Cam is watching a new recording of Atriama, tail swishing in the gap in his couch, and doesn't stop to pause the show when he feels a summons go by.
"Sousuke, can you vacuum the place? That end of the room first, please."
- it hasn't happened to come up that he can make vacuum robots yet.
...And he checks to make sure that Sousuke vacuumed in the correct direction, which he did.
.......And watches the camera feed some more.
Fuck.
Cam leaves the circle open for an hour - it was a generic circle, he needed results, this place is a mess! - but there's no way that no angel in the entirety of Heaven has picked up a legit summons. He's a fluke. He is going to have to do this himself.
...Where has his summoner's tracking device got to?
The city of Takamatsu, plus or minus a decade. Cam's summoner is about as far southwest as anyone still lives, or at least he was before Kyushu's grand reopening.
Back to work.
After a bit more upgrading of the country, Cam gets an email from himself.
Do exactly as we say or your summoner dies.
There follows a warning to not even try taking him out of Takamatsu, and a set of surprisingly innocuous instructions.
You don't have to fucking threaten Cam's summoner to get pomegranates. Why is someone threatening Cam's summoner to get pomegranates?
If they wanted a nuke he'd probably go try to protect the summoner and not make any nukes, but pomegranates? Pomegranates it's worth paying whoever this is off the once, to see if any more information might be forthcoming about who the fuck they are, how they know anything about where he came from, and whether they can follow through.
Cam puts pomegranates where the extortionist wants pomegranates. It doesn't actually say not to follow the pomegranates, so he lurks.
Eventually a bystander stumbles across the pomegranates and collects them because why not. Well, nothing else about the extortion has made sense so far.
Cam sends himself an email recording this event, in case the extortionist was going to come by later and wonder where their pomegranates went. He puts a tracker on the bystander.
The bystander is very quickly confronted by people in uniforms. If Cam's surveillance is detailed enough to pick up sound, it's something about smuggling and suspiciously out-of-season fruit. Turns out "I just found it" isn't very convincing.
Right, fruits have seasons. That. Is a thing. How much trouble is this bystander in...?
More after it escalates to them accusing him of colluding with the rebels. (Rebels: apparently a thing?) He denies it, he runs, they take aim,
, their guns stop working and Cam steps out. "He wasn't smuggling. The pomegranates were mine."
"Rogue cape!" The guns are pointed at Cam now, though who knows if they're trying to fire or just threatening. The officers are talking into radios instead of to him. "The rebels have parahumans. Need backup now."
And after an impossibly short response time, a squad of uniformed parahumans appears and starts firing on Cam.
"I don't think I fall within your jurisdiction!" objects Cam. If he doesn't want to just fly away his options are basically "get shot" or "try to dodge, fall over, and also get shot", so he just kind of sits down on the street. "As you can see I am a white person and as you could know by not living under a rock I've been working for Japan! If there is somebody I should have told before paying China a visit or something I'd be happy to keep that in mind in the future!"
Not that they're questioning him about it. One of the figures in the flowing uniforms shouts "Thirty-first path!" and they switch from ineffective stun bolts to ineffective lasers.
"If you want me to fall over and die I really can't help you but if you'd like to have a conversation I'm all for it!" says Cam encouragingly.
Electromagnetism, vacuum, edged forcefields. At one point even the ground flows upward around Cam's ankles and solidifies.
Well, that one's mildly inconvenient. Said ground is pushed out of the way by water. They don't wanna talk, Cam doesn't wanna knock them all out, now Cam has wings and is flying away.
Since the distraction is just about to end, a gunshot takes the opportunity to go off. Several gunshots, close together. Three of the identically masked capes fall and two of them get back up while slowly healing.
The capes appear to be doing a good job of finding people and cutting them down without taking further losses, but there's no sign of how they're locating targets.
Okay, this is frustrating but not really Cam's skillset, and while people dying in front of him is very irritating people are also dying of preventable diseases elsewhere in the world. Cam shoos back to Japan.
After spending a small amount of time catching up on projects on this side of the sea, Cam gets a call.
"What did you do?" the Prime Minister asks. "You might not be associated with the CUI's opposition, but they sure think you are."
"I was there for unrelated reasons and they turned out to have strong opinions about fruit and attacked me. I didn't fight back and when they didn't seem to want to talk, I left."