After summer starts autumn.
Chapter Two – Autumn
Megurine Luka pulled a can opener out of her pocket and started fiddling with it. She was nervous, for Len had warned her that there were flying things about. Strangely, he had looked at Miku and they had both shared a conspiratorial smile. Luka was not going to take chances. She had modified her can opener to have a secret compartment for a knife(like a Swiss army knife, can opener-style) for a reason, and this was that reason.
Kagamine Len was raking leaves, whistling cheerfully and innocently. He was, however, only half of those things.(And, guess what, it was not innocent. Accuse him of anything, though, and you would find yourself confused, baffled and not remembering the events of the past few days.) In his free hand he held a banana, as per usual. It was half-peeled. One of the great mysteries of Len is how he can peel a banana while doing anything. Walking, shaking hands, in a handstand, swimming, singing(he once mistook a banana for the mic, or was it the other way around?). A rake pole came hurtling towards him.
Len, however, was expecting this. Another mystery of Len was how he expected something to happen twice, and they did. Now, a lesser person would be driven insane by this, but Len was not a lesser person.
He was a Vocaloid, none of that nonsense about not having an actual personality and not actually being real.
Now, about the pole.
It was, actually, having a bad day. If it just had some semblance of a face, it would be screaming, crying, and hyperventilating. Not necessarily in that order. It—and its companion, the rake—had been bought by a blue-haired guy. The guy had been singing under his breath. The pole and the rake were very excited about their first life in a home, fresh out of the factory, to experience leaf-raking adventures. They had planned to marry, have little fork-spade-ratchet babies, and die old. But I digress.
Right after they arrived at their first home, they were immediately thrown on a couch in favour of a brunette wearing an outfit probably banned in six countries. They had not minded, of course, until the rake got sat on and cursed at. They were then thrown out the window.
This had slightly irritated them, but at least they were still together, they reassured each other. They would always be together, they repeated over and over again.
They'd landed in a patch of nicely-treated grass, no bugs, thankfully. They had also thought of moving only a little bit, that won't hurt anyone, will it, to analyze their unfamiliar surroundings.
After a glance, they had concluded that this was a home fit for a family of celebrities. There was an artistically arranged cluster of beautiful housepartments(because they were really pretty much half-house and half-apartment), a building with a sign that said STUDIO above the door, trees everywhere, and a nice patio(complete with swimming pool) in the center of it all, probably for activities. As a predicted side-order, there were heaps of dead leaves everywhere.
It looked as if the rake and the pole had a lot of work to do.
While they were strategically thinking over their raking route(something taught at the factory), though, a depressed-looking silver-haired girl with a bottle of something, probably alcohol, picked them up and started sobbing. She had whispered something about nobody liking her, and the sobbing turned into full-force bawling. Neglecting to look at what she had picked up, she ran to what was probably her own home, rake in one hand, and alcohol in the other, and dropped the rake on the way there, such was the power of the body tremors caused by her grief. (Yeah, you know I'm not trying at all.)
They were dropped into the pool. The pool.
If there's a four-letter word that every gardening implement dislikes, it's "pool".
Why? Pools have water(and even if there was no water, the tools would be used to scrape slime off the sides. Insert shudder here). Which means rust. Gardening tools quite like their bodies without rust. Rust meant getting abandoned in a dark, dusty corner of the tool shed. Speaking of tool shed, there was none in sight, but that could've been the rake and the pole's line of view; the complex was probably big enough to house a forty-thousandth of Tokyo. There could be a tool-shed anywhere.
At long last, after five painfully long minutes, a short-haired blonde girl in a sailor's outfit fished them out of the pool. Finally! they thought. A kind person! Oh, we shall provide aid to you in all your raking endeavours. Praise! Long live blondie! WE SHALL FOREVER BE IN YOUR DEBT.
"WHO DROPPED A RAKE IN THE POOL?" Kagamine Rin, for it was her, screamed. No, she was saying it really loud because, you know, screaming does bad things to your voicebox. Or 'precious vocal chords', if you care to wax lyrical about it.
"I CERTAINLY DIDN'T!" Megurine Luka calmly answered. "AND—"she jumped, looked around, mucked with her can opener, and abandoned her first thought, replacing it with another sentence. "ASK KAITO! HE BOUGHT THE STINKING RAKE!" she then closed the window she had been leaning out of, sighed in relief, and stared into her reinforced room, looking at it in a new perspective. Everything was covered with Kevlar and things were hammered to the walls. "I'm justified," she muttered to herself. "I have a perfectly good reason for this."
