Timeline and continuity don't matter. No one's ever been sued over a fanfic, so I'm not even going to renounce ownership of anything. I am the state. I hope you read that in your head as Leonard Nimoy.
Everyone has a hobby. Some of us spend our free time and money on miniature railroads. An admirable hobby, which I find it hard for contemporary society to look down upon. The modeling of miniature towns with their transportation schemes is beautiful in a way. There's no political bickering to subsidize a route no one may ride, nor to describe the very idea of rail transit as a form of Marxism and yell on TV about it. Passenger or freight? Contemporary trains or vintage? Deciduous or a rocky setting? Suburban or urban? Yes, quite beautiful, really. The creator is truly free. Some build plastic robot models. An interesting hobby that I find rather limiting in terms of direction, but still a worthy use of one's spare time and disposable income. And is anyone really under the delusion that the Zeonic suits don't look the coolest? That singular glowing pink eye just speaks to me. But not enough to actually build and buy one. Most hobbies tend to involve building things. As does mine, in a way. I build stories around heroines. Yes, the framework of the story is already in place, but one is able to make it their own with the use of the rainbow of colours in imagination. Why else would the simulation game exist, other than to provide us with a template with which we fill in all the details ourselves? Exactly why does that heroine like strawberry sundaes so much, and what does it have to do with me? You are the ultimate constructor, as the hero of a simulation game. You fill the void in the heart of the heroine with your own story, yours and hers. This is what interests me. I play games.
Exasperated sigh. What's with these games nowadays? They don't run correctly unless you install them, and then your memory card, already full of important and precious complete game saves is completely shot. This is right before the weekend, I don't need nor want to have to go out again. Good lord, what a pain. This could all be averted if the developer could just design a game that plays correctly from the hardware. Or a decent memory cache. Of course, this is too much to ask. They're all in bed with the memory manufacturers, I just know it. What a racket. That's what I need to go into as a career. Not a game designer, they don't make any money. Memory card racketeer. That has to be where the money is.
And now here I am, getting ready to leave my house, having already been liberated from education for the entire weekend, not to mention having been liberated from my impostor younger sister for at least some amount of time. What a waste. I nearly left out the back door before I realized I hadn't told my mom I was going out. If she went upstairs for whatever reason and didn't reassuringly see me enjoying 1/100th of my game collection simultaneously she may well panic and summon the police for a missing persons report. Again, I must sigh. Turning around I opened the door that separated the living area of our house from Cafe Grandpa. It seemed a little more crowded than usual.
A state-of-the-art contemporary microprocessor finished a calculation in my head quite quickly. I had overheard talk in class today about a "new" cafe appearing in one of the local travel magazines. Could it have been mom's? The possibility seemed likely now. I passed by customers sitting in tables by the door, sitting in tables not normally occupied. This was strange indeed. I finally found mom delivering cake and coffee to a table by the window.
"Mom, I have to go out the electronics-"
"KATSURAGI?"
"Yes?" My mother and I both instinctively turned to the source of the outburst. You have got to be kidding me.
"It is you, Katsuragi!"
Takahara Ayumi. And Miyako. I'd kissed 50% of this table before. An irrelevant statistic. And my first kiss, too. At least she didn't remember. Thank god. And now they knew where I lived. This is hardly optimal, especially now that they know I live in a cafe featured in a magazine that they had been discussing in class today. Perhaps I should not have put my headphones in to drown out their tepid conversation this morning and prepared a better escape from the house than announcing my residency in the currently trending cafe to some of the biggest gossips in my class. Trending topic #Otamegacafe.
Mom, rather, in her current terrifying visage looked more like she should be called "mother" moreso than "mom," turned to me. "Keima, I'm rather busy right now, you can just go to the store." Then, her world came to a halt. The calculations were apparently now complete, the Crays were powering down. As the spools of tape finally finished spinning, her mouth was ready to deliver the still quite beautiful monochrome, blinking cursor, answer, delivered in a still very elegantly formatted ASCII box constructed of hyphens and pipes.
"These are frie- acquaintances of yours?"
