Yuri Worlds
[14] Similarities
Meanwhile, Haruka softly asked if anyone wanted more of that reddish tea. Naoko’s head turned when Haruka slipped back over to the kitchen. She stretched her slim nose up, as though preparing to be lifted and carried through the air on an exaggerated scent path. An invocation of cookies passed over, but Naoko shook her head and fanned a swift hand. “I already had three cookies earlier. Approximately 150 calories, so that’s a minimum of a half-hour walk to negate them. Probably gonna have to throw a large hill in there too. Anyway, that leads me to the critical, tantalizing question I can’t help but give voice to: Can you describe the word? Is there a sound that slides past the same glottal region? Could there be other reasons why nothing came out when you spoke? Again, if you find any of these questions offensive or bothersome, I will gladly withdraw them.”
Misaki wanted to jump on that offer. Just settle it like that and pivot to more important matters. And she was going to, when Chika stepped in. She urged that since she was the one who brought it up, it only seemed proper that the responsibility rested with her. She sat up high in the couch with her arms at her sides and as much hair out of her face as possible and began, “We have… an other, which is not a girl or woman in our culture. How to explain it….There are relationships and policies between different countries in this world, correct?”
Naoko nodded eagerly. “Yes! I mentioned up north, Masnova. There’s this conflict between them and a republic they used to have dominion over, and this cruel, nasty lady who was once with their secret police is now the supreme ruler.“
Chika winced and noted, “That doesn’t sound far removed from our world, unfortunately. I digress. And I’m not sure what exact point I intended to make with that. But I suppose you can think of this separation of girls and women and this other as being like these separate entities in your world.”
Naoko lifted her tan eyebrows and not only clutched her chin but laid a finger around her lips, clinging to her face as though she were worried that too much excitement might make it fly off. She rocked her knees and postulated, “This other you refer to… Are we talking different-sized ears, larger or smaller eyes, hair color or length, or other physical features? I ask because there are actually these groups of girls in our world that have non-human ears. Rabbit ears. Dog ears. Cat ears. At least, that’s the myth. Lost tribes of women who in generations past were slandered as being the progeny…of not human mothers.”
Chika bent forward on the couch and not only exclaimed that sounded cool but also seized the opportunity to focus on “progeny“. She carefully highlighted the differences between what Naoko knew and this other. Bigger muscles, flatter chests, and different hip shapes. And questioned what progeny meant in her world versus their own.
On this point, it was like Naoko suddenly dropped in age. Her mouth went flat, her face acquired the color of a flash sunburn, her shoulders tightened against her body, and her legs got so close and tight it was like they wanted to merge together into one. It seemed like a minor miracle that she didn’t topple over into an embarrassed heap right there. She meekly stammered out a few sounds and glanced over to Haruka for assistance, but she had her eyes shut and was drinking the longest sip of reddish tea.
Finally gathering together enough air and resolve, Naoko squeaked that, “There are books and other works that go into deep and specific detail about the human reproductive process. I may have a few stored in my library for purely academic purposes stored…somewhere, probably gathering a lot of cobwebs in the back. I have them. Umm…But a lot of weird notions. It sounds like, when you refer to this other of human nature, it’s some contraction of human. But that doesn’t make any sense. There is the term chuusei. Essentially, meaning in the middle of girlhood but also 'without'. But that would be like a doll or a blank figure in the shape of a girl but without any human traits. Like a flat rendering a little girl would attempt when first learning to draw. Is that where you’re going?”
Chika didn’t let this opportunity slip away. She bounced up from her seat with all the still uncomfortable rebounding involved and proclaimed, “YES! Exactly! Chuusei! That sounds exactly like what I’m getting at. There are grown women in our world and… that, which we have a term for, the people who organized our trip apparently don’t want us to say out loud here.”
Naoko quietly considered that with her arms folded and her forehead adding many pen lines of wrinkles. “Huh. Interesting. I wonder why they would be so secretive? Many years ago, when multiverse travel first arose, the government treated it like new trading partner opportunities. Girls in other worlds would send us so much money for our junk because our junk would be their valuables, and their money would be worth more than gold. Didn’t really pan out. Plenty of conspiracy theories popped up… All of which I heard from Nishikawa Bianka. Have you met her? You would know if you did.”
Misaki noted that Yuka made reference to her living in the neighborhood. She had a sister? Naoko took a deep breath and admitted, through a sigh, “Yeaaaah. Nishikawa Kosame. We used to date. Briefly. Still friends. If you met her, then you would also definitely remember the occasion. She likes to dress a little weird. Her sister too. But Kosame more so. Bianka… she was born here, despite how her name sounds. Her name evokes a spy working for the government. Which is ironic considering she doesn’t trust anyone in the government. Like that family cartoon set in the southern prefectures. The one where the name kind of sounds like ‘friend’. The ladies get together and drink in front of their house. They have really strong accents. I don’t know why I’m going on about this when you’re from another universe, and it’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of it. Feel free to check it out while you’re here. I like it, even though it’s silly."