Back down to the patio, Rin wrinkled her nose and stomped away, looking for a tool shed and muttering curses under her breath; curses against Kaito, Luka, The Rake, Miku(just because!), and everybody else on the ten-hectare lot. Once she reached the tool shed(which was snazzily designed by the way; lots of glass and metal), she opened the door, dumped it in, and stomped away.
The rake and the pole were relieved, pretty much. No more. No more, until the next day. Then they would be ready for this home of howling harpies and screeching ghouls. And they would get through the day. Then every single day after that. They would, they repeated. It was their new mantra, constructed in fifteen seconds. They would get through it. They would get through it. They would get through it.
Enter Hatsune Miku, aka Chaosbringer.
Miku was having a great day, just peachy. There was a new song that she was supposed to learn in a week(because it was just really long*), and the song was pretty depressing, but that'd been remedied by Kaito bringing her along to buy a rake; she'd split off from him, since wow, that is the cutest autumn outfit ever, don't you think, Kaito, go on, you don't have to wait for me, go home now, bye-bye, and she'd come home bearing pea coats, sweet princess collars, and shoulder bags, tired but happy.
After carefully unpacking the eight shopping bags she had recycled(because she liked those shopping bags! If you're gonna talk about her eco-awareness, shut up, she's not being kind, well, maybe a little bit*), laying the clothes on her bed to show the others later, Miku decided to go get a homemade milkshake(Gumi made wicked milkshakes) or a cheeseburger or a bowl of chilli or something equally unhealthy. She'd just burn it off by doing something strenuous.
Downstairs, Gumi was napping on the couch. Miku smiled. Gumi was adorable, yet she, Miku, needed her milkshake. She walked over and flicked Gumi in the eye, which hurt a lot.
Gumi was not surprised. It was a regular occurrence for Miku to do something unpredictable to grab attention and get something. She'd tried to hold her ground several times, but Miku'd just persuaded her each of those times. Either way, Gumi would do anything her housepartment-mate(that would be Miku) wanted, because aforementioned housepartment-mate was a scary sweet crazy-persuasive diva. It would be hard to change her, yet somebody had taught her manners last month. After a healthy bowl of of skepticism and arguments, everybody had come to the agreement that the ability to say 'sorry' five times in fifty opportunities does count as manners. Manner, singular. It was a small step, but a step nonetheless.
"We ran out of ingredients, Miku, you were supposed to get groceries while you were with Kaito but you probably got distracted by some shiny clothes, so I'm going back to sleep," she grumbled, yawned, and turned over, burrowing into the assorted but organized heap of bolsters, bench cushions, and fluffy pillows. "You know where to go when you need food," she muttered in a lower tone.
Miku cursed under her breath; curses against Gumi, milkshakes, Gumi, Rin(just because!) and Gumi.
Stomping past(not really stomping; that would ruin her heels) the patio and the pool, she hurried past the gates that enclosed the Vocaloid neighbourhood. It would be a sort of compound, but it was practically a little neighbourhood. The fanmade Vocaloids had really cozy(but small and expensive[the furniture was superb]) houses settled behind the housepartments. Which reminded her that with the number of Vocaloids in the neighbourhood, at least twenty people should be out and about today, yet nobody was out except for Miku. Well, they probably have good reasons to stay home, Miku thought. Probably.
Walking into some oily-smelling restaurant, Miku waited in a very long line(about six, seven people) and jumped when a person in the line next to hers tapped her shoulder. "Hey," he said.
"Oh, um, hello," Miku answered, baffled as to why some random guy would want to talk to her in a very busy line where he was probably going to be pushed forward any minute now.
"Could you. . . you know," the guy gestured. "do something for me?"
"What is it? Not that I would help you or anything," she hastened to add. "I'm just curious. You know, intelligent people are curious and all that," she said, flashing a condescending smile. He gave her a dry look. It seemed he was tired of her already. He probably was.
"Yeah, could you please pick up that rubber ball to your left? It's yellow and has a bullseye on it, you can't miss it." Then, looking left and right, the guy dropped his tone and said, "it's for the safety of the planet."
Miku slowly turned around to search for the ball. There it was. "Okay, I'll get it. But don't do anything shady while I'm getting it or else," she said in a voice that told you that she could probably buy a grenade launcher in thirty seconds and use it against you without getting thrown in jail. The guy nodded quickly.
She knelt and, in that position, slowly reached out for it, her hand slightly cupped and her fingers splayed out, the perfect grabbing-a-ball-off-a-floor stance. Closer. . . closer.
