Yuri Worlds

[31] Blood

Misaki stayed in the bathroom area long enough to become fully aware of Namiko’s steamy pontoon relief, as her friend termed it. Namiko made several playful riffs on macho, masculine figures from television and film, which delighted Misaki and encouraged her to linger once she had her new clothes on. They were probably reaching the borderline of too much noise and not being reticent. But Misaki needed a distraction after the existential stress of dealing with the wristband in the tub.

Namiko spoofed manly men so well, but Dwight also taught Franklin how being manly should be. He didn’t need to shake off Guy’s dainty hand. A man was confident in himself and projected that to others. Dwight had nothing to prove. He didn’t protect Guy and Franklin to show off his muscles. No need to chug beer or get swole. He cried. Sometimes a lot. In his own way, Guy was confident as a man too. And he was confident in his girl persona. Franklin just didn’t have all that in him. And Misaki grappled with it.

Who was Misaki? Before this day rolled out before them, Franklin would’ve frowned at such a question. Misaki was just this girl he was going to pretend to be for the sake of convenience. Nothing deeper than that. But the way she invaded what he considered his life left him with so much uncertainty. The flower girl thing. The name switch.

Lighthearted Dwight antics helped her smile more, but behind that, she could still feel anchors of concern. Her still damp hair was saturated by lingering sweat. Chika rummaged through her bags while sitting with her legs folded. She smiled but just shared a wave and a yawn. At some point, she fiddled with one of her better cameras that came with her and started a proper video.

“Howdy, Hotner faithful! This shouldn’t be the first clip. We’re already a little ways into Tuesday technically with the whole not time dilation weirdness. I can hear the wind outside picking up again. Here I am, living my most unusual anime girl life. It’s a vibe so far, and it's an absolute mood to be stuck this way for the next couple of days. I hope I don’t have to change the ISO. Looks good...”

She then proceeded to give a light gloss of events from the day, focusing on how tired she felt waking up. Like a robot. And how disconcerting it was on the other side, and then trying to get her bearings in the city. She gave a cheerful, light mention of their host and her family. And then proceeded chronologically through their journey, touching upon the side effects with a vague analogy of cryo-sleep from sci-fi. She celebrated the altered but still familiar video games and her hopes to partake in more and adequately document their differences.

Chika gave detailed thanks to the company, everyone she could think of offhand, and encouragement to keep watching before she settled into her outro. Shifting modes, Chika casually checked with Misaki if she was forgetting anything. All the brain cells she had available for the task of reflecting on the past day suddenly fled in fear. The only topic Misaki could think of to offer up was some mention of the food.

Chika perked up and flared a mischievous grin. She went into aching, evocative detail about their meals and made a note to include inserts with visuals. Before she could add anything else, her head drowsily dipped and snapped back up. The camera nearly flopped out of her hands, but she managed to catch it. Misaki didn’t need to say anything. Chika went back to drying her massive expanse of hair.

Namiko soon rejoined them with smiles and a huge towel doing its best to keep her hair from dripping. The trio burned off their final waves of laughter and energetic reflections before their beds called them. Yasha made subdued sounds around the nearby bathroom before stopping by briefly to gather her things. As promised earlier, she made her bed in the tea room.

Plans to stay up and chat soon faded into the all-consuming comfort of their covers. Misaki managed a mini nap before tiredly finding the room dark and several stray hairs sucked into her mouth. Peeling them out wasn’t too gross, but she washed up in the bathroom anyway. A calm darkness settled around the house. She had no idea if it was early or late. No expected specters crossed her path. No surreal visions of Haruka popping up again. But the wristband still bothered her.

Sprawled out in bed with the covers attempting to blunt all sensations, her wrist pinged like a raw wound being jabbed at by fine needles. It was more annoying than excruciating. Having crossed the threshold of taking it off once, a second time didn’t seem so scary. But she would be asleep with it off. Surely someone would see. Clearly, the risks were too great for all those hours.

She thought about all that but still did it, like peeling off a Velcro strip clinging to her flesh. The world didn’t explode. But her hand wasn’t discolored either. She wrapped the naked limb in a dense supply of blankets, knowing full well that nervous shifting and drifting would swiftly undo that bulkhead. It was something at least, and it was enough of an excuse to let her sleep.

With everything that had befallen them and the richly strange environment, strange, special, and unsettling dreams seemed inevitable. But there was nothing. Nothing she could remember, at least. Just a warm, bright void tickling her senses. And the sharp edits of dark room moments gingerly fading to morning.

