Senior Manager Pekorin Usadori stared out from the windows at his station, giving the nousagi owned work camp a silent appraisal as he walked through the polished corridors of the administration site overlooking it. From his vantage point over the carrot fields, he could see an assortment of workers; mostly moonafics and KFP with a few Shishiron thrown into the mix, however there were a good many more foreigners working than you would have seen in previous years. They never had too much trouble when the tatsunoko disbanded however when the fandead went schizo and were banished to the arctic waste that left a major labor gap in carrot farms and construction camps across the nation. The Usaken Company had been mulling over how to fix this issue in the most cost-effective manner for quite some time and proposals for how this could be solved were submitted by many site managers across Pekoland.
It was due to his ingenious proposal that the south coast Usaken Company work site was now within the top ten percent of the companies most profitable locations, really it was all quite simple; there were plenty within the Empire’s borders that enjoyed sight seeing and travelling to new lands however the cost of booking a place on a ship was often too much for some to afford. Pekorin went to the coast of /hlgg/ and advertised the Usaken Companies transport services with as much charisma as he could manage and soon hundreds of people were sailing away on Usaken owned ships with the idea that all they’d need to do once they got back to their homelands was to work a little harder than usual to pay off a monthly fee. There were many merchants who were far too willing to glance over the contract if it meant cheaper travels in transporting their cargo and many more who were low class and didn’t understand the fine print within their contracts which meant that they were no longer citizens of whichever nation they’d come from and were now employed as indentured servants until their debts could be paid, along with interest. When they came back from whatever merchant business or vacation getaway, they went directly to Usaken work sites and were kept under heavy restrictions as to where they could go and what they could buy.
Pekorin had gotten high praise from upper management for his ingenuity and he was expecting a promotion. The site manager had even told him that there was a chance that Pekorin could own his own worksite in the not so distant future, something that his peers could only dream of. He couldn’t help but smile as he skipped through the halls, overjoyed by things finally falling into place. It was at that moment that he saw a work officer reclining against a wall, most likely a junior slacking off when he thought nobody was looking, “Oi, you’re resting on company time, peko! I know you haven’t clocked out either, you’re still in uniform.”
No response. This was the type of person that Pekorin hated the most, brats that had no respect for their elders. He’d write the boy up and have his pay cut, teach him a lesson about how to treat your betters so that he wouldn’t be a bother for however many days Pekorin would still be working on this site. He huffed a sour breath and walked over to the boy who had his back pressed neatly against the walls, his work cap was pulled down over his face and his head was leaning against his shoulder. Pekorin snapped his fingers in front of the boy, feeling his patience begin to drain. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulders and shook him roughly however instead of jolting awake, the boy collapsed to the floor like a mannequin whose strings had been cut.
Pekorin stared down at the boy, his eyes growing wide. There was blood on the floor where the boy fell, small dark droplets of red running down his nose and ears had fallen onto the stone along with a large outpour that Pekorin had to crouch down to make out. Near the center of the young boy’s light blue hair there was a neat hole which had crossed through his skull creating a large crimson crater where it had exited through his right eye. Pekorin’s heart began to beat like a war drum as he backed away from the murdered nousagi, thoughts swirling in his head as he began to look around the hallway to see if anybody else was there. There was nobody except him and the corpse. He took a glance back at the bloody corpse and began to run suddenly, fear taking his legs in a furious sprint. His boss would know what to do about this, his boss was the boss for a reason, if there was anything more reasonable to do than the boss would tell him that once Pekorin got to his office. It was getting dark but he knew that his boss didn’t leave until Pekorin finished counting the day’s profits and as he turned the corner to the bosses office and saw lantern light flickering from the doorway he began to shout, “Boss, boss there’s something going on, peko! There’s been a murder!” He entered the office and froze on his heels.
The body was slumped over his desk, blood staining the many files and papers that documented the different transactions their branch of Usaken made with Pekoland government, many tax related, particularly in terms of avoiding them. Pekorin tried to say something but his voice was caught in his throat, he tried to breathe but he felt as if someone had their fingers curled around his neck, he tried to close his eyes but it felt like the moment he did something would pounce on him. He was almost thankful when he heard the man’s voice from behind him, “Good evening, Mr. Usadori, I assume?” Immediately he was sent stumbling forward into the room, twisting his body around to glimpse the assassin while simultaneously putting as much room as possible between himself and the murderer. He pressed himself up against the bosses desk as the intruder entered the room, no obvious weapon in his hands, “Who the hell are you, peko?” Pekorin’s eyes looked the man up and down, tall and stern faced with a sharp jawline to match. He had blue hair and long ears like a nousagi and if nobody had been looking specifically for him, he’d probably pass as one to, however under Pekorin’s stressed eyes he could see a wig for what it was, “You’re not nousagi…”
“Good eye, though with how politics seem to work in Pekoland, I doubt you’d be very surprised if I was.” He stepped forward into the room and gently nudged the door closed behind him, trapping the two of them in the room, “My name is Biscuit, Jam Biscuit.” The nousagi stared at the man for a moment, wondering if his fear had somehow caused him to mishear something however the man’s face was as serious as ever. It was a fake name, clearly it was but…Biscuit?
