Yuri Worlds
[25] Class
Did Yuka know? If her presence meant so much to the girl, then her grandmother had to have said something. It wasn’t her business, even though the old lady expected her to find the right moment and the right words. At higher speeds, the cacophony within the car, around, and beneath it, blurred away to an anonymous, tolerable hum.
The high school was easy to see from a distance as it stood three stories tall with a bright, alabaster sheen. Several large Sakura trees flanked the sidewalk along the front. As they had been warned and anticipated due to the timing of their trip, the full splendor of the trees in pink bloom appeared to have passed. Nevertheless, the artistic detail and natural beauty with just the lingering traces of blossoms were still enough to inspire awe, along with scattered wilting stretches of pink scattered across the cement.
They should’ve been liberated from the crazed clutches of the truck, but the awkward latch belts and the sinking softness of the seats still ensnared them. Yuka and Maharu showed them the way by pushing in on their belts and then rolling towards the door. Yuka accomplished it with a minimum of fuss, shifting and ducking while Maharu whipped her body around and seemed like she was starting the signature move of a certain cerulean hedgehog. Each of the trio landed dizzy and discombobulated, but they were finally free. Their driver lingered to make sure everyone was fine and give a sheepish apology for the roughness of the ride.
A soft and soothing melody issued from one of the overhead speakers as they made their way to the front door. Shifting from shoes to slippers was approaching old hat. Still surprising was Yuka changing into a spare uniform from her locker. It looked a little tighter than the other one. She snuck the skirt underneath and then unfurled the rest once she had her top on. She didn’t leave enough skin or time for anyone else to look away. Maharu’s change appeared as a blurry combination of spinning pizza dough and binding a package.
The hallways and spaces looked lifted from a big-budget school anime. It was a little thing she glossed over before, but the wall textures not only held their details upon fine inspection but seemed to acquire even more the closer any of them peered.
Girls just walked everywhere; they existed in every single corner of the school. They all wore the same uniform as Maharu and Yuka. Girls of every type with a rainbow kaleidoscope of hair colors, style quirks, subtlety in their flesh tones, and distinct body language. Their clothes separated them, a gap that Misaki found herself wishing she could bridge to overcome the obvious glances of curiosity in their direction. She doubted that anything approaching loaner uniforms was possible, and purchasing a set, just for the sake of some uncomfortable moments or as a useless souvenir, seemed pointless.
Reflecting on that, she had to wonder what would happen when she brought the uniform back through the Travel Anywhere equivalent of customs. Considering they had managed to convert their possessions to fit in with the rest of the world, she felt a subtle disappointment that the uniform would likely be leeched of its art when crossing over. Her dress would have to suffice, no matter how much it made her stand out.
Before they could join in the cleanup, Yuka took them over to administration. The staff member she wanted to talk to wasn’t present, and the woman available looked quite stern and older through her frowns than even Miss Okura. Leaning on the prospect of simply sightseeing wasn’t a good idea, so Yuka emphasized that the three of them were visitors from a different school here on a technical, school-visiting matter. The three of them kept quiet, and even Maharu played up this spin by offering open questions about the fighting spirit of their school sports. She didn’t expect an answer and simply spoke as a cute distraction.
The administrator pushed her glasses up and sharply scrutinized the entire group. She scolded them about the importance of arranging an official appointment and a set time for visiting. But she ultimately didn’t turn them away and printed out several green passes they were to wear around campus after they signed and gave their contact information in a large black book. Following Chika‘s lead, they put down a messy and mostly scrambled version of their real home address.
If anyone had a problem with that, Chika figured they could just give the company's address. The crotchety lady clung to the book and looked over the top at each of them, as though squinting at the text would provide a secret message unraveling their duplicity. Somehow, what they wrote, despite being rendered in regular English, didn’t raise any red flags from that alone. Namiko had to resist the temptation to give a joke location referencing one of her favorite shows. This tiny skirting of the law made Misaki‘s heart pulse again, but compared to the terrors of the truck, it didn’t seem like much to worry about. If they didn’t pass, they could just walk back to the house and have some tea. Fortunately, the administrator didn’t pursue any of her suspicions.