When wakefulness finally, begrudgingly arrived, she discovered her body awkwardly bent against the pillow. The others were already up. It was just her in the bedroom. No, there was someone else. Yuka sat beside her bed with a strangely familiar book open in her lap. It was like she was preparing to read her a bedtime story. That made no sense.

“What…time?”

It took a moment for Yuka to react to Misaki’s roughly mumbled question. She seemed entranced by the pages.

“Oh! It’s early. Your companions went with my moms for morning calisthenics at a little park not too far from the train station. We tried to wake you, but you kept snoozing. Sorry. I'm also sorry I couldn’t help but take a peek at the books you brought with you. Some of them are so weird. I don’t know how to parse this set of terms. HE…HIM…HIS… Are they related to the chuusei? Is that just a way of referring to them? This is so cool!”

Those pronouns hit Misaki’s brain like a hard rain drumbeat drill. The secret was out. Wait! Her wristband! She’d left it off overnight. Where was it? Did it do translation for her? It couldn’t. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have understood what Yuka was saying. It had to be somewhere nearby, a harsh, foul lump clinging to her side, probably pressed into her back.

“I love this part!” Yuka gushed, not noticing Misaki’s growing distress. “Reminds me of Inugami. I assume this means jigoku. This poor puppy though. A guardian, a tireless protector. Making sure the living and the dead stay where they need to be. Day in and day out. Faithful and loyal. And it’s called a hellhound, a monster. But in this art… it’s not growling; it’s crying. All alone to do the toughest job. It…he…if I read this right…is a good dog. Isn’t that so cool? I wish I could give him head scratches. Sure, it looks scary, but even the most ferocious thing can have the gentlest spirit.”

Too much going on. So many thoughts she couldn’t cobble together into anything rational. This had to be another dream. A nightmare of upsetting the rational balance.

“Why…you’re reading…my books?“ Misaki asked, her brain still too sluggish to produce anything more coherent.

Yuka looked up from her reading and offered a sheepish expression. She closed the book and gently caressed its leathery cover. “I didn’t mean to pry. I just saw Miss Yamane had this massive book out with this really cool cover. Tentacles everywhere! So spooky and such strange ideas. Creepy things that you can’t even think about without going crazy. That’s so wild. I figured, you know, since it’s all fake stories… I think. It wouldn’t be inappropriate to learn. If I know more about the culture you come from, then I can better entertain your group with common perspectives. Doesn’t that make sense? And you talked about UFOs and big, hairy creatures being so important, and I just wanted to know more so we could share our stories with one another.”

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Yuka wore as bad a poker face as any Franklin clung to. Her brown eyes darted about like pinballs, reaching for the high score. She was hunting down a reason and a context that fought to get away from her. Awareness slowly materialized inside Misaki‘s head as she rolled around on the cushion, searching for her wristband. It was under the heaviest pile of blankets, sprawled out like a shard of glass. Her wrist didn’t hurt anymore, and there were no returning blemishes.

With a frown, Yuka asked, “What is that?”

Misaki glanced up with her own look of concern. “This? The black strip? It’s a wristband. We’re supposed to… the company wants us to wear them all the time as identification. Mine just came off overnight.”

Yuka pulled the book on world folklore from Misaki‘s bag close to her chest and continued to stare at the stretched wristband. “That’s weird. I mean… I feel like I’ve seen it before. Were you wearing it yesterday?”

Answering simply, Misaki told her, “All day long. Did you not notice it?”

Scooting slightly closer, Yuka took a breath and concluded, “I guess not. But I don’t know how. Did we talk about them?“

Thinking back, it seemed surprisingly fuzzy for just a few hours ago, but Misaki concluded that the clerk at the shop had noticed it and seen them as visitors. The purpose of the wristband was to distinguish them. It was strange that she could recall its color being more of a slate gray compared to the current obsidian. Wait. Ayame!

She mentioned how Ayame had questions about the wristband and probed it. This immediately triggered a reaction in Yuka. She remembered that. Ayame had been aware of the wristband, and when she brought it up, Yuka felt conscious of it as well. She hadn’t said much about the object. Yeah, travelers wore it. That made sense to her, but it felt like it slipped her mind the moment she looked away from Misaki‘s wrist.

