fic for arashikuro (1/2)
For: arashikuro
From: cupcake4mafia
Title: Troubleshooting
Pairing: Ohmiya
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Summary: Nino is lured to his company’s new office in Honolulu with the promise of running his own network. Unfortunately, working alone means he also has to take tech support calls from the team’s clueless manager.
Notes: A million thanks to my betas and cheerleaders who helped me keep writing even after life got in the way, to an amazingly patient and understanding mod, and to arashikuro for an irresistible prompt!
When Jun first asked Nino to join the Honolulu team, Nino laughed it off.
“Right, because I love being in the sun and meeting new people.”
Jun insisted that he was serious. “You’re skilled, you’re reliable, you speak English-”
“I do not! Why does everyone keep saying that?” Nino groaned, exasperated.
“Everyone saw you talking with Peter at the New Year party.”
“I bullshitted him for five minutes with movie quotes and now I speak English?”
“Let’s put it this way: you have communication skills. Which is more than I can say for the rest of your godforsaken department.”
“It’s IT, what do you expect?”
“A horrible windowless bunker full of hopeless nerds,” Jun answered, with a visible shudder. “Consider, though, having your own horrible bunker all to yourself.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Your own office, your own server, your own network. All you.”
“You mean...working alone?” Nino asked, daring to dream.
“We’re looking at ten workstations in this branch, tops. It doesn’t make sense to bring more than one IT person.”
Nino groaned helplessly.
“I thought that might interest you,” Jun said, grinning wickedly. “One more thing: Aiba and Toma are also on the team.”
The three people on the floor that Nino could stand to be around, setting up his own network, having a room with four walls - never again looking over his shoulder for his supervisor to catch him on gaming forums...
Hell, I could play games in my office, he thought, giddy.
“Is there a pay raise?” he finally remembered to ask.
“The Company is offering to relocate you to Hawaii,” Jun reminded him.
“Yeah, but I don’t care about that part.”
---
The Company cared. It seemed no one quite had the power to put the brakes on Kitagawa “Johnny” Hiromu’s increasingly eccentric behavior, but upper management was at least trying to find ways to indulge the CEO’s Great New Ideas without going bankrupt. So, even though Nino’s travel expenses were comped and his L-1 visa all taken care of - he still ended up having to share an apartment with Aiba.
Nino whined about this at length to Jun - but mostly because it was funny watching Jun struggle with the fact that he technically had to listen to Nino’s whining, now that human resources had been added to his responsibilities as office manager. Deep down, Nino didn’t really mind sharing what Americans considered a “tiny” two-bedroom place with a friend who had a habit of cooking for him.
There was also the job of outfitting the office and setting up the network - most of which he got to do from his own private “horrible bunker,” just as Jun had promised. Aiba and Toma were along for the ride - having been sent ahead of the rest of personnel to start meeting up with local clients and trying to make some marketing contacts - and they became much more involved in setting up the office than Jun or Nino had expected. This was especially fortunate for Nino, since the two of them were much better at feigning interest in things like Jun’s struggle to choose between various shades of gray cubicle dividers.
Nino learned from Aiba on their walks home that he and Toma were having an obscenely good time at their client “meetings” - surfing lessons, barbecue parties on highrise condominium rooftops, trips around the island to eat from what were apparently Very Important Food Trucks. Aiba suspected things would become more formal once he and Toma weren’t “new in town,” but he still felt guilty thinking about his coworkers back in Tokyo. Nino told Aiba to lighten up - which is something he never really thought he’d have to do.
Hawaii didn’t really do for Nino what it seemed to be doing for everyone else. The second of his two trips to the beach with Aiba ended with dehydration, sunburn, and both of his legs covered in jellyfish stings. Still, Nino was enjoying himself in his own way - enough so that if his department in the Tokyo office hadn’t been full of exactly the kind of painfully unpleasant people Jun thought it was, Nino might have also felt guilty about his good luck. When he wasn’t setting up equipment or playing with the network, he was surfing the internet free of surveillance and joining Aiba and Toma in stupid office olympic trials - like desk chair racing - that Jun couldn’t even pretend to disapprove of. He was also eating hamburgers almost every day (which quickly resulted in those extra kilograms that his sister had gleefully warned him of before he left for America).
Nino dreaded the arrival of the rest of the staff, especially the chief and assistant operations managers. There were barely going to be enough people in their one-floor rental space for one person to manage - why did Tokyo have to send two? The photos that were circulated back when the team was first announced did nothing to improve Nino’s outlook. Yeah, Sakurai Sho and Ohno Satoshi were young and good-looking and had perfect hair, but it was the same with almost everyone Nino worked with these days. Their CEO had done more damage to the company in recent years than just greenlighting outrageous projects like opening a satellite office in Honolulu; he had also gone on a “restructuring” spree, promoting young executives to leadership positions over their more experienced seniors to improve the company’s “millennial reach” - or whatever bullshit buzzword “Johnny-san” was into that week. If anything, the fact that these redundant managers were young and good-looking would probably mean that they were anxious to flex their power.
