Chapter 7: The Naked Pitch
The request pinged into the Hamsky account on a Tuesday afternoon, a quiet chime that sounded like a digital hamster squeak. Chad, sorting through a backlog of mundane photo-editing commissions, almost archived it as spam. The subject line was in Japanese characters, followed by a clumsy English translation: "Inquiry Regarding Models of Notable Public Appearance – Urgent."
He opened it.
The text was earnest, layered with the polite deference of a formal business inquiry that had traveled a long, confusing road. The sender, Takasu of Takasu Corporation, explained that he had been in Akihabara nearly a month prior during a "particularly vibrant console launch." He’d witnessed, to his amazement and amusement, "three foreign youths of exceptional camaraderie and… minimal attire" causing a cheerful scene. They’d been dubbed the "Naked Rangers" by local net forums. His marketing team, always looking for authentic, unexpected faces, had immediately flagged them as perfect fits for an avant-garde swimwear line launching next season.
"The energy was perfect," Takasu wrote. "Uninhibited, joyful, a true brotherhood. Not a professional model's stiffness. We wanted to capture that."
Then came the bafflement. When his team went to gather reference material, every trace had vanished. News articles loaded as blank pages. Social media posts led to broken links. Forum threads dissolved into 404 errors. It was, as several confused reporters noted, as if the Naked Rangers had never existed at all. This, Takasu explained with palpable frustration, had created a "significant logistical paradox." How does one hire phantoms?
Chad’s blood ran cold for a second, then settled into a familiar, low-grade hum of anxiety. He knew exactly how traces vanished like that. He glanced over his shoulder. Kevin was across the room, fully engrossed in teaching a vr hamster how to perform laparoscopic surgery.
Chad read the request again, more carefully. What stood out wasn’t the confusion over the digital void—that was just Kevin’s standard privacy protocol, a blanket "undo" he likely applied without a second thought—but Takasu’s tone. There was no leering, no crude objectification. The man spoke of "potential," of "authentic synergy," of wanting to showcase confidence rather than just flesh. He’d seen Leo, Ben, and Mark as people, not just headlines.
A warm weight suddenly pressed against Chad’s back, and chin hooks over his shoulder. “Chad is reading a boring email. It has no pictures of hamsters,” Kevin observed, his breath tickling Chad’s ear.
“It’s about your friends,” Chad said quietly. “The Naked Rangers.”
Kevin’s head tilted. “The… Rangers! Kevin’s friends! Are they in trouble? Kevin will help!” His voice was gaining its frantic, hopeful edge.
“No, no trouble. A man from Japan saw them. He wants to… hire them. To model clothes. Swimwear.” Chad struggled to simplify the concept. “To wear special small pants and have their picture taken for advertisements.”
Kevin processed this, his brow furrowed in deep, cartoonish thought. He didn't understand commerce, but he understood "friends" and "pictures." “But… they are Rangers. They wear helmets. Not… special small pants.” The notion seemed to confound him. “Why does the Japanese man want this? Kevin does not understand his request-data.”
Chad sighed, a small smile touching his lips. Kevin’s literal mind was a refuge sometimes. “I think he just sees they have good energy together. Like you do.”
This, Kevin understood. “Good energy! Yes! Kevin has the best energy! So do the Rangers!” He squeezed Chad from behind. “Can Kevin see them? Today? Kevin wants to play ‘Defeat the Data-dragon’ with them! They promised to be the dragon this time if Kevin coded him fire-breathing code!”
An idea formed in Chad’s mind. A safe, contained idea. “Yes. We can go see them. To Starlight. We can… ask them about the Japanese man’s request.” It was a flimsy pretext, but it would get Kevin out of the apartment and into a supervised social situation. It might even be good for the trio to hear the offer.
Kevin let out a chirp of sheer delight and, in one fluid motion, scrambled fully onto Chad’s back, locking his legs around Chad’s waist and his arms around his neck. “Go! Go now! Adventure to the friend-place!”
“Kevin, you have to wear something,” Chad said, already knowing the argument was futile but bound by social contract to make it.
“Kevin is wearing Chad!” came the cheerful, muffled reply, face pressed between Chad’s shoulder blades.
Compromise was the cornerstone of their coexistence. Chad grabbed his thick, oversized photographer’s jacket—a durable, waxed canvas thing with a soft inner lining. He stood up, Kevin clinging to him like a koala. With practiced, weary grace, he shrugged into the jacket, not putting his arms in the sleeves, but letting it drape backwards over his own shoulders and, more importantly, over the naked form plastered to his back. He zipped it up as far as it would go, which covered Kevin from the back of the knees to the crown of his head, creating a large, slightly lumpy hump. From the front, Chad just looked like a tall, lean man wearing his jacket in a unconventional, slouchy manner.
“No talking until we’re in Bell’s team room,” Chad instructed, his voice low.
“Kevin is a silent backpack,” the jacket-hump whispered.
The trip to Starlight was a masterpiece of low-grade terror. Chad nodded politely to the building security guard, his heart hammering. He took the elevator alone, thankfully. The jacket hump wriggled once when the elevator music played a tinny synth version of a song Kevin liked. Chad cleared his throat loudly, and the wriggling stopped.
