A/N: Well, they declared my lovely Neon a total loss, but I had a plan and a budget ready to go. Therefore, I got myself a new car on Friday, 10/29! I left work, dropped off the rental, and went to Caldwell Toyota/Scion, and after getting all the paperwork done, thus signing my soul to Toyota Motor Credit for the next four years, I picked up Mariko, my 2005 Scion xA in Black Sand Pearl. Pics are at photobucket dot com slash albums slash v192 slash Roque slash Mariko. You can see Marivel, my girlfriend, in them as well. She's the lovely one. It's a sweet car... really cool-looking (Even Marivel likes it, and she hates cars), full of good standard features, and only $14,905 after tax, title, and fees. That, comrades, is a bargain.

In any case, Mariko is the entire reason why I missed an update this past week. My thus-unbroken record is gone, but for good reason indeed.

I actually had a cool experience while writing this chapter... while I was working on it, just trying to think in Yuu's terms, I got a little bit lightheaded and dizzyish. It felt like my point of view was floating a little bit above where I was actually sitting. Physically, it felt like I was sort of out of my body. I'm sure it was just lack of oxygen or something like that, since I'm as secular as it gets, but it felt very out-of-body-experience-ish. It was a nice feeling before I shook it off.

Props to Cendrillo and Marivel for getting the entire beta process done in less than twelve hours' time. Thanks also to Romei for leaving a review! But you know, people, it's okay to find bad points; I really want to grow as a writer, so harshly constructive criticism is once again always welcome.

On with the show!


3: What Happens Tomorrow

January 9th
A Train on the Mita Line near Jinbocho station, Tokyo
1:15 PM

The transfer off of the Shinjuku line was smooth and uneventful at Jinbocho, and soon enough, they were en route to Kazuki's house in Meguro.

Much to Yuu's chagrin, the ride on the Mita line was far less crowded than their first train, and they only ended up sitting next to each other.

"How are we going to unify all of our different styles?" Kazuki asked as he and Yuu compared their seperate character designs. "Let's face it, Yuu, that's going to be the tough part in terms of art for this release."

"We'll have to come up with a template for the basics," Yuu said after tapping her chin in thought. "Aya and I will have to reduce our eye sizes and synchronize placement. Also, we're going to have to do something about how you draw face structure."

"That bad, huh?"

"Well, your characters always have more shading on the undersides of their chins. You're working well with light sourcing; that's a fairly advanced skill to have. I'm not saying to exclude it, but look here and here—" Yuu pointed out a few characters in a copy of Not Hundred that Kazuki had lying in his lap— "and you end up with the same shadow falling off of different structures. We'll probably have to work on how you portray the chin and cheekbones."

"Yeah, I hear what you're saying... I was never good at drawing much other than the basic square jaw and cheekbone face. Even with light placement, I couldn't get it to refract away the faces."

"Kazuki, you started off with hard-boiled sci-fi, moved on to a parody mishmash of archetypes, and then moved back to hard-boiled reality. That at least had a female role in it, though, and that's your weakness. Haven't you ever drawn a female face in art class or just for painting's sake?"

"Only from time to time, and not really within a dojinshi framework," Kazuki said. "From time to time, we'd just have human drawing in art class, and Mizuki and I would be each others' subjects."

"What sort of story are you going for in particular?"

"Well, going on the 'how' of romance, I didn't want to do the standard thing... of course, since that's our theme—deviating from the normal standard—I wanted to try something that was the opposite of your standard romance. My character is a widower... he lost his wife a few years ago, and essentially he's not moved forward all that much. I want to look at his situation and have him connect with the readers... I want him to ask them 'how can I go on with my life? How can I feel the same way again for someone else?'"

"That's spoken like someone who's gone through something similar before."

"Mita, now approaching Mita Station," the train's loudspeaker announced. "Transfer at Mita Station for the Asakusa Line. This is a Mita Express train to Mita and Meguro. Again, now approaching Mita Station; transfer for the Asakusa line. Mind the gap, please."

