Yuri Worlds

[2] Anticipation

As soon as Guy said that, their waitress emerged from behind the kitchen with their entrées. Whether she had heard enough of their conversation to piece together any context seemed unclear from her body language. Franklin could tell that Dwight was chomping at the bit to release a huge non-sequitur but just managed to resist the urge.

Once the waitress was away, Franklin carefully asked, “Sister? I thought you were going with Uehara for a surname. Chika umm…Uehara Chika. Wasn’t it registered?”

Guy added a sprinkle of pepper to his chicken and shrugged. “There’s all sorts of reasons why siblings might have different last names. Also, nothing is final until Monday. What do you think?”

Franklin‘s head felt like it was the unwilling host to a crazed electron cloud. Thinking just wasn’t possible. Rather, a frantic mosaic of half-remembered songs along with the most recent serenade took up residence. His travel form had gone through eight iterations. Redhead to start with spunk and a massive amount of hair. Then came the blonde elfin girl with subtly pointed ears. He spent several days refining the first draft of the purple-haired girl. Her body was festooned with light, rainbow jewelry. That was followed by the tangerine skater girl clad in hoodies and some attitude. The blue-haired iteration of Guy’s original had a wind-wafted, ethereal goddess style. Adventure girl redhead returned with copious tweaks before he basically melded blue and red.

Misaki. She’d really grown on him—stronger than any stray daydream or tabletop character creation. Her eyes projected a subtle but striking shade of dark raspberry that complimented her hair. While Chika’s luminous grape locks flared and fanned their color tone, Misaki appeared as though she had a simple, short, neck-clinging swoop of black hair. But when the right light caught it, according to his design, it showcased a striking shade of purple that practically sparkled.

She was going to have rather skinny but surprisingly long legs. Franklin fussed with her bust early on, barely letting it poke through a gray, long-sleeve cotton top. Dwight provided persistent encouragement, until he wasn’t quite sure at this point how big she was supposed to be. Misaki was absolutely bigger than Chika, but putting an actual label on it eluded him. Something else also occurred to him.

“You’re eight months older than me. How would you be my little sister?”

Guy placed his slim, soft hand with flesh-tone painted fingernails on Franklin‘s shoulder and assured him, “Dude, it’s pretend. Besides, at our age, that’s practically within the margin of error. But, if you want to rationalize it, we can explain it away with some passage of time disconnect between the two worlds. The point is… Now you have to nail down your girl so that I can finish the details on mine. Deal?” Guy put out his hand with a smile. Franklin eagerly shook it, even though he fretted about whether it was too sweaty.

Between eating his salad and lamenting how many rainbow streak marks his fingers left on the phone screen, Franklin struggled to really figure out the details. It wasn’t as though he wanted a bust that reached into the stratosphere like Dwight. Internally, he remembered every fragmentary comment that orbited around him in older workplaces and schools about back pains and support.

He considered himself decently experienced when it came to navigating the information and myths of the Internet. Throwing his alter ego descriptively into an AI helped but also confused, since her limbs often appeared grotesquely longer than what he was looking for. Too many times, he had to go with his first hunch. By the time supper was finished, he actually had the closest thing to what he would consider a final draft of Misaki.

She was oddly positioned in a concrete pipe, as though she often hung out and played in construction zones. He used the app to upload everything before his doubts could sneak in. After that, it was just a quiet sense of resignation that all other possibilities were cleared away for this one. Neither of his friends could tell much difference between this version and any other recently, but they celebrated that he had finally decided. Franklin was the only one with leftovers, not quite getting up the enthusiasm to finish his salad.

They walked back in a circuitous loop, stopping by a nearby market to pick up some groceries to take back. Dwight shook his head that the small bookstore he used to frequent over here had been replaced with a candy shop. He still got a sample with nougat.

Franklin reflected. He was glad that he was going with his closest friends to this strange other world, which managed to keep a consistent population despite having only girls. Just one of those things they hadn’t figured out yet.

One of his earliest memories involved Guy. He lived in the old house with his parents. The physical details of its layout twisted and contorted with confusion and being a child. It felt like someone took the features of the later house and mirrored them. So many times, he would embarrass himself by expecting a room to the left when he would just bonk into an unexpected wall.

