Yumi and Sakuya's first meeting was much earlier than either can remember.
It was a blistering August afternoon in Chiba, though the kids on the playground certainly gave no indication of noticing it with how carefree they were. The man taking a seat on a bench fanning himself with a magazine, however, couldn't say the same. It was far too hot to even read the literature he had, let alone play in a sandbox or on a slide. How was his daughter enjoying any of this right now, he thought.
A woman sat down beside him. She was dressed in a near-immaculate white dress and matching wide-brimmed hat, putting his band shirt, cutoff jorts, baseball cat, and aviator ensemble to shame. She also looked positively tiny next to him, though that might just be because he was rather large to begin with.
Despite their differences, she seemed to be suffering just as much from the heat. Doing the gentlemanly thing, he held out his magazine. "This heat, am I right?"
With a smile, she took the magazine from him and fanned her neck. "The forecast didn't predict it would get this warm," she said. "I hope it cools down soon, or at least let there be some clouds."
"Tell me about it," he said, lifting his cap to wipe his forehead off. "I promised my daughter we'd come here if she was good at the dentist, but I didn't expect it would get this bad. At least she seems happy."
"I brought mine here hoping she might make some friends. I doubt she'll be very disappointed when it's time to leave." She pointed towards a blue haired girl standing awkwardly off to the side of the playground as another girl buzzed around her to try and get her attention.
The man couldn't help himself from laughing. "That one would be mine. Always gets excited when she meets someone new."
"Do you two come here often? I don't remember seeing you before."
He shook his head. "Nah, just close to our dentist. We're a ways away on the outskirts of the city."
"That's too bad. Sakuya almost looks like she's having a good time." Imperceptible as it would appear to outsiders, her mother picked up on the fact she wasn't entirely displeased by the other child's attempts to get her attention.
"Maybe we'll get in touch with you sometime." He handed her a business card. "Bunta."
"Shinobu," she said, placing the card into her purse. "I don't have anything to give you in return. Could I write a number?"
"Sure. Use this." He held out his palm to her which made her laugh, though she went through with it all the same. "Always preferred putting notes on my body instead of paper. Makes sure I remember everything for later, you know?"
Across the way, the two girls were getting to know each other, though that might be a fairly strong way to describe their interaction so far. Rather, one talked incessantly towards the other as she remained mostly silent save for a few inputs and a nod here or there. Even so, they seemed to be getting along fairly well like this.
"And I heard when your teeth fall out you can plant them in the ground and then they grow a big tooth tree, but I don't know if that's actually true or just something I heard on TV one time, but I really want to try it just to see if it works, but none of my teeth have fallen out yet and I'm really getting tired of waiting, but no one is going to give me any teeth so I just have to wait until one falls out. Do you have any loose teeth?"
She shook her head. "I'm just 3."
"Huh. Me, too." She sat on ground and picked at some grass off to the side. "Do you play Duel Monsters?" she asked a second later, receiving a shake of the head in response. "My mama and papa taught me to play and they're really good. I want to be good like them one day but I still need to practice a bunch and get more cards and duel more people, and you should really start dueling so we can play together if I come back here sometime. Look!"
She took out a card and shoved it into the girl's face. "It's my favorite and really strong." The card glistened in the sunlight, the holofoil artwork nearly blinding from the angle it was held at.
"Pretty," she said, almost spellbound by the card in front of her. She couldn't make sense of any of the words written on it given that she couldn't read yet, but that only added to the mystique. "I should get cards."
"Yeah, they're lots of fun. I even learned how to read them, see? Ma-jes-ty Ma-gi-cian." She moved her finger along each part of the name as she read it to prove she knew what each character meant. "I can teach you how to play when you get cards. It's kind of hard to get at first but once you start playing it feels easier, and then you keep learning and playing and it gets even easier."
"Okay," she said, handing the card back and making a mental note to ask her parents for some of her own when she got home. "Have you ever played piano?" she asked, deciding to be the one to initiate a new topic for a change.
"No, which one is that? Is it the one that goes boom boom bang?"
"No, that's a drums. A piano goes ding ting ting and has all the black and white keys."
"Oh, I like that one! Do you play it? I bet you're really good."
She shook her head. "I want to. I like how they sound." Losing herself briefly in a daydream of being able to masterfully play the piano, she began rocking side to side until she was shocked out of her thoughts by a tap on the shoulder.
"Good, you're still here. You stopped talking and were kind of shaking, but I guess you're fine, so it's okay. Sometimes I do stuff like that when I think about things really hard. Did you think about piano?" She nodded. "That sounds fun. Want to go swing now?" Another nod.