Nino was the head of his department, now. In fact, he was his department. Technically, Aiba and Toma were the only ones who should to have to walk on eggshells when the managers arrived. Of course, Nino knew the reality was that all administrative staff were basically the same in management’s eyes. So, he fortified his bunker - stacking empty equipment boxes to make it harder to squeeze in to where his small desk sat, littering that small desk with peripherals and networking cables that looked important and possibly dangerous to touch - and hoped for the best.
Then their CEO died.
Nino woke up to his phone chiming at 2 AM with a message from Jun: Johnny had a heart attack. The next morning they gathered in their still half-empty waiting room to hear the news that the CEO had passed and that his niece - “Judy” - would be taking over.
Nino was sure this would be the end of their wild vacation. Everyone knew that Judy was much more level-headed than her uncle, and the rumors about the crazy ideas she had talked him down from were impressive. He couldn’t imagine that she would have any faith in this pet project. He could tell by the dazed, dreamlike way the others continued through the motions of work that they felt the same. Any second, that other shoe was going to drop.
Only, it didn’t. The rest of the administrative staff arrived. Jun held interviews for a receptionist and hired a Hawaiian girl named Crystal who spoke perfect Japanese but still got them all stammering whenever they had to talk to her. Before Nino knew it, Jun and Crystal were heading to the airport with two carefully selected lei to greet their managers.
So, now, they all have to pretend to be at work.
---
Nino makes it a full week past the release of Underwitness before he breaks down and installs the game on his work computer. Seconds after the title screen loads, his phone rings.
Divine retribution, he thinks. Ohno Satoshi, Chief Operations Manager, his caller ID tells him.
Nino hits speakerphone with his free hand, his cursor still lingering over the game’s menu options.
“IT Department.”
“Sorry to bother you,” Ohno Satoshi mumbles, sounding sincerely apologetic. “But I’m having a problem with an email attachment.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Nino answers, well-rehearsed. “Let me open a ticket for you, and I’ll let you know as soon as someone is available to take a look.”
“Okay, great, thank you.”
Relieved, Nino opens up the character creator. Halfway through picking a hair color for his sniper, he remembers that he’s not in Tokyo anymore. There is no one else “available to take a look.” There’s just him.
This is what you wanted! he scolds himself as he shuts down the game and tucks in his shirt. Your own network, all to yourself. Here’s what comes with it.
It is a little funny, at least, that Ohno apparently believed, wholeheartedly, that Nino could have an assistant tucked away somewhere in the utility closet that doubles as their server room. The awkward mourning period that the office has had to observe in the wake of the CEO’s death postponed any kind of welcoming party; Nino has hidden in his bunker as much as possible the past few days, so he’s only heard from Aiba that Sakurai seems “smart” and Ohno seems “nice.” Nino felt like “nice” was a weird description for an operations manager, and now he’s starting to wonder if Ohno might be “nice” in the same way Aiba is - the way that sometimes ends with Nino taking apart half of the copy machine to free Aiba’s shirt cuff from a print spooler.
A cheerful “Hello!” interrupts Nino’s thoughts as he passes by the reception desk. Jun insists that Crystal’s endless cycle of greetings throughout the day is typical for Americans and not a troubling sign of memory loss, so Nino smiles and nods back.
He finds Ohno’s door propped open with a file box - one of many that were unnecessarily flown from Tokyo. Nino hasn’t been in the corner office since he set up its workstation, and he’s pleasantly surprised to see that a garish mounted fish is now hanging on the wall alongside the muted watercolor paintings Jun carefully selected for the room after weeks of deliberation.
“Manager, excuse me. Is now a good time?”
Ohno jumps, wide-eyed, and pockets the iPhone he was fiddling with, all with the guilty look of a man clearly unaccustomed to being in charge.
“Yes, of course,” he answers, gesturing for Nino to come in. “Please, don’t call me ‘manager,’ though.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It still sounds strange, kind of like a joke,” Ohno says, smiling apologetically. “Ohno is fine, please.”
This might be one of those office politics things where Nino is supposed to insist saying “manager,” but, honestly, Nino has never been a big fan of titles and honorifics.
“Ohno, then,” he agrees. “Would you like me to look at that attachment?”
Immediately, Ohno stands up and gestures for Nino to sit in his seat. Nino is relieved - it takes so much longer to fix things when people refuse to let him drive.
“Alright, what kind of file do we have...” he wonders aloud, resisting the urge to just lie back and take a nap in the obscenely plush chair Jun picked for this office.
The attachment is a PDF from someone in accounting back in Tokyo. Nino clicks on it and watches it flash and disappear. He looks down at the taskbar and sees ten copies of the file are already open.
“Ah, I see. Your default setting for email attachments is ‘open in full-screen view,’” Nino explains.
You’re an idiot who can’t look at the bottom of his screen to find an open file, he doesn’t say.
“It was there the whole time?” Ohno asks, chuckling weakly. “Wow, I feel stupid.”
“You shouldn’t,” Nino lies, keeping his eyes on the screen. “A lot of people get confused thanks to that setting. Here, I’ll fix it for you now.”
