And here we are, the thing that I have been setting up since the start of this month. To those who managed to read all of the BanG Dream! oneshots leading up to this day, you may have noticed all the references to the Ruiko (or, at least, to the Raildex franchise as a whole)? Either way, here we are once again for Saten Ruiko Day! This will be my second year in a row to do this, so let's see how much I've improved since, shall we?
A special thank you is going straight to the amazing Reiriniverse from Tumblr for creating and providing me with the cover image of today's oneshot! Thank you once again for all of the hard work that you have put into these edits!
This oneshot is written with the events of Chapter 83 of the Toaru Kagaku no Railgun manga in mind, so there might be some spoilers for that here.
Disclaimer: I do not own Toaru Kagaku no Railgun
It was a bright and sunny spring afternoon in Academy City, and everything seemed like the usual. The sun was shining high above everybody's heads, breaking through the few clouds that were scattered about in the sky. Students and adults alike could be seen roaming the streets, whether they were running late for an appointment or were taking a stroll they all appeared to be happy and in good moods.
Except for one individual.
'She's late… they're all late…' Saten Ruiko thought to herself in disappointment, taking yet another hopeful glance at the clock that hung overhead. It was already well past the agreed meeting time and nobody was here yet.
With a defeated sigh, Ruiko walked back to the living room and sat down at the table, her head hung low as the thoughts of what could have happened to her friends start to overwhelm her. She knew that it was just irrational of her, that they would all come but just lost track of time, but she couldn't help herself.
"Where is everyone?" Ruiko muttered softly as she rested her forehead on the top of the table.
'Warm… so warm…' Ruiko thought as she felt her eyelids droop. It was a long day for day after several weeks of hardships, so Ruiko accepted her exhaustion.
It wasn't long until she fell asleep in the middle of the room…
"I'm running late!" the blonde girl shouted to herself, startling the people around her. As usual, however, she did not pay much heed to what they thought of her; instead, she took this opportunity to deftly slip past all of them and try and get to her destination faster.
Punctuality was never her strong point, but Frenda Seivelun never thought that she would regret sleeping through her alarm as much as she did right now. If anything, Frenda had expected it to be because of fear of what Shizuri would do to her if she's late to a meeting.
Instead, it was for an entirely different reason.
As Frenda was making her way down the streets, she skidded around a turn and—
"Ow!"
The next thing that Frenda knew was her laying on the floor and every part of her body hurting.
"Are you—it's you!"
Frenda looked up in shock when she recognized that voice before she knew what she was doing. A part of the blonde regretted doing this, however, as she could feel her heart fall when she saw who she had run into in more ways than one.
Standing right in front of her was the third-ranked level five esper of Academy City: Misaka Mikoto. But the Railgun was not alone; Frenda recognized the twin-tailed girl standing beside Mikoto as the same girl who she had an argument with in the nearby family restaurant not too long ago.
"Oh, it's you two," Frenda said in a surprisingly disinterested voice as she looked away from the other two espers. Getting back on her feet and dusting herself off from the fall, Frenda turned around on her heel without paying either Mikoto or Kuroko any heed.
"Hey! Where do you think you're going!" Kuroko exclaimed, already reaching out her hand to try and stop Frenda from leaving. Surprising the teleporter, she managed to stop Frenda without much trouble, but that was not what surprised Kuroko the most. It was what Frenda did next that did.
"What?" Frenda spat as she turned her head around to glare at Kuroko. Without waiting for a response, Frenda added, "I'm not doing anything that breaks the rules, now am I? So basically, you can't do anything to me."
Kuroko was about to say something to Frenda when she was surprised with a gentle grip on her own shoulder. Looking back, Kuroko was shocked to see the look on Mikoto's face.
"She's right, Kuroko," Mikoto said calmly, silently urging Kuroko to drop the topic before turning to Frenda with a serious look on her face, "Even so, where are you going?"
