Neptune was in trouble. Her own room was a drowning chamber, slowly filling to the roof with murky water, and all she could do was lie on her bed and wonder how she had ended up in this prison in the first place.
Her day up until now had been great. She had caught Nepgear drifting downcast and directionless through the hallways earlier today. Nepgear had brightened up like a firefly at night at the sight of her older sister up and about, and they had been able to have a normal conversation for the first time in a long time. In just a few minutes, it was as if the invisible worries piling up on Nepgear's shoulders had never existed at all.
The two of them had always been on the same frequency: quick to detect when the other was feeling down, and equally quick to detect when things were right again. An inside joke between some of their mutual friends was, in fact, "Nepgear and Neptune, never not in-tune."
On top of making up with her sister, Neptune had finally, finally made up with Blanc the night before. She had walked out of Blanc's room perfectly calm on the surface, but she had been reeling on the inside. A huge weight had been taken off her mind, and once it was gone she had felt giddy, carefree, light as air. All day today, she had tried to avoid getting distracted, but every time she thought about it (which was quite often) her face twitched, and a happy feeling emanated from her chest like a warm coal nestled right next to her heart.
She had not slept last night until one in the morning. She had continued talking with Blanc after they made up—at first only about the movie, then gradually about other things that were going on in their lives, until eventually their conversation seemed to include everything under the sun like a Katamari ball.
Blanc had opened up more as time went on, becoming more willing to voice her thoughts and make jokes and laugh. Her beige hair had seemed to shift between hues in the light of her adjustable desk lamp, which had been their only source of illumination into that night.
Neptune had not wanted their conversation to end, but by midnight they were both starting to yawn. She had stood up slowly, adjusting her clothes as she talked in hopes of postponing the inevitable for a few moments longer. Perhaps sensing her hesitance to leave (or possibly because she felt the same way herself), Blanc had asked if it was okay if she visited Neptune's room, so they could work on the script and talk some more. Neptune had agreed easily. Under the promise that they would pick up tomorrow night where they had left off, she said good night and left, gently shutting the door of Blanc's room.
By then, the sun was long gone. The academy's ceiling lights had dimmed to save power, leaving her with only a trace of moonlight to guide her back to her bedroom.
She had walked back in blissful tranquility. The concert hall in her head where her thoughts typically clamored for attention was oddly silent. Her room, when she stepped inside, was darker than she had ever seen it, seeing as she was usually asleep by this time of night. Since she planned to go to bed, she neglected turning on the lights, slipped out of her shoes, and walked toward the corner with her bed.
Her heart had thumped when, in crossing the room, she tripped over a pair of left-out game controllers from the night before, and the night before that, and before that—
And that was when she had realized her mistake.
Noire had been coming over every day to keep her company, and on four days out of five they usually ended up playing games together. Unless an unexpected issue cropped up, Noire was going to show up at the same time as usual. But now Blanc planned to visit as well, and Neptune had forgotten to tell either of them about the other.
This was bad. Really bad. Like putting two very powerful magnets in the same room. Worse than the time she had run out of credits to pay for a meal, and she had been forced to offer her katana as payment, and that was pretty bad.
The very next day, she had gone right back to the establishment to pay off her tab and retrieve her weapon, but Histy had never let her hear the end of it. Her lecture had gone on and on about respect and things a CPU should never do, and how not in a million years has something like this happened... And so on, and so on.
Well, this was something a CPU should never do if she valued her life and her friends and her friends' friendships.
Neptune grabbed her head and made as if to pull out her hair.
"Agh, not like this! Come on, what should I do Histy?!"
In a brief moment of hysteria, she found that she missed the advice-giving fairy companion that seemed always to hover at her shoulder.
If Histoire were here right now shouting at her to listen, then listen she would have done. But Histoire was across an ocean, for once completely unbothered by Neptune's absence in the Basilicom. Homestay at Gamicademi had been her idea, after all, and she had arranged the entire trip for all of the four CPUs. Her work might actually be easier with Neptune's admittedly wild-card work ethic out of the calculations.
Not bothering to repress a groan, Neptune rolled in her bed. Every passing second brought her closer to her doom; the water level kept rising. She combed her brain for a saving grace, some bright idea to make ends meet, but it was as if the voice in her head was too busy screaming to come up with any plans. She mussed with hair then spent a minute fixing it. She tossed and turned until her shirt had bunched up around her solar plexus and her shorts had started to slip.
