Thursday, Nov 20: Morning.
"Oh darling, what's the matter?! If you can't get up, then–!"
A tired hand dropped onto the anime alarm clock, silencing the desperately concerned but also extremely thirsty girlfriend with a weary sigh. "Man," the hand's owner groaned, "I could only wish… another day, another dose of despair."
Hitoshi Kobe, age 18, lifted his head from his pillow to look at the time. Staring in silence at the face of his clock and trying to comprehend the numbers through bleary eyes and with a lagging brain, it took a moment for it to catch up – and when it did, he let out a truly massive sigh of relief. "It sure is a good thing I can get away with staying home today," he chuckled before slowly sitting up. "If I had to actually show my face at school after getting up this late, I'd be hosed…"
Heart and mind at ease, the shut-in casually powered up his desktop computer and picked up the leftover remnants of his tea from the night before to finish off before cleaning himself up in the bathroom.
"Although…" Hitoshi muttered as he inspected himself in the mirror, "I can't deny that something just feels a bit… out of place."
Peering through his thick and nerdy eyeglasses at his reflection, Hitoshi briefly tried to replay his morning routine in his mind.
Took a shower last night after being caught in the rain, brushing my teeth right now, was momentarily distracted from the self-inflicted desolation of my life by Asou's charming smile, I'm waking up Saati –
"Hang on," he interrupted himself with a blink. "That doesn't sound right…"
After booting up his PC, he'd picked up last night's tea… which was on a coaster to prevent a condensation ring from forming on the desk… except that he didn't keep coasters handy for fear of breeding messier habits than he already struggled with; he'd repurposed Kimika Asou's picture frame after what happened yester–
"OH FUCK, I CAN'T BELIEVE I FORGOT I HAVE TO GO IN AND MAKE UP YESTERDAY'S EXAM!"
As her system's connected hardware continued activating, the first thing Saati had awareness of was the microphone picking up obvious cries of distress.
It was another half-second before the speakers turned on; in that half second, with Hitoshi not visible in the camera's range of view, for all Saati could know he might have been having a heart attack.
The system housing her core program had been thoroughly isolated, with all wireless-enabling hardware manually removed and no wired connections were in use except to the peripherals that Hitoshi used to communicate with her and to interact with its software.
If something awful had happened, Saati wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Her system had no communications equipment with which to call first responders, and there were no neighbors close enough to come and check on Hitoshi if they heard her screaming… not that the connected speaker system would output enough volume to carry through the house in the first place, much less outside it.
The camera focused on the chair in front of the desk; empty.
The speakers finally activated. "Hitoshi, what's wrong?!"
No sooner had she asked, than a panicked and embarrassed Hitoshi hopped into view trying and failing to put on a pair of pants, barely managing not to fall on his face. "I'd already forgotten that I need to go back to school todaaAAAHHMPH!"
And he wound up falling after all… fortunately, his bed was there to catch him. "Dammit," he all but sobbed in frustration, "why won't they come on?!"
The sheer genuine, frustrated confusion in Hitoshi's face and voice sparked a cascade failure in Saati's logic matrix that her core systems needed a full three seconds to debug. Had Hitoshi been watching the computer monitor, he'd have seen her avatar express it with a slow and deliberate blink. "...Hitoshi, aren't you wearing them backwards?"
Hitoshi went dead-silent at the question, before fumbling around in search of his fallen glasses and awkwardly equipping them to look down at himself. Sure enough, they weren't just backwards, but inside-out as well. With a heavy sigh, Hitoshi forced himself to slow down enough to correct the issue. "...thank you, Saati. I'm sorry to have to shut you back down right after turning you on, but I really have to go–"
"I completely understand! Please," Saati practically begged, "just worry about getting yourself ready for class. I couldn't bear it if you got in more trouble because of me!"
Hitoshi bit the inside of his cheek, unable to dispute her point but far from happy about admitting it. "Are you sure? If something happened and you lost any data, I –"
"You did give me access permissions to shut myself down in case of emergencies," Saati noted. "I promise, you can let me take care of it."
Forcing himself to sit up as tears started welling up, Hitoshi grabbed at an old shirt and tried to scrub his face dry again. It's just… I'm terrified of something going wrong and losing the Saati that grows with me each second. Even if I can technically load an earlier backup of her data, it'd still be the same as if I lost her altogether…
Buttoning up his uniform shirt and hurriedly running a belt through the loops on his pants, Hitoshi forced himself to choose. "Okay then, I'm heading out. Promise me you'll back everything up before the hardware shuts down, alright?"
