Yuri Worlds

[50] Everything

Recovery from that quaint creative aftermath took a little while, for Misaki in particular. Hana considered acquiring some red face paint to assign players to the rogue cannibalistic sewer-dwelling civilization, but her moms stopped her short of that while otherwise indulging her “creative spark“.

The innkeepers allowed them a space to really stretch out for Hana and her broad ambitions, which didn’t intrude on other guest parties. The point at which Misaki realized this game of pretend wasn’t going to involve rainbows and unicorns was when the events were kicked off by the captain of the city guard getting brutally attacked by a sledgehammer and Hana’s gleeful description following the analogy of flattening a watermelon. Even after that, the group was largely willing but encouraged the kid to leave more to the imagination.

The preceding rounds of washing and soaking brought quiet serenity of spirit, which Hana‘s animated storytelling didn’t disrupt. Yasha was totally into the mythology and presentation throughout. Nami considered recommending a few grimdark fantasy works that might be up their fellow traveler’s alley but wanted to be able to do likewise for Hana with locally obtainable books.

In spite of the subject matter, Misaki really enjoyed the tableau of interesting characters that Hana populated her fantasy realm with…before ruthlessly slaughtering them. Bianka asked plenty of lore questions and actually managed to knit two separate factions together as having the same ancestral origin. One thing that made Hana grumble though was the prospect of having to go back in imaginary time and set stories in the kingdom’s past. It felt like way too much work, and she wouldn’t be able to drop in any bloody surprises.

Ayame made some casual connections to the Warring Goddesses Era and the rough outline that Hana had for her game. The girl reluctantly admitted that perhaps the histories provided her with some level of inspiration, but she also did a lot of work on her own and with her moms. Fuyuki found herself both captivated and slightly queasy throughout. She gently nudged the young lady towards the possibility of less violent creative subject matter, but Hana‘s moms shared a look of resignation with her, saying that this was a battle they had long ago conceded.

Haruka took some time to set her still-dry leather tome down to scribble notes on the universe that Hana unfurled. Miss Okura indulged in the endeavor for a few minutes before retiring to her suite. Kosame attempted to give the lady knights at the margins of the game lyrical ballads and fanciful backstories. Hana enjoyed slaughtering them. Naoko actually survived for several segments of the game by being an astronomer and lady of letters in the otherwise brutal realm.

Maharu had no qualms about the subject matter, even though she lamented the loss of one of her favorite royal rivals and gently urged Hana to consider bringing her back in one fashion or another. Hana sympathized but remained firm in her choices. Death wasn’t death without teeth.

When all that was done, they reflected on the game without directly talking about it. A fancy dinner was served in one of the main halls, with the cheerful owner of the inn rushing about to make sure every little detail was attended to. The group indulged in surface-level secret sharing with the rest of the guests as part of an introduction activity. Kosame enjoyed old suits. Maharu was a shrine dancer.

Misaki struggled for a long time before finally offering up the detail of looking forward to painting a small statue version of herself. The unfinished figurines would be there when they got back home—the most visceral reminder after this vacation slipped away from them. Yuka liked the idea but would rather have majestic, muscular dog statues to guard her room.

Her offering to break the communal ice involved the simple explanation of wanting to be a lawyer someday. Chika and Namiko revealed themselves to the larger crowd as an entertainer and a janitor respectively. Bianka named and described her ten favorite birds, and everyone else ran with this animal appreciation template for their responses to the point that their host had to rephrase the icebreaker. Interspersed with introductions, they received a wide variety of small dishes. The younger attendees had to skip the small alcoholic sample. Misaki skipped hers because she wasn’t interested and went right for the sliced vegetarian appetizers.

Each segment of the entrée was prepared differently, from boiled to fried to vinegared to steamed to raw to soaked in a broth. It was an interesting variation on the methods of Sasaki hospitality and operated more like a coordinated performance than a homey meal. The live music also left a very different impression. Misaki communicated to Yuka and her mothers that she much preferred the way they did things. They agreed with private smiles.

While digesting afterward, Misaki chanced upon Ayame with her feet up, her head back, and her eyes covered by a small, steaming towel. Somehow, she knew it was her without needing a voice or an introduction. Probably weird mystical spirit stuff.

Ayame preempted Misaki‘s question: "I peeked and saw you down the hall. I got lucky. What’s on your mind?" Misaki eyed her suspiciously and made her way over to a nearby couch.

“Everything,” she answered with an arm planted on her head, as though trying to seal an invisible hole threatening to leak all of her being out.

"Don’t do that," Ayame advised her. "That’s too much for any girl." Misaki didn’t disagree, but she genuinely had no clue how to reduce the load in her thoughts—the scramble of everything before they even arrived here, all the confusing fragments that either meant something or nothing. She wasn’t even sure how to adequately frame that quandary within the confines of words.

"I can’t help it. I’m afraid that terrible and important things could happen at any time, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’ve spent my whole life avoiding them as much as possible."

