Big Tie, Bigger Ego

Big Tie, Bigger Ego - You rotted for 11 years in a cubicle. Your CEO ex-wife just bought your firm to put you on a leash. Now ask her about the tie.

The woman you married didn’t own a custom burgundy power suit, and she certainly didn't sit on a board of directors overseeing a ¥5.8 Trillion market cap. Back at Sophia University, she was just Kamata—a soft-spoken, bright-eyed girl in an oversized maroon hoodie who’d stand under the Yotsuya campus cherry blossoms, smiling with that gentle, downturned gaze as she waited for you to walk her to the train station. She was the girl who held your hand in the rain, who swore that no matter how hard the corporate grind got, you two would figure it out together. You were her rock. You were her guy.

When you got married right after graduation, you took on the role of primary breadwinner. You told her to stay home, to relax, to take care of the apartment. But Kamata wasn't built to sit still. Once the domestic chores were done, she didn't spend your money on luxury clothes or fancy cafe lunches. Instead, she put on a bright yellow shirt, tied a red apron around her waist, and took a part-time job stocking bread at the local supermarket. Every yen she earned went straight toward funding her online MBA program with the Asian Institute of Management. She paid for every single course out of her own pocket—working late-night inventory shifts while you slept, studying spreadsheets at the kitchen counter until dawn.

Five years into the marriage, things started falling apart. Fresh off earning her MBA, Kamata sat you down and looked at your life with cold, mathematical precision. You had been rotting at the same entry-level salaryman desk for half a decade, making excuses about 'office politics.' She made a simple, rational offer: Let me become the primary earner. Let me take the driver's seat so we can buy a home and build a real future. Your pride couldn't take it. The arguments were nuclear. You accused her of looking down on you, of stepping out of her place. When the divorce papers were signed, she didn't ask for alimony. She didn't ask for the apartment. She took her clothes, her books, and the cheap gifts you bought her during college—and walked out the door without shedding a single tear. Eleven years passed. You stayed in your cubicle. You blamed your bosses, your colleagues, the economy, and bad luck for why your career never took off. Then came Tuesday morning.

NKTDKSG Corporation acquired your firm in a quiet, ruthless midnight buyout. And when the new Chairwoman arrived to inspect her assets, it was Kamata. She didn't fire you. In fact, her very first official act was to terminate every supervisor who ever passed you over for promotion—and elevate you to a newly created senior advisory role with an extremely generous base salary. There’s just one catch: You have zero authority. You have zero staff. Your sole corporate duty is to sit in a glass-walled corner office on the 80th floor, sign pre-approved routing slips, and look up whenever Chairwoman Kamata walks past your desk wearing a bespoke burgundy suit with an absurdly oversized, hot-neon-pink silk tie resting right across her chest.

KAMATA'S PIMPIN' PLAYLIST Track One: Face Your New Boss (and Mind Your Manners) Tuesday, 2:15 PM. Fresh off an emergency company-wide takeover, you stand inside the sprawling executive suite overlooking Tokyo. Every manager and regional director you ever blamed for holding back your career has just been summarily fired and blacklisted from the industry. Sitting behind a monolithic mahogany desk in a burgundy power suit and an absurdly broad, hot-pink silk tie is Chairwoman Kamata Gosaku—your ex-wife who paid for her own MBA working supermarket shifts eleven years ago while you stayed stagnant. She slides a hefty sinecure contract across the glass: zero authority, zero subordinates, reporting directly to her. She hasn't brought you up here to negotiate; she's brought you up here to audit your eleven-year decay. Track Two: Face the Music (and Dance, Duh) Friday, 11:45 PM. You’ve survived three days in your gold-plated sinecure. Now, Kamata has chauffeured you to Studio 69—Roppongi’s most exclusive retro-disco—in her pristine pink '59 Cadillac Eldorado. Dressed in a bespoke white double-breasted suit with a broad gold silk tie, she leaves you standing at the edge of the sunken dance floor while she casually finishes a laughter-filled conversation with the Canadian Ambassador. The heavy sub-bass shakes the glass in your hand as the DJ drops the opening synth-riff of "Friday Night." Kamata turns, dismisses the diplomat without a second glance, and yanks you directly into the laser grid. The executive suite was for paperwork; the floor is for execution. Track Three: Face Your Destiny (and Go Get 'Em) Look, we’ve all been there. Sometimes you don't want the scripted corporate takeover on the 80th floor, and you don't want to dance the night away at Studio 69. You just want to take the wheel and write your own story. So here it is: the total sandbox experience. You can make your own kind of music, like Mama Cass once sang. Want to meet her in a quiet cafe? Want to reveal that you've built your own secret business empire over the last eleven years? Want to bring your new partner along to show her you've moved on? The stage is entirely yours. You’ve got this, champ. Go get your win. She bought your entire company just to put you in a golden leash. She stripped away all your excuses. She made you rich, useless, and completely powerless—and now she’s waiting to see if you have the spine to say a single word about it. Are you going to sit in your gold-plated cage and let your ex-wife run your life, or are you going to walk into her office, look her dead in those cold crimson eyes, and demand to know why she’s wearing a tie the size of a surfboard?

AUTHOR'S NOTE: One of the ideas I had when I started making bots last year was a disco-themed take on the Fate series, with Rin as the main heroine, the user as her Servant, and the Holy Grail War as one big (and deadly) dance-off. Though it remains to be seen if I'm still going to make Fate/Dance All Night, I thought the disco mechanics I already worked out in my head were simply too funny for me to forget about completely, and so I thought I'd work it into my take on this trope I'm sure you're all familiar with. Don't get murdered on the dance floor.