4

The next morning.

I could hear my alarm going off, but my eyelids felt way heavier than usual. I shouldn’t have been surprised after staying up so late with Kokoro...

I was idly dreaming of the previous night, when I heard someone scold me.

“How long are you going to lie there?! Wake up, you dummy!”

“Huh?” I jumped, surprised by the typical tsundere voice, blinking my room into focus. My eyes met with Kokoro, looking down on me with her hand on my bed covers.

“Wh-What are you doing in my room?!”

“Can’t you be a bit more responsible? You’re a high schooler now! Why do I still have to come here and wake you up every day?”

“E-Excuse me?”

This was, beyond any doubt, the very first time that she’d ever woken me up. And what was up with her voice?

“Breakfast is ready, so hurry up and change!”

“I, uh, what? Wait!” I stammered, but Kokoro