Yuri Worlds
[13] Meanings
Once Misaki was a few steps away, the girl took a deep breath and composed herself. She had strikingly long legs jutting out from a navy-toned skirt with some light creases. A fair blue button-up collared top remained tucked in the waistband of her skirt, but with billows of wrinkled cloth. The lab coat, which had set off Misaki, seemed particularly crumpled, but more so because it was a few sizes too large for this girl. Also, she wasn’t certain of it, but it seemed the coat had the faintest hint of a rose tone, as though discolored in the wash.
The new girl’s hair was the lightest brown of anyone they’d yet met. She was terrible at identifying colors but had some vague experience plugging in different anime character color hex codes to wildly confuse and complicate instead of clarify exactly what shades she wanted as Misaki. This girl’s hair was a lighter shade than Kei’s, actually closer to Namiko's. Regular almond felt too dark, and skinned almond was too light. Somewhere smack dab in the middle of those two. It spiked in places and unfurled like party streamers. A series of pink and blue ribbons did their best at organization. Her eyes were blue, but not the sharp and hypnotic shade of Kei and Haruka; they were more like the tint of a swimming pool in summer.
Haruka? She scanned around and found that Haruka was standing off to the left with her arms folded over her stomach, as though gently restraining an ache. The new girl brushed herself off, stood up carefully, and reached down a hand to where Misaki was still sitting on the floor.
“I half thought you were Maharu in disguise with that tackle. Must’ve been quite a nightmare you were having.”
Misaki accepted her arm. The new girl got her up, but they both wobbled to the point that she worried they would end up in the same pile again. Fortunately, Chika rushed over to stabilize them before that happened. With quiet disappointment, the new girl sighed and stretched her arms, admitting, “I desperately need to exercise more.”
Lingering, Misaki asked if the girl in the lab coat was all right. She responded with an eager nod. “Only a handful more screws knocked loose. I’ll be fine. I’ve been meaning to extricate them. Yourself?”
Misaki checked herself and noticed some scuff marks on her top. She had to pause and remind herself that the bumps coming out of her front were perfectly normal right now. Her knees and elbows ached, but she could see no signs of scrapes in her skin or rips in her clothes. Clinging to the remnants of her strange dream, Misaki briefly summarized, “I was attacked by someone in a lab coat. Probably a mad scientist. Or a pharmacist.”
The new girl’s eyes widened. “You know, I would like to say that’s strange, but it’s not the first time. If I had a holey coin for every time it happened, I’d have ten yen. Not a lot, but enough to have a good relationship with a shrine donation.” After she finished saying that, she posed with a hand stretched out, a little smile, and raised eyebrows. Haruka stifled a faint snicker, as though it were a cough attempting to flee her throat, but said, “I don’t think they understand your joke, Miss Soma.”
Pouting, the girl in the lab coat took a deep breath and glossed over the main points. She began by relaying it was a metaphor that, if something happens a lot, then someone might wish for a small yen coin for each instance. Misaki assured her that part was comprehended and the same where they came from. The part she didn’t know right away was that certain coins had holes. Somehow, the translation methods still made sense of something equivalent to holes and holy. At the same time, the name for these smaller denomination coins hinted at “strong relationships”. So, girls often donated them to shrines to strengthen the bonds of their relationships with others.
Namiko frowned and chimed in with the question, “Isn’t that also a reference to…some cartoon?” Misaki knew that it wasn’t just some cartoon. It was a meme, one playfully invoked by Gal from time to time in her tamer set of references and known by Dwight. She understood why Nami was hesitant though. But the stirring turbulence of wild memories left in her head made her want to give the middle finger to the company about keeping other sexes quiet.
From Miss Soma’s point of reference, this particular joke came from a foreign program titled Fiona and Fran. Two young sisters on a summer vacation from school. Their older sister keeps trying to find evidence of their shenanigans, such as wild, impossible inventions. It was still a kid’s show in this incarnation and included animals. Lab coat girl’s words wavered when she talked about it, briefly acknowledging that it was for little girls. Chika vehemently asserted that, where they came from, watching such things was perfectly fine for, “Grown men and women.”
Chika’s lips dropped hard when she realized what words she had just spoken. Misaki felt a sinking sensation too, while Namiko drew her hands up near her mouth and did her best to disguise her nervous alarm. She retained a vague but faint hope that all the weirdness with the translation methods would smack the incongruent word with a meaning that didn’t rock the boat.
Miss Soma eagerly nodded as she listened along and rocked her head. Then, came the word. It didn’t escape her attention. The active pen line of her mouth settled flat before dipping into a curious frown.
“Excuse me, but what does that mean? Right before you said women. It just sounded like a stray popping noise.”
Chika swallowed and grimaced. “I misspoke; I meant girls and women.”
Miss Soma pulled gently at her soft chin. “Didn’t seem like it to me. Here, I’ve actually got an old recorder I like to carry around with me because it’s so simple to just take down a random thought or save notes. Technology can be so fussy sometimes. Here…”
She pulled out a little handheld cassette tape recorder with a slender microphone poking out from the top. Miss Soma politely asked her to repeat exactly what she said. Chika looked around at the others but couldn’t think of any way out. Lab coat girl held down the record button and waited silently. Softly, Chika repeated, “Grown…men and women.”