And Miku took the ball, stood up, and whirled around. "Here it is." The guy took it, said thank you, and hurled it at the back of another random guy's head. This one was morbidly obese, and started choking on his food. A woman rushed up to him to do the Heimlich manoeuvre, but, unable to reach her arms around his stomach, ran to the policeman guarding the door and pulled him to the crime scene. The policeman thumped the obese man on the back with a force that could kill most baby koalas. Another woman, who had started screaming when the incident started, promptly fainted.**
Miku hurried forward in line. She was horrified and decided not to talk to strangers in fastfood restaurant lines ever again.
She ordered a hamburger( it looked big in the advertisements) and an even bigger milkshake(the advertisements had not been lying about this one). Sipping the milkshake and eating the hamburger, she slowly and leisurely walked back to the neighbourhood.
Once there, she proceeded to sit down on a chair and finish her very unhealthy food. Could it even be called food? Why, yes, it is food.
Waiting to finish her 'food', Miku was bored. She needed something to look at, besides that little pigeon that always landed on that spot on the post right above that little wire thing and just below the Warning! sticker. After a few moments contemplating why it would land there and landing(get it?) several answers, she needed another thing to look at.
Enter Kagamine Len.
Len was perhaps the second person not taking a nap or staying at home. He was doing community service because Rin told him to and because he was going to do it anyway. The piles of dead leaves were pretty to look at. If you weren't there. And if your only reference was an expertly taken Instagram that was blurred, given a red-and-orange filter, and covered with an inspirational quote using the Helvetica font.
And so Len had raked the whole day. Of course he had taken numerous breaks and naps and snacks, but he was close to finishing by the time Miku had come back from her shopping spree. With nothing else to do, he carefully touched up the piles of dead leaves and whatnot. That was when a certain evil counterpart(male, though) of his thought up of a bright idea involving jumping, piles of leaves, and jumping onto piles of leaves. Genius.
Honne Dell, right after he wrecked Len's precious, hard-earned stack, laughs his special evil laugh, reserved for these kind of shenanigans. He had his own list of various laughs, and they all sounded different from each other. Meiko documented the laughs and Haku, as much as she loved her brother, provided the field research and commentary.
Right now, he was laughing his 'I ruined something expensive, what you gonna do now?' laugh, a hybrid of 'I'm not sorry!' and 'Look at that mess!'. Len burns imaginary fireballs into Dell's forehead, using his 'Hand me your payment, it's equivalent to how much you value your life!' glare. Dell only laughs harder, destroying what else of the leaf-pile that hadn't been completely demolished.
"So, Len, you know I'm not going to help you, obviously, so, I'm going to go with Haku to the AA meetings, bye," Dell said, smiling like a, well, like a loon. Len is still speechless. His mouth is closed like a maximum-security prison and he is still glaring Roman Candles at nothing when the evil albino leaves.
He tilted his head to face the sky and he screamed, in a manly way: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!"
After a while, Len cooled down and looked at the leaves scattered everywhere and, resignedly, sighed. Oh well, he thinks. At least nothing else got wrecked. He fixed it all back up into one pile in fifteen minutes and, not caring for the look of the hastily-fixed thing, slumped onto a nearby bench with a slug sitting on it(he found this out using his rear) and moved a bit to give the slug some space, biting into one of two bananas he found in his front pocket. He guarded the heap since he, you know, expected things to happened twice.
Only the uppermost leaves were in need of immediate raking. Finally, the fruits of his labours have mostly revealed themselves.
Miku quietly watched Len as he suddenly grinned and started raking the last bits of leaves. Deciding that this would also be very productive, strenuous, and fat-burning at the same time, Miku fast-walked to the tool shed and got the newly-bought rake(which pseudo-screamed). Now, where would she start?
Teal-Hair of the Diva Clan marked her hunting grounds. "Banana-Devourer of the Mirror Clan, you will not enter the boundaries set by this line. Bade you go or I will be forced to attack you and enjoy it." With that, Teal-Hair began doing Some Very Hard Work.
Miku couldn't get the leaves to budge. After realizing that the rake was pointing towards her and not towards the leaves, she fixed her error and tried to finish the Very Hard Work. The Most Ancient Tool was still not cooperating, so Miku punished it severely for its actions and returned to her task. But alas! The Most Ancient Tool had broken!
Miku was furious.
Len dodged the rake pole coming his way.
Miku stomped over there to give him a piece of her mind. He smirked. She glared. He stopped smirking.
"Oh, oh no. Too close. Miku, stop stomping. No, no, stop. WAIT!"
Somehow, they ended up with their faces smooshed together. Like, you know, kissing.
I guess they enjoyed it?