“I should probably put it back on,” Misaki concluded, holding onto the edge of the strange wristband that she was certain was and should’ve been jet black and a light gray. Yuka nodded to herself and cleared her throat. “I don’t wanna get you in trouble with the company or anything. I’m sorry about reading yours and your friend’s books. I’m just so curious about your world and what it’s like compared to mine. I have so many crazy questions in my head. What does this wristband do anyway? It looks like a mini electronic ink reader printed on old celluloid film.”

The band slipped around her wrist right as Misaki attempted to articulate what she had learned and what she was supposed to say. Identification. And it made sure that you were protected. Although that hadn’t been impressed upon them quite as much. Melting happened if you stayed too long with the process that converted them from who they were to these fake anime girl forms. She suspected the wristbands were some sort of monitoring system or inoculation against Melting. And everyone knew they were travelers because of these things. So why did Yuka respond as though she was just now becoming aware of these things?

Misaki looked up, and her mouth dipped in horror as she caught sight of Yuka. Her eyes were impossibly wider than she had ever seen them. Muscles clenched and quivered throughout her face. It was like a paralytic agent had spontaneously passed through her flesh, and only the frailest motion was possible. All her bright colors dimmed subtly, as though cloaked in an intangible darkness. The book tumbled out of her grasp and sprawled open across the floor. She didn’t look down at it, and she wasn’t looking over at Misaki, but she was staring straight ahead, as though an invisible predator had her in its thrall.

Misaki struggled to speak, to beg Yuka for an explanation of what was going on. But her words were stymied by suffocating sand, worse than that nightmare with her parents. She struggled to reach out just as much as Yuka, but they were each frozen in place.

After a few flush and panic-stricken moments, Yuka gathered together enough strength to do more than simply tremble in place. She screamed, untempered and unrestrained enough to shatter windows and vibrate walls. It came as a single, unbroken note for as much breath as she had before it devolved into messy gurgles. A strand of red, like a tiny, unspooled ribbon, dripped from her left nostril and sailed to her chin. Blood, wet and fresh. It clung there like the meal of an invisible tick, slowly swelling.

Whipping backwards on the floor, Yuka wailed and thrashed with pained cries as though her head had been placed in a vice and was a millimeter from exploding. Struggling on her hands and knees, Misaki tried to reach her, but every step was like a drumbeat of thunder and lightning sent from the gods directly to her skull. A cacophony of torment and chaos was building to a crescendo of destruction. But it stopped.

All the pain suddenly turned off, and Yuka relaxed on the floor, her breathing slowly returning to normal. She sat up in quiet confusion and looked around. A single, drying freckle of red flecked her hand. With concern, Yuka looked over at her companion to see where the blood may have come from. Finding no origin point there, she carefully searched herself and found the slick remains around her nostril.

“Oh my gosh. I’m so sorry. Excuse me. I should wash up.” Carefully but swiftly rising to her feet, Misaki smoothed out her school uniform and dashed across the room to open the door and slip out.

Something happened. Misaki sharply comprehended that much. But probing the details felt like pushing razor wire into an open wound. She had to put the books away. World folklore that she brought with her for reading amusement and comparison, and then there was Dwight’s complete H.P. Lovecraft. Best to keep it away from the girls. That would raise some uncomfortable questions.

Once they were put away, she found herself back in bed with the covers pulled close. Just getting up. Yuka had come to check on her. She had been sleeping so soundly earlier, and the others had gone with the rest of the Sasaki family for morning calisthenics. Another one of those anime things that just happened in Japan that she should’ve taken advantage of. But her friends were the early birds, while she was the night owl. Just one of those things. Just one of those things. Just one of those things… Just… one of those things. Just one of those things. Just one of those things… Why was her heart screaming in her chest?

It would be fine. It was fine. Side effects. Just some normal side effects. It hadn’t even been a day since her entire body and molecular structure were put through the wringer and completely rewritten from the man she’d been… The man… Since she was. She was a man. She started out as a man, and she’d been a man all these years. Not the finest sterling example of one in the world, but physically, emotionally, psychologically, and actually… a guy. Simple as that. Just the fallout of being turned upside down by the craziest vacation possible.

But now was the time to let the craziness go. They had nearly two weeks of this almost version of Japan to explore. No losing himself in strange little visions. No craziness. Just take it easy and enjoy. That’s all there was to it.

Get up, wash up, and prepare for breakfast. See Yuka off on her regular school day. And go with her friends on their path. Go through these days. Enjoy all these days. Don’t freak out.

So…why was there blood? She did her best not to think about that.