"Sorry, but I don't have any tragic lost-romance story," Kazuki sheepishly grinned as he spoke over the announcement. "I just took things from the other end of how we normally see them."

You mean you've never had a girlfriend before? I mean... not like I've ever had a boyfriend before... I swear, I'll never understand how guys think. My stupid little brother is absolutely no help whatsoever.

"Well, in that case, I think that Captain Squarejaw's Space Ranger Team will have to take a backseat this time, Kazuki," Yuu said. "We'll need to get you some practice on drawing women as characters in a dojinshi, not just as subjects in art."

"Yeah, I've noticed that there's a difference between art and manga. I can't take as much time on characters as I've been taking... as much as I'd love to draw a dojinshi that has Aya's high levels of quality and detail, hers are usually shorter than what I go for and focus more on objects. But the people... man, I envy her talents."

"Play your cards right, and Aya'll benefit along with you and me, Kazuki," Yuu said confidently. "It's high time you two broke out even more onto the dojinshi scene. There's simply no reason to keep you down in the underground anymore."

The train pulled up into Mita, brakes squealing as the cars decelerated.

Thank you, Sir Isaac Newton, Yuu thought as inertia pushed her briefly onto Kazuki.

"Yeesh. Trains don't seem to like us much, huh?" Kazuki chuckled.

"What do trains know anyway," Yuu said, rolling her eyes with faux indignation. "We can't let things like inertia stand in the way of your evolution as a dojin artist!"

"You're spending too much time around Taishi, Yuu;" Kazuki said, laughing. "That line was too much like him for comfort!"

"Watch it," Yuu said, stifling her own laughter and positioning her harisen under Kazuki's chin. "I'd smack you one if I wasn't in a good mood."

"Okay, no need for violence... my sister..." Kazuki said, finishing off with a mischievous grin.

A good laugh later, they went back to business.

"We're going to relate our characters, right?" Yuu said. "How will they be related? Brother and sister would be too far apart if your character's already going to be married with a wife who died in the timespan of years ago."

"I was thinking a minimum age of twenty-seven," Kazuki said, drumming his fingers on his knee. "But maybe they ought to be older, a little more mature. That way we avoid any undue angstiness and indecisiveness that'd otherwise crop up from an adolescent-age character."

"Kazuki, we are adolescent-age characters."

"Doesn't mean we have to be dewy-eyed about everything. Besides, this is all part of the challenge. We could write normal stories as a dojinshi circle, but we chose to do something different. Let's really give our readers something fresh and unique to connect to."

"Well, plot-wise, we can put in a transition between Izumi and your character... have you thought of a name yet?"

"Meguro," the loudspeaker chimed on again. "Now approaching Meguro Station. This is the last stop on the train. All riders must disembark at Meguro. Again, now approaching Meguro Station. This is the last stop on this Mita Express train."

"Let's stop at the convenience store for some supplies," Kazuki said, standing up and stretching. "We'll get some work done when we get back to my room. I'd have cleaned up if I knew you were coming."

"Nothing I haven't seen before," Yuu said as she stood up. "Just so long as you keep your hentai stash out of public eyesight."

"I don't have a hentai stash!"

"Sure you don't," Yuu mockingly narrowed her eyes. "Just nothing too far out into left field and I'm sure you'll still have something of an actual normal life."

"I'm telling you, I don't have any hentai!" Kazuki said in a low voice.

"I'll take your word until it actually spills out of the closet," Yuu grabbed onto a ceiling strap as the train came to a stop. "But at that point, all bets are off and you're getting harisenated."

Sendoh Residence
Meguro 12-14-47, Tokyo

"I still envy the fact that you've got a room that's bigger than most two-car garages, Kazuki," Yuu said upon removing her sneakers and stepping into Kazuki's room.