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
That brought an exuberant giggle from Chika, who was the first of them to get the reference. She got even more amusement out of envisioning the show, as it had to exist as a cartoon in this universe. Deeply immersed in Internet culture, she broke down and carefully translated a myriad of references for Naoko to comprehend.
The poor girl’s brain practically looked like it was melting. She absorbed what she could and resolved, with a hand up, that imagining the characters in any other form would be way too much. But the possibilities excited her. Misaki wondered if they had tantalized her enough that she might want to travel in their world someday. She always found it strange how rarely Travel Anywhere discussed visitors coming to their world. She had to wonder if the issue of Melting was involved. Or perhaps reasons that the company kept secret.
Whatever tension existed in the wake of the censored pronoun slip evaporated, especially as Haruka invited Naoko to join their game and partake in some cookies made earlier. Almond cookies. Naoko softly whimpered as she gazed longingly at them. She then made several groaning noises before resolving that maybe she could just add a few more hills to climb.
On the topic of hills, Namiko asked about trails connected to what she heard about a local shrine. The Akechi Chiyo-ni Shrine was the nearest and where Maharu was a shrine maiden. Despite being considered close, Naoko remarked that it was quite a walk to get to the entrance and had some of the sharpest inclines in the area. Now that, she resolved, was sure to work off her cookie debt.
The game on the television was the local version of Mario Kart, which was remarkably close to the original in title and mechanics. Misaki lamented that she slept through a game like this. The details of her dream had fading edges, even more nebulous than her sight while experiencing it. Still, there wasn’t a great magnitude of things to remember or forget.
Restrained and in pain, searching for an escape, running into what appeared to be Haruka sprawled out on the floor, then being captured and wounded. Even though she made a vague reference to lab coats, she suspected the others had already dismissed it as a random bad dream. Misaki yearned to do the same. Just cast it aside along with all the other weirdness. But Haruka saw something scurrying around; Yuka’s leg wasn’t discolored because of nothing, and someone called them with a warning. She was also certain that Haruka echoed that warning. But how to ask the girl whether she said something before she went to sleep without seeming strange? What would it even mean if she did?
The cheerful music of the select screen, along with a wide array of Nintendo characters that none of the trio had ever imagined outside of fan creations online, drew her attention away from this wellspring of worries. Later. Deal with it later. Enjoy your vacation in the meantime. Take in the quiet miracle of a world fashioned and run by tireless art.
It was fortunate that the courses weren’t massively different from the ones the three of them were used to playing. So many subtle details threw them off though. The handling options and the alternate options for heart items. The series contained a much greater, although still playful, focus on romantic elements. The bad girl queen of the Koopas pined much more for the hero and treated the princess character like a BFF. It remained at the same ambiguous level, but Chika delighted in the prospect of this series being essentially an all-girl harem. Misaki recalled that many in Gal’s fandom would’ve been over the moon to see stuff like this of official release quality.
The trio was also delighted to learn that the movie adaptation, the most recent one, was still playing in theaters. It was at one of the first weekend showings that Guy revealed to him and Dwight that they would be visiting a real animated world, courtesy of this sponsorship from Travel Anywhere. The themed dishes and drinks at the prestigious local theater vigorously spun around Franklin’s stomach for the entire evening after that announcement.
He wasn’t consumed by fear, not then, but rather high-speed anxiety about everything involved, what it would take to get ready, and whether he could even comprehend the idea of being a living, breathing anime girl in a world that lived and breathed beyond anything he had ever seen. It still made him a little bit sick, but that was just a Franklin thing. Misaki couldn’t help but imagine some sort of film festival that involved the exact same movie but as created by filmmakers in a dozen different worlds. She could see this movie again in a way that no one she had ever met before had experienced.
Like the apex of lost media. She knew a wide variety of specific examples back in college for an elective film class. The original version of an Akira Kurosawa film, a bunch involving Lon Chaney, the possibilities of so many Stanley Kubrick works, and, of course, a single negative of Citizen Kane that survived Hearst’s purge. Some back home claimed to remember seeing the film, despite the fact it was destroyed so long ago, but they traveled in the same circles as those with elaborate conspiracy theories about Quantum Helix and Travel Anywhere. Franklin could understand skepticism about traveling to different universes, but it required immensely powerful and complicated technology. Not falling asleep and having a dream that you saw some movie that didn’t exist.
Those deserved to be shoved in the back with similarly crazy claims that Nelson Mandela actually survived until 2013. Even Chika once made a quip about whether he hung out with an immortal, alien Elvis Presley.