“Alright, well, thank you, Ninomiya.”
“My pleasure,” Nino answers, standing.
Ohno just keeps standing, so Nino side-steps out of his way. He pauses in the door and watches Ohno watch his computer screen, wary.
“Is there anything else?” he asks.
“Sorry, no,” Ohno says, flashing a smile. “Just. Mondays.”
“It’s Friday,” Nino corrects him, automatically.
“Yes. Right. It is, isn’t it?”
Another excellent pick by their CEO, Nino thinks, hiding an amused grin as he nods a polite goodbye.
As he walks past reception, mere minutes after the last time, Crystal at least has the decency to shorten her hello to a “hey.”
So there’s that.
--
The weekend that follows is a blur of battling cyborgs and lizardmen and learning useful phrases such as “EAT A BAG OF DICKS” from his new friends on the American Underwitness servers. By the time Ohno calls Nino for help first thing on Monday morning, Nino has already forgotten exactly what stupid thing he helped him with before.
Even if Nino remembered, he probably wouldn’t be prepared for Ohno telling him in panicked whispers that there aren’t any documents in his My Documents folder.
“Well, this is a new computer,” Nino reminds him, as gently as possible.
“So my documents are still on the computer back in Tokyo?”
Nino isn’t fast enough to stop the “HUH?” that comes out of his mouth.
“HUH?” Ohno repeats back, eyes wide.
He looks so genuinely afraid that he might have to have his files physically moved to America that Nino has to step himself back a bit.
“Okay, no,” Nino tells him, firm. “Your files aren’t back in Tokyo.”
“Oh good,” Ohno breathes, sinking back in his chair.
“Your files were transferred here over the VPN. I copied them to our local network and I put a shortcut on your desktop so you could find them on the A: drive.”
“Find them...where?”
“Here,” Nino says, reaching for Ohno’s mouse.
Their fingers touch and they both jump. Apparently “here” wasn’t enough warning for Ohno. Nino doesn’t have much of an excuse, though.
Well, you are running on three hours of sleep and half a cup of coffee, he tells himself.
“Ohno Satoshi’s Folder,” Nino reads aloud as he points out the shortcut. “Understand?”
It’s dangerous to be that condescending, Nino knows, but the charm of Ohno’s “niceness” can’t quite overcome the shitty mood brought on by sleep deprivation.
“Okay, but when I go to My Documents from the start menu-”
“That points to the documents that are stored in this computer. Your documents don’t live in your desktop anymore. They live in the server - in my office.”
“I see,” Ohno nods, looking like he’s finally actually grasping this.
“Is there something in particular I can help you find?”
“No, that’s okay, I know how to get there now. Sorry this was such a waste of time.”
“Not at all,” Nino argues politely.
“So the ‘server,’” Ohno says, leaning against the arm of his chair and furrowing his brow in a thoughtful way. “Is that something like-” he hesitates and drops his voice to an almost-whisper: “The ‘cloud?’”
There are not enough hours in the day for me to help this man, Nino thinks.
“Kind of,” he answers, with a strained smile.
----
“Maybe he’s just looking for excuses not to work,” Aiba suggests, testing Nino’s decoy boxes for sturdiness before picking one to use as a stool.
“Well, that’s fine for him, but how am I supposed to slack off?” Nino grumbles, mouth half-full of takeout.
Aiba cranes his neck around to try and look at Nino’s screen. “Are you playing it here, too?”
“No,” Nino says, as he logs in. “That would be a waste of Company bandwidth.”
“Oh my God, Nino, I’ve got it,” Aiba interrupts, pointing with his chopsticks. “He likes you!”
Nino snorts. He sits back and waits for his map to load as Aiba gets up and paces the narrow clear spot on the bunker’s floor.
“That has to be it, though. I mean, he has an assistant right in the hall there to help him with this stuff, doesn’t he? Why would he call IT just to get his email open?”
“Because people think that’s all I’m here for,” Nino tells Aiba, sighing at the wrongness of it all while his level 42 sniper checks her guild storage for anything good that might have been added this morning.
“Yeah, but, the stuff you told me - like, not knowing what a file extension is? Even I’m not that bad. I think it’s an act. He wants to seduce you.”
“Well, this is the worst seduction I’ve ever experienced.”
“I think you should consider it.”
“Consider what?”
“Being seduced.”
Nino looks up at Aiba, raising his eyebrows more than he ever thought possible - but Aiba does tend to bring that out in him. “Do I really seem like that kind of girl to you?”
“I’m just saying! He’s a catch, isn’t he? Upper management, handsome - I mean, I think so. He is, right?”
“He’s not bad,” Nino concedes. “But let’s be real - I could never be happy with a man who uses Yahoo to search for Google.”
---
One assault mission and two unnecessary hellos from Crystal later, Ohno calls again. For a brief moment, Nino fantasizes about not answering. Of course, he does, and he braves the possibility of another hello to get back to Ohno’s office.
