Takeoff

It was a strange feeling that was coursing through my body. Foreign, yet familiar. Something as deep as a desire, but as blurry as a story told by someone else. The only word I could pin on it was… anticipation. A deep and warm feeling that made my fingertips tingly and my mind race. Was there really something that could make me downright giddy like this?

If I looked up from my suitcase I could just barely spy someone over its rim that definitely fit that category of things that could make me go lightheaded. One way or another, Adachi was making me feel this way lately. I couldn't help but let the corners of my lips curl up in a feline smile. You could say I was in a good mood.

My partner in so many ways was the exact opposite of me. Her face was not twisted in a wide grin and her thoughtful hand movements did not mirror my own haphazard luggage treatment at all. Cool as a cucumber, that Adachi. Of course she was. It was hard to catch her fretting over most things that didn't involve me directly. This may sound incredibly arrogant, but I had plenty of evidence for this hypothesis by now. On a peaceful day with just the two of us Adachi would relax and show a softness that I could not get enough of, but at most times she fumbled around cutely to a tune that only she could hear. The stoicism that most people associated with her was nowhere to be found. Not that I disliked that side of her either.

And now we were packing our luggage for the big trip. I had gone through some embarrassing preparations to get here and there was that one awkward conversation we had not too long ago, but it didn't really matter to me. Right now my head was filled with unexpectedly positive images and illusions of distant beaches with crashing waves and a red sun sunken past the ocean's edge.

"Hmhm hmm~" I hummed to myself. I actually hummed. Something had definitely happened to me, but I was too dazed to acknowledge it.

"Shimamura." Adachi spoke up all of a sudden and stopped her hands.

"Hm?" I glanced over the silver rim of my suitcase yet again.

"Is there a particular reason why you wanted to go overseas?"

"A reason?" I put a finger to my temple and started contemplating that question. It was probably normal to expect some kind of reasoning here. Sure. After all I had picked a very specific place for our trip. San Francisco, a city that was far enough away to require a plane no matter what prefecture of Japan you lived in. Some place beyond the ocean, within the United States of America. That kind of place.

Why would I pick that destination? It's not like I knew anything about that city. Never even heard about its sights or specialties. Wait, wasn't there some famous bridge? Yeah that was probably as far as my general education would get me.

For all intents and purposes it was a random pick. There was just no way I could make up a reason that Adachi would understand. It was not the destination, but the journey? That was cheesy and totally false. Nobody enjoyed the flight more than the actual vacation. At least I thought so, but some folks were probably thinking differently about that too. Plane enthusiasts, they must have existed too.

"Hm, why indeed." I gave a vague non-reply and folded a shirt for the third time. It was nice and square shaped by now.

"Eh?" Adachi blinked in confusion while she had watched me over her shoulder. That rattled expression was rather cute. The reason she reacted in such a way was clear to me of course. She had expected me to have put more thought into this trip, considering how much I had prepared for it already. Then again, it was a bit late to question me only now - one day before the flight.

"To be honest I just thought it's more interesting to go that far at least." I raised one finger and gave her a serious expression.

"Is that… so?" She swallowed something, probably a follow-up question. This woman I shared a home with really had a way of suppressing her own body functions like a badly constructed android.

"I would have liked to go to space at least once, but it wasn't in our budget this time." I decided to throw a joke into the room and wondered if Adachi would pick it up or stare at it in confusion like a moody cat.

"M-Maybe one day…" She muttered and turned her head towards her neatly organized suitcase. For the second time in short succession my mind couldn't associate any other description with Adachi. She was simply cute.

I knew full well that we would never be able to afford space travel. Not if things continued the way they were at least. There could always be some world changing event where aliens came to visit and shared their technology with us. Or maybe that was forbidden. I had the impression that aliens weren't allowed to interfere with us lowly beings yet. Why was that? Sometimes I made my mind up about the weirdest things I guess. Some may have called it intuition. In the corner of my eyes I sensed an ominous blue light reflected within our window.

So with the void of space being as distant as my dreams, there was only one option left. Even if we could only scratch the stratosphere, I wanted to fly far away and then land somewhere I never imagined myself before. A different world that the old Shimamura could never have reached for various reasons. And pulling her along with my carefree hand, Adachi would be right behind me. Of that I was as certain as the next sunrise would arrive.