Again, Ayame referred back to her previous advice not to do that. Misaki gave her a longer look. She shrugged and expounded upon that, saying, "I’m not a doctor, but I do the doctor thing. Something is causing you trouble. Doing something a certain way causes trouble… Literally, the best thing you can do is change your behavior. Oh, but no…I can’t do that. I don’t know. Well, I’ll think about it. And so forth. I have heard every single response you could ever imagine from family and then from the nicest, cleverest, and most well-adjusted ladies. They know what the problem is, and they tell me what they have to do. I can’t make anyone do anything more than that. They are the only ones responsible for whatever happens next."

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Misaki raised her eyebrows in response, hopeful that Ayame might offer up an addendum with possible alternatives. But she stuck to all that. She also listened to a long-winded series of stories from her, in the hopes that something might slip through in her choice of words or language. The term “bullshit” even popped into her head as something to watch out for. If anyone happened to utter it, Misaki didn’t catch it. Ayame spoke a lot of different words, sometimes in quizzical combinations, but none of them overtly proved or even suggested anything.

And she was probably right. The entire situation and issue lay with her. She had to put everything—no, not everything—together. But had to resolve everything. The load rested on her shoulders. Everything came down to her. Which Ayame said, without explicitly saying so, was a load of bullshit.

The choice was hers. All these incongruent discoveries they came across, from weird entities that slipped in and out of the physical, she could only assume, to potentially nefarious prerogatives held by those who ran and owned the technology that allowed them to cross the boundaries between different universes safely. God, goddess, or whatever, she was breathtakingly tired, saturated with relaxed sentiment but also sapped of the motivation to pounce and pursue so many possibilities. Something had to exist and persist that she could capture, criticize, and interpret from Ayame’s leavings of phrase. But she was exhausted.

Maharu saddled her with what felt like an ‘everything’. Not that she was accusing or admonishing the girl. But wasn’t the weight of tearfully not being excluded from accusations of multiple murders basically an everything? Same with dreams that made no sense outside of conspiracy theories that would surely make someone like Bianka shrug and shake her head. And Mari. She couldn’t forget the fact that Maharu let slip that the woman came from another universe. How was she able to stay here long-term?

Nagging questions and possibilities clung to Misaki. She knew; she had. There was so much to pull together—too much to think about and shape into something that made any sort of sense.

The company had to be experimenting on them. Perhaps they intended to keep them as permanent anime girls with their minds erased and rewritten by some mysterious spirit force emanating from this universe. One that made her appear to be a natural, consummate girl forged of this reality. What other possibilities existed? Did it even matter?

If they were out to trap her in this reality as a girl, maybe it wasn’t such a bad deal. Becoming the sparkling, gleeful human marshmallow from the other day wasn’t her ideal, but Yuka guided her back to her genuine shape. If this was to be her fate and future home, maybe fighting it wasn’t worth the stress. She collected a smorgasbord of things to worry about, like practically every guarded comment that snuck out of Haruka’s mouth, as though she were a secret agent.

Clearly, something had to be going on, right? All those suspicious visions. But the couch was so comfy, and she couldn’t be bothered to keep her eyes open all the way. It was a Friday. The end of their first week. And she’d preoccupied herself with all these incongruent elements, either paying painful attention to the plentiful minutia or ignoring the broad details altogether.

She poked at random cel shading visual glitches as though she were a play tester providing bug reports to the designer. Wouldn’t that just be the worst if everything turned out to be a simulation they plugged them all into just to see what happened? What would matter then? Nothing.

There had to be more; it all had to mean something. Her life, her love, her hopes and dreams, the possibilities for the future, and so much more. It couldn’t just all be a broken little dream that never amounted to anything, plugged into a frail hope made of gossamer illusions. She couldn’t return to being a painfully manipulated device stuffed full of mindless sensors and shocks directing her towards the next designated activity at the precise time, expressing stock devotion and emotion to the Corporation and Its goals. Thank you for your call. Thank you for your service. That will be this amount of money deducted from expenses. I am glad to have had a human conversation with your human interface unit.

Exhausting, soul-sapping, and endless. And then, once the artificial apparatus reached the same level she could provide, replacement and erasure. Only the forces of Dwight would remain, the custodians of life, because of the simplicity and ingenious complexity of tidying up the world after everything else could be done by machine. The secret of that little, loving robot at the end of the world. Only the humanely devoted can pick up the pieces.

Why did she continue to torture herself, even in the relaxing depths of her vacation? She didn’t need to pry and dig through this orange-headed mom’s precise wordings for some stray gotcha comment. She had so many irrelevant questions to ask all the girls gathered here. Kosame and Naoko dated long ago, and the former still clearly fostered gentlemanly romantic castle clouds of old-fashioned fantasies. It quite contrasted Naoko’s reasonable, grounded, rational perspective. Could those two separate swaths ever be reliably resolved? And so much lingered with the Okuras. With Haruka. With all of them. And with the girl that lingered in her thoughts the most.

Yuka. Her girlfriend. Her friend. Her love. Her hope to break the draining spell of what came before. Before they left earlier, Yuka casually hinted at some especially fun episodes involving Miss Kirk and Lady Spock in romantically ambiguous situations, despite the organization and decorum ordered by their positions and responsibilities. She didn’t expect much. But Misaki couldn’t wait to see them because of the company she would share.