Through the Looking Glass

Episode One - The Ocean's Call, Pt.1

Two weeks. Two weeks now it had been since Kirito had vanished without a trace, from a coma, in a hospital bed.

In her younger years, Tomo had spent her childhood engrossed in stories of hard-boiled detectives, the type who spent years pursuing cases halfway across the world, their plucky assistants following them to the ends of the earth it happened to lead to just the faintest inkling of a lead. That had taught her determination, never to give in even under the most adverse of situations.

Her mother's job as an investigative journalist had taught her the other important lesson in research - don't blindly follow the Holmesian Fallacy. The belief that you should consider every possible option, no matter how unlikely it was, eliminating each possibility until you were left with the truth, no matter how improbable it was, was certainly a good thought for an investigator, and did teach her to keep an open mind, but to eliminate every possible option? It required a degree of omnipotence, and that was something that no one had...

In pursuit of her mission to find Kirito, she'd spent those two weeks pouring tirelessly over any possible lead, no matter how minor or coincidental it could be. Before the whole death game thing, a detective had came into school, and given them a lecture on how detectives worked to solve cases, and a key point she'd taken from that experience was to be thorough. Sometimes, even the smallest thing could unravel something massive after all... the example provided by the detective had been that of the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer who'd claimed thirteen victims throughout the 1970s, and had only been caught after an officer had a hunch on a man they'd arrested for public urination, and it turned out they'd detained the killer, after over a decade. In no particular order, she'd come across a few possibilities:

People who might have seen him being moved? Either no one had seen his mysterious abductors, or the more likely option, they'd been told to keep their mouths shut about it.

Medical records? Completely inaccessible, hidden behind an ungodly level of security clearance, to a level that most generals probably didn't possess... which led to her to wonder: Who actually knew about Kii-bou being taken into hospital?

Obviously their little group all knew about Kirito's disappearance, but there was no feasible way any of them could've taken a comatose patient, let alone kept them alive afterwards, so that ruled them out... except one person: Seijirou Kikuoka, or Chrystheight as he went by in VR, an officer in the JASDF and Kirito's contact within the military sphere of influence after SAO concluded. Which made it all the stranger that he hadn't been cooperative with finding him, especially considering his seeming status as his prized operative...

/-/

Sensing a migraine fast approaching at the mere thought of dealing with Kikuoka, Tomo looked over to her clock - 02:48am. She really should be asleep, she thought, especially if she actually wanted to find Kirito. A tired detective was of very little use to anyone, after all, and if Asuna found out about the constant all-nighters, Kirito wouldn't be the only one in the doghouse when they found him...

Clearly, the thought of sleep was too much of a temptation, as she slumped over her desk, the weight on her eyelids closing them, as her mind began to wander...

PING.

Reflexively, Tomo grabbed her phone and opened it, to find her usual lock screen - a photo of better times, everyone in their school uniforms and smiling, except for Kii-bou, who suffered from a complete lack of any photogenic appearances, and was therefore grimacing instead. Atop the picture though, was a push notification telling her that she had a voicemail...

Seriously, who rings a gal at this time? Ne'er mind that, who answers their phone at this time! She thought to herself, as she tapped the notification and entered her passcode. The phone went straight into a call to the voicemail service, repeating the usual about the date and time of the message, before it went to the message itself: