Takemi's mouth drops open for a moment. She takes a breath to steady herself. "What was that? That pulse?"