"That is none of your business," Frenda said with a smirk, shrugging Kuroko's hand off of her shoulder before making sure that there was enough distance between her and the other two girls, "But if it eases your minds, I am just going to a friend's to eat dinner with her."
And without another word, Frenda took all of her belongings and promptly walked off into the distance, leaving a slightly confused Mikoto and Kuroko behind.
"What's up with her?" Kuroko huffed as soon as Frenda was no longer within hearing distance of them. As Kuroko was mulling over her meeting with Frenda, Mikoto started to pick up the things that the two of them dropped earlier with a sheepish smile.
"Now now, Kuroko, she's just on her way to a friend's as well, right?" Mikoto said in a desperate effort to try and calm Kuroko down a bit. When she saw that it wasn't working, Mikoto added, "Come on, we're falling behind schedule too. We wouldn't want the dormitory supervisor to catch us past curfew again now do we, Kuroko?"
"N-No, we don't…" Kuroko said, shuddering at the thought of what that woman would do to them if they were late again. Gently massaging her left shoulder in an effort to ease the sudden wave of pain that appeared there, Kuroko quickly fell into step with Mikoto, "Onee-sama, wait for me…"
Mikoto ended up slowing her pace a little to allow Kuroko to catch up to her, and once she did they walked together side by side in silence. A silence that was only broken when Kuroko turned to look at Mikoto and asked, "Do we have it with us, Onee-sama?"
Instead of giving Kuroko a verbal reply in response, Mikoto instead decided to hold the bag up higher in the air to show it to the teleporter. A smiling Kuroko, seeing the contents of the bag, was about to say something when Mikoto stopped mid-stride.
"Onee-sama?"
Kuroko's question remained unanswered, much to Kuroko's disappointment, as Mikoto's attention was drawn somewhere else. It was only after Kuroko followed Mikoto's line of vision did she realized why.
"Onee-sama, are you serious…?"
But it was too late to try and stop Mikoto; the third-ranked level five esper had already gone off to the store she had her eyes set on.
"I'm still not sure if you should have gotten that, Onee-sama…" Kuroko whined as the two girls slowly made their way up the familiar set of stairs. She was about to say more but saw that Mikoto had been ignoring her completely.
"A-Anyway, we're he—" Mikoto began, trying desperately to shift the focus of Kuroko's attention to something else. Mikoto ended up trailing off, however, when she saw that the two of them were not the only ones here.
"What are you doing here?!" Kuroko and Frenda exclaimed simultaneously as soon as they saw the other. Clearly, none of them had expected to see the others there, but it were Kuroko and Frenda who voiced their thoughts out the fastest.
As more and more time slowly but surely came and went, both Kuroko and Frenda were lowering their guards and retracted their fangs once again. However, this did not last. Kuroko was about to say something else when the door suddenly flew open and an irate-looking Ruiko stepped out.
"Whatever you are shouting about, you should st—oh, it's you guys," Ruiko shouted angrily but stopped abruptly once she realized who the people shouting in front of her dorm room were. Her anger quickly turning into joy and happiness, Ruiko quickly grabbed the wrists of both Kuroko and Frenda and dragged them inside, "What are you two doing? Come inside!"
Getting dragged off by Ruiko, there was nothing that the two girls could do but accept their fate; Kuroko was caught so off-guard that she forgot she could teleport away from Ruiko's grasp if she wanted to. This left Mikoto to watch the whole ordeal with a knowing smile as a single thought crossed her mind.
'Saten-san's the same as always… huh?'
As Mikoto followed the other three inside Ruiko's dorm room, silently thankful that she could do so at her own pace, the third-ranked level five had to suppress a gasp from escaping her lips when she saw what Ruiko had done to it. The room had been cleaned thoroughly, and while Mikoto never remembered Ruiko for being messy this was still surprising to her.
Ruiko had even brought in some banners that she hung up around her room. While these were all old and had been used for other purposes in the past, Ruiko had managed to design it in such a way that nobody would have noticed.