Sakurai Sho is in the hallway (still wearing a jacket and tie, Nino notes, happy to see he’s still winning the “when will Sakurai Sho roll up his sleeves” pool) handing some documents over the wall of Chinen’s cubicle. Nino continues their fantastic relationship of nodding politely and never speaking to each other. Sakurai seems like he does want to speak about something, though, but he turns back to Chinen instead.
“I’m sorry,” Ohno says as he opens his door and ushers Nino in. “I know you must be sick of me.”
Nino knows that Ohno started rolling his sleeves up on day three. He knows this because he’s been in Ohno’s office almost damn every day since his arrival to teach him How to Computer.
“I’m here to help,” Nino insists, mentally running through his sniper’s inventory and what she might need for the next mission (Extraction from Cyborg Base).
Ohno points to his screen and Nino is distracted from his thoughts, briefly, by Ohno’s surprisingly elegant hands and carefully filed fingernails.
“How do I get this line to go away?” Ohno asks.
Finally Nino registers that Ohno is pointing to a range in some kind of budget spreadsheet.
“Well, that’s a cell border,” Nino says, trying to stay level - he knows lots of people work in Excel without ever creating their own sheets so he wants to give Ohno the benefit of the doubt. “You’re going to want to select all these cells and then go up here to the Formatting section-”
“Cells?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s a cell again?”
For. Fuck’s. Sake.
“These are cells,” Nino says, gesturing to, well, everything. “All these boxes, here. They’re called cells. That’s why the program is called Excel.”
“Oh!” Ohno says, face brightening like he’s just learned a Fun Fact.
“Yeah,” Nino says, gritting his teeth to keep his frustration firmly in check.
Ohno is still focused on the screen, fortunately.
“I always just called them ‘boxes,’” he admits, slightly sheepish.
Maybe Aiba is on to something, Nino wonders, hysterically.
“So...this is a cell line.”
“Cell border,” Nino corrects. “You can change it using this tool up here.”
Ohno thanks him and apologizes for being so dumb and damn if that isn’t making it hard to hate this guy. Most people start to get defensive about their computer skills at this point - and probably rightly so, Nino’s not doing a very good job at hiding how ridiculous this all is.
“I guess I have to get back to it,” Ohno says, hunching over a little and actually looking his age for a second.
“I could pretend something’s wrong with it if you want to take a break,” Nino hears himself offer, gesturing to the computer.
Ohno smiles up at him, a tired smile but a genuine one - wrinkling around the eyes.
“No, I have to take care of this,” he sighs.
He opens a drawer in his desk and reaches in. Nino freezes, suddenly unable to look away. It’s none of his business, he knows, but he can’t help but be afraid that-
Of course, he thinks, resigned, as Ohno pulls out a printer calculator that looks roughly as old as Nino. Apparently unbothered by Nino’s presence, Ohno starts tapping away, the horrible loud clacking and whirring noises of the ancient machine filling the room.
“What are you doing?!”
Ohno turns, slowly, and Nino bites his cheek to hide his shock at his own outburst. Ohno doesn’t look annoyed, though - just surprised.
“I’m adding up these expenses,” Ohno answers, his words trailing up like a question.
“Do you really need a calculator for that?” Nino asks, hoping that maybe Ohno is just weird and superstitious and not that clueless.
Ohno looks down at where his fingers are hovering over the calculator and then back up at Nino, eyes still wide and confused.
“I’ve never been very good at doing math in my head-” he starts, apologetic.
“I mean Excel does the math for you,” Nino interrupts, unable to bear it any longer. “That’s the whole- I mean- It uses formulas to-”
“There’s a calculator in the program?” Ohno asks, looking excited.
“Not a calculator- It’s-”
Let it go, Nino tries to tell himself. He can use an abacus for all it matters.
Somehow, Nino can’t let it go.
“Let me show you something.”
Nino bats Ohno’s hand away from his mouse, selects all the data in the column and hits autosum. Ohno sits up straight in surprise.
“Wow!”
“Yeah.”
“Damn, I’ve really been wasting a lot of time.”
“No shit.”
Nino doesn’t realize he’s said it aloud until he meets eyes with Ohno and finds his eyebrows raised, his mouth open in small round “Oh?”
“So that, uh, did not come out how I-”
Nino stops short when he realizes Ohno is smiling.
“It’s okay,” Ohno says. “I’m really fucking tired of talking like that all day.”
Nino hesitates, unsure of Ohno’s sincerity. He’s usually great at reading people, that’s why Jun brought him here in the first place, but he feels like he still doesn’t quite get something about this guy.
“Seriously.” Ohno leans forward and props an elbow on his desk, resting his chin in his hand and staring at his computer screen. His smile fades. “Everyone keeps calling me Manager no matter what I say. It’s always a relief to talk to you.”
Nino has even less of an idea how to respond to that; worse, he can feel his face turning red. Ohno isn’t looking at him, but he still turns his head to cringe. Blushing - Aiba would be so happy.
Ohno’s phone rings. The caller ID reads: Kitagawa Hiromu, CEO; no one has changed the name on his old line over to Judy’s yet.
“Sorry,” Ohno says.
“No problem,” Nino answers.
He hurries to the safety of his bunker without looking back.