She had stopped before going full on with calling them "friends." Rather accurate, especially in regards to Miyako, but still slightly harsh. For a mother, no less. And Ayumi was at least non-confrontational with me on occasion. Sigh number 3 in no less than 5 minutes.
"You must go to school with Keima." Right to the point. Mom recognized the uniform, Elsee only wears the female version of it 6 days a week.
Ayumi positively beamed. "Yes, we're in the same class as he and Elsee! I'm Takahara Ayumi, and this is Miyako." What's with that reaction, should you be so proud to share a class with this insect and his patently fraudulent little sister? Then her gaze narrowed. Didn't my mother just give me a look strikingly similar to this one? "Katsuragi, why didn't you tell me your family ran this cafe?"
"Was I supposed to include it in my self-introduction to the class at the start of the year? Hi, Katsuragi Keima, my interest is games, my non-interest is real life, I live at Cafe Grandpa, please come see me there often!" I tilted my head, in complete mockery of a cute girlish gesture. At least Miyako snickered in laughter a little bit. Ayumi continued to frown. I thought she would at least smile at that one, she's only interested in teasing me. What do I care?
"Keima, be nicer. They're customers, after all. And aren't they your classmates? Do you always treat your acquaintances like this? You certainly don't get this from me, it must be that horrific father of yours. I ought to tell him how you're turning out, no thanks to him; once I start speaking to him again next year." An entire litany of criticism. This at least got Ayumi to smile slightly, probably delighted to see my get my comeuppance for once from an authority figure whom I couldn't discredit snidely. Yes, even I must follow the Confucian ideal of fealty to my parents.
Mom turned to Ayumi and immediately switched back to her glowing public-side face. "Thank you for being friends of my son, he must be a bother to you." Obviously the opposite was true, however I kept my mouth shut, which seemed like the most logical course of action in this current conversation tree. Now I just have to search for the flag that lets me exit early before I end up down a route I do not desire.
"Oh, it's no bother! In fact, Katsuragi has been kind enough to tutor me before a test a few times..."
"He did?" Mom looked back at me as though she had just discovered she had a son. Tutoring, I must have done something like that, yes. Another troublesome day at school with no other escape flags.
Miyako now looked shocked. "He did? Why didn't you invite me, I need help in English!"
"Keima, don't play favorites with your friends." I see mother had graduated the pronoun up to 'friend.' This is progress? Furthermore, playing favorites? Nonsense. It becomes difficult to refuse when your literally devilish fake sister uses her dark and sinister magic to constrain you inside the space of a classroom not once, but several times over. Eventually she lost all pretense that she was doing it for the sake of her friends, and somehow only Ayumi became the other beneficiary of my superior tutoring. When the fools could pay attention and stop talking about their awful band or Nakagawa Kanon. Hardly my fault that I was bestowing my supposed favoritism on Ayumi, and qualified by 'supposed' because I was also training Elsee in the delicate art of not failing an exam simultaneously.
"I don't know what you mean. Anyway, as I was saying, I need to go to the electronics-" No! Don't cut off my escape flag! I saw my freedom slipping away from me once more as my mother's face darkened further and interrupted me.
"Why don't you sit with our valued customers and talk with them? Right, Keima?" This was starting to become terrifying. I began to mouth a refusal when I saw her hand reaching for the back of her head. About to let her hair down. End-of-the-world panic alarms rang throughout the command center of my brain. A stern-faced yet quite beautiful Lt. Colonel Katsuragi turned to her subordinate, the generic me as I cowered under my command console, and ordered me to surrender to the all-powerful enemy. And thus I sat in a spare chair at speeds rivaling light itself, all with an enormous forced smile on my face. Curse the Real world and its lack of proper escape flags.
"Yes, that sounds great, mom!" My clenched teeth managed to say through an imbecilic grin.
"There you are, then! Is there anything else I can get you two girls?" Immediately back to the positively shining smile reserved only for non-family.
"I'd like some more water, that's all for me." Was Miyako trying to diet? Again, a half-heard conversation came back. I had no idea what she was trying to accomplish with her diet by coming to this cafe which would destroy such a specially configured sensor with sugar saturation. The tricorder on the American Star Trek series would surely warn the doctors of the health risks contained in this establishment. My personal directive of non-interference in the affairs of less-advanced species again came to the forefront of my mind and I returned to the problem of not being able to transport myself away from these drones attempting to assimilate me into the Real World Collective.
