The steel door slid shut behind them, giving them some privacy at last. Yoko threw herself onto the hard cardboard bed and stuffed her face into the equally hard pillow, letting out a long and loud groan. The girl, meanwhile, finally put their game down on the desk, and went on a tirade.

  "I don't get it, all of them are useless!" they ranted. "Two of them are deadbeat adults, one of them's a kid. None of them's surviving in the fields for more than 3 minutes, none!"

  "You're one to talk, Rin, when you didn't even bother to talk to any of them. What, are you trying to be the Em*nence in Sh*dow? What's with all the excessive pretentious posing in the shades?"

  "A character's first appearance must be cool as hell." Said Rin with a smirk.

  "Yeah yeah, thanks to that nobody knows you. Doesn't that defeat the entire purpose of the first appearance?"

  "The audience yearns to know me more." Said Rin with their hand on their face, their head tilted upwards as if gazing at something only cringe chuunibyous can see. The mysterious ace in the team, all eyes on them, yet they remain a secret to all the observers. That's who Rin thinks they are.

  "Like hell they do." Snapped Yoko. She just can't stand her brother's cringey poses and words of self-imposed grandeur. "Whelp, I wasn't expecting myself to be the only girl in here."

  "Oh, can't I be counted as one of the girls as well?" Rin leaned backwards with a wide grin. "You're a boy, come on." Yoko rejected the idea instantly.

  "They don't know, that janitor Miguel even said he assumes I'm a tomboyish girl no? We get mistaken for sisters at school a lot anyways." Rin's grin grew wider, entertaining the idea in his head. "Well whose stupid chuuni ass decided to stand around instead of properly introducing themselves?"

  "They don't need to know what they don't have to know."

  "There you go with your cryptic circular sentences again."

  "Cool, right?"

  "You rehearse that much?"

  "Every night in front of the mirror before bedtime."

  "I can't with you." Said Yoko with a sigh. "Listen, you're going to properly introduce yourself to them right now, okay?"

  "But that would break this entire kuudere character I'm trying to build up! Do I really have to?" Rin did not forget to "collapse" onto the floor with doggy begging eyes directed straight at Yoko, which, given his current body, looks absolutely revolting.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  "Enough with your characters already! Can't you just be yourself in front of others for once? What is up with your obsession to be the cool mysterious dude in the room?" Yoko asked, exasperated by Rin.

  "Like you're one to talk, Miss Stereotypical Meek Japanese Girl." Retorted Rin. "We all make up characters to show to the public, don't go lecturing me when you do the exact same thing."

  "That's- You're introducing yourself to them, right now!" Yoko swiped her card on the door and shoved Rin out of the room. To their surprise, the common room is empty. "Have they gone off somewhere? Without telling us, their precious team mates? How cruel." Rin said with a fake sob. "Oh shut up."

  "Oh well. Ah, right," Rin straightened himself, "have you checked your bank account, Yoko? The note said something along the lines of transferring all the money we had in our real bank accounts into the account the complex made for us?"

  "Oh, right, yeah." Yoko scrambled to turn on the holographic projector on her desk. "We should have at least a couple hundred dollars from what we've saved in our piggy banks..." "Piggy bank? Didn't Dad deposit our money in the bank that he works in?" Rin asked, confused. "Uhh... right... I forgot you didn't know that..."

  Zero, zilch, nada. Their bank account is completely empty, mostly because they never had one to begin with. "Well, that's a mighty shame." Rin shook his head. "We need to find a way to get some money then. Did the note say anything about making money in here?"

  "No, but it did mention enrolling into experiments. I wonder if that's paid?" Yoko turned back to her holographic projector, and opened up the "Recruitments" page. Sure enough, recruiting experiments lined up into a list, with their rewards shown in the bottom right corner of each listing.

  "That sum's pretty dank, we should totally enroll into one as soon as possible." Rin peered over Yoko's shoulder, the rewards for the experiments ranged anywhere from 10 to 200 Clone Assignment Tokens (CAT, for reference Jones' grilled hot dog cost 0.5 tokens.).

  Feeling too good to be true, Yoko pulled up the help page. The reward, as it turns out, gets distributed among the members of the group, with the team leader deciding on how to split it. Instead of 10 tokens per participant, it might be 2 tokens instead, assuming even distribution.

  Worst case scenario, the leader may embezzle all the tokens and leave his team mates with nothing. But Yoko figured that as shady as Miguel is, he shouldn't be the greedy type.

  "We'll have to talk with Miguel, Jones and... Shit what was their name again? Navis? Weird name. Anyways, we'll have to talk with them about this. After all, Miguel's the only one who can put our names in." Said Rin. He plopped himself down onto Yoko's bed and spread his arms and legs out for a good long stretch.

  Right on cue, a sharp "Ping!" came from the speakers. Yoko had received Sung's message.

  "Meet y'all in 15 minutes, we need money. Fast. ~Navis"

  "What was that?!" Rin got startled by the ping and fell off the bed. "Ow..."

  "This might just go smoother than I thought." Said Yoko, deliberately ignoring the loud thud right after the message ping.

  "And you just told me to stop using cryptic circular sentences... I'm literally shaking my head now dear hypocrite sister." Rin followed that up with a pout.

  "Oh just shut up." Yoko hit Rin with another chop to the head.

  "Ow!"

  "And you're going to introduce yourself to them before we start the meeting!"

  "'Kayyyy..."