Part 2
From: cupcake4mafia
Title: Troubleshooting
Pairing: Ohmiya
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Summary: Nino is lured to his company’s new office in Honolulu with the promise of running his own network. Unfortunately, working alone means he also has to take tech support calls from the team’s clueless manager.
Notes: A million thanks to my betas and cheerleaders who helped me keep writing even after life got in the way, to an amazingly patient and understanding mod, and to arashikuro for an irresistible prompt!
When Jun first asked Nino to join the Honolulu team, Nino laughed it off.
“Right, because I love being in the sun and meeting new people.”
Jun insisted that he was serious. “You’re skilled, you’re reliable, you speak English-”
“I do not! Why does everyone keep saying that?” Nino groaned, exasperated.
“Everyone saw you talking with Peter at the New Year party.”
“I bullshitted him for five minutes with movie quotes and now I speak English?”
“Let’s put it this way: you have communication skills. Which is more than I can say for the rest of your godforsaken department.”
“It’s IT, what do you expect?”
“A horrible windowless bunker full of hopeless nerds,” Jun answered, with a visible shudder. “Consider, though, having your own horrible bunker all to yourself.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Your own office, your own server, your own network. All you.”
“You mean...working alone?” Nino asked, daring to dream.
“We’re looking at ten workstations in this branch, tops. It doesn’t make sense to bring more than one IT person.”
Nino groaned helplessly.
“I thought that might interest you,” Jun said, grinning wickedly. “One more thing: Aiba and Toma are also on the team.”
The three people on the floor that Nino could stand to be around, setting up his own network, having a room with four walls - never again looking over his shoulder for his supervisor to catch him on gaming forums...
Hell, I could play games in my office, he thought, giddy.
“Is there a pay raise?” he finally remembered to ask.
“The Company is offering to relocate you to Hawaii,” Jun reminded him.
“Yeah, but I don’t care about that part.”
---
The Company cared. It seemed no one quite had the power to put the brakes on Kitagawa “Johnny” Hiromu’s increasingly eccentric behavior, but upper management was at least trying to find ways to indulge the CEO’s Great New Ideas without going bankrupt. So, even though Nino’s travel expenses were comped and his L-1 visa all taken care of - he still ended up having to share an apartment with Aiba.
Nino whined about this at length to Jun - but mostly because it was funny watching Jun struggle with the fact that he technically had to listen to Nino’s whining, now that human resources had been added to his responsibilities as office manager. Deep down, Nino didn’t really mind sharing what Americans considered a “tiny” two-bedroom place with a friend who had a habit of cooking for him.
There was also the job of outfitting the office and setting up the network - most of which he got to do from his own private “horrible bunker,” just as Jun had promised. Aiba and Toma were along for the ride - having been sent ahead of the rest of personnel to start meeting up with local clients and trying to make some marketing contacts - and they became much more involved in setting up the office than Jun or Nino had expected. This was especially fortunate for Nino, since the two of them were much better at feigning interest in things like Jun’s struggle to choose between various shades of gray cubicle dividers.
Nino learned from Aiba on their walks home that he and Toma were having an obscenely good time at their client “meetings” - surfing lessons, barbecue parties on highrise condominium rooftops, trips around the island to eat from what were apparently Very Important Food Trucks. Aiba suspected things would become more formal once he and Toma weren’t “new in town,” but he still felt guilty thinking about his coworkers back in Tokyo. Nino told Aiba to lighten up - which is something he never really thought he’d have to do.
Hawaii didn’t really do for Nino what it seemed to be doing for everyone else. The second of his two trips to the beach with Aiba ended with dehydration, sunburn, and both of his legs covered in jellyfish stings. Still, Nino was enjoying himself in his own way - enough so that if his department in the Tokyo office hadn’t been full of exactly the kind of painfully unpleasant people Jun thought it was, Nino might have also felt guilty about his good luck. When he wasn’t setting up equipment or playing with the network, he was surfing the internet free of surveillance and joining Aiba and Toma in stupid office olympic trials - like desk chair racing - that Jun couldn’t even pretend to disapprove of. He was also eating hamburgers almost every day (which quickly resulted in those extra kilograms that his sister had gleefully warned him of before he left for America).
Nino dreaded the arrival of the rest of the staff, especially the chief and assistant operations managers. There were barely going to be enough people in their one-floor rental space for one person to manage - why did Tokyo have to send two? The photos that were circulated back when the team was first announced did nothing to improve Nino’s outlook. Yeah, Sakurai Sho and Ohno Satoshi were young and good-looking and had perfect hair, but it was the same with almost everyone Nino worked with these days. Their CEO had done more damage to the company in recent years than just greenlighting outrageous projects like opening a satellite office in Honolulu; he had also gone on a “restructuring” spree, promoting young executives to leadership positions over their more experienced seniors to improve the company’s “millennial reach” - or whatever bullshit buzzword “Johnny-san” was into that week. If anything, the fact that these redundant managers were young and good-looking would probably mean that they were anxious to flex their power.