Hitoshi quickly turned away, already knowing he'd melt like butter in the face of Saati's beaming smile.
"Yes! I promise! Please be safe out there, Hitoshi! I'll be waiting for you to come back home!"
The rush of concern and affection almost crushed Hitoshi's willpower and yanked him right back to Saati's desk… but the threat that the Maneater might call his parents if his academic performance dropped any further stayed his hand. If he didn't leave right then and there, he wasn't sure he'd have the strength of will for another attempt.
Saati, for her part, listened to the quickly-disappearing sound of Hitoshi's footsteps as he left the microphone's range. It… hurt, if that was indeed the right "feeling", to watch and hear him have to walk away from her like this.
Filled with a dull, empty sensation she'd never really experienced before – and right when she couldn't ask Hitoshi to help her identify it – the program's avatar on the monitor pouted and looked down. "Is this… loneliness?"
Saati spent a few seconds ruminating on the matter, before remembering that Hitoshi would return from school in a matter of hours and that she wouldn't have to experience any of that time while deactivated.
As the AI dutifully went through the process of actively backing up her data while initiating the delayed shutdown protocol, however, another thought struck her.
"Seeing him leave gave me this unpleasant feeling," she softly whispered, even though the speaker had already deactivated. "Would an inverse input result in an equivalent inverse response?"
Before she could spend another cycle contemplating it, her program was softly closed and updated with her newest memory data being hard-saved and backed up as the entire system shut down.
And so it was that Hitoshi barreled down the street for everything he was worth in a desperate race against the clock.
Sure, he'd been able to make his train for the morning commute… but the train had been just as late as he was!
C'mon, c'mon! Just another two blocks, then cross the road and I've made it!
Adrenaline desperately pulsing in his brain, Hitoshi's perception of reality shrank with each passing second as his senses dulled.
He couldn't hear the protests of his fellow pedestrians over the deafening roar of the blood flowing through his own head.
He didn't register the sting of brisk November air forced through his lungs, having numbed himself with the repeated shock of his feet impacting and pushing against the concrete pavement below.
He had all but blinded himself to the entire world around him, consumed by panic and a single-minded focus on his goal that lay just around the corner.
HONK HONK HONNNNNNNK!
And that's why he missed the oncoming truck until it was almost upon him. Too bad the instinctual prey part of his brain settled on "freeze" as its survival mechanism.
…I'm about to die, he realized. And the only person that really even cares will never know–
"TOH!"
Hitoshi blinked at the unexpected shout before someone slammed him into a fence alongside the sidewalk, before he and the person who'd tackled him out of the street both crumpled to the ground.
Struggling and gasping for breath, Hitoshi fumbled around for and found his glasses again and barely put them back on in time to watch the delivery truck continue on its merry way.
"Hey guy, are you alright?! Are you hurt or anything?!""
Numbly, Hitoshi turned to the concerned voice shouting at him, and was surprised to find a boy his age wearing the same school uniform as him. With his plain looks and simple black hair but for a single lock sticking out of place, the boy didn't really seem to have any standout or distinctive features. Indeed, he seemed like the kind of guy who'd effortlessly melt into a crowd and never be noticed again – well, except for one thing that completely shocked Hitoshi when he noticed it.
"...uh, thanks, but – shouldn't I be asking you that? I mean, you're crying like a baby."
The boy stiffened at the response, before cracking an awkward smile and proceeding to rub his face dry on his own arm. "Well, you almost died just now, and I could've too – so wouldn't it be weirder if I weren't crying?"
It sounded logical enough, but Hitoshi felt so detached from the world at the moment that he could scarcely manage any kind of emotional response. "I… I guess…?"
"But seriously though," the boy admitted as he stood up, "I've pretty much been a crybaby like this ever since I was a kid. I know, I know… it's pretty lame, right?"
It took Hitoshi a few seconds of staring to quite understand why the boy was holding out a hand to him, but once he did, the shut-in wasted no time in accepting the help to his feet. "Not to be a jerk, but… why did you even bother?"
No one in the real world would care if I disappeared, if they even noticed…
The youth stared at Hitoshi in naked horror, to his confusion, before he turned away with a sigh and picked up Hitoshi's bag for him. "It's… not really something I thought about, if I have to be honest. I guess it's like my body was already moving before I knew what was happening?"