Knock! Knock knock!
Neptune froze before swinging her legs out of bed and standing up, slowly and silently, to answer the door. Halfway there, she paused and turned around to eye her unmade bed and the clean, unfolded clothes heaped on her table. She had planned to tidy up before anyone got here, but there was no time for that now.
Sure enough, as she approached the door, her biggest fear was confirmed—on the other side of the door, she could hear two voices, bitter and hushed, furiously engaged in an argument that no sane creature would dare come in the middle of.
Roll the dice, pay the price, she admonished herself as she stood poised with her hand above the handle. Neither voice seemed aware that she was there. More afraid of what could happen if she let them be instead of letting them in, she unlocked the door and stepped back to open it wide. Whatever discussion was going on came to an immediate halt. Two pairs of eyes turned on her, one metallic red and the other a dull blue, and for a few seconds she could see the intensity in both before it faded.
"Oh, Neptune..."
"Hey, Neptune."
Blanc and Noire greeted her in sequence, their voices and faces friendly minus the steely sharpness in both their eyes. At first, Neptune was tempted to crack a joke, but she abandoned the thought, not wanting to risk making a dangerous situation worse. She settled for a smile, a wry one to let them both know she was well aware of what she had done, and invited them in. Blanc, clutching a few leaves of paper and a fountain pen, slipped briskly into the room.
Noire hesitated to follow. She gave Neptune a look that was at the same time vexed and confused. "I'm not interrupting something, right?" she asked, her voice so indifferent it stabbed straight into Neptune's heart. "I could always come back later."
Even though Neptune knew the suggestion was sensible, for a reason she did not understand, she could not bear to send Noire away at that moment. "No no, you aren't! You can stay." She took Noire by the arm and pulled her into the room. Childish or not, she did not want Noire to leave. Her presence was comforting, like an oil lantern burning steadily through the night.
Her room was much too small to comfortably accommodate three people at once. Magnets, she thought again as her visitors gravitated toward opposite ends of the room. Her place was in the middle as the only buffer and common ground between the two.
She could only hope that they were not feeling very combative, because in the case of an argument, she would be seated right smack in the middle of the crossfire.
At times like these, the olive branch had to be extended. But for that to happen, the olive tree had to lose a limb.
"Oh yeah," she blurted, her mouth tasting like lies as the words left her lips, "I have some extra pudding left in the fridge." She stooped to open the cooler door. A wave of chilled air wafted out. On the top shelf of the refrigerator, above her cans of juice and snacks, and the fruits that Noire had stocked the fridge with over the past week, sat her last two cups of ambrosia—golden, silky, and tremulous with fear at the idea of being given away. "If you guys are hungry, I'm willing to sha..."—she swallowed hard, the word loath to leave her throat—"Shaaare."
With tremendous effort, Neptune tore her eyes away from the dessert cups and looked over her shoulder at her friends, expecting and dreading them to nod their heads. Food was usually a good way to lighten the mood, as far as her own experiences went. And sometimes, sacrifices had to be made. Dessert or friendship—when it came down to it, only one of the two could be restocked at an item shop.
Blanc and Noire shared a look, then their eyes went back to her.
"No thanks. You eat it, Neptune."
"Yeah, I'm not really hungry. Thanks though."
Neptune stopped, her fingers centimeters away from closing around the pudding peace offerings. This was the first thing they could agree on—to turn down her mega-rare, once-in-a-lifetime offer, literally rarer than scouting a 4 member without a rate-up event?
Almost indignant, she opened her mouth to complain but then thought better of it. As much as it bothered her that her largest-ever show of hospitality had been brushed off as if it were nothing, it was better to play the hand she was dealt than lose more than she needed.
She closed the fridge and stood up. This whole situation was starting to make her head hurt.
"Here, Neptune," Noire said as she settled down on the bed and crossed her legs. She held out a canned beverage. "Sorry, Blanc," she said with a glance in Blanc's direction. "I would've bought one for you too if I had known you'd made up with Neptune."
"I'm glad you didn't," Blanc said without so much as a pause. "You wouldn't have known what flavor I like, anyway."