He was sickly as a child and required a lady to watch him in the afternoons to make sure he didn’t have anything bad happen. Then came Guy.

His curly, brown hair was just as long when he was little. The kid at the door introduced themselves as Gee and beamed an exuberant smile, the sweat on their body sparkling in the sunlight. For some reason, Franklin, at that age, deduced that this was a neighborhood girl. He barely understood anything when it came to the differences between boys and girls except that girls tended to not want to even bother to play with him while boys played too hard and left him in the dust. But this girl, Gee, eagerly wanted to play with him.

It didn’t matter if it was the old, dusty solar monopoly board game in the front room, the old video games on the television, or just rolling a ball back and forth on the den carpet. She was all for it. Whenever he made a mistake in a roll, she leaned over and fixed it for him, even though it often times would have benefited her. She also asked him to help her with different video game tips, even though it was clear she was more experienced than him. And she took responsibility for whenever the ball knocked something over.

Quietly and softly, Franklin realized in retrospect that he was falling in love, even though the parameters and meaning of that thought eluded him. Then, his mother checked in on them and revealed he’d been mistaken the whole time. This was a boy from down the block. The youngest of the Horner family.

A sinking sadness saturated Franklin’s thoughts as he parsed what that meant. Every notion inside his head splintered like a bridge falling into a river in the middle of the night. They still played a lot, with ’Gee’ being one of the few kids around who even bothered to come over. But instead of that bright, beaming exuberance of that first meeting, Franklin‘s thoughts were reserved and measured.

They went to the same elementary school together, and Guy made sure to sit in the same groups with him. Franklin had issues standing up for himself for even the smallest things except when it came to Gee. A big kid once pushed Guy to the floor because he didn’t like that he brought a teddy bear and a pink scarf to school. Franklin barreled into him with everything he had and knocked an entire bookshelf over him. For weeks, no one in the class talked to Franklin, except for Gee.

It wasn’t long before they met Dwight. He had been in another class, but they transferred him because of “behavioral issues”. What that meant was calling out teachers when they were wrong, pummeling people who bullied others, and making himself the regular butt of jokes with fart noises. The three of them immediately got along great. Despite how hesitant Franklin felt to hang around other people, he always made sure to find time for Dwight and Gee.

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That was until college, when it seemed like they scattered to the winds. They kept in contact online and through text messages but didn’t talk nearly as much as they used to. Just another example of friendships that sadly died on the vine. Or so it seemed.

Franklin found an apartment on the edge of town after his parents moved away. He spent most of his time alone in it, with only casual acquaintances noticing him. In the job he had at the time, he ran tech support for several companies through a client. Dealing with problems was far easier than dealing with the nervous uncertainty of regular life. And so he thought it would continue… except Dwight and Gee moved back to the area and wanted to move in with him. They pooled their resources and bought and refurbished one of the old houses near where Gee and Franklin grew up. Amongst his friends, Franklin felt like his heart beat again and his soul could shimmer, even though such silly notions were ones he kept to himself.

“Finally, dude, you settled your tits,” Dwight celebrated as they made their way out of the shopping plaza. That peculiar comment caught the attention of one of the workers, but she didn’t say anything about it.

Back at the car, Dwight got in the driver’s seat while Gee was also up front. Franklin stretched out in the back, and their shared Spotify playlist drifted through the speakers. Exhaustion started to hit Franklin. He didn’t sleep much last night, even though this wasn’t the day of the trip. But scheduling and setting everything up made him anxious. Before they arrived, his mind raced with all sorts of frantic, negative possibilities while his guts squeezed tight. Coming down from all that left him feeling achy, especially his right shoulder. Leaning against the car door gave him some incidental vibration massage.

On the way back home, they casually chatted about the local events in the other world that would be available. Hanami was at its tail end despite the time disconnect, and summer fireworks festivals were still a ways off, but they were right on time for their equivalent of Golden Week. Franklin worried that they might miss all the good stuff, but they had a packed itinerary. Castles, hikes, shrines, and parks. Just like Japan, but actually an alternate version of where they lived. Somewhere strange but familiar. Much greener than this stretch of earth had any right to be.

