Teto awoke to find something amiss. She could've sworn she'd fallen asleep next to her friend Gumi last night. Hadn't she? She was in Gumi's bed, after all. The freeware singer's memory was not the best, but she was almost nearly certain she had. She was in Gumi's bed, after all.
She stumbled out of bed and poked her head out into the hallway. "Gumi?" she called nervously, attempting to be quiet but her voice coming out loud anyway. She heard a sob from the staircase at the end of the hall and tiptoed over.
"Gumi?" she asked carefully. "Is something wrong? You weren't there... when I woke up."
"Oh, of course you wouldn't understand, Teto," Gumi muttered, her voice cracking. Teto was concerned now. That didn't sound good, that crack in her voice. Maybe Gumi was sick or something. Maybe she should tell Master that Gumi was sick.
"Gumi, are you sick?" Teto asked nervously, not wanting to catch something bad. Gumi laughed harshly, cruelly, and Teto was very, very concerned. "No, Teto, I'm not sick," Gumi spat, her sad morphing to angry. "It's called having feelings, although I suppose you wouldn't know about anything of the sort."
"... Gumi, I... I don't understand," Teto mumbled. "I do have feelings. I have feelings and I feel them. You're acting weird, though... maybe there really is something wrong..."
"You stupid Utau," The Vocaloid muttered bitterly, "you don't have feelings like I do. A Vocaloid is built like a person. We have complex personalities with hundreds of emotions, thousands even. You... you're lucky to have three or four sides to your personality. A human is complex and multi-faceted, like a gem, and a Vocaloid is a cheap imitation of that. You, Teto... you... you're just... made to look pretty and sing."
Teto's eyes widened. There was definitely something wrong with Gumi today, she thought, as tears came to her eyes. "Y-you're wrong," she sobbed, trying to will back the tears forcing to invade her eyes as she realized that Gumi was, in fact, not wrong at all. "I-I do have feelings, Gumi... I do, I feel them..."
"Is that the best you can do?" the Vocaloid spat. Teto could no longer hold back the inevitable and burst into tears. She ran down the stairs crying, looking for someone to comfort her. "Ruko!" she called desperately. "Ruko, Rook, Uta! Ritsu! Anyone..."
Gumi laid her head on her drawn-up knees and cursed herself a million times over. What the hell... had she just done to Teto? Her unstable artificial emotions were too out of control, and she'd snapped at her... "good friend," possibly ruining whatever weird relationship they'd kind of almost had. Damn her. Damn her to hell for hurting Teto, even if was kind of by accident. Humans were complex and multi-faceted, huh... but she was no human. She was a Vocaloid, which only made it worse when she made stupid mistakes.
The phrase "I'm only human" curiously didn't seem to apply when you weren't.
Gumi pushed herself up off the stairs, rubbing her eyes to rid them of the cold-sticky residue her tears always seemed to leave behind. She quietly descended to the ground floor, looking around for Teto or anyone else who might know where she was. She had to make things right, had to show Teto that she was still herself and not some evil monster like she'd seemed to be earlier.
"Tetooo," she called softly, as though beckoning a timid cat. "Teto... are you here?"
There was only silence. Gumi ventured further, creeping nervously around the mock-circular ground floor, considering checking in the Vippaloids' collective private room for Teto but not really wanting to. She approached the door marked "VIPPALOID" in a messy scrawl she recognized as Ruko's handwriting with far too many doubts to go any further. "Teto?" she timidly whispered, afraid of Ritsu or possibly someone else appearing and lecturing her or something of the like.
"Gumi?" came Teto's voice from inside, always too loud, hurriedly hushed by the other Utau.
"Teto, I... I'm sorry I snapped at you, I didn't mean it... my emotions kind of... got the better of me..."
The door opened to reveal a very irked Ritsu, and Gumi braced herself. "Come in," he said irritably, his skirt swishing dramatically as he spun on his heels to face a still-sobbing Teto. "Gu-mi?" she said disbelievingly, her words getting choppy like they always did when she was flustered. Ruko gave Gumi a cold stare from the girl's side.
Gumi walked over nervously and sat next to Teto on a bed that looked like it was made for a little girl. Ritsu looked very pissed off when she did- oh. It must've been his bed.
"Hey, Teto... I really didn't mean any of that stuff I said, not really... like I said... my emotions just kind of... ran rampant."
"But it's true," Teto muttered, "that I don't really have feelings, not feelings like you or the ones that matter... three or four at most..." Uta put a hand on her shoulder, having seemingly appeared from nowhere. "It's okay... to not have fe-eling...s, Te-to," she mumbled, attempting to wrap her raspy computerized voice around the right words. "I don't reall...y have mu-ch of a voi-ce... or fe-eling...s..."
Teto looked up at her predecessor and burst into tears again. Uta looked as surprised as was possible for her, and everyone else chose to gape, albeit some far more subtly than others.
"Teto," Gumi said in what she hoped was a soothing tone, "it's really okay. If you forgive me for yelling at you, then we can just go back upstairs and sing, or something..."
"I-I'm so selfish!" The Utau wailed, completely ignoring Gumi's words. "Poor nee-cha- I-I mean, p-poor Uta!"
Gumi sighed and pulled Teto's face out of the older Utau's vest. "Everything's fine," she said firmly, gently pressing her lips to Teto's.
Corny ending is corny. XwX I conveniently just learned that it's "VIPPALOID" and not "VIPPERLOID" last week.
It killed me a little inside, but I wrote Defoko as Uta because that is her proper name.
Finally, UTAU is indeed a word in all caps, but so is VOCALOID and it would just look awkward if I started shoving caps in there everywhere.