She owes Yusuke a favor

Futaba was alone at her computer desk, covered in energy drinks and plates from previous meals. She had three monitors on; The first had a video playing, the second was a video game Futaba was currently playing, and the third was a console with lines of code the she had been working on for her class final in cyber security.

She would switch between mindless grinding for resources on one monitor before swinging back to write a couple lines of code, all the while chugging down a can of monster energy that would surely take months off her life, but she didn’t care.

Futaba was wearing a simple outfit that afternoon, a white tank top and black sweat pants. She was a simple college student that studied at home, not necessarily caring how she dressed as long as she was comfortable.

“Hmmm, This assignment isn’t due till tonight. I bet I’ll get it finished by tonight, just in time for my raiding party to show up.” Futaba said to herself, something she would do when alone.

“Hehe, who knew college would be so easy! I get to game and do school work at the same time!” She said, leaning back in her chair as she admired her coding work so far.

After years of self taught coding and hacking as part of the Phantom Thieves, Futaba was taken aback by how trivial her college work was. She’d hacked into large companies and government agencies dozens of times, and now she was learning how to program a website and firewall, like she hadn’t done that dozens of times before.

She felt almost bored by her college work, which rarely challenged her. She needed both a video and a game to keep her fleeting attention span from just ignoring the assignment all together, which had landed her missing work and receiving zeros across her first two semesters.

Part of her wished she was still part of the Phantom Thieves, navigating through battlefields like an RTS game, influencing the battle from above and supporting her teammates. That part of her life was exciting, and definitely beat sitting alone and coding useless code all afternoon.

But as Futaba was about to switch back to her game, she felt her phone vibrate in her sweat pants.

She raised an eyebrow in mild surprise, taking the phone out to see a notification from Yusuke!

“Inari? He hasn’t texted me in a hot minute.”

After the Thieves had disbanded several years ago, the group had stopped talking as much over text. The sole exceptions to this was Futaba and Yusuke, who not only texted semi-regularly, but also hung out together on occasion whenever their schedules aligned.

Futaba immediately opened his message and began to read them.

“I’m sorry for texting you out of the blue like this, but I need to, as you would say, cash in a favor of yours. Whenever you’re free today, please drop by my house.”

“A favor? What does he need that I owe him for?” Futaba asked herself