Winds of Destiny: Rising ~ {Hawks x OC}

Chapter Eleven: Hidden Message

"I'll let you grab the brainless fur ball..."

"Brainless fur ball... Brainless..." She trailed off, focusing on the familiar word that she'd been seeing over and over for the past few weeks. "Nomu... Was he trying to tell me something about the Nomu?"

It was a bit of a stretch, but his obviously roundabout way of speaking during their conversation made it seem more plausible. If he hadn't been able to come right out and say the word "Nomu", hinting at a time when he'd mentioned something similar to her would have been the next best thing. But what about the Nomu? Had he figured something out about them since he'd been working with the League? Maybe where they were or who was making them?

"Kinda reminds me of that old doc from UA!"

The phrase he had mentioned in reference to the old lady who had owned the cat she'd rescued from the tree flashed through her mind all of a sudden. "Old doc..."

Was it possible that the person behind the creation of the Nomu was actually a doctor? It would make sense. A doctor would have been able to access quirk records and dead bodies without raising any obvious red flags.

Misaki shot up out of the bathtub and scrambled for her towel. She quickly dried herself off and threw on a robe as she hurried out of the bathroom. Rushing out into the living room, she grabbed her tablet, along with her pen and a notebook, before walking back into the bedroom and throwing herself down onto the bed. Sitting cross-legged in the middle of the expansive surface, she wrote down the words "cat" and "old lady" with the words "Nomu" and "doctor" underneath them. Thinking back through their conversation again, she racked her brain for anything that had seemed even remotely significant, and several more words began to fill up the page: free time, tree, pancakes, hometown, Sky Lounge.

She paused after writing down the location Hawks had taken her to for her birthday and her eyes shot over to the necklace hanging around the bust on her vanity table. The gleaming fire opal stared back at her from its comfortable seat amidst the two gold feathers wrapped around it. She couldn't help but feel a bit of irrational jealousy toward the object as she remembered what it felt like to be wrapped up in Hawks's own feathers. Sighing softly, Misaki shook herself out of that train of thought and focused back on her current task.

"Sky Lounge..." She trailed off thoughtfully. "Sky Lounge is a place, so... It would make sense for that to be a clue about a location, right? Did we talk about any places?"

She thought back to the night of her birthday dinner while trying to focus on remembering anything that could've been in reference to a place. She was reminded suddenly about their conversation after dinner when Hawks had volunteered to take her anywhere she'd wanted to go for the evening. She shook her head again and berated herself, "Get your mind out of the gutter, Misaki!"

There was no way that place had anything to do with the location of the Nomu doctor.

She took a deep breath and ran back through what she could remember of that night from the beginning again. "A place, a place..." Glancing back down at her notes, her eyes were suddenly drawn to the pancakes, and she wondered aloud, "Where was the food from again?"

"The chef has them all imported from Kyoto."

She distinctly remembered him telling her that several of the dishes that night had contained vegetables that were unique to the Kyoto area. She'd suspected that the pancakes were a lead in to the Sky Lounge clue, but he must've mentioned them as a way to signal her to focus on the food. She wrote down the word "Kyoto" next to Sky Lounge in her notebook before picking up her tablet and typing a quick query into ROAM, looking for doctors in and around Kyoto. The search came up with over eighteen hundred results.