"It came with the house and my parents both take the train everywhere," Kazuki poured some hot water into two handleless mugs. He put a few pinches of green tea into strainers and set those into the mugs, letting the tea steep. "They just put down carpet and better insulation, and soon enough, here I am."

"Oh, here you are," Yuu scoffed by reply. "You've got a house, Kazuki. The rest of us peons have to cram into apartments with our relatives, y'know."

Kazuki shrugged. "I was six when we moved here, Yuu. I didn't have much choice in the manner."

"I'll leave the 'oppressor of the masses' speech to Taishi." Yuu pulled up a pillow to the table in Kazuki's room and knelt on it. She opened up a bag of squid crackers and took a bite out of the crunchy snack. "So where do you stand with your characters?"

"I've got a couple of rough sketches of the male lead that you've already seen, but I'm not so sure about the love interest yet. I have problems trying to picture what I want her to look like. It's harder than I thought to come up with original character designs in this sense... it's something I'm not too familiar with."

"Start from the basics," Yuu suggested as Kazuki finished steeping the tea and dumped out the leaves. She accepted the mug gently, wary of the heat, and sipped a little. "Is she representing a concept? Is she normal, is she graceful? Is she clumsy?"

"Well... definitely someone who can shake the male lead out of his—"

"Give him a name, Kazuki. If you're going to create a character, you can't just leave him nameless."

"All right, how about Kenshiro. Nice and modern, nothing too hidden behind the meaning..."

"Okay, who do you want to shake Kenshiro out of his loneliness and isolation from the loss of his dear wife?"

"Someone strong..." Kazuki said, wrenching his brow in thought. "But someone who still lets him be himself. Someone caring enough, but someone who isn't a pushover. Yet... she's just got that something, you know?"

Is that the kind of girl you like? Is that what you look for? Or is this just your exploration... just a foray. Because... because that could be me you're talking about... and believe me, you wouldn't ever have to be anyone but who you are...

"Did you have any physical characteristics you were thinking of, Kazuki?"

"Not really." He shrugged. "I mean, how do you take a personality trait and translate that into appearance?"

"Think about it. If you've got a woman straightforward, honest, and independent enough to help another person on such an emotional level, do you really think she'd have hair all the way down to their waist and wear nothing but Gucci?"

"Well... yeah, I see..." Kazuki said, nodding and sipping some of his tea. "The only person I can really base these things off of is you, so I just didn't want to turn it into a copy of people I knew."

"Let's work with that, then. Although you'd better not have clues that lead your readers to think it's me, Kazuki. I won't have you doing self-insertions... there are too many Mary Sues out there."

"Mary Sue? Who's that?"

"Never mind. Let's get started. Draw me."

"Draw you?"

"Yeah, draw me. It'll be good practice. Start from the image of what you're thinking of and then you can make basic changes in structure, appearance, and add visual quirks as necessary. You also need to get the female face down in a manga sense."

"That's not a bad idea," Kazuki opened his sketch pad, leaned back on a floor chair he pulled up, and propped the pad on his knee. "I mean, I've been really looking at your face the past few minutes and it's gotten me thinking about how to create an ideal image for the female lead."

He's been looking at my face? Has he been looking looking, or just sidelong noticing? Oh crap, I don't have any acne or anything, right? Calm down, calm down, you've been OK so far, and there weren't any cavernous sores when you looked in the mirror this morning... and stop being so vain, dammit! Kazuki wouldn't care if you had a pimple or two!

"Tell me then, Kazuki," Yuu said, turning a little towards him and tilting her head a little to the left. "What differentiates my face from Taishi's, for example? Let's hear how you can make some of your own improvements."

Calm down. Don't give him reason to suspect an ulterior motive. I feel like crap trying to trick you into looking at me, Kazuki, but for now, I just want to feel your gaze. Just this once.

Kazuki flipped to a blank page in his sketchbook by means of response, running his eyes along the contours of Yuu's heart-shaped face. "It's a different shape and texture entirely..." Kazuki said half-attentively between sketches. "Your chin isn't as cleft as Taishi's... I mean, the way your face looks has things in common with other girls' faces, but..."