Franklin looked out the window at the dusty expanse, briefly colored by recent, early spring rains. The exit signs on the overpasses were discolored and illegible with white and red graffiti. Two weeks was a lot, but perhaps not enough. Soon they pulled into the side drive in front of the attached garage. Dwight was still repairing some loose shingles in the back and recently replaced the rusting, unused mailbox out front with a rotating wind toy. Gee put on his reusable facemask because the tree on the side was already dropping dusty pollen. Dwight had work in the evening to get ready for, and so did he, even though Franklin didn’t have to go anywhere.

The long central hallway branched off into different rooms like the trunk of a tree turned inside out. After the groceries were put away and some tidying up was done, Franklin crawled into his bed with an alarm set on his phone for exactly ninety minutes. It was easy for him to close his eyes but hard to shut off his brain.

Elements of the songs from the trip and fragments of lyrics from weeks ago spun around like a furious tempest. He tried his best to stamp that down, but new, irreconcilable thoughts rose in their place. The looming reality of becoming Misaki for nearly two weeks simultaneously aroused, terrified, and paralyzed his thoughts. No matter how much he tried to shut all the craziness down, sleep eluded him. Lifting up his phone with its too-short charging cord still attached, Franklin soon found that Guy was back streaming on Twitch.

The walls and foam provided enough insulation that the echoing was minimal. Gee had his face made up and his lips accentuated. He had on a cute gamer graphic top and bright skirt with silky, cat-ear headphones and a languid yawn that Franklin could sympathize with.

Franklin used to be a mod for the channel, but he tended to miss far too many comments while getting caught up watching Gee, or rather Gal Hotner, as Guy adopted as a handle. Gal delighted in confusing his audience. Pronouns often shuffled from one stream to the next or were decided by games. Franklin had his own thoughts about where Guy may be at with his or her identity. It didn’t matter, so long as his friend was happy.

At this point, any efforts at salvaging a nap seemed pointless. Listening to Gal talk about a wide range of stream-of-consciousness topics while booting up a recent RPG farming game, Franklin fixed his sheets. He watered several little plants in the corner just enough and considered sneaking in a game too before it was time to start work. In the most awkward napping position possible, with his legs slowly sliding across the dense carpet, Franklin’s eyes drifted shut. They felt achingly dry, especially the left one. Thinking about where he had some eyedrops, he only vaguely recognized a sound like something rustling.

Calm and quiet pervaded the space until a sharp sound right at his feet. His eyes managed to flare open for an instant with confused alarm at what he was seeing. At first, the strange mass appeared reminiscent of several shocking images posted online of black pin mold. Only the startling apparition wasn’t rooted to a spot but instead shifted and darted towards his ankle.

Snapping back in shock, Franklin scurried across the covers and nearly to the pillows. Only a vague feeling like a touch from a syringe needle gave him any palpable connection to what he glimpsed. He stayed back for several frantic heartbeats without breath before carefully checking over the side. Nothing.

Not even a hint of a shadow showed on the carpet. Nothing appeared that could easily be labeled as the source of such a strange apparition. No pile of black socks slightly fallen over or any other suspicious laundry. He poked the floor with the bug zap racket a few times before resolving that nothing was there. Putting his feet back down was a nervous next step. They strangely ached, but so did his right shoulder.

Checking in the bathroom, he found that nothing about his body appeared harmed or even discolored. No random bruises. Vague fears of Travel Anywhere unleashing dark and unknown terrors from between worlds on humanity returned to his head. The wild, unfounded questions of a dozen online commentators. Travel Anywhere started out many years ago as a tiny subsidiary of the Quantum Helix Corporation, the first group in the world to crack inter-dimensional multiverse travel. Oddly, they once owned a division that sold bathroom fixtures, but that recently shut down. The government still wanted to talk to them about their procedures for importing and exporting goods and products. Franklin shook each leg a few times, even though there was clearly nothing there.

He told himself that no weird carpet monsters snuck through the travel portal and followed him all the way here. It would’ve had to piggyback on the car or run really fast. And why him? He wasn’t anyone—certainly not anyone worth being pursued by strange creatures. Despite all he told himself, he still felt disconcerted and jumbled. But he didn’t have time for such worries.

Work was waiting. The last day of work before their vacation.