Neptune accepted the drink with a thank you and sat down on the edge of the bed, careful to leave a gap between herself and Noire. She pulled the tab; the drink fizzed loudly toward the top of the can, and she brought it to her lips to prevent it from spilling. Sweet, sparkling, heart-pounding fruit juice flooded her taste buds, and she checked the label: "strawberry cherry lemonado". No wonder it tasted so pink.
She chanced a look at Blanc, who stopped glaring at Noire as soon as she noticed Neptune looking at her. Blanc arranged the stack of papers she had brought with her on the desk. She seemed tense; her fingers failed multiple times trying to separate the papers, and her tongue clicked in frustration.
Afraid that things were already off to a bad start, Neptune called Blanc's name and waited for her to turn around. "You can have some of mine if you want," she said, offering the can.
"Oh. W-well, just a little bit then. I'm thirsty." Blanc leaned over and accepted the drink. She hesitated and looked at the label before taking a small sip and handing it back. "Thanks," she said quietly and turned back to the desk. "We should start working on the script now."
Neptune nodded. Blanc picked up her pen and rolled her wrists as she customarily did before writing. While she started to explain her plan for the night, Neptune pulled her legs up onto the bed and put a pillow behind her back so she could sit against the wall. There was still a reasonable amount of sunlight left, so she might as well be comfortable.
In full work mode, Blanc's pen glided across the paper, pushing out dialogue and notes for the first revision of their screenplay. Every few minutes, she read something aloud or directly asked for input, which Neptune and Noire provided.
"You should try to keep the dialogue as realistic as possible," Noire commented during a discussion about one of the heroine's lines. "Nobody would ever say something with so many frills and fancy words in reality."
"That's kind of hard to avoid," interjected Blanc," Especially when you consider that these are fictional characters in a world that the viewer should already have assumed functions differently on a fundamental level. It's fine if people talk a little differently. Plus, you still get people in real life who dress up their speech like that anyway."
"I was just saying, realism is pretty important. People have the most appreciation for the character who says things as they are and gets things done. It has to be relatable, because we aren't trying to make some kind of Shakespearean play here."
"I dunno if it's just me, but the heroine seems pretty relatable as far as this scene goes." Neptune swallowed, doing her best to summon specific evidence to back her claim. "There was that part earlier where she just says nothing, you know? I know it's not just me, everyone's gotta feel that way sometimes. That's pretty real, don'tcha think?"
Noire sported an obstinate frown, but after a second she nodded and returned to her book. Blanc looked darkly at her before returning to her work. Neither of them seemed inclined to give an inch in the clashing of their wills, but at the very least they were not fighting yet. It was a precarious balance, with Neptune as the mediator, but they managed to scrape by without having too intense of an argument.
Rewriting the whole first scene took over half an hour, if the clock's hands were anything to go by. Neptune had opened a game on her handheld so that she could grind levels for her new party members (the game was a turn-based RPG with one of the most annoying post-game dungeons she had ever experienced) but her heart was not in it. Twice her adventurers had fallen, both times to the same common enemy in random encounters. The first death from a party-wide sleep-inflicting ice attack was one thing, but the second death made her realize she had no patience for strategy at the moment—she had neglected her defenses wanting for a quick kill. She powered off the game and put it away.
Daylight had begun to wane. Now was about the time that the other students started back to their rooms. Neptune could hear their footsteps every now and then as they passed by in the halls, an intermittent rhythm on the metallic tiles, but it meant nothing to the three of them in here. Nobody seemed to bat an eye to the walking or talking.
Blanc eventually stood, saying to nobody in particular that she was going to go get a light from her room. She disappeared for a few minutes, shutting the door behind her with a soft click. She came back with a desk lamp sporting an adjustable wire neck.
Neptune drew her knees to her chest, bundling blankets around her legs. It was beginning to get colder. All three of them were wearing the same uniform with the only differences being in color, so they all had on the same thin blazer and above-the-knees miniskirt.
For a while, she thought she was the only one who sensed the temperature dropping, but then Noire put her book down and ran a hand across her exposed legs. Noire had chosen not to burrow under the blankets like Neptune had opted to do, and Blanc sat closest to the window, where it was probably even colder.
Neptune sighed inwardly. Nobody's having fun right now, she thought, doing a shimmy to get the blankets up around her shoulders.