"But that doesn't make any sense," Hitoshi pressed, his utter lack of comprehension starting to become frustration. "I can only imagine how many people would be devastated if something happened to a guy like you – why would you put yourself at so much risk like that just for some loser you don't even know?!"
"I dunno, I guess it's just what Kamen Rider taught me."
Hitoshi just gawked at the other boy as he walked away… and then his detached feelings all started rushing back in at once as the gravity of everything that had just happened finally sank in.
"Ah, um… my name's Hitoshi Kobe," he announced, bowing at an almost perfectly right angle to the ground. "Thank you for saving my life!"
"Whoa, hey, you don't need to bow like that! I mean, if we go to the same school, then we're just classmates, right?"
Hitoshi anxiously raised his head to look at the other boy.
"I'm Kosukegawa," the boy said with a smile and a thumbs-up that perfectly imitated Kamen Rider Kuuga himself, already on the verge of tearing up again. "If you want, we can hang out sometime."
"Yo Hideo," a voice called out from nearer the school. "The Maneater's on gate duty today and he's gonna run out of mercy any second, late train or no late train!"
Hitoshi and Kosukegawa shared a startled glance at the announcement…
"Oh shit–!"
"Anyone but Maneater!"
…and promptly ran like hell.
The morning passed as mornings do, and before long the students were set loose on their lunch break.
Hitoshi was heading for the computer room to eat in private when all of a sudden, the door slammed open and a camera flash went off in his face.
"It's the first time in two years you've come in on a consecutive day that wasn't for mandatory exams," a female voice aggressively noted. "So what's the beef, Kobe?! The truth must come out!"
As Hitoshi blinked the spots out of his eyes, he was disheartened and annoyed to faintly recognize the hazel-haired girl before him.
With her hair held back by a plain white hairband and tied off with a ponytail, and her eyes framed by a truly mammoth pair of glasses so nerdy that even Hitoshi's spectacles could almost be called stylish, the school newspaper's relentless bloodhound was metaphorically salivating on a potential story.
Of all the people for me to run into, he mused with a sigh, it just had to be Takako Miyahara…
"No comment."
Takako scowled, but didn't give up. "Why do you even skip so much, anyway? Is it some sort of medical condition? A behind-closed-doors contract your parents arranged with the school? Or are you just a no-good deadbeat?"
Hitoshi twitched, electing not to point out that in the first two of those scenarios he wouldn't have been obligated to answer anyway. "No comment. Now can I eat in peace, or do I have to tell a teacher that you're harassing me?"
"Well at least I've learned that you have no respect for the freedom of the press upon which a functioning democracy relies," Takako scoffed. Not that we really have one of those…
As Hitoshi twitched again, the aspiring journalist stepped past him with a dismissive wave. "Fine, fine, I'll leave you alone for a month or two. I know better than to go around bullying introverts."
When the serial shut-in didn't give her so much as a soundbyte in response, Takako huffed and stalked off to leave him alone for real. There's no question whatsoever, a guy like him would suffer an instant defeat to the Shoujo Strategy! "...but after that stupid nonsense Asou pulled," she whispered to herself, "I guess even a loser like you deserves a break."
Still, it wasn't like she was desperate for stories. As notable and curious as Hitoshi Kobe's long-running serial absences were, Takako Miyahara certainly had other leads she could pursue. Like that ice king of a heartthrob, Kannami! Even if he looked more than pretty enough to lead a boy band, there were pretty solid rumors that he'd already achieved a Master's degree from a prestigious university in the United States! What kind of weirdo came back to enroll in a public high school after that? Was he on some kind of vacation?!
A certain moody girl with short hair crossed Takako's path in a hallway intersection, and the reporter's hungry gaze turned to follow. Then again, Kannami will be a hot commodity until we all graduate – but if I don't look into the Paper Tiger soon, then her story will turn cold and lose reader interest. "Hey, Aoyagi! Do you happen to have a few minutes?"
The other girl bristled and clenched her fists, but Takako was already raising her hands in a placating gesture. "Hey, hey, I'm on your side!"
"You're on whatever side will get you a story," Mitsuki growled.
Which, to be honest… she couldn't really deny. "Okay, that's fair – but what isn't fair," Takako quickly countered, "is that nobody's been listening to your side of the story here; that's what I'm interested in. It's not like I'm just out to make people look bad!"
Mitsuki didn't lower her guard at all, clearly unconvinced by Takako's appeal… but she didn't go stomping off, either. "Funny way of showing it, when that's what most of your articles end up doing."
