Chapter Twenty: Guessing Game:

-Watari’s Lab-

April and Kyosuke waited for their manager to arrive.

“What exactly did he call us over this early for?” Kyosuke asked.

“Beats me,” April said. She looked at her phone. “His text sound like he found something big.” The assistants lifted their heads when the door opened.

“Good morning, guys!” Watari said.

“What’s this about?” Kyosuke asked. Watari held up his hand, smiling.

“Patience,” he said. “I just need to make a quick phone call here.” The scientist pulled out his cell phone.

“Hello?” a voice asked on the other line. Watari’s eyes lit up.

“Ah, Tsuzuki!” he said. “Just the person I wanted to talk to. Is Hisoka there with you?”

“Yes…”

“Good, I’m putting you on speaker right now.” He pressed the button to switch the speaker on. “Can you hear me now?”

“Yes,” Tsuzuki and Hisoka said.

“Alright. You’re going to play a little game with me,” Watari said. April and Kyosuke made perplexed faces.

“What?”  Tsuzuki asked.

“What does this have to do with the case?” Hisoka asked.

“Patience,” Watari said. “Humor me with this, okay?” His assistants tried to grasp where this was going.

“What are you talking about, Watari-san?” Kyosuke asked.

“Ready?” Watari asked, ignoring him.

“I guess…” Tsuzuki said.

“Great. Which one shall we start with—the corpses or the baby’s parents?”

“The parents,” Tsuzuki answered.

“Good choice.” Watari turned to his assistants. “April, boot up my laptop.” The British shinigami stood up and walked over to his desk.

“Good,” her boss said. “Now, Tsuzuki.”

“What?” his friend asked.

“The father was a human, that’s all I know as of right now. I am still running the tests.”

“And mother?”

“Ah! Here comes the fun part. First, demon, dragon, or monster?”

“Huh?

“Demon, dragon, or monster? Take a guess.”

“I don’t know…”

“Come on, guess!”

“Demon?”

“Correct!”

“What?”

Watari glanced behind him. “April?”

She pulled up his research notes. “She was a yaoguai, sir.”

“A yaoguai?”

“Her fangs didn’t look like any shape I saw in this country. After days of looking through the database and turning up nothing, I decided to widen the search through East Asia. Guess where our yaoguai was from.”

“Uh… South Korea?” Tsuzuki asked.

“Try again!” Watari said.

“North Korea?”

“Go further inland.”

“China?” Hisoka asked.

“You’re close,” Watari said. “Try Hong Kong.”

“Hong Kong?!” the shinigami on the other line asked.

“Apparently, that little baby is half yaoguai.”

“But what’s a yaoguai doing in Japan?” Tsuzuki asked.

“Hold on,” his friend said. “One issue at a time. I still don’t have any ids on the bodies.”

“So… are you going to call the Ju-Oh-Cho in Hong Kong?”

“Probably. Oh, there’s something else.”

“Something else?”

“Yeah,” Watari said. He turned to Kyosuke in the lab. “Hand me the test results.” Kyosuke stood and bowed.

“I got back the baby’s blood test results,” Watari said to the phone. Kyosuke handed him the paper.

“Thank you,” the scientist said, taking the paper. “I noticed a peculiar spike.”

“Does it have to do with her being half-yaoguai?” Tsuzuki asked.

“No. I have never seen anything like it before.”

“Does the mom have the same?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t even know where to start.”

“That is strange.”

“We are still working on it.”

“Anything on our case?” Hisoka asked. Watari grinned.

“Where do you want me to begin?” he asked.