The room lights had been off all afternoon, and now only the shine of Blanc's reading light kept the place lit. Neptune's dark-purple hued duvet seemed to absorb the little light there was into itself and became warmer and warmer by the minute.
Neptune must have started to fall asleep, because the next thing she knew, her right leg moved on its own, jerking into her chest as if possessed. Her eyelids shot open at the extremely disconcerting feeling of not having been in control of her own body. She lay awake for a few breathless seconds. Her heart pounded, and she flexed her fingers and toes to be sure she still had all her digits.
Thankfully, her hypnagogic episode had ended as quickly as it had happened. As she calmed down, she registered voices and remembered who was with her.
Noire had moved from her spot on the bed to stand near the desk. Her palms were flat against the edge of the wooden tabletop, her back bent, and her shoulders pitched as she leaned over Blanc's workspace locked in what appeared to be an intense debate. The flow of her words was quiet, fast, and accusatory, and though Neptune had a hard time piecing together a full sentence, she had a hunch that the topic of discussion was herself.
A nettled sigh came from the chair, and Blanc stood up. She swatted Noire's hands away and collected the papers scattered about the desk. Surprisingly, she uttered no expletives, but the hostility in her glare said enough. She shoved the chair away and brushed past Noire (who hastily backed into the wall to let her through), and she would have stormed right on out if she had not glanced at the bed and noticed Neptune watching. She froze, papers clenched in her fist.
"Neptune... Never mind. I have to go now." Blanc cast her eyes down and receded from view behind the wall separating the bathroom and the bedroom. Neptune heard her strap on her shoes, heard her open the door and interrupt a group of chatty, perambulating students in the hallway. She heard Blanc's voice, lowered in apology, which was the last sound she heard before the lock clicked and silence settled over the room again.
With Blanc gone, the room seemed to grow ten times larger. Even the sound of Noire crossing the room and plopping onto the mattress could not dispel the heaviness, the feeling that was like amplified gravity drawing her downwards.
Neptune closed her eyes and thought about trying to go back to sleep, but she felt the mattress shifting. When she opened her eyes again, Noire sat just beyond arm's reach, on the edge of the bed with her feet on the floor and her elbows digging into her thighs. Noire was wringing her hands. A confounded expression had made its home on her face.
"I'm sorry," she said without looking up. "I made her mad. I wasn't trying to, I just... I don't hate her, but I just started talking, and..."
Automatically, Neptune told her it was fine, but she knew it was a lie from the moment the words entered her mouth. Noire knew it too. Her eyes stayed fixed on a spot on the carpet, unblinking, as if she were lost in thought. "Hey, Noire, don't be like that. Come on, gimme a hug or something. It's alright, you know?"
She put her arms out like an expectant mother waiting for a running, leaping group hug from her children. It struck her as weird that she was the one offering comfort for once; their roles from the past week had been seemingly swapped, except Noire seemed unwilling to play along.
Neptune thought for sure that Noire would give in eventually, albeit reluctantly, and come closer to let herself be hugged for a few minutes. Noire was simply the type who needed to be coaxed into relaxing. But after a few seconds, her surety started to wane.
After ten, it was almost gone.
After a minute, she drew her arms back under the blanket. She looked away from the bent figure that refused to respond. Her surety melted away like hail in a rainstorm.
"I'd better go," Noire finally said. She had finally spoken, but her words were not ones Neptune wanted to hear. "Don't worry, I'm not thinking of anything weird. But I need some time to myself, and you probably want some too. We need this. It's late too," she added without even a glance at the clock.
Neptune said nothing. She continued to say nothing, even though Noire was wrong—she wanted company, not time to hear herself think. But that was exactly what Noire wanted. Like a child torn between an act of selfishness and one of kindness, Neptune froze with indecision. She remained silent as Noire crossed the room and motioned to the dimmed desk lamp forgotten by its owner. "Do you want me to turn this off?"
After a moment, Neptune nodded. Her surroundings became shadows. She sensed Noire walk through the room.
It was quiet for a moment, until Noire cleared her throat and gave a brief, "Good night."
The door clicked open and closed again. Neptune stared into the darkness, where Noire had been sitting a minute ago. She listened until Noire had became just another set of footsteps moving indistinguishably through the hallway.