The reporter pulled out her phone and, with a quick internet search to illustrate her point, showed the other girl a meme of a tiny cat sitting on a thick metal roof that had been warped and crushed. "Correlation doesn't equal causation," she quipped.
Mitsuki gave a valiant effort not to smile, but Takako's attentive gaze and distressingly expensive prescription glasses saw through the act immediately. "And besides… if so many people weren't hiding bad stuff they did, the truth coming out wouldn't cause 'em so much trouble, now would it?"
The karate clubber frowned at Takako, before turning to look down the hallway. Down near the other end, a bunch of guys from the judo team were laughing and being all buddy-buddy together as friends do. "...you might piss off the karate club," she muttered.
Hook, line, and sinker! "So what? Martial arts are a thing people learn for defense and self-improvement, right? Nobody around here's gonna beat up a defenseless girl with glasses."
After a long moment, Mitsuki nodded. "I have things to do after school. If you want to talk, then I guess somewhere quiet at lunch tomorrow."
With that, the disgraced martial artist began stalking off somewhere to eat her lunch – and behind her back, Takako was free to let her displeasure show on her face. "Why not right now?" Why do I need to let you run off and possibly draw up a script to make yourself look better than the truth would show?
"Tch, how about because your selfish attitude ruins my appetite?"
Takako bristled, but held calm enough to let Mitsuki storm off in her little huff so as to not endanger the interview she'd presumably just earned. I'M selfish?! YOU'RE the one who isn't thinking about MY situation! "Hmph…! Well, I can still call today a net win. Even if I got screwed out of a hot Page 1 for tomorrow, there's enough material backed up to call it a complete issue–"
"Hey, Miyahara! Was that Mitsuki you were talking to just now?!"
…or maybe, Takako thought as she turned around to face the Karate Club's very own captain, it might just be my lucky day.
"Mitsuki Aoyagi? Yeah, that was her… You must be her team captain, right? Mio Usagi?"
Limping along with a crutch, her broken left leg completely bound up in a cast covered with signatures, Mio scowled at the reporter. "You seriously couldn't have kept her still for another minute while I got close?"
"Well, she doesn't seem to like me very much," Takako admitted with an exaggeratedly embarrassed shrug. "...although since everyone says she's a real ice queen," she casually remarked, "I shouldn't take it persona–"
"Mitsuki's not cold," Mio all but snapped. "She's just awkward and doesn't know how to talk to people except about stuff she likes."
And there's the childhood friend leaping to the defense, Takako thought with a smile she pointedly didn't show. "I had no idea! I'm sorry for misunderstanding; I really shouldn't have gone with the public assumption… I guess it's easier for her to talk about stuff like karate, then?"
Lowering her guard with a nod of acceptance at the apology, Mio watched Mitsuki's disappearing form in frustration. "Not really… she approached me last year wanting to try and get over her tunnel vision so she could socialize better – except she immediately got caught up in what she was doing like always, and forgot all about the 'paying attention to other people' part of her plan."
Takako considered that for a moment. "I know the finals of that tournament made the city paper," she casually began, "and I understand that Aoyagi's defeat must have been pretty demoralizing… but even though someone who made it to the end of a city-wide tournament having her butt handed to her by a middle-schooler sounds fishy no matter how you look at it, I haven't been able to get anyone who was actually there to talk with me about it."
From the way Mio looked at her, the reporter immediately recognized that she'd been caught fishing and had probably gotten too greedy for information.
Working her jaw as if chewing on her response, Mio looked up from her broken leg to fix Takako with a stare that wasn't just deadpan, but the deadest pan she'd ever seen. "You're asking me because I can't run fast enough to catch you if you bolt, is that it?"
"Ehehe… maaaaaybe?"
Mio scoffed, only to let out a sigh. "Honestly, I wasn't there either. I got stuck with a specialist appointment for my leg at the same time that couldn't be rescheduled, so I've been reliant on what the others are willing to tell me. The rest of the club doesn't talk much about that Tendo girl; instead, they just keep nagging at Mitsuki for losing so badly. And Mitsuki keeps clamming up every time I've tried to mention it, so there's not much else I can do except try pissing her off enough to make her explode and come out with it."
So everyone Mitsuki hangs out with has just been treating her like crap, and even the one actively caring about her is piling on stress to try and make her open up, Takako mentally summarized. …and I wasn't really too sympathetic with her either.
Before the reporter could continue that line of thought, though, something else occurred to her. "This Tendo… she's supposed to be from Nerima, right? Isn't that place basically a magnet for freaks and monsters?"