Nino was the head of his department, now. In fact, he was his department. Technically, Aiba and Toma were the only ones who should to have to walk on eggshells when the managers arrived. Of course, Nino knew the reality was that all administrative staff were basically the same in management’s eyes. So, he fortified his bunker - stacking empty equipment boxes to make it harder to squeeze in to where his small desk sat, littering that small desk with peripherals and networking cables that looked important and possibly dangerous to touch - and hoped for the best.
Then their CEO died.
Nino woke up to his phone chiming at 2 AM with a message from Jun: Johnny had a heart attack. The next morning they gathered in their still half-empty waiting room to hear the news that the CEO had passed and that his niece - “Judy” - would be taking over.
Nino was sure this would be the end of their wild vacation. Everyone knew that Judy was much more level-headed than her uncle, and the rumors about the crazy ideas she had talked him down from were impressive. He couldn’t imagine that she would have any faith in this pet project. He could tell by the dazed, dreamlike way the others continued through the motions of work that they felt the same. Any second, that other shoe was going to drop.
Only, it didn’t. The rest of the administrative staff arrived. Jun held interviews for a receptionist and hired a Hawaiian girl named Crystal who spoke perfect Japanese but still got them all stammering whenever they had to talk to her. Before Nino knew it, Jun and Crystal were heading to the airport with two carefully selected lei to greet their managers.
So, now, they all have to pretend to be at work.
---
Nino makes it a full week past the release of Underwitness before he breaks down and installs the game on his work computer. Seconds after the title screen loads, his phone rings.
Divine retribution, he thinks. Ohno Satoshi, Chief Operations Manager, his caller ID tells him.
Nino hits speakerphone with his free hand, his cursor still lingering over the game’s menu options.
“IT Department.”
“Sorry to bother you,” Ohno Satoshi mumbles, sounding sincerely apologetic. “But I’m having a problem with an email attachment.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Nino answers, well-rehearsed. “Let me open a ticket for you, and I’ll let you know as soon as someone is available to take a look.”
“Okay, great, thank you.”
Relieved, Nino opens up the character creator. Halfway through picking a hair color for his sniper, he remembers that he’s not in Tokyo anymore. There is no one else “available to take a look.” There’s just him.
This is what you wanted! he scolds himself as he shuts down the game and tucks in his shirt. Your own network, all to yourself. Here’s what comes with it.
It is a little funny, at least, that Ohno apparently believed, wholeheartedly, that Nino could have an assistant tucked away somewhere in the utility closet that doubles as their server room. The awkward mourning period that the office has had to observe in the wake of the CEO’s death postponed any kind of welcoming party; Nino has hidden in his bunker as much as possible the past few days, so he’s only heard from Aiba that Sakurai seems “smart” and Ohno seems “nice.” Nino felt like “nice” was a weird description for an operations manager, and now he’s starting to wonder if Ohno might be “nice” in the same way Aiba is - the way that sometimes ends with Nino taking apart half of the copy machine to free Aiba’s shirt cuff from a print spooler.
A cheerful “Hello!” interrupts Nino’s thoughts as he passes by the reception desk. Jun insists that Crystal’s endless cycle of greetings throughout the day is typical for Americans and not a troubling sign of memory loss, so Nino smiles and nods back.
He finds Ohno’s door propped open with a file box - one of many that were unnecessarily flown from Tokyo. Nino hasn’t been in the corner office since he set up its workstation, and he’s pleasantly surprised to see that a garish mounted fish is now hanging on the wall alongside the muted watercolor paintings Jun carefully selected for the room after weeks of deliberation.
“Manager, excuse me. Is now a good time?”
Ohno jumps, wide-eyed, and pockets the iPhone he was fiddling with, all with the guilty look of a man clearly unaccustomed to being in charge.
“Yes, of course,” he answers, gesturing for Nino to come in. “Please, don’t call me ‘manager,’ though.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It still sounds strange, kind of like a joke,” Ohno says, smiling apologetically. “Ohno is fine, please.”
This might be one of those office politics things where Nino is supposed to insist saying “manager,” but, honestly, Nino has never been a big fan of titles and honorifics.
“Ohno, then,” he agrees. “Would you like me to look at that attachment?”
Immediately, Ohno stands up and gestures for Nino to sit in his seat. Nino is relieved - it takes so much longer to fix things when people refuse to let him drive.
“Alright, what kind of file do we have...” he wonders aloud, resisting the urge to just lie back and take a nap in the obscenely plush chair Jun picked for this office.
The attachment is a PDF from someone in accounting back in Tokyo. Nino clicks on it and watches it flash and disappear. He looks down at the taskbar and sees ten copies of the file are already open.
“Ah, I see. Your default setting for email attachments is ‘open in full-screen view,’” Nino explains.
You’re an idiot who can’t look at the bottom of his screen to find an open file, he doesn’t say.
“It was there the whole time?” Ohno asks, chuckling weakly. “Wow, I feel stupid.”
“You shouldn’t,” Nino lies, keeping his eyes on the screen. “A lot of people get confused thanks to that setting. Here, I’ll fix it for you now.”