Furious activity played out in the hallways and against the windows of the school. Girls shook out old, dusty mats, sprinted down the halls with cleaning cloths, shoved buckets, and wiped down windows. Despite how different they looked from everyone else, it didn’t take much effort to join in. Chika got grabbed to tidy up a spare room with her hair swiftly tied back. Namiko earned looks of wide-eyed surprise from her rounded, frontal defensive perimeter. Not good for a sponge, but the rest of her was eager to help. As a skilled custodian, she immediately went to work, giving casual but helpful advice and moving girls around for efficiency.
It wasn’t long before she earned sincere, reverential sentiment from all the girls. Some activities suffered with the exaggerated dimensions of her body, but she didn’t let that slow her cleaning down. That energy was deeply appreciated and soon swelled into a competitive streak with Maharu, who did a surprising amount of happy screaming.
Once it all settled into a routine, Yuka grabbed Misaki, pulled her away from organizing books, and asked her to follow. They snuck slowly along a side hallway, past sports equipment and a flight of stairs, arriving at a linking bridge between the main building and one on the side. Yuka explained that her club room was over here. And she wanted to show it off.
They passed several rooms with sliding doors, exactly like Misaki was expecting from the margins of a multitude of anime programs. The room in question was after one with a piano and several woodwinds in storage. She pulled aside the door to present it. The room was completely dark, blacked out on all sides. Misaki took a step back, but Yuka pushed forward and smacked the light switch. Girlish screams burst out.
“My eyes! Oh, Goddesses! My eyes!” Sprawled out on the floor with a black laptop on her thighs was a distressed blonde girl with bright green eyes consumed by a vast pupil painfully shrinking in the light. She wore a loose black hoodie with a green drawstring. “Too much natural light!” She covered her face with an arm. “I was just about to set up a Faraday cage. Ouch…”
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”Please, don’t do that. You should be cleaning with everyone else or with the computer club. What are you doing in our room in the dark? Do I even want to know?”
The girl on the ground with a laptop shielded her eyes for a few moments before clearing her throat and remarking, “You should want to know. Everyone should want to know what’s actually going on in the world. I was surfing the intangible ether that surrounds every living being. The tether and the bonds pressed tight around life. I shut out all distractions but the goddess voice calling from the depths. And I was about to make my deepest level of meditation complete when you arrived.”
Yuka turned on a second light towards the middle of the room. The strange girl flinched but didn’t say anything about it. Hands on her hips, Yuka asked, “I just want to make sure you realize that a Faraday cage would block a signal.”
The girl snapped her fingers. “I knew you would say that. But here’s the beauty of it: The cage is for me. Only around me. Though I may be trapped inside it, in actuality, I would be liberated. Though connected to my source of information, my mind and body fly free.” Somehow, she managed to make that sound logically impassioned yet quite unhinged with her fluttering tone and wide hand gestures.
This new girl wore a wide-billed black hat that matched the curtains taped up along the windows behind her. Her eyes were seemingly back to normal at this point, with tiny glinting pupils at the center of her jade irises. They were framed by sharp lashes and dense black brush lines that cranked up their intensity to the level that Dwight often worried about with his most natural expression. Her hair framed her head, sleek and bright, standing in for her lowered hood. Below, she wore deep green, clingy tights. Her shape, made vaguely ambiguous by her baggy top, still didn’t provide any competition for Namiko but stuck out more than most. Her feet were bare but also strikingly dirty, as though she crawled through mud worse than what the truck clambered over.
“Okay,” Yuka answered. “But can you do all that somewhere else?”