"I can't believe you got your vacation approved at this time. Who did you bribe?" The man with the most unidentifiable face in the entire building grumbled near my desk.

Despite my impending vacation and flight I was still obligated to check in at the office and do my job one more time. It seemed hopeless and futile, seriously, but somehow I was expected to focus on these boring numbers running across my computer screen yet again. As if that wasn't straining enough, that guy who worked a few desks over had decided to talk to me again. I had totally forgotten his name… or did I never even learn it? I think I named him Taro last time. Let's stick with that.

Taro for some reason thought that he was on speaking terms with me and acted quite casual. It was a genuine mystery. It would have been easy to believe that I owed him some report, but if that was the case he wasn't doing a good job of getting it right now.

"I filed a request like everyone else." I replied with as little emotion as I could possibly muster. Even zombies growled with more enthusiasm.

"Sure you did, but this is the big vacation season! You know that management usually prioritizes families, right?" And by that he meant people with children I guess. This was way beyond anything I paid attention to, but it vaguely resonated with what I heard before. "I'm single too, but I'm stuck here swamped with work. Isn't that odd?"

Why should I have cared? More than anything else I wanted an answer to that.

"Yeah." I was turning into Adachi the longer this conversation went on. One-note replies with a stoic face.

"Wait, you got someone to spend that vacation with, am I wrong?" His glasses suddenly caught the light in a weird way that made it glare my way. What a pain.

"I am sorry, but I am not interested."

"Why do you always assume I am hitting on you?" He grinded his teeth and downed the rest of his cold coffee in one gulp. "You are going with that friend of yours, right? What was her name again…" He scratched his chin thoughtfully.

"Huh?" My ears perked up at that strange claim. He couldn't have known about Adachi. I was careful not to get pressed out like and overripe grape when I got approached by the break room ladies, so nobody in this company knew anything about my personal life. Until roughly a year ago there hadn't even been anything to know anyway.

"Aichi? Nah. It's at the tip of my tongue." He seemed too disgruntled to remember, but I could tell we were thinking of the same person. "She was pretty polite, unlike a certain someone." He remarked and loosened his stiff shoulder.

"How did you meet?" I asked with feigned serenity while my hand clutched the mouse tightly.

"She brought me some documents back when you played sick after Christmas. Actually she was kind of a weirdo after all. No wonder you are friends." He shrugged and turned to leave as if that final comment was his definitive judgement.

"Adachi is not weird." I said with a dry throat.

"Adachi, right! I knew it was something like that." He smacked his mug against his flat hand. "Well you know her better than I do, so that might be true. I could tell she cared about you at least, which is weird for sure." He made another casually deep cutting remark, but it was off-set by my thumping heart.

She cared about me. I knew that of course, but it was so strange to hear it from a complete nobody of a bystander. How could a simple message like that carry so much weight? Adachi left that kind of impression with someone she met just once. It was embarrassing, but also elating. I couldn't have imagined feeling that way about anything not too long ago.

"Enjoy your honeymoon." He waved his final goodbye for now and returned to the dark corner of his messy desk. We were still in each other's line of sight, but pretended vehemently that this was not the case.

Honeymoon? That word was not one I could categorize at all.

"Honeymoon…" I repeated it again with a low voice as I swiped across my smartphone. Pictures of paradise like island resorts were flickering by.

"Did you say something? You shouldn't mutter like an old man or you will start looking like one!" The living embodiment of all my childhood grief was shouting into the living room, hell-bent to make me regret visiting this house. She had done something in the kitchen just a moment ago, but somehow she must have sensed my doubts and came to prey on them.

"I'm not going to become an old man."

"Your dad has that covered already, but mother always said you took after him the most." Was the fact that she only recited grandma's words supposed to mean she thought differently? "You will be wrinklier than me in no time flat if you keep that frown up!"

"Who do you think caused it?" I grumbled and turned on my back. The couch was pretty comfortable, though I had grown more accustomed to the one at our place by now. It was worth carrying it over from Miss Adachi's house.

'Our place', huh? Just when had I stopped perceiving the Shimamura residence as my home? It had not even been a year since I moved out. In many ways I was more familiar with every crease and creak in this place than in the apartment I rented with Adachi. Sometimes I woke up in my bed and glanced over expecting my little sister's snoring silhouette…

But I couldn't deny the way I felt. While this house felt familiar, mundane and comforting, it simply wasn't my home. Home was the place I returned to every day after work. It was the place where I cooked food with mixed results, hoping that something would finally tickle my partner's fancy. It was the place that belonged just to the two of us.