"But?"

"Well, you have some different quirks the way your face is. Your bone structure is a little more subtle... when you smile, unless you're really grinning, your cheeks don't dimple so much. Your skin has more of a creaminess to it, and your freckles become a lot more subtle in the light, too."

He's noticed me... oh my God, he really has noticed me! He's seen stupid little things like that... I'm blushing. Stop blushing. STOP BLUSHING. Calm down. This could just mean he's really observant.

Kazuki? Notice something like this? Right. Sure.

"There," Kazuki said, making a few quick further sketches. He leaned forward and slid the sketchbook across to Yuu. "Is this better than what I've put out so far?"

Yuu picked up the sketch. It was still reflecting Kazuki's very shonen style, with defined lines and strong shading, but the look on Yuu's face was a neutral, open expression. He had adapted her eyes slightly to Yuu's own larger, anime-style eyes, yet keeping them within Aya's very realistic almond-shaped Asian characters. The sketch was rough, but Yuu could see the care that Kazuki had taken to detail the subtle, almost invisible impression of her cheekbones and even made a mild, mulled shading of the freckles that dotted the skin near her nose. Her hair was done with a similar sketchy quality, but it still showed attention to the heather-brown color and thick, smooth texture.

I'm glad you see me like this, Kazuki... that somewhere fundamental, you see me as a girl. Not just someone else. I know that if you can see me like this, you have to be able to feel some sort of affection for me. Just the same way I see you, the same way I'd want to draw you... you drew me in the same manner.

"This is remarkable, Kazuki," Yuu said, inadvertently letting her voice drop an octave. "How did you manage to shift your style like this?"

Hell with your style, when did you see me close enough to get all these little details down pat?

"Just because my style's normally gritty and unrefined doesn't mean that I can't draw really well," Kazuki said as he leaned back onto the oakwood floor chair. "I tried some sketches like this for my first dojinshi, but at that point, I didn't see myself doing any work in any idioms other than what I knew really well. Three dojinshi later, I'm trying to diversify so I can connect with more readers. So I tried this."

"Well, I have to say, this is a very refreshing change, Kazuki," Yuu crossed her arms over her chest and nodded confidently. "I'm glad you didn't have Taishi buckling you down to get this going."

"You and me both. For once, I'm glad I'm doing a dojinshi for my own terms and reasons, rather than his."

"I don't mean to be intrusive, Kazuki, but... how long have you known Taishi? You two must be really close for him to be able to order you around like he does."

"You mean 'us three,'" Kazuki said, taking his mug of tea and breathing the vapors deeply. "Taishi, Mizuki, and I were in the same kindergarten and we've been friends ever since. We've been through everything, from Taishi and me trying to drag Mizuki into playing like she was one of the Cyborg 009 with us to the whole 'girls are icky' phase. We've been through it all together."

"But it seems like you're the only one who puts up with Taishi anymore."

"To be honest, he's always been dramatic like that, but it's only dojinshi that really got him to be serious about anything. Mizuki of course can't stand it... hell, ever since the frog incident in second grade, she's been wary of Taishi."

Yuu nodded. "I guess he ended up getting you into the right thing. I for one am glad he did."

"It's no big deal," Kazuki said, grinning and looking away from Yuu. "I mean, even Mizuki ended up coming around a little, and—"

The jangling electronic ring of Kazuki's cell phone interrupted him. "Speak of the devil herself," Kazuki said as he checked the caller ID display. "I'm sorry, Yuu, I don't mean to be rude. I'll be off as soon as I can."

"No worries." Yuu sipped her tea as she seethed.

Who else could that be? Taishi would just burst through the door, Aya always knocks three times, he'd meet Chisa at school, he sees Reiko at work, and he doesn't hang out with Minami all that much except with Taishi and the others... dammit, Mizuki, you're going to owe me for this...