“Internationally your company has been steeped in just as much commerce as it has controversy and while I might personally find it distasteful it has nothing to do with me, or I suppose I should say, had.” Biscuit took another step forward and Pekorin was forced to brush up against the corpse of his boss in order to maintain a far distance between the two, “This new venture the Usaken has undergone has had some unforeseen consequences on the global economy, certain players in the game aren’t happy with it. Those merchants you have working here were supposed to run back home.”
In the peripheral of his vision Pekorin could see the drawers of his bosses desk, one of which was pulled slightly ajar and stained with blood from where the boss had tried to pull it open before death met him. Inside Pekorin could see the handle of an Usaken company standard flintlock pistol. He could grab it, he could grab it if he got a little closer, “The game? Are you Sakuran? Hoping to drag our name down as revenge for the nousagi cutting you off, peko?” He wanted to keep the man talking however he stayed silent. Pekorin felt his heart begin to beat faster as panic flared once more in the silence. Finally, he spoke in a soft hushed tone, “Try and remember, where did the merchants you imprisoned come from? What were they carrying?”
Pekorin tried to think back to that time, to all the faces he’d seen and spoken too. He could even recognize some of them in the fields not too far from them right now however he couldn’t understand what the man was saying, “You’re mad! I never targeted anyone, there were merchants from all over the empire, they had nothing to do with each other, peko!”
“But they did. You stepped into something you shouldn’t have, little rabbit.” Pekorin’s mind raced as the man took another step forward, he thought back to all of them once again, about the hours he’d spent with a fake smile on throwing whatever compliments he could in order to get them to sign the damn contract. Then he realized. It wasn’t the merchants precisely, but their wives. They were fat, plump things that followed their husbands along cheerily to food stands and bakeries. He made jokes about Usaken branching into whale migration with his work buddies once he’d gotten back home, however now that he was thinking back to it, so many of them kept talking about heading to “the island” or making stops at “the island”, it was all too clear, “You’re an architect, peko!”
The man who called himself Jam Biscuit smiled and Pekorin’s blood ran cold, “Of course you might not notice it in reports if you hadn’t paid much attention, there’s no big famine occurring because of a few merchants missing however there’s no abundance either. The Onigiris and Moonafics who we’ve been building upon for so long are beginning to crumble down due to the greed of a few little rabbits, at this rate we might even start to see Omaruza start to decline.” Pekorin moved suddenly and shoved the corpse aside, sending it toppling to the ground as he grabbed the flintlock pistol, finger on the trigger.
“I won’t let you turn my goddess into a bloated cow, peko!” He leveled the pistol and pulled the trigger before the blurred shapes in front of him could take focus, the kickback of it throwing Pekorin to the floor. The man was unarmed. He had nothing to defend himself with. Pekorin kept thinking this, even as his chest began to swell with heat and his vision began to go dark around the edges. That man was unarmed. Pekoran couldn’t have been hurt, he simply couldn’t. He tried to breath in but there was no more strength in his lungs to do so, the pain in his chest was beginning to go terribly numb and before long it became too much of an effort to even keep his eyes open.

Jam Biscuit rubbed his arm where the wrist mounted crossbow had discharged and torn through his sleeve, it was something that he hadn’t been quite too sure about commissioning from the Robosa however as a silent kill it beat gunpowder by a large margin. He approached the body of Pekorin Usadori and retrieved the bolt lodged deep inside of his chest, the nousagi had some of the highest percentage of schizos in the Empire and an incident like this wouldn’t look to odd with that in consideration along with the planted evidence he’d left in Pekorin’s household. When their bodies where discovered, it would appear as a murder suicide driven about by a greedy desire to take his superiors position as soon as possible. As for other sectors of the Usaken that continued to propagate the practice that Pekorin had set forth, a mixture of sabotage and subterfuge would be needed to put an end to the stagnation of the grand architectural goal. Having done his duty, the man known as Jam Biscuit arranged the bodies to match with his story and after making sure to erase every trace of his existence within the room, disappeared into the darkness of the night.