The bullpen of Bell’s team was a haven of gentle activity. Soft chatter, the click of keyboards, the smell of Anne’s lavender desk spray. Bell was at the central whiteboard, drawing a wonderfully detailed but completely irrelevant diagram of a capybara wearing a hard hat. Maya was pretending to review a budget spreadsheet next to him, a small smile on her face.
David and Mike looked up from a dual monitor setup, their professional expressions giving way to mild surprise at Chad’s appearance. Priya and Sara waved from their station.
Leo, Ben, and Mark were huddled around a single terminal, arguing good-naturedly about an edge-case bug. They were the target.
Chad made a beeline for them, giving a tight, polite smile to the room. “Hey. Sorry to drop in. Urgent… gaming question. From Kevin. For these three.”
The mention of Kevin made David’s eyes narrow slightly, but he gave a slow, careful nod. Mike just looked intrigued.
Chad bypassed the main seating area and headed towards a small, seldom-used breakout room—a glass-walled cube with a couch and a table. He shouldered the door open, stepped inside, and let it hiss shut behind him.
“Clear,” he muttered.
The jacket erupted. Kevin shrugged it off like a cocoon, letting it fall to the floor, and sprang forward with arms wide. “Rangers! Kevin is here! Data-dragon time!”
Leo, Ben, and Mark jumped, then broke into immediate, matching grins. “Kevin!” Ben said, laughing. “You can’t just teleport in here!”
“Chad-backpack teleport!” Kevin corrected, already gravitating toward their laptops. “The Japanese man wants you to wear special small pants!”
Three bewildered looks swiveled to Chad, who was retrieving his jacket with a sigh. He gave them the condensed, sanitized version: respectable Japanese tech CEO, saw their Akihabara “performance,” was impressed by their dynamic, wanted them to model innovative swimwear, but all references to them had mysteriously vanished from the internet.
Leo blinked, his mind racing back to the sensory overload of Akihabara—the neon, the crowd’s laughter, the liberating absurdity of posing in just helmets. Ben’s cheeks flushed a deep red, not from shame but from the sudden, vivid memory of the cold air and the bizarre, exhilarating freedom of it. Mark’s analytical mind instantly cataloged the timeline, the subsequent online explosion, and then… the profound, inexplicable silence that followed.
“The photos,” Leo whispered, the word barely audible.
Ben’s eyes widened. “The… comments section. People were… comparing.”
“Measuring,” Mark stated, his voice flat with a delayed disgust. “It was a whole thread. It got vicious.”
They all looked at Kevin, who was now happily adjusting the contrast on Ben’s monitor, humming his hamster surgeon song. He’d been monitoring them, always monitoring his friends. The online harassment had registered in his systems as a threat. His response wasn’t a moral judgment; it was a digital immune response. Identify pathogen. Delete pathogen. Delete all traces of pathogen host.
Chad leaned in close, his voice a low rush under Kevin’s humming. “He completely forgot. He was furious at the comments, the comparisons. He used something… deep. It didn’t just delete the photos online. It scrubbed them from local devices, from cloud backups, from forum caches. It unmade them. He forgot he ever did it.”
The trio absorbed this, the scale of it settling in their guts. Their brief, wild moment of fame had been erased from the world’s memory by a protective god they played video games with.
Mark’s analytical tone returned, laced with a new unease. “So this Japanese guy… Takasu. He’s asking for photos that don’t exist anymore. That can’t exist. He’s asking for ghosts.”
Before Chad could formulate an answer, the glass door of the breakout room hissed open.
Bell stood there, holding a sleek, metallic disc about the size of a dinner plate. It was white and featureless except for a thin, glowing seam around its edge. He looked curious, not upset, his head tilted. “Hey, everything okay in here?”
Kevin, sensing a new presence, scrambled back from the monitor and onto Chad’s back in one fluid, practiced motion. He peered over Chad’s shoulder, his arms locking around Chad’s chest. “Who is that?” Kevin asked, his voice uncharacteristically small and shaky.
Bell’s warm brown eyes shifted from the disc to the man on Chad’s back. He heard the self-referential name. His mind, brilliant with code but pure in its understanding of people, made a connection. The silent, impossible salvation from Non’s revenge. The void where a man’s career had been. David and Mike’s tight, haunted smiles afterwards.
“You’re Kevin,” Bell said, not as a question. His expression softened into something profound and grateful. “Thank you. For what you did. I don’t know how, but… thank you.”
Kevin froze, his grip loosening slightly.
Then Bell smiled, that humble, open smile that made his whole team feel safe. “I’m Bell.”
Kevin’s entire demeanor transformed. The tension melted, replaced by a sunrise of pure joy. “Bell? Kevin’s best friend is also named Bell! So you are also Kevin’s best friend!” The logic was impeccable and absolute.
He launched himself off Chad and crossed the small room in two bounds, wrapping Bell in a tight, exuberant hug. Bell, surprised but instinctively kind, hugged him back with a gentle laugh. “Okay! Hi, best friend.”
