Ranko groaned, rubbing the palm of her sore left hand just above her ever-present silver bracelet. “How many more of these stupid things are there?!”

Nabiki smirked, waving off her little sister’s complaint. “Oh, just another six or seven hundred.”

“Seve… what?! Are you fucking serious?!” The redhead groaned loudly, throwing her hands in the air and letting them slap down hard on the round wooden table. The tabletop shook a bit, causing the nearly half-meter high pile of dreaded neon pink papers to cascade across its cherry surface. “Whose dumb-ass idea was it to have me sign all of these stupid things, anyway?!” She pushed away from the table, sighing as she meandered over to the bar counter. “I need a fuckin’ break.”

The redhead lifted the skirt of her lavender sundress, carefully sliding onto one of the bar stools with an exhausted sigh. Behind the bar, a lanky blonde leaned across the counter with a bemused smirk. “If memory serves, Ran-chan, that was your idea.” Yui slid a pilsner glass full of dark brown soda across the counter to her sister.

“Yeah, well, like I said.” Ranko scoffed and took a long draught of her drink, resting her left wrist against the glass to use it as a makeshift ice pack. “Dumbass.” She flashed her sister a soft smile. “I guess, I just wanted the first newsletter to be a little special for ‘em, ya know? Especially given… anyway, I’m definitely not doing this every month, especially if the subscriber numbers go up much mo…” Her voice cut off at the sound of a deep chime coming from the kitchen.

Yui pushed off with her elbows on the counter, popping herself to a standing position. “Oooh! It’s here!” She flitted toward the blue saloon door to the back, bouncing on her heels. Before she could open it, she was greeted by a black-haired woman exiting the kitchen in a green Mountain Dew tee shirt and a pair of jeans that fit her as if they’d been spray-painted onto her legs. She carried a large box in her arms.

“I swear, Yuri, the look on your face? You’d think it was Christmas.” Sakura giggled brightly, winking at her partner as she passed her the white cardboard container. “I’m still busy doing the bills back there, but maybe later, you can sit on my lap and tell me what you want?”

The blonde took the box, hiding her blushing simper behind it as she carried it back to the polyurethane bar counter. Does she always gotta call me that in front of people?

Ranko chuckled at the pair, draining the rest of her soda into her mouth and swallowing it back. “Watch out, Yui! Sure sounds like Sakura Claus is trying to turn you into a little ho, ho, ho!”

“Hey!” Yui swatted playfully at the songstress’ arm across the bar with a pale blue bar towel, her cheeks glowing red. “I may have to take that kinda crap from my wife, but I’m not putting up with it from my little sister!”

The young singer giggled, snapping her hand out and catching the towel. She drew her arm back, yanking the towel away and disarming the giggling bartender. “Look. You could have sucked it up, put on a big, fluffy white dress for a couple hours and looked like an idiot. Let me get all the teasing and shit all out of my system. But no-ooh, you had to go all modern woman don’t need nothin’ fancy and skip all the hoopla, and so now? All of this sass…” She motioned to her face with a rotation of her wrist, a motion she regretted with a slight wince. “You’re stuck with it forever, sis. There’s no other outlet for it. This is just your life now.”

Ranko turned as she felt a tap on her shoulder, smiling down at her partner from her perch on the stool. “Hey, ‘Kane! Wanna get in on this? I’m just roastin’ a Yuri over here.” She smirked deviously.

She blinked when Akane handed her a small object made of pink plastic, an admonishing scowl on her face. “Ranko, I keep telling you, you’ve got to stop leaving this thing lying around everywhere. You need to get used to having it with you all the time before you go on the road again, silly girl. Every time I turn around, I find it lying on a table or something. You’re gonna walk off and leave it somewhere if you’re not careful.”

The redhead sighed. “C’mon! I mean, I’m just hangin’ at the bar, Akane! It’s not like anybody’s gonna call me here! Besides, I don’t got my purse with me.” She lifted the hem of her dress, reaching up into it. When she extracted her hands, her pager was no longer in them.

“Then you’re gonna have to start carrying it more, I guess.” Akane’s face dropped into her palm as she watched her wife’s beeper disappear. “Did you just… clip that… to your panties? Seriously? What are we gonna do with you, girl?”

Her wife shrugged, blushing a bit at the scandalized look Akane gave her. “Look, you said I gotta have it on me, and this dress don’t have pockets. What the hell else am I s’posed to do with it?” Eager to change the subject, she glanced back up at the bar, where Yui had pulled four tall bottles of liquor and a few smaller containers out of the shipping box. “So, what’s all that shit?”

Yui grinned excitedly, picking up a bottle of milky white liquid and holding it up for display. “This is called arak. It’s a liquor made with anise and licorice and stuff.” She next tapped a small metal tin with a pink label that rested on the counter beside it. “And this is sumac, which is a kind of spice that has a little bit of a metallic bite. If you use it in a cocktail, it makes it come out a deep red, which is pretty cool, too.”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Ranko picked up another liquor bottle, this one containing a clear liquid that looked not unlike vodka to her. She read the label aloud with a skeptical tone in her voice. “Raki?”

