Chapter Three: Café Mew Mew 咖啡屋巢巢

That morning I woke up still expecting to be in my usual dark, dirty room, but awoke to a clean, pink….fluffy one instead. This is gonna take some getting used to… I dressed in my morbid garb and attempted to go downstairs again. After I managed to get there, I saw Keiichiro and Ryou waiting for me in the lobby just outside of the kitchen.

"Good morning, Komori. Would you like to go down to Café Mew Mew with us?" Keiichiro offered.

"Yeah, sure." I yawned, still half-asleep.

"Oh, you already know about the café! That saves me from having to explain everything!" Ryou said happily. Keiichiro rolled his eyes and led us out of the house and into the warm summer morning. The limo that Keiichiro and I had ridden in from the airport yesterday was parked to the side of the driveway. I ambled over to the limo, fully expecting us to ride in it, while Keiichiro and Ryou continued to meander the other way. Huh? I saw Keiichiro pause and look around in bewilderment. He spotted me leaning against the limo with a stupid look on my face. Keiichiro motioned for me to join them with a wave of his hand.

"Komori! We're walking! The café's only around the corner!" he laughed good-naturedly. I sprinted over to them with my head tilted down, trying to hide the flush of red that blotted my face. Ryou and Keiichiro laughed for a while over my act of stupidity, but got tired of it after a while and started blathering away about some sort of cake mixture. Living with these two clowns is gonna suck. As we turned the corner, I spotted what I thought was a giant cupcake. When we fully turned the corner, a sign that was brimming with more pink than my room hovered over the giant 'cupcake' that read 'Café Mew Mew'. This wasn't exactly the kind of look for a café you'd think two (straight) grown men would choose. The café was embellished with hearts and several candy-like designs, which could have passed as real candy. What the frickin' crap? Keiichiro saw the look on my face and laughed.

"You'll be surprised when you see how much business we get!" he said and led us through the oh-so-feminine door. The inside didn't improve my opinion at all. It was just as (and if possible, worse) than the outside. The whole café reminded me of an icing-covered gingerbread palace.

"Welcome to Café Mew Mew! Hmm…I guess since you're going to be working here you're going to need a uniform…Where did I put those again, Keiichiro?" Ryou proclaimed.

"Oh, the old ones are in the storage room." Keiichiro replied, tossing Ryou the key.

"I guess I'll go dig it out then." Ryou said as he ran through a pair of swinging doors, of which I assumed led to the storage room.

"Don't tell me," I said warily, "The uniform's pink." Keiichiro looked at me and smiled knowingly.

"Nah, we decided we used too much pink while decorating the café, so we decided that having the uniform pink might be going overboard." After I was about to ask what color it was, Ryou bounded in holding something that was red and frilly that looked suspiciously like a dress.

"Here, this should be about right." he said as he tossed it to me.

"Well, what do you think?" Keiichiro asked eagerly.

"Well, it's….very interesting." I said (which was the only nice thing I could say about it). I held the semi-skimpy uniform up to me. The end of the dress landed about six inches above my knee, and underneath the skirt was a sort of overly-inflated undershorts. The dress came over a collared shirt as a heart-shaped apron.

"Looks like it'll fit," Ryou said, "How about starting work tomorrow?" I was pretty okay with starting work, but one thing was bothering me. "Wait, how can I work if I can't even speak Japanese?" I asked.

"Eh, don't worry; I have an invention that can fix that. I can hook it up tonight." Ryou said. I sighed blearily. I was concerned about what sort of invention Ryou was going to 'hook up' and where he was going to hook it up. It looked as if there was no way around it.

"All right. I'll start tomorrow." I conceded. Later on, as I was going to bed, Ryou marched in with what looked like a gigantic microchip in his hand that had small probes emanating from its center.

"Um, Ryou, is this going to hurt?" I asked nervously, staring at the sharp points of the probes. He placed the chip onto my head and bore down on it until it was firmly stuck to my head. He applied a small touch on the top of the chip and a sharp sting rippled through my forehead. I felt the skin around that was around the chip, then lowered my hand to see a small trickle of blood smeared on my forefinger. Oh, that's just lovely…

"It's relatively harmless. It just feeds information into your brain while you're asleep, when you're most susceptible to memorizing information. I used it when I first moved to Tokyo." Ryou explained. Wait, relatively harmless?

"Right, well, thanks." I said, looking down with my eyes watering from the pain of the probes that were fixated into my skull.

"No prob. Be sure to get some sleep, you've got a busy day ahead of you." He said as he walked out of the room and shut off the lights. I hate my life…