Seeking a better vantage point, Kevin began to climb, his bare feet finding purchase on Bell’s slacks as he clambered onto his back. Bell, ever adaptable, steadied himself with a slight “oof,” holding the strange metallic disc out to the side like a waiter balancing a tray.
The moment Kevin settled, his chest against Bell’s shoulder blades, the circular device in Bell’s hand hummed to life.
The glowing seam blazed with blue light. The air above the disc shimmered, and a life-sized hologram resolved in the center of the breakout room. It was a man in a perfectly tailored navy suit jacket, no tie, his shirt open at the collar. He had stylish glasses and a genuinely warm smile.
Takasu San adjusted his glasses, his holographic form looking around with delighted interest. “Ah! Connection stabilized! Excellent.”
Takasu San’s hologram gave a slight, formal bow, his smile warm and immediate. “Bell-san! It is good to see you again. And Leo-kun, Ben-kun, Mark-kun! You remember me, I hope?”
Bell, with Kevin still perched on his back like a cheerful barnacle, returned the smile. “Of course, Takasu San. How are you? The boys do remember you, don’t you?” He glanced at the trio, his expression encouraging.
Ben’s eyes lit with recognition first, cutting through his lingering shock. “Right! The day after… Akihabara. We went to your headquarters for the Neptune integration demo.” The memory was a safe harbor, a professional anchor.
Leo leaned subtly toward Ben and Mark, his voice a razor-sharp whisper. “He kept talking about local ‘trends’ and ‘youth culture.’ He was totally fishing about the Naked Rangers.”
Mark gave a micro-nod, his analyst’s mind locking onto the threat. “He can’t know. The link is gone. The data trail is ash. We just have to be normal.”
Kevin, who had been studying the shimmering hologram with intense curiosity, suddenly gasped. “Takasu! Kevin knows this name! It is in the request-data! The one for the special small pants!” He swiveled his head to look at Chad, his eyes wide. “Chad! This is the Japanese man from Hamsky!”
All eyes turned to Chad, who felt a flush creep up his neck. He gave a tight, professional nod toward the hologram. “Yes. This is Takasu. I’m Chad. This is Kevin. We… operate the Hamsky account.”
Takasu’s hologram adjusted its glasses, a flicker of genuine surprise passing over his friendly features. “Ah! Hamsky! This is a fascinating synchronicity. Your work has an… evocative quality.” His gaze, sharp and appreciative, swept back to the three junior developers. “But it explains my dilemma. I saw the news reports of the so-called Naked Rangers in Akihabara. Their physique, their camaraderie—it was perfect for a new product line. And then, poof.” He made a vanishing gesture with his hand. “Every pixel, gone. A true digital mystery.”
He leaned forward, his holographic form glitching slightly at the edges. His tone shifted to enthusiastic business. “The product is swim briefs. But not static fabric. They are woven with micro-reactive polymers. They change transparency in response to localized body temperature.”
He gestured elegantly, and a secondary holographic render appeared beside him: a sleek, high-cut brief. It was mostly opaque but shimmered with a heat-map pattern of deeper transparency along the inner thighs and the center front. “Cool skin remains covered. Warmer areas… reveal. It is about the gradient, the suggestion, the confidence in one’s own skin.”
Kevin listened, his brow furrowed in concentration. The technical specs meant nothing to him. Only a few words stuck. Naked Rangers. Confidence. Skin.
His face lit up with pure, unadulterated understanding. “Oh! Naked Rangers! Kevin’s friends are the Naked Rangers! They are right here!” He pointed triumphantly at Leo, Ben, and Mark.
A frozen second of utter silence gripped the breakout room.
Then Kevin moved.
It wasn’t a blur; it was a deletion of the intervening moments. There was no rush of air, no recognizable motion. One instant, the three young men were standing in their casual office clothes—chinos, polos, soft cotton tees.
The next instant, those clothes simply ceased to be.
A small, neat pile of fabric rested at each of their feet. Leo’s glasses sat atop his folded shirt. The air in the room felt suddenly, profoundly cooler against their completely bare skin.
Leo made a small, choked sound. Ben instinctively crossed his arms over his chest, then dropped them, his face flooding with a heat that would have made Takasu’s prototype completely transparent. Mark just stood rigid, every muscle taut, his mind utterly blank for the first time in his adult life.
Kevin bounced on the balls of his feet, clapping his hands. “See? Perfect models! No clothes to block the temperature! Kevin helps!”
Takasu stared.
His hologram flickered, a data skip of pure astonishment. Then his surprise dissolved, not into awkwardness, but into a deep, rolling wave of laughter. He threw his head back, the sound rich and unguarded, echoing through the small room from the hologram projector’s speakers.
“Incredible!” he managed, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye as his laughter subsided into delighted chuckles. He adjusted his glasses, his gaze now openly, professionally appraising the three stunned young men. “You three are actually the Naked Rangers. The proportions are even better in person. The camaraderie is palpable. And the confidence! To stand so unflinching! This is exactly the energy my product needs.”