The blonde clung to her laptop, responding, “This location forms the northernmost point of an equilateral triangle connecting directly to the shrine and my bedroom. The spirits offer the greatest opportunity for deep connection. Natural harmonies. Something freaky is going on, and we need to investigate it with all the tools at our disposal. Forces—dark forces—occupy the fundamental fibers of our world. They want to suck our energy dry. Dark spirits. Slender, pale, emaciated girls clad in inky black suits with sinister smiles permanently etched on their faces.”
Misaki noticed a shift in Yuka’s demeanor at that last comment. She tightened her jaw and seemed genuinely rattled. She took a slow breath and asked, “Where are you getting that from? Energy draining dark girls?”
It seemed like the blond was about to pontificate in the same fashion as before, but Yuka lowered her arms and leveled a stare. The weird computer girl twisted her hands a few ways and answered, “It’s just random forum stuff. Never any proof, but it freaks me out. Usually about our trading partners from other universes. Those in charge—the ripe princesses, the plump kitties—don't worry about the little girls. No deal that sounds so good doesn’t have strings attached. They’ve got to be taking something more from us, and there are these… Passing reports of dark creatures that look like nasties in their employ. That’s honestly all I’ve got, but it’s still enough to really worry me. I just want to dig deep and figure out what’s going on. And there’s a new version of this game that dropped this morning, and I wasn’t able to download it, and the signal is it umm… it’s just really good. Right in this room and none of you ever really use the Wi-Fi.”
Shrugging off concern, Yuka huffed and peeled off the taped up black-out cloth. Misaki wasn’t sure what to say. She vaguely recognized that description as dovetailing with meme games from years ago, and random stuff Franklin sometimes caught on YouTube about people and entities with black eyes and sinister smiles. But that was the kind of spooky stuff that always popped up. She had no idea if there was some spirit story or yokai-like figure in this culture. The folklore book she brought probably wouldn’t help too much, but it might provide at least a framework for guessing what legends existed in this world. She’d have to delve into it more later.
She had to ask. Struggling with exactly the right phrasing she wanted, Misaki folded her hands over her stomach and asked the blonde girl, “Have you heard any mention of, like, a small furry creature thing that is scary and black like that but a puff ball of fur with needles thinner than sea urchin? Like a very nasty soot spirit?” Yuka flashed Misaki a quick look, as though to communicate, ‘Don’t encourage her’.
The blonde squeezed her mouth with a wiggling finger and did some concentrated reflection before shaking her head and shrugging. That just sounded to her like creatures that might occasionally show up in horror or speculative fiction shows. But lacking anything concrete to share, she immediately postulated that it sounded like exactly the type of horrifying things that the government and these corporate trading entities from other universes might experiment with and unleash upon their unsuspecting world. It occurred to Misaki right then that she wasn’t certain if the girl knew she was a visitor to this world. Mentioning it didn’t sound like the best idea.
Instead, she realized that they hadn’t been introduced and went ahead with offering up her name in the polite fashion, with her fake family name first and her given name following. The conspiracy-hungry blonde didn’t immediately offer up her identity, but rather narrowed her eyes and scrutinized Misaki sharper than the administrator earlier.
“This is the Nishikawa Bianka I mentioned, Kosame‘s little sister,” Yuka noted, preempting whatever the blonde was thinking of saying. Bianka frowned sharply and lamented being exposed. She struggled to wipe away that name, claiming furtively that it was a deep cover alias, and it was preferable to refer to her by her secret codename, “Chrysanthemum. Because mums the word.“ Misaki got the impression that this girl, while having some interesting thoughts, tended to envision her life and every event around her as having very deliberate, dramatic theme music. She also recalled that there was some sort of syndrome that popped up in anime, not too far from whatever the heck this was. Calling it delusions of grandeur sounded rude though.
And she didn’t want to immediately and completely denounce the stuff that this girl was saying since plenty of peculiar and unusual events had followed them before they arrived and all day long.