There was a buzzing in his ears, a thick, ringing sound like a gong. His throat felt like sandpaper, and his tongue tasted like charred black metal. Where other people would have gotten splitting, cluster headaches, his head felt calm. Empty. Like someone had reached in, unplugged his brain, and left a white void.
In short, Sota was suffering from the severe side-effects of Akane's Cooking Disease. Not that he knew that. No, all he knew was that he was confined to a hospital bed, with disappointingly plain decor, far away from damsels playing dulcimers and from underground streams like in his dream.
It was sad.
He really loved that dream. What a great dream. If only if it was real.
That girl Akane was sitting by his bedside, along with some other guy he didn't know. She looked like The Scream painting by Edvard Munch. All dried up and shriveled cheeks with hands clasped to her face, an expression of the potent agony within her heart.
She glanced up with shimmering eyes when Sota stirred from his slumber.
"Sota-kun! I'm so sorry!" she blurted out. "I-I just thought you'd...my almond cookies...!"
She burst into loud wails of despair. The guy next to her looked vaguely uncomfortable.
"Hey...you know, you just need practice cooking, Akane, it's nothing to worry about. You'll get better."
Sota sat up slowly.
"Hold on. You were the one who made the almond cookies, right, nee-san?"
Akane gave him a shaky nod.
Honestly, his pre-hallucination memories were pretty fuzzy. Those cookies were green and sort of black from what he remembered.
"That..."
"Was horrible?" Akane sniffled and wiped and nose on her sleeve.
"No."
"It sucked?"
"No."
Words could not describe the out-of-body, bizarre experience he'd had. It was like lightning striking his head and filling his mind with brilliance.
It was...
"Awesome."
"P-pardon?"
The guy next to Akane stared at him like his brains had gotten scrambled.
"I wanna share those cookies with my friends, if you don't mind, nee-san."
Akane's eyes began shimmering again for entirely different reasons.
And that was how, in the days to come, Sota's whole middle school experienced mass hallucinogenic experiences.
Some kids wrote books and poems. Others became known for groundbreaking scientific discoveries. Pint-sized prodigies, all of them. They won awards. They came on television. The education department touted the excellence of Japan's school system and foreign observers looked on with envy. There were some high-profile "kidnap the genius children" scandals that came to nothing, the disappointed abductors releasing the kids upon realizing all that brilliance was momentary and not a long-term trait.
There were rumors of almond cookies that mutated to rumors of orange cookies, that mutated to rumors of mysterious oranges that produced brain-altering chemicals. Scientists, Sota learned years later, had turned these mythical oranges into their version of the El Dorado, Shangri La, Atlantis, Troy, whatever. They would search for decades to come, never realizing that the secret lay in one martial artist's absolutely terrible cooking.
The butterfly effect was real.
A/N: Soon we'll get back to the Ryoga drama, but in the meantime, checking back in with Sota here...
Let me know what you think. :)