alex almost wishes he could enjoy the city -- while ian had taught him enough japanese to get by when he was younger ( and mi6 taught him enough in the span of two weeks to be fluent now ), he’d never been to tōkyō before -- but he’d been sent to tōkyō to keep an eye out on suspicious activity, like his job in wimbledon two years ago, and so despite him “playing” on his switch and drinking some strawberry ramune, he’s keeping an eye out.
[ of course, that job in wimbledon had involved him getting into the cross-hairs of the chinese triads and getting swept away into stopping a nuclear holocaust in russia. somehow, alex has a feeling that this will end up in a similar way ( it always does ). ]
alex doesn’t react when he notices an old man mutter to himself. to most people, they’d brush it off as someone making mental notes to themselves, but alex has always had good instincts, and there was something in the man’s posture... he was nervous, certainly, and the way that his chin was slightly angled meant that he was talking into his collar rather than to himself.
alex hums to himself as he twists the left stick three times to the left and then once to the right. smithers had outfitted the switch with a lot of fun gadgets, including one where alex could listen into frequencies as long as he could find the right one. no, that was the tv in the store, no, that was a radio -- there.
《 -- ree possible exits from this alleyway, and the police are sure to cover all of them. so, we’re going to need to do something to guide them away from your chosen route, botchama. 》
《 whose to say that we have to use one of those three? i found another option, and while it may not be the most fun, it’ll certainly work for our purposes. 》
《 tomorrow night, then. i’ll drop the note off to the police on my way back. 》
『ne, ne, nii-chan, are you american?』alex is ripped away from overhearing the rest of the conversation by a group of elementary school kids. it’s happened to him a few times already -- apparently young children get a kick out of seeing foreigners, especially blonde ones.
he starts to answer their questions, but when alex looks up to see whether or not the old man had left, to his not-surprise, he’s gone. so, tomorrow night, something is going to happen, and they’re dragging the police into it.
... hopefully this isn’t going to be a murder, he thinks.
well, rather than a murder, it seems like a performance. alex had read the newspapers for today to know that kaitō kid, or phantom thief 1412, was doing a heist near the location that alex had overheard the old man ( and he guesses the phantom thief, who sounded... young. maybe around his age, a little older ), and alex was kind of surprised by the spectacle of it all.
aren’t thieves supposed to steal in the dead of the night and not draw attention to themselves, he wonders, looking at all of the screaming fan-girls. he had googled the thief when he realised the heist tonight had been the plan he had overheard, and he was surprised to see the multitude of fans this guy seemed to have. he had disappeared for a long while before coming back about three years ago. since then, he’s apparently stolen a multitude of things, but mostly jewels, but he gives the authentic articles back. alex wasn’t sure why somebody would go through the whole heist in order to give what they stolen back, but maybe he just liked the attention ?
he’d been thinking that he could go back to the previous location where he’d initially overheard the plan between the two, but he had no idea as to where the alternate route would have been.
instead, he decided to go to the location of the heist. he may be able to stop the theft from happening, or, at least, overhear enough that he could figure out where they were going and beat them there. unfortunately, it would probably be weird to be on his switch during this chaos, so it seemed like that was a bust unless he went somewhere else first.
alex winces when he feels a sudden ache in his chest -- right where the sniper from scorpia that tried to assassinate him shot him. alex automatically looked up, scouring the rooftops. there was a shift and -- there ! he could see a glint of light that could only come from a sniper rifle. he wonders, wildly, if this was a police officer or if this was someone kaitō kid was working with. or, even worse, someone who was drawn in by the crowd and decided that they would cause the maximum damage firing into a busy crowd such as this.
alex looks at the building where the heist was going to be and made a decision, and he disappears into the crowd to head towards the building he’d noticed the sniper from.