"You are no fun." My mother spoke as she craned her neck over the couch and stared directly into my eyes. Personal space was a foreign concept to this woman. Even Adachi didn't get this up in my face when I used her as a lap pillow. "That self-satisfied face doesn't suit you at all." She said completely deadpan.

With great effort I managed to suppress the instinct to touch my face to make sure I wasn't making some weird expression. I had managed to turn my smile upside-down just in time for the near collision with my mother's face at least. She must have noticed anyway. All those vitamins and supplements she took gave her hawk like vision.

"Do you want something?" I asked with forced countenance. It was not like me to test my stamina in a staring contest, so I broke eye contact first.

"You used to talk about traveling the world a lot as a brat." She spoke with a mysterious look in her eyes.

I didn't remember that and it bothered me that she did. There were a lot of things I said as a kid that didn't need to come back to haunt me now. I had been quite rambunctious and outgoing, sometimes for the worse. If she brought up that princess story I was definitely bailing.

"Pah. We took you everywhere, but you were never satisfied. Then you wouldn't leave the house for years and snoozed until your eyes turned crusty." She put a hand through her short hair and acted all theatrically. "That Adachi really is a miracle worker."

There were a lot of things I could have objected with and in fact my mind was bursting to retort already. Nobody could make me so furiously defensive like my own mother. But she did have a point, kinda. There was only one part I could not accept.

"It was my idea." I said stubbornly.

"Haha, you just copied our honeymoon trip idea!" She suddenly pointed at my face dramatically as if she had caught me red handed.

"What?" My eyes could not have been duller and my tone of voice not a smidgen more emotionless.

"Look at the postcards on the shelf. That's the Golden Gate Bridge!" She hurried to grab said postcard and shoved it in my face. Why was she acting as proud as if she had built the damn bridge with her own hands?

That bridge wasn't golden. It did seem familiar though. I tried to read the English words, but struggled a lot. In all the jumbled squiggles I did recognize something I had seen several times in the last few weeks. San Francisco.

"You and dad went to the USA?!" I was genuinely shocked this time.

"Hoho." She gave me the most torturously smug smile, before replying. "No way. It's just a postcard I bought."

It was hard to admit, but that woman really got one over me. I felt red hot shame spill across my cheeks and I begrudgingly accepted my loss. Not that I had any idea what we had been competing over. It's not like I had ever heard a story about my parents going overseas, so I would have had every right to be surprised.

"It's true that we considered it at the time." She suddenly added quietly and with a unnecessarily flexible move she jumped on the couch right next to me, sweeping my legs away unapologetically in the process.

"For what?"

"The h-o-n-e-y-m-o-o-n. Pay attention!" She poked my hips painfully and I squirmed.

There was that word again. Now that she had brought it up as well with more context it finally clicked inside my badly computing brain. Honeymoons were those trips that newlyweds went on right after their marriage. Obviously I knew that, but something inside my head had been trying to parse a different meaning from the dictionary entry I suppose. Huh. Honeymoon. Hm. Really.

"Without that trip you may not even be here." She said something so wretchedly, disgustingly, horrifically and repulsive that it almost caused an allergic reaction to my skin. With all my mental fortitude I created an image of something adorable and completely opposite of anything that implication could have caused me. My desperate mind grabbed the first thing lying on the pile and conjured up an image of an old and loyal dog. Gon. Oh no.

Caught between repulsion and sadness now my squirming only intensified.

While this bird of prey that posed as my mother seemed to revel in my suffering, she also gave me a much tenderer pat on the head. If she intended to crush my skull to put me out of my misery she was doing it wrong. "You can fulfill the dream we had back then. The honeymoon that never was."

"Which movie did you steal that line from?" I asked with suspicion, expecting her hand to pull my hair at any moment.

"You wouldn't know it." She responded without an ounce of shame.

"It's just a vacation anyway. None of you make any sense." All this talk about honeymoons was unsettling for some reason.

"Right." She relented surprisingly easily this once. "I hope you have fun together." That was the first motherly smile she had shown me in quite a while…

"Dinner's ready, Sis." The call of my little sister's starved voice broke that weird moment we had and I immediately jumped up to rush off. It wasn't like I disliked that intimacy, but come on. It was way too late for us to act like a normal mother and daughter!