"What's up, Mizuki?" Kazuki said as he pressed the Talk button and held the phone up to his ear.

"Yeah, I—" he started, then paused to listen. "Well, that's not until three, right?"

Another pause, then Kazuki checked his watch. "No, I didn't."

Yuu tilted her head, curious. Kazuki noticed her motion and covered the mouthpiece with his hand. "We're supposed to be going shopping soon, she's just wondering where I am," he whispered. Yuu nodded twice out of understanding.

Let me guess, you need a new super-cute skirt to show off to your vapid little friends. The same ones who dragged you to that Christmas party, right? Oh, I remember that. I remember that loud and clear. You showed up in that damnable dress, you with your perfect 91-cm bustline. My boobs are small even for an Asian girl.

Of course, I'd have worn that same dress if it'd have an effect on you... as much as it pains me to admit it.

"Mizuki, I didn't forget!" Kazuki said, sighing. "I swear, I didn't. Look, Yuu is here right now." Pause. "How many other Yuus do I know, Mizuki?" Kazuki rolled his eyes, grinning. "Why're you so jealous all of a sudden?"

"I am not jealous, you jerk!" Yuu heard the angry voice of Mizuki Takase from the cellphone. The tinny electronic voice was amplified enough to cause Kazuki to jerk away from the phone reflexively.

"Okay, okay, but I'll be there. 2:45. Right. Okay, don't worry. And I'll only carry your bags if you're carrying the check for tea later. Okay? Okay. I'll see you then. Bye."

Geez. You don't deserve to be a whipping boy.

"I know, I know, things never do seem to change," Kazuki said sheepishly as he pocketed his phone. "But take heart; after we hit up Left Hand, the St. James, and Parco, she's letting me pick out some manga that she might like. It'll at least help curb her raging anti-dojinshi sentiment to the point where she can at least hang out with us."

"If she ever opens up, that is," Yuu grumbled. "I'll be the first to admit I overreacted a little when she first started insulting dojinshi, and yeah, she came around on Christmas Eve, but I still think she'll never understand people like us."

"I don't know about that... you two were talking from time to time after the summer Comic Party, weren't you?"

"Yeah, but not in any substantial manner. When do you have to go meet her?"

"Half an hour, but she's not far from here. I wanna get things all nailed down here before I head out."

"Okay, let's work on your characters."

December 31st
Kobe

I know there's a lot to you I don't know. But I want to know it.

I want to understand you well enough to get the vibes off of you that keep you running, that keep you moving. I really want to get your motivations down pat, Kazuki. Of all the people I know, of all the characters I've created or worked with, of everything I've drawn and written... you're the one who I want to stay with.

I know that you're closer to Mizuki just to start off than you are to me, but I don't see that as a problem. Hell, that contributes to the solution. Rather than think of her as your long-time friend since childhood, I see her as a foil for me. She's a nice person, don't get me wrong... well, okay, I really disagree with her and I hate the way she's so prejudicial, especially to you, but her presence can't be erased. I might as well deal with it.

But how do I deal with it? I'm no lilting violet, no great example of femininity. But dammit, I'm a girl, and I can beat her at her own game. We've got the same basic genes, and everything else stems from there. I know you're not the type of guy to drool over a girl's chest... I know I don't need to show off for you. That's refreshing, I'll say that much. I'm all about looking presentable, hell, even pretty, but I can't work in her style.

But that doesn't mean I can't work in mine.

I know there's got to be a way for you to notice me. Despite the fact that I dress like I'm about to go jogging, I do take great pride in my appearance.

The rest is just a matter of compatibility... and you already know enough about me, that we have the same interests... despite how brusque I can be sometimes, I know that you wouldn't go in for someone vapid and dumb.

So it looks like I'll have to pay Kenichi-san for the coffee and see if that cool store down off of the Kanjyo shopping arcade is still open...

To be continued...