Tao | please indulge me

[inlets]

[Pick your poison:

• A reputable high school, populated by students in white uniform. Are you perhaps a transfer student? A teacher? A new addition to the security guards?
  
• You're on a computer or some database or another when the screen behaves strangely. You are now being hacked.
  
• An electronics store. Tao is picking up a copious amount of parts, almost at what looks like random, and not bothering to be quiet about it.
  
• Your choice.

Mmhahahaha.]

Comments

[messianic]

[...right.

future expenditures.

more armor, more weapons. headphones and their equipment is unlikely--]

That's true too. I don't know if I could ever go through the store as thoroughly as you have, though. Have you done this before?

[inlets]

[This is why you turn those headphones into said weapons. Everybody wins.

Tao shakes his head as he heaves the stuff toward the counter. Not that any of it is heavy for him. But there's the matter of keeping up the ordinary image, to a certain extent.]

Haha . . . Not by this much. It can't be helped, though. I have to replace everything.

[messianic]

[...... no tao. no. stop weaponizing everything.

But Minato just keeps up, heaving up the basket of stuff on the counter alongside.]

Ha...

[WELL IT'S HEAVY FOR HIM, HE'S SCRAWNY.]

..."Everything"? That sounds like a pretty big task for one person.

[inlets]

[The cashier accepts your burden with begrudging hesitance, Minato, as they begin to scan every. single. thing.]

It's nothing I can't handle! I was the one who made "everything" in the first place, so setting them up again will take less time.

[They should have lasted for much longer than a couple of months, but then . . . ]

[messianic]

[sorry, cashier bro...Minato is beginning to try to think of ways to make up for the horrible task they've given her. Trying.

Thinking.]

Mm...

[...wait what.]

Again? Why would you have to set everything up again?

[inlets]

[There's something almost solemn about the way Tao loops the headphones out of his neck.]

Ah, about that . . . because they all broke . . .

[messianic]

[Give him a moment. He pauses to consider that.

And then repeats flatly.]

They all broke.

[.....he looks at their piles and piles of electronics.]

All of them.

[inlets]

[He nods.]

All of them.

[The headphones join the rest of the items on the counter. Tao, sheepishly:]

Dogs love to chew up stuff, you know?

[messianic]

[.........]

Your dog chewed up all of these electronics.

[... the flat deadpan cannot be overstated at this point.]