After finishing dinner with my family I was set out into the night to find my way home under the stars. They did not create a mysterious road for princess Kaguya and me to meet. Not that I knew what to do if I ever did meet her. Probably ask about what floating through space felt like.

My father had offered to drive me back home, but I actually felt quite good about the summer air at night and decided to walk to the station. Many thoughts swirled through my mind as my sandals clapped across the paved road. My sister had insisted that I buy her several souvenirs on the trip. That was a given. Dad had only wanted me to take pictures of some tourist spots so he could share them with his friends at work. Why was he going to show them off as if he had been there himself? And my mother had nothing else to say but to give Adachi her regards. Weird.

There was really no special reason why I had come by my family's house so close to the trip. I had come to pick up a few things I had forgotten during the move that may have come in handy for traveling, that's about it. Although it felt like I was saying goodbye for a while, it was probably just some kind of homing instinct. A year ago I would have reported back to them whenever I left for more than a day, as rarely as that would happen.

It goes without saying, but I did invite Adachi. She declined again, muttering something about preparing some last minute things. I could not exactly tell whether it was an excuse this time. Maybe it was a half-truth - those were always harder to discern. Adachi was still far from comfortable visiting my family or meeting anyone in her free time. I honestly felt like she would have preferred to stay in our apartment for the rest of eternity. An eternity with just the two of us inside four small walls. Some people would have developed claustrophobia after a while, but for me it was not that unusual. There was the question of obtaining nourishment, but these days you could order almost anything on the internet. It didn't seem so bad.

My sandal kicked a small pebble by accident and it crossed the river and splashed after skipping three times. I couldn't even do that with my best throw usually. A total coincidence had carried it that far.

Well, it wasn't like we could just shut ourselves in anyway. But if I was quite honest I still wanted to leave even if we had the option. Not because I needed my space from Adachi, but rather because I wanted to take her with me to other places. Neither of us had much desire to go anywhere, but if it was a date or something it became so strangely appealing to me. Maybe I was done with amusement parks for life, but I would treasure all the faces Adachi had made when we did go there. Those were things I could not have experienced at home.

The trip was much the same. I didn't know anything about San Francisco. There was nothing in particular I craved to see or experience there. But I wanted to take Adachi to that place. I wanted to be with her, anywhere. And if that anywhere was some strange unknown place I would like that too. It could be special like no other vacation I had ever had.

Kind of like a honeymoon.

It wasn't winter anymore. The red of my nose and cheeks could not be explained by the freezing air that had enveloped us back then. The night sky had no sun to burn me either. Right now I was just glowing in rouge from pure embarrassment. It had all caught up with me at once.

That wasn't the kind of trip it was. Not at all. But even so, it was supposed to be special. I had bought that silly swimsuit after all. I had been on a diet to make it less… well it was definitely going to help. From the beginning I had never quite understood what a relationship would entail. At least I had tried to block out the details from my mind. Things were comfortable right now, so it would have been preferable to keep it that way. Definitely.

But there was a small part of me that cranked up the revolutions of my heart and sped up my blood pressure. Even though I said I never really thought about it… even as I told myself that I had no particular interest in that…

Sometimes Adachi would look at me in a certain way. I didn't have the vocabulary to describe it and I probably never would. Behind her focused eyes was something a little bit more blurry. Something warm – no, hot – that I could only perceive at the corner of my awareness. Maybe I didn't want to acknowledge it.

We were partners, girlfriends, lovers… whatever term you could assign, it didn't matter. I simply knew that we were not beyond a certain line yet. A line that was drawn in invisible sand below our naked feet. It was invisible, because neither of us acknowledged it. That was all. Occasionally it would become almost visible, in the mornings when we woke up so close, in the evenings when we touched on the couch.

It was not a topic I was comfortable with. Even though I was an adult woman, some things just didn't come up. Things I had already discarded long ago when I decided not to have a boyfriend or the like. I guess I had never even considered that it would be a girlfriend instead. Yes, we were both women, so… There were some mysteries that made things even more complicated. Even my meager understanding of the topic would have been enough to get the basics under the assumption that it was a man a woman in the picture. Now it wasn't.

Adachi… just how much did she know? How much did she hold back? What was I even trying to figure out? It was frustrating to feel so clueless.