"Hmm. Is there anything you recommend, Katsuragi?" That wasn't an honorific term, she must have been talking to me and not mom. Unable to sigh outwardly, I confined it.
"Well, I don't enjoy sweet foods. But, mom's cookies are usually very good." When you can eat one at a time instead of having to down all of the leftovers at once. 'Otherwise it's a waste!' Yes, they're wasted making my stomach explode and nearly vomit due to too much sugar.
"Oh, I'm sorry, we've run out for today." Lucky for me, at least, maybe not for Ayumi, who looked disappointed suddenly, making me feel bad. Especially since I had just inwardly jumped to delight due to not having to force feed myself leftovers tonight.
"I can bring you some at school on Monday if you like." Wait, who said that? My mouth was open. No, I couldn't have just said that to Ayumi. Takahara Ayumi. No, surely that was someone else. A glance in my peripheral vision to find someone in the Maijima school uniform, who would have known her and also happened to be in this casual dining establishment. It wasn't Miyako, who was currently looking at me as though my eyebrows were about to crawl off my head. Male uniform; it was definitely a male voice. Heavens above, I had said that, hadn't I? Another extraneous commitment to the Real World, further traveling down this fruitless route. This time it wasn't even mom's fault. What a disaster.
Ayumi, for her part, smiled in a way I don't believe I'd ever seen before. "You'd really do that? Thank you, Katsuragi!"
"Ah, yeah..." I sheepishly tried to turn from her smile. Infectious. No one must know of what transpired today. Especially not Elsee. Good god, I can't even imagine what school will be like on Monday with me red faced with embarrassment from looking at that smile of Ayumi that even now won't turn off, while further sheepishly handing over a bag of cookies. Disgusting. I'll have to ask some actually reliable devil like Hakua if she can erase this from everyone's memory. Even my own. No, she'd never do something like that, she'd simply hit me, call me a moron, and then somehow leave an opening for an un-necessary shower-walk-in scene. She is quite reliable, indeed.
I didn't even want to see what was going on over where my mother was standing. Probably with a disgustingly evil grin on her face watching her usually worthless son promise a legitimately nice thing to a cute classmate. And I just considered her cute myself, which is rather disturbing in and of itself. Oh, and I can't wait for mom to tell Elsee about this, I'll really never hear the end of this from either of them. Well, as long as my life is becoming a nightmare, I may as well roll right along with this now that I'm past the point of no return on this death route.
The conversation proceeded normally from there, with my mother casually stopping by a bit more often than normal, always hanging within earshot. School this, their band that, why don't I ever come to see them practice, why don't I help study more often, surely there's something we help you with, Katsuragi. No, no, your thanks is enough. Is it really me participating in this horrid conversation? Or am I watching this trapped in my own body, forced to look onwards out the prison of my own vision as I fritter away my time staring at Takahara's eyes.
Eventually Miyako discovered a reason she needed to escape suddenly, so the three of us stood up to leave, promising that we really must do this again some time. It's been a pleasure, please come again. Mom really taught me how to flatter the customers well, I guess. As Ayumi began arguing with my mother that she insist that she pay for the meal, to which my mother was refusing for being such nice friends to me, I called out to tell mom that I was finally leaving for the electronics store.
"You're going to Bac Camera?" Ayumi asked me.
"Yes, they're the only store in the neighborhood that carries large enough memory sticks."
"Can we go together? I need a new pair of headphones, my last pair broke the other day." Ayumi, asking me to be seen in public with her? I suppressed the urge to get a thermometer to measure how much of a fever she may be running.
"Ah... Yes, I don't see why not..." I said, unconsciously putting my right hand behind my head in embarrassment. Wait, no, my mother was doing that for me, squeezing my forearm a bit painfully, I noted.
"Good job, Keima..." I heard the slightly unfriendly whisper from mom.
"I was about to leave, so should we go now?"
"Sure!" Another beaming smile. She should stop that, something like that isn't suited to the real world.