They casually strolled towards a swing set, holding hands because why not? Once there, they each took a seat next to the other, quickly realizing they were in a bit of a predicament. "How do you swing without pushes?" Yumi asked, kicking her legs fruitlessly to try and make herself move.
After a moment of thought, Sakuya stood up. "I think when you go forward, you put your legs out, then pull back when you come back." She gave the other girl a hard push, sending her forward so she could put into practice what she'd been told. To their mutual amazement, it seemed to work.
"Swing!" she said, managing to keep herself moving. Though she wasn't gaining much air, it was still a fairly monumental accomplishment at her age to say she'd managed to swing on her own even if she did get help to start. And then she let go and fell on the ground.
She remained prone for several seconds, causing her new friend to worry whether or not she'd died then and there. Thankfully, she rolled over shortly after that, giggling uncontrollably before saying, "I fell down." The fall was from such a short distance that it barely even hurt, making it more of an amusement than anything else.
"Yeah," she said with a nod, helping her up.
"Want to swing now?" She shook her head. "It's lots of fun, but okay. Can you push me again?" The cycle of pushing, swinging, and falling down continued for the next several minutes, neither of them seeming entirely aware that falling off the swing was not actually the goal of this activity. They were forced to stop once Yumi managed to get a bad scrape on her elbow after the ninth fall in a row.
"Does it hurt?" Sakuya asked, taking part of her dress and rubbing it against the wound.
She shook her head. "Not really, but my parents tell me to go get bandages even when it doesn't. Otherwise I get something call infection, and then I could get sick and die." They took off together towards their parents, Yumi screaming, "Papa, I got hurt!"
"Again?" he said with a slightly exasperated tone. They weren't so much concerned about her getting hurt while playing as expecting at this point, though they'd been fortunate in that nothing had been very serious so far. "Let's see."
He patted her on the head with a laugh. "Doesn't seem too bad. Do I..." he felt around on himself. "I think I left your potions at home." They'd taken to calling any kind of medicine a potion after Yumi had sat with her father as he played an RPG one afternoon.
"I might have something," Sakuya's mother said, digging through her extremely cluttered purse. Growing more and more frustrated with each piece of random garbage she pushed around, she huffed, "I know I have bandages in here somewhere."
"Top pocket in front," Sakuya stated, with a quick look inside proving her to be right.
Bandaged up, Yumi let out a loud, "Thank you!" before the two prepared to run off back to the playground together.
"Oh, hey, wait up," her father said. "It's actually getting kind of late, so we should be getting home."
With a glance towards her watch, Sakuya's mother agreed. "You're right, we need to be leaving soon, too."
"I don't want to," Yumi said with a frown, Sakuya's expression dropping at the same time.
Her father smiled. "Don't give me that face. We'll come back soon and you can play with your friend again before you know it."
"Exactly," Sakuya's mother said with a nod. "It's only for today. You'll see each other again soon."
Though neither wanted to, they didn't have much choice but to relent. The girls said their goodbyes to each other and headed off in opposite directions, Yumi talking the whole way to the car about her new friend. Sakuya was deep in thought considering why she enjoyed another person's company like that and whether she would want to do it again, only nodding when asked whether or not she had a good time today.
Unfortunately for the two of them, it would be some time before they were able to play together again. Several years, in fact, thanks to a combination of careless purse cleaning and sweat-soluble ink. Needless to say, they weren't very happy about that.
Decided to do another .5 chapter again, but this time in the past. Really short one this time, mainly since I'm busy working on another full chapter and something else I want to do.
I realized midway through that I'm either the best at writing small children of all time or the absolute worst. I don't have much experience with small humans like that, but I used literally all of it in writing these two now. Probably some Rugrats in there, too.
The main reason this exists is because I wanted to at least give a little insight into who their parents were before everything went wrong. Also for the sake of having Yumi be the one to originally get Sakuya to play the game in the first place, since I thought that was kind of funny as an abstract idea.
I might do more of these every so often, like in the middle and end of an arc like what happened here. Just as a break from serious plot stuff to do ideas that I can't really work into real chapters, flesh out the world some. People seem to come back to the first one of these I did a while back based on reader statistics, but I'd probably know that more for sure if people wanted to comment. I could be wrong and no one actually cares about these small diversions in between the real action.
That's about all I have to ramble about today. Thanks for reading. Always remember to buy a 10 pack lot of Extreme Force that's undoubtedly been scaled so the cheap bastard selling it can just grab the Secrets and profit off people foolish enough to think 10 for $14 is a good deal like that, all for the sole purpose of getting at least one Underclock Taker to help finish your deck. Since that is exactly what I did today.