These thoughts were glued to me all the way until I made it through the entrance of our apartment. I half expected Adachi to sit in the entryway like an abandoned dog waiting for its owner, but surprisingly everything was dark. I tip-toed through the hallway and glanced into the bedroom. There she was sleeping peacefully. She must have been tuckered out from the stress of preparing so intensely. When I had left she had been frantically checking out routes from the airport to our hotel.

I felt a smile bloom on my face and closed the door. She deserved that rest and I would not disturb it. In that case I had the living room to myself for a while. Instead of turning on the television or taking a nap on the couch I inspected a certain silver rectangle on the kitchen table. Adachi's laptop. It was relatively old by now, but it had given us countless hours of service in all kinds of areas.

I swallowed.

The internet was a source of all human knowledge. Humans took it for granted to the point where we didn't even notice that we used it for almost anything. I was not that attached by the navel to the World Wide Web, weirdly enough. I sometimes browsed on my phone, but I had little interest in stuff that I couldn't also watch on TV.

But this late at night there was not much interesting stuff on the channels we had… and anyway, you could not pick the topic you wanted with it. Informational channels aired their own program without my input. It would have been a huge coincidence if they aired something about the niche topic on my mind.

I rubbed my face with both hands.

Seems I was really going to do it. Hopefully I could figure out how to delete the search history on Adachi's laptop.

I awoke from a hazy sleep that was filled with images of street names and English words I had studied. This blurry mess had stuck with me from the day I had spent preparing for the most important journey of my life. It sounded like an exaggeration, but that couldn't have been further from the truth.

It was the middle of July and the hot morning sun was caressing the bed sheet and crossing my exposed legs. My hair was spread over the pillow like tendrils of oil in water. The ceiling greeted me with its neutral muted white as usual. Everything seemed to be in order in our bedroom. We were still home.

To make certain of that fact I turned my head over the pillow and looked to my side. There she was! Shimamura in all her sleepy glory. Her night dress was a bit loose as she had turned many times and her hair seemed slightly frazzled again. We were close. Not just in our hearts, but physically too. It was true that we had two separate beds, but the arrangement had changed a while ago. Against every creaking rusty joint in my body I had bowed down before my roommate and begged her to let me push out beds together.

I had no untoward intentions whatsoever! In fact there was nothing to even consider. It was just obvious that with how much Shimamura turned she would eventually fall off her bed, so if we stuck them together she more room to move and I would stop her from going to the edge, even if my own body had to serve as a barrier…

I buried my face in my hands. What kind of childish excuses was I making to myself here? Obviously Shimamura had known that this was not the reason. She knew. She absolutely knew. Even I knew it. But nonetheless she agreed to it in her usual carefree way. Since then I had been extremely stiff at night to avoid moving too far to her side. It would have been shameful to bump into her and wake her up.

But… sometimes I would hold out my arm and she would rest on it. The excitement I felt during those times was impure. I couldn't even deny it. That much joy and satisfaction could not have been normal. I regulated my breathing and pretended my arm wasn't part of me. Just a doll appendage that I could not move or feel. It helped me not to wake up Shimamura, but at the same time my blood flow was critically low in that limb. Sometimes I could not feel it for a long time after it got free. Oh well.

This morning we were not that close. I had fallen asleep before Shimamura even made it home, so it was her decision to lie at that distance. Her head was turned away from me and she was slightly curled up, probably because the blanket had gotten tangled in the gap between our beds. It was summer already, so the nights were far from cold. In fact I could see sweat pearl on her neck…

I shook my head vehemently and bounced off the bed. Today was the important day! A day I had looked forward to immensely, just as much as I had dreaded it. Our first flight together was a challenge I intended to survive. This melodramatic part of me was also new and I started to wonder what else Shimamura would awaken inside me.

While I stripped off my pajamas and went to the bathroom and glanced into the living room and saw my laptop closed and neatly placed on the table. I vaguely remembered leaving it on the kitchen table actually, but my mind had been super hazy when I finally pulled my eyes away from the screen. I knew it wasn't good for my eyes to do that anyway. Shimamura had dragged me to an optician and we found out that my eyes were a bit worse than average. I should probably have at least worn reading glasses I was told.

"So that's why you always squinted at your watch! You weren't glaring at all!"