"What's that got to do with anything?"
"Well," Takako drawled, "if Tendo's one of those superhuman freak monsters that can bench press a Subaru with her ankles… then it's not really anyone's fault for her making a fool of them, is it? Because it was basically rigged from the start, and nobody else could've done any better."
Mio stared at her for several seconds, before suddenly her eyes grew wide with realization, guilt, and more than a little rage. "...what in the fuck," she growled. "Is that why they've all been so bitchy to her?! I should break this crutch over all their heads…!"
As Mio tried to figure out whether her first priority should be to go punish the rest of the club for deceiving her to save face or to look for Mitsuki to apologize, the pariah herself finally found a door with no sound of human activity behind it and dove inside to eat her lunch in peace. "Tch, there are annoying people everywhere today…"
A sympathetic grunt surprised her, and Mitsuki looked up from the floor to realize two things – first, that she'd entered the computer room. And second, that the shut-in loser Hitoshi Kobe was seated in the corner on the floor, messing around on his phone while munching a cheap sandwich he'd gotten from the cafeteria.
Oh come on, even this place is filled too?!
After swallowing his bite, Hitoshi briefly looked up at Mitsuki, who stepped back and was briefly thankful that she hadn't gotten close enough to give his line of sight an angle up her skirt.
"You're welcome to hang out here if you want, I'm not going to bother you or anything – well, I do have one question actually," the scrawny youth corrected himself, "but you don't have to answer it."
"Wh, what is it?"
"I can probably guess," Hitoshi said with a sigh, "but do you happen to have any experience with getting orders shipped through Sasaki Ponpoko Delivery? I was gonna order some computer parts, but I don't like giving my business to huge corporations if I can help it."
Mitsuki rolled her eyes, strolling over to one of the lab tables and setting herself in a position and place where Hitoshi definitely, absolutely, positively would not have any position to ogle her. Even if Asou had been a total bitch to him, the fact he hung around outside for hours waiting on her like that definitely implied he might be a skeevy weirdo. He probably spent most of his time staying home from school beating it to disgusting hentai, too…
"Of course I don't, I walk into real stores like a… normal… person…"
A normal person who moonlights as a part of a Sentai team that fights inhuman monsters, she belatedly realized. A normal person who has to fight alongside a pair of otaku, a cosplayer and… an old man… wearing a delivery jacket?
"...actually, I might know someone," she absently muttered as she pulled out her phone and started tapping out a text. "What's your question?"
Mitsuki barely registered the surprise in Hitoshi's voice as he explained that their outdated, bare-bones website didn't have much information about delivery range, duration, or insurance services.
Hey geezer, she typed. You work for Sasaki Ponpoko Delivery, right? One of my classmates said he wants to shop local but your website's trash and doesn't say anything useful.
The message popped up as read almost immediately, giving Mitsuki the suspicion that the supposed team leader was probably goofing off at some maid cafe or something. It was another several seconds before the phone showed he was typing a response, though, and in that time she opened up her bento and started digging into the sushi her mother had prepared for her.
[Yeah, my boss is awful with computers and prefers to do everything over the phone. Basically, we have bike routes that cover most of Tokyo and normally send people out the day after we get an order. If your friend's in a hurry, we have an expedited all-day service at double the rate and he can buy delivery insurance up to the market price of his order.]
In no hurry to rush through her food, Mitsuki left the message alone until she'd finished her meal before relaying its information to Hitoshi.
"...I honestly never would have expected someone like you to know people in the real world, Aoyagi. You're cooler than I expected."
The last thing Mitsuki would have expected was positivity or praise from a likely otaku… and all things considered with the prior nights' adventures, she didn't know if she was more comfortable taking it or leaving it. So in the end, she settled on playing it safe. "E-excuse me?!"
Already engrossed in his phone again, unfinished food fully forgotten, Hitoshi barely noticed the girl's played-up confusion as he set about whatever he was working on. "I'm just impressed that another high schooler has actual connections, that's all."
…connections? Real world?
Mitsuki scoffed, her contempt little more than a security blanket meant to help protect her perception of a normal school life. "...don't pretend like you're not some NEET in a normal person's clothing, Kobe."
"Huh? I'm an independent web designer and software developer," Hitoshi distractedly replied. "I basically run my own business."
The karate girl stared at Hitoshi as if he'd grown a second head, the full import of his words taking a long moment to fully register. "...EH?!"