What caught Mikoto off-guard the most, however, was that they weren't alone; Kazari, Erii, and Banri were all sitting around the table seemingly waiting for them.
"Uiharu-san! Haruee-san and Edasaki-san are here, too?" Mikoto cried out before she knew what she was doing. The words had barely left her mouth and Mikoto had already turned around on her heel to look at a grinning Ruiko, "Saten-san, did you—?"
"That I did~," Ruiko said triumphantly, having forced both Kuroko and Frenda to sit down right beside each other and already busy trying to coerce Mikoto into sitting down as well. As Ruiko was gently but determinedly guiding Mikoto to her seat as well, she added, "Now why don't Misaka-san join us?"
Without being given much of a choice anymore by her dear friend, Mikoto was forced to sit in between Banri and Kuroko. As soon as the last guest had been seated, Ruiko stood back up again and walked over to stand in between the table and the front door.
It took the girls who were present several seconds before one of them managed to break the silence.
"Say, not to rush you or anything, but aren't you supposed to say something to us now?" Frenda asked, directing her question to Ruiko. Much to the level zero's amusement, however, Ruiko quickly noted that this seemed to be the first time since she has seen them together that Kuroko actually agreed with Frenda.
"I'm not really the one who should be saying something, now should I?" Ruiko asked as she eyed all of her friends carefully. As she did this, Ruiko took great pleasure in seeing the different reactions that she was getting from all of her friends. However, she knew that she had to remain strong to get the answer that she actually wanted, and so she quickly added, "I know that I invited you all to come visit me, but not only were you all late but you were fighting right outside my door, too."
"Ah, sorry again, Saten-san," Kazari spoke up as she dove to the side to grab a bag that she had placed to the back of the room. With the help of Erii who had gone after her to help her, the two girls gently placed it on top of the table where Banri helped to take everything out and arrange them neatly, "We couldn't really make up our mind which one to get for you, so we ended up wasting a lot of time before deciding on just getting all of them for you."
As Erii ended up helping Banri unload the many CD cases, Kazari turned to Ruiko with an apologetic smile, "I hope you will like these, Saten-san."
"Uiharu… Harue-san… Edasaki-san…"
"We've got something for you, too, Saten-san, and it is because I found it and couldn't make up my mind that we were late today," Mikoto said, shaking Ruiko back to reality as she nodded in Kuroko's direction. Kuroko nodded in return and took something from her bag that elicited a small giggle from Kazari when she saw it: Kuroko was holding a shirt that was designed after Roseglow, the band that Ruiko really started to like recently.
"Misaka-san… Shirai-san…"
"I couldn't find anything in particular, but I managed to find these," Frenda said after she felt people's stares on her. From her purse, Frenda picked up several small cans that she added to the pile created by Banri and Erii. Upon closer inspection, the other girls could see that these cans were cans containing canned mackerel.
"You… all of you…"
As Ruiko had to take a moment to try and regain her composure, the remaining girls in the room all shared a look with each other before nodding simultaneously. Moving as one, the six of them all stood in one line while waiting for Ruiko to get back to them.
"Ready?" Kazari asked as she looked around her, seeing the nods of confirmation that she was getting from the others before she took a breath, "One… two…"
"Saten-san! Happy birthday!"
As the familiar sound of party poppers going off resonated through the room and Ruiko got covered entirely in the thin paper strips, the other six girls waited with bated breath to see what Ruiko would do.
Taking a moment to dry her eyes using the back of her hand, Ruiko raised her head with a smile before nodding gratefully.
"Thank you, everybody!"
So I ended up writing something completely different, is that really a problem? Anyways, with everything considered, I don't particularly dislike this oneshot, so I hope that it still ended up all right. Why don't you tell me in a review what you thought about it on your way out, and I will wish you all a very good day/afternoon/night! Take care, everybody!