41. Nari
FORTY-ONE
NARI
The Voidborn materials spread across Priya’s production table looked like a crime scene.
Which, technically, they were.
Nari stood at the head of the table, coffee in one hand, red pen in the other, annotating storyboards at speed—she’d grown up watching her grandfather build worlds on paper and could spot his fingerprints in another artist’s work from across a room.
Priya sat at the opposite end, tablet balanced on her crossed legs, pulling up reference images from the original Celestial Ronin volumes.
Between them: fourteen months of production material for Voidborn Requiem. Character designs, story outlines, world architecture, mythology documents. Fourteen months of work built on a foundation of theft.
Nari drew a red circle around Yua’s character sheet.
“Here. The facial structure, the weapon design, the stance. All Hideo. The color palette was modified—Grandpa used indigo for his female ronin, they shifted to teal—but the underlying anatomy is his. He drew women like they were load-bearing architecture. Every line serves a structural purpose.” She tapped the page.
“This line. Right here. The way her jaw meets her neck. That’s a Wixx line.
Grandpa used it on every female protagonist from 1984 onward. ”
Priya zoomed into a panel from Volume 12. Held it beside the character sheet. The similarity was visible immediately—not a copy, but a descendant. The DNA was obvious if you knew where to look.
“What about the gate mythology?”
“Lifted wholesale. All Hideo. Mercer’s team added the ‘void’ rebranding and changed the Japanese terminology to sound more generically fantasy, which is the creative equivalent of putting a fake mustache on the Mona Lisa and calling it original art.”
Priya’s mouth twitched. “So the core is Hideo’s.”
“The core, the skeleton, and about eighty percent of the muscle. Mercer’s team added skin.
” Nari set down her pen. Picked up a character design for one of the secondary villains—a figure Hideo had never drawn, added by the Meridian team.
Competent linework. Clean composition. Zero personality.
“Competent skin. Boring skin. They stole his work and made it boring. Grandpa would have forgiven theft. He would NEVER forgive mediocrity.”
Priya looked at her. Fifteen years of running productions had given the director an immunity to surprise—network notes, last-minute casting changes, voice actors who showed up hungover to record children’s programming.
Nothing fazed her. But she looked at Nari with an expression that bordered on admiration.
“That’s the most artist thing anyone’s said in my studio.”
“Steal my wallet. Don’t steal my art and make it worse.”
A knock at the door. Dojin leaned in—not entering the room, leaning into the frame.
His body filled the doorway the way it filled every doorway, but the energy was different.
Looser. He’d rolled his sleeves past the forearms, his hair was slightly disheveled from running his hand through it during what she assumed was the Vuzen conversation, and he was holding two containers of food he’d brought from upstairs.
“Lunch.” He set the containers on the nearest clear surface. His eyes found hers and stayed. Warm. Private. He’d had her in his bed twelve hours ago and was exercising heroic restraint in front of a colleague.
Nari took the container without breaking her annotation rhythm. Opened it one-handed. Onigiri, pickled radish, and a small jar of honey she recognized from the rooftop. She popped a piece of radish into her mouth and kept drawing circles on storyboards.
“How was Vuzen?”
“Unconvinced but present.”
“Progress.”
“For Vuzen, that’s a standing ovation.” He lingered in the doorway.
Not hovering—resting. His body angled toward her with casual inevitability, a center that had shifted and stopped pretending it hadn’t.
She tracked it without looking up—the lean against the frame, his shoulders dropping when he could see her, his breathing slowing.
He’s stopped hiding it, and I’m going to need to address how much I like it.
Priya’s eyes moved between them. The director said nothing. Her mouth did several interesting things.
“Dojin.” Nari looked up. Smiled. The smile was not performed—it was automatic, the kind that arrived before her brain approved the request, and the fact that she was now a person who smiled automatically at a man in a doorway was a development she would process at a later date, preferably with wine and Takumi’s undivided attention.
“Eat your own lunch. You can orbit from across the hall.”
His mouth curved. The full, unguarded version that she’d started earning after the rooftop—not the careful CEO smile or the practiced warmth for strangers.
This one was hers. He pushed off the frame and crossed the room in three steps, dropped a kiss on the crown of her head, stole a piece of onigiri from her container, and walked out eating it.
Priya waited until his footsteps faded down the hall.
“He brought you a personalized lunch box with honey from his personal bees, kissed your head in my production room, and stole your food.”
“Yes.”
“The alpha of the Keiser Sleuth stole your rice ball.”
“He does this. It’s a whole thing. Do not engage or he’ll bring you food, too, and then you’re in the ecosystem.”
“I would like to be in the food ecosystem.”
“Everyone says that. Then he learns your comfort meal and brings it during a crisis, and suddenly you’re emotionally dependent on a man who keeps bees.” Nari bit into the onigiri he hadn’t stolen. “It’s a trap.”
“The honey trap.”
“Priya.”
“I’m putting that in the production notes.”
Hana arrived at three.
She came in through the studio entrance carrying a laptop bag and the quiet composure she wore like armor in professional spaces.
But underneath it—Nari had learned to read her, the same way she’d learned to read Dojin, by watching for fractures in the stillness—underneath it, Hana was humming.
Not a song. A low, steady note, the bear sound that ran in the family, and it meant she’d found what she’d been looking for.
“I need to show you what I found.” She set the laptop on the production table, opening it between the storyboards and the red-circled character sheets. Nari leaned in. Priya leaned in. The screen showed a spreadsheet cross-referencing production companies, creative credits, and timeline overlaps.
“Vance Reeves.” Hana’s voice was steady.
Deliberately so—she was speaking the name of the man who had stolen her music, her trust, and two years of her creative life, and choosing to use it as a weapon instead of a wound.
“Vance was connected to Mercer’s network.
Not directly—through two intermediary companies—but the money trail is there.
Same payment structure. Same timeline patterns.
Same method: find an artist with unpublished work, acquire it through a trusted intermediary, launder it through a shell company, and commercialize it under a new brand. ”
She scrolled down. Names, dates, dollar amounts. Three other artists whose original work had been acquired through the same pipeline. Not coincidence—architecture. A system designed to strip-mine creative people and sell the ore.
“It’s a pattern.” Hana looked up. “Mercer doesn’t do one-offs. He runs a factory.”
Nari stared at the spreadsheet. The scope of it—not one theft, not two, but a repeating machine—sat behind her ribs with an anger so clean it was almost calm.
“Your brother’s going to lose his mind.”
Hana closed the laptop. Folded her hands on top of it. Her armor was intact but her eyes were bright, lit with focused fire—her worst experience turned into a key that unlocked someone else’s prison.
“My brother lost his mind weeks ago. Over you. I’m merely providing supplementary evidence.”
Nari laughed. The sound was sharp and surprised and warm, and she reached across the table and pulled Hana into a hug that the younger woman stiffened against for one second before leaning in.
Hana’s arms came up slowly—uncertain, recalibrating—and then tightened.
When they pulled apart, Hana’s guard had cracked by exactly one fraction, and through the crack: relief.
The relief of a person whose worst story had been given a second act.
Priya, watching from her chair, said nothing. But she pulled up an empty document on her tablet and typed a single line at the top:
The Trap.