Shimamura had exclaimed after that evaluation. I had never seen her so excited and close to laughing at the same time. I was not quite sure what she had meant by that and it seemed like it wouldn't be as funny to me either.

After washing my face and brushing my teeth I prepared everything necessary for the third time and checked the flight schedule one more time. No delays or cancelations yet. Good.

When the clock turned towards late morning I felt that I had to wake up Shimamura, as much as it hurt me to do it. She was a pretty late sleeper as you would expect, but today we had a schedule. And there was plenty of time to sleep on the plane. I read up on turbulence and how hard it was to sleep on such flights, but that's what the sleeping pills were for. Not for me though, I would have to keep an eye on Shimamura.

When I was about to open the door to the bedroom I was just a second too slow as it was already opened from the inside. In a half-dazed state my girlfriend stepped through the doorframe and looked up at me from her hunched pose.

""Ah.""

We let out a surprised noise at the same time and stopped centimeters from each other's faces. Red hot lava was streaming through my veins and I was utterly paralyzed in the melting pot that I called my body. Sweat was running down my neck at breakneck speed, but my eyes could not move at all. In this position we were in I looked downwards while Shimamura looked up. Her sleepy eyes had widened, her mouth was slightly opened, parting her full lips. And below her chin the loose night dress revealed something unspeakable. My eyes were glued there. I could not tear them away. No way to shut them.

"Mornin' Adaahaachi~" She suddenly yawned while saying my name and the spell was broken. If I was not utterly stressed out I may have noticed the shade of red at the tips of Shimamura's earlobes. Or maybe that was also just my imagination. Otherwise she was not showing any reaction.

"D-Do you want b-breakfast? We still have an hour before we need to leave." I managed to not fumble completely and stepped aside to let her move into the hallway.

"Yeah, probably best to eat something now. I heard airplane food sucks." She replied jovially.

I sighed in relief for some reason.

"They got some souvenirs here as well!" Shimamura spun in place, making her long skirt dance happily.

"Mhm." I nodded quickly.

It was an airport, so that much was expected at least. Not that it mattered too much, considering we were still in Japan. What point was there to getting souvenirs from a close-by airport? I was not complaining, though. Far from it. I thought it was very endearing to see Shimamura so bright and cheery. If our travel expenses doubled before we even crossed the ocean that would have been a worthy sacrifice to see her smile.

I pinched my waist and suppressed the pained yelp. While it was true that happiness was worth more than yen, it was still no reason to burn our reserves here. Somewhere inside my love-struck skull there was still a responsible adult left. I swear.

"I wonder if it will be sunny over there too." Shimamura had already dropped the keychain she had been inspecting a second ago and was now looking at the glass ceiling that projected the indomitable sun into the airport. She was adjusting the cap she had put over her tied up hair. Instinctively I touched my matching cap in the same place.

"The West Coast is very hot." I responded without returning the smirk she threw my way. She had totally noticed that cap grab. Who would have thought that these memorabilia from the theme park would come in handy after all?

"Good thing you packed five tubes of sunscreen then." She chuckled. Was she implying I didn't bring enough? I had worried about that myself actually. Maybe we could buy some more in one of the shops… "Look Sakura, there it is!" I had no time to worry about the sunscreen anymore. In an instant reality completely surrendered to one all-encompassing feelings. Shimamura's arms around mine. She was hugging my arm with full force and pointing at the airfield.

The softness and wholeness I felt from our connection was overwhelming and let the plane in front of our eyes look like something out of a fairy tale for a moment. A giant white carriage with wings. My ponytail waved in the wind as I adjusted my cap and followed Shimamura's eyes. This was our personal escort to the distant land of our dreams. Or something more poetic even.

"Did you ever wonder how planes manage to fly?"

"Uhm… aerodynamics?"

"Pretty much. But that's a boring answer."

"Then…" I rubbed my neck and adjusted the backpack's position slightly. "…they fly because people need to get to their destinations."

The distant sound of engines roared across the field. The trees and meadows behind it shook from the air pressure and left a swirl of green dots on the horizon. People were being moved from platform to platform on escalators. Everything was in motion now, except for us. We just stood there watching the spectacle, connected by the arms.

"That's the answer I was looking for." Shimamura said approvingly. "One hundred points."

"I was being scored?"

"Only on how Adachi-like your replies are." She laughed at the sour look on my face and pulled me along.

Ever onwards to our journey across the bluest skies.