The blonde nodded. “It’s Turkish. Made from grape pomace and aniseed, usually.” She reached back into the box, extracting a bottle of pomegranate syrup and a small dropper bottle of licorice bitters from the folds of bubble wrap. Sakura reached behind her wife, snatching the sheet of packing material from the box and beginning to pop the large bubbles with her thumbs.

“What’s all this crap for,” Ranko asked, handing the bottle of raki back to her sister.

With a chuckle, Yui took the bottle and added it to her little hoard. “Well, I figured if you’re gonna go all snake charmer with Viper, we ought to have a Rocktail to match. So, I ordered a bunch of cool ingredients from that part of the world to experiment with, and once I get a chance to play around and put together something I like, we’re going to introduce the world to the Snakebite.”

Ranko nodded, a sad little grimace in her eyes. “Yeah, I guess we do need another one, don’t we?”

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Yui nudged her across the counter. “Nothin’ wrong with celebrating a new song with some adventurously yummy booze, goofball. Why the long face?”

“It’s not that,” Ranko said, her shoulders slumping. The mirth had vanished from her eyes. “I just remembered we’re gonna need a new drink on the menu to be Zoe’s favorite, ‘cause Ken…” She sighed heavily. It had been three days since her friend and former drummer had left for a research university in California, and she missed him terribly already. She melted into the side hug that was offered to her, nuzzling her cheek against Akane’s shoulder. “I’m so worried about him.”

Akane kissed her wife on the temple, stroking her loose, wavy hair with a gentle hand. “He’s gonna be fine, baby. He’s got the best doctors on the planet looking out for him.”

“Don’t you dare take his name off that fucking drink, Yui,” Ranko implored as her lover held her. “Not ever. He might not be on stage with us right now, but he’s a Dapper Dragon forever!” It was a trivial thing, but she could not bear anything that put more distance between Ken and the people he loved, no matter how small.

The blonde shook her head, resting a supportive hand on her sister’s forearm. “I wouldn’t dream of it, honey.”

Ranko sighed, glancing back wistfully at the mountain of newsletters awaiting her signature as Nabiki folded another packet of three pastel pink pages and stuffed it into an envelope, sliding it around the table to Mei for a stamp. “I hate that our first one of those had to give them the bad news.” And the next one might end up saying that we’re not doing another album, depending on what Yokai’s next move is.

“It’s not all bad for ‘em, babe,” Akane said, giving her a little shake to buck her up. “I mean, there’s three pictures of you in your bathing suit in there.”

The redhead managed a dark chuckle, shaking her head slightly with a roll of her eyes. “Leave it to you, pervert.” Still, she seemed to regain her composure a bit for having laughed.

Akane mock-scoffed, rocking back on her heels and resting her hand gently on her chest between her breasts, covering the cartoonish sorcerer logo of the Minato Mystics on her gray tee shirt. “Pervert? Me? I’m entirely innocent. I wasn’t even gay until you came along and corrupted me, you little she-devil, you…”

Ranko purred, leaning forward on her stool to kiss her wife on the lips. “You’re welcome.”

“You’d better get back to work,” Akane said, motioning with her hand toward the table. “Those things aren’t gonna sign themselves.”

The young singer slid off the stool to her feet with a pathetic whine. “I don’t wanna. My hand hurts from all the writing, and I still gotta do homework after this, too.”

Akane reached for her wrist, pulling gently at her wife’s right arm. “No, Ranko. Come on. Procrastination time is over, girlfriend. Back to the grindstone now.”

“No! I don’t wanna! You’re not the boss of me! Nyaaaaaaaah!” Ranko stuck her tongue out playfully, using her finger to make one of her eyes droop in a ridiculously mocking expression as she pulled her arm free from Akane’s grasp.

The elder girl chortled sadistically, looking her wife over with a ravenous sneer. “Oh? You think so, huh?”

The expression on Ranko’s face changed in an instant, to one of flustered nervousness. Oh, shit. Stepped in it now. “I, uh… I gotta go! Look out, Sakura!” The singer vaulted the bar in a single hop, slipping past Yui and her wife and crashing through the blue saloon door to the safety of the back room.

Akane did not give chase, however, instead slipping around Yui and casually behind the bar and reaching under the counter on the side closest to the front door.

Yui shook her head, continuing to add her collection of experimental ingredients to the cabinet under the back bar. “I can’t believe you’re letting her get away with…” She blinked as she heard a repeated beep coming from Akane’s hand, and turned to find her holding the bar’s gray cordless telephone in her hand below the edge of the counter. “Who you callin’?”

“Huh? Oh! Nobody,” Akane said with a devious malice in her eyes as a little chirp came from the receiver. She pressed a few more buttons on the handset without ever lifting it to her ear, clicking the green talk button with her thumb to end the call. She returned the receiver to its cradle with a little clatter, nonchalantly picking up the bar towel Ranko had abandoned. She began to idly wipe down the counter with it, even though it didn’t really need cleaning.

The blonde shrugged. “Whatever floats your boat, I gue…” Yui stopped mid-word as she heard a series of three high-pitched beeps and a low hum coming from the back room.

They were immediately followed by the sound of something heavy hitting the floor.