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Soma clicked the recorder off and manually rewound it for several seconds. Loudly, the speaker burst out with, “SO MANY CALORIES! Stop eating those cookies!” A quick rush of red fluttered up the girl’s cheeks as she softly admitted, “Too far back. I could smack a duck for an almond cookie though. Here it is…”
She pressed a few more buttons and then played the recording.
“Grown… [POP] and women.”
Misaki squeezed back her lips calmly, but inside, she was asking herself, “What the heck was that?”
She had no idea what to say to the incontrovertible evidence before them that what Chika just said had somehow been censored. It had to be the company. No wonder they set things up the way they did. They cautioned them against mentioning human details that were unknown to this world. Those were the rules, but they didn’t make a huge deal of it. Franklin was so stressed about slipping up and getting into trouble. But it turned out that whatever they had done to them appeared to have established a hard censor against saying things they weren’t supposed to say. Misaki found this even more intrusive and horrifying than all the looming EEG nonsense from her employers. What on earth could they have put inside them?
And what were they gonna say to these girls? Miss Soma was paying close attention to their body language, which Misaki was sure left no ambiguity to their rattled shock. An overwhelming drawback of an anime-style body; the invisible artist painted all of the emotion clearly across their faces.
“Where’s Yasha?” The question slipped out of Namiko‘s mouth as she glanced around the room. Misaki had been preoccupied with Yuka and tending to her leg. She couldn’t remember seeing Yasha when they left the bathroom in the back. She’d been so tired though. And now, a fresh avalanche of concerns and thoughts felt far more important than whatever that chaotic, mercurial blonde conundrum was up to. She returned to the comfortable spot beside the screaming white whale and gently rubbed her eye. Considering how big they were, she half expected softball-sized nuggets of Sandman grit to sprinkle out, but what she could find actually seemed smaller and harder to see than usual. She avoided explicitly picking at her eyes. That had to be another act of rudeness she didn’t want to commit.
Haruka scanned the room and casually gestured with her arm half out and her palm flat. Misaki couldn’t see around the corner, but she surmised that was generally in the direction of the enclosed outdoor area. Yasha sat in a small, green patch with the bamboo shadowing her. Miss Soma folded her arms and glanced over there before asking, “Yasha, huh? I’m assuming… northern foreigner? Apologies if that sounds presumptuous, but the name reminds me of a general group of spirits in folklore. Probably coincidence. Yaksha. Demon gods. I don’t know them that well. I tend to just lump them in with oni. Point being, before I get sidetracked, I’m sure your friend and their name doesn’t mean any of that local stuff, but fair warning for her that other girls may shy away from her.”
Misaki didn’t know what to say either way about this notion. Folklore may well have inspired Yasha‘s name. Or she just threw it together and thought it sounded cool. Misaki reminded herself to skim through the folklore book she brought with her to see if it had any of this. Resolving that their travel companion hadn’t been spirited away, Miss Soma returned to the previous question: “Can you help me with what word made that pop sound? Oh, and goodness, I haven’t properly introduced myself. Soma Naoko. I am in my third year at the same school as Sasaki Yuka. Founder of the Scientific Studies Club. Before Haruka graduated, we used to hang around a lot. It was fun… I can tell you all the details of the Frog Incident.”
Haruka casually made an X in front of her chest by crossing her arms. Naoko responded with a quick head nod and a chopping arm motion. Both things clicked for Misaki, with vague recollections from instances in anime. Despite Haruka‘s request, Naoko mentioned, “Sometimes you just gotta stuff a frog down your clothes. For science. Also, for science, it would be much appreciated if you could help me understand this language gap. If it’s a very personal or cultural thing, I can drop it, but I have this hunch… My nose is a little itchy… that it’s something else.”
The trio kept quiet. Not that it would deter this science girl. They could dodge around it or ask for polite privacy, but the tenacious curiosity in Naoko’s bright eyes didn’t seem like it would give up so easily. Perhaps, she considered, it was a bad idea. Much like trying to say that their folklore revolves around UFOs and Bigfoot. She neglected Skinwalkers, for good reason, since they actually freaked Franklin out as opposed to the casual curiosities of the other set.
It would’ve been better to get Chika and Namiko on the same page before she admitted, “It’s a term from our world. I can’t think of an equivalent. Probably just a glitch or oversight in their attempts to translate the language barrier. Like a blank.” The deeper she got into the explanation, the more it sounded reasonable to her. Naoko silently focused on her until she was finished, then pulled out a small paper notebook to jot something down. She then scrutinized her own writing as though she had transcribed a hieroglyphic and was now attempting to decipher it.
Misaki‘s heart raced in her chest. What if she did figure it out? What if she learned that there was an entire swath of humanity that this world had never known or imagined? Before, Misaki would’ve shrugged, figuring it wasn’t a big deal. But that vision, that experience, felt so vividly real and painful. Dreams weren’t supposed to have pain, right? That was what woke you up. But she felt everything as if she were actually there. Still, she had no clue if those events were something the company might actually attempt if someone got out of line. But the mere prospect terrified her.