“Alright, well, thank you, Ninomiya.”
“My pleasure,” Nino answers, standing.
Ohno just keeps standing, so Nino side-steps out of his way. He pauses in the door and watches Ohno watch his computer screen, wary.
“Is there anything else?” he asks.
“Sorry, no,” Ohno says, flashing a smile. “Just. Mondays.”
“It’s Friday,” Nino corrects him, automatically.
“Yes. Right. It is, isn’t it?”
Another excellent pick by their CEO, Nino thinks, hiding an amused grin as he nods a polite goodbye.
As he walks past reception, mere minutes after the last time, Crystal at least has the decency to shorten her hello to a “hey.”
So there’s that.
--
The weekend that follows is a blur of battling cyborgs and lizardmen and learning useful phrases such as “EAT A BAG OF DICKS” from his new friends on the American Underwitness servers. By the time Ohno calls Nino for help first thing on Monday morning, Nino has already forgotten exactly what stupid thing he helped him with before.
Even if Nino remembered, he probably wouldn’t be prepared for Ohno telling him in panicked whispers that there aren’t any documents in his My Documents folder.
“Well, this is a new computer,” Nino reminds him, as gently as possible.
“So my documents are still on the computer back in Tokyo?”
Nino isn’t fast enough to stop the “HUH?” that comes out of his mouth.
“HUH?” Ohno repeats back, eyes wide.
He looks so genuinely afraid that he might have to have his files physically moved to America that Nino has to step himself back a bit.
“Okay, no,” Nino tells him, firm. “Your files aren’t back in Tokyo.”
“Oh good,” Ohno breathes, sinking back in his chair.
“Your files were transferred here over the VPN. I copied them to our local network and I put a shortcut on your desktop so you could find them on the A: drive.”
“Find them...where?”
“Here,” Nino says, reaching for Ohno’s mouse.
Their fingers touch and they both jump. Apparently “here” wasn’t enough warning for Ohno. Nino doesn’t have much of an excuse, though.
Well, you are running on three hours of sleep and half a cup of coffee, he tells himself.
“Ohno Satoshi’s Folder,” Nino reads aloud as he points out the shortcut. “Understand?”
It’s dangerous to be that condescending, Nino knows, but the charm of Ohno’s “niceness” can’t quite overcome the shitty mood brought on by sleep deprivation.
“Okay, but when I go to My Documents from the start menu-”
“That points to the documents that are stored in this computer. Your documents don’t live in your desktop anymore. They live in the server - in my office.”
“I see,” Ohno nods, looking like he’s finally actually grasping this.
“Is there something in particular I can help you find?”
“No, that’s okay, I know how to get there now. Sorry this was such a waste of time.”
“Not at all,” Nino argues politely.
“So the ‘server,’” Ohno says, leaning against the arm of his chair and furrowing his brow in a thoughtful way. “Is that something like-” he hesitates and drops his voice to an almost-whisper: “The ‘cloud?’”
There are not enough hours in the day for me to help this man, Nino thinks.
“Kind of,” he answers, with a strained smile.
----
“Maybe he’s just looking for excuses not to work,” Aiba suggests, testing Nino’s decoy boxes for sturdiness before picking one to use as a stool.
“Well, that’s fine for him, but how am I supposed to slack off?” Nino grumbles, mouth half-full of takeout.
Aiba cranes his neck around to try and look at Nino’s screen. “Are you playing it here, too?”
“No,” Nino says, as he logs in. “That would be a waste of Company bandwidth.”
“Oh my God, Nino, I’ve got it,” Aiba interrupts, pointing with his chopsticks. “He likes you!”
Nino snorts. He sits back and waits for his map to load as Aiba gets up and paces the narrow clear spot on the bunker’s floor.
“That has to be it, though. I mean, he has an assistant right in the hall there to help him with this stuff, doesn’t he? Why would he call IT just to get his email open?”
“Because people think that’s all I’m here for,” Nino tells Aiba, sighing at the wrongness of it all while his level 42 sniper checks her guild storage for anything good that might have been added this morning.
“Yeah, but, the stuff you told me - like, not knowing what a file extension is? Even I’m not that bad. I think it’s an act. He wants to seduce you.”
“Well, this is the worst seduction I’ve ever experienced.”
“I think you should consider it.”
“Consider what?”
“Being seduced.”
Nino looks up at Aiba, raising his eyebrows more than he ever thought possible - but Aiba does tend to bring that out in him. “Do I really seem like that kind of girl to you?”
“I’m just saying! He’s a catch, isn’t he? Upper management, handsome - I mean, I think so. He is, right?”
“He’s not bad,” Nino concedes. “But let’s be real - I could never be happy with a man who uses Yahoo to search for Google.”
---
One assault mission and two unnecessary hellos from Crystal later, Ohno calls again. For a brief moment, Nino fantasizes about not answering. Of course, he does, and he braves the possibility of another hello to get back to Ohno’s office.
Sakurai Sho is in the hallway (still wearing a jacket and tie, Nino notes, happy to see he’s still winning the “when will Sakurai Sho roll up his sleeves” pool) handing some documents over the wall of Chinen’s cubicle. Nino continues their fantastic relationship of nodding politely and never speaking to each other. Sakurai seems like he does want to speak about something, though, but he turns back to Chinen instead.
“I’m sorry,” Ohno says as he opens his door and ushers Nino in. “I know you must be sick of me.”
Nino knows that Ohno started rolling his sleeves up on day three. He knows this because he’s been in Ohno’s office almost damn every day since his arrival to teach him How to Computer.
“I’m here to help,” Nino insists, mentally running through his sniper’s inventory and what she might need for the next mission (Extraction from Cyborg Base).
Ohno points to his screen and Nino is distracted from his thoughts, briefly, by Ohno’s surprisingly elegant hands and carefully filed fingernails.
“How do I get this line to go away?” Ohno asks.
Finally Nino registers that Ohno is pointing to a range in some kind of budget spreadsheet.
“Well, that’s a cell border,” Nino says, trying to stay level - he knows lots of people work in Excel without ever creating their own sheets so he wants to give Ohno the benefit of the doubt. “You’re going to want to select all these cells and then go up here to the Formatting section-”
“Cells?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s a cell again?”
For. Fuck’s. Sake.
“These are cells,” Nino says, gesturing to, well, everything. “All these boxes, here. They’re called cells. That’s why the program is called Excel.”
“Oh!” Ohno says, face brightening like he’s just learned a Fun Fact.
“Yeah,” Nino says, gritting his teeth to keep his frustration firmly in check.
Ohno is still focused on the screen, fortunately.
“I always just called them ‘boxes,’” he admits, slightly sheepish.
Maybe Aiba is on to something, Nino wonders, hysterically.
“So...this is a cell line.”
“Cell border,” Nino corrects. “You can change it using this tool up here.”
Ohno thanks him and apologizes for being so dumb and damn if that isn’t making it hard to hate this guy. Most people start to get defensive about their computer skills at this point - and probably rightly so, Nino’s not doing a very good job at hiding how ridiculous this all is.
“I guess I have to get back to it,” Ohno says, hunching over a little and actually looking his age for a second.
“I could pretend something’s wrong with it if you want to take a break,” Nino hears himself offer, gesturing to the computer.
Ohno smiles up at him, a tired smile but a genuine one - wrinkling around the eyes.
“No, I have to take care of this,” he sighs.
He opens a drawer in his desk and reaches in. Nino freezes, suddenly unable to look away. It’s none of his business, he knows, but he can’t help but be afraid that-
Of course, he thinks, resigned, as Ohno pulls out a printer calculator that looks roughly as old as Nino. Apparently unbothered by Nino’s presence, Ohno starts tapping away, the horrible loud clacking and whirring noises of the ancient machine filling the room.
“What are you doing?!”
Ohno turns, slowly, and Nino bites his cheek to hide his shock at his own outburst. Ohno doesn’t look annoyed, though - just surprised.
“I’m adding up these expenses,” Ohno answers, his words trailing up like a question.
“Do you really need a calculator for that?” Nino asks, hoping that maybe Ohno is just weird and superstitious and not that clueless.
Ohno looks down at where his fingers are hovering over the calculator and then back up at Nino, eyes still wide and confused.
“I’ve never been very good at doing math in my head-” he starts, apologetic.
“I mean Excel does the math for you,” Nino interrupts, unable to bear it any longer. “That’s the whole- I mean- It uses formulas to-”
“There’s a calculator in the program?” Ohno asks, looking excited.
“Not a calculator- It’s-”
Let it go, Nino tries to tell himself. He can use an abacus for all it matters.
Somehow, Nino can’t let it go.
“Let me show you something.”
Nino bats Ohno’s hand away from his mouse, selects all the data in the column and hits autosum. Ohno sits up straight in surprise.
“Wow!”
“Yeah.”
“Damn, I’ve really been wasting a lot of time.”
“No shit.”
Nino doesn’t realize he’s said it aloud until he meets eyes with Ohno and finds his eyebrows raised, his mouth open in small round “Oh?”
“So that, uh, did not come out how I-”
Nino stops short when he realizes Ohno is smiling.
“It’s okay,” Ohno says. “I’m really fucking tired of talking like that all day.”
Nino hesitates, unsure of Ohno’s sincerity. He’s usually great at reading people, that’s why Jun brought him here in the first place, but he feels like he still doesn’t quite get something about this guy.
“Seriously.” Ohno leans forward and props an elbow on his desk, resting his chin in his hand and staring at his computer screen. His smile fades. “Everyone keeps calling me Manager no matter what I say. It’s always a relief to talk to you.”
Nino has even less of an idea how to respond to that; worse, he can feel his face turning red. Ohno isn’t looking at him, but he still turns his head to cringe. Blushing - Aiba would be so happy.
Ohno’s phone rings. The caller ID reads: Kitagawa Hiromu, CEO; no one has changed the name on his old line over to Judy’s yet.
“Sorry,” Ohno says.
“No problem,” Nino answers.
He hurries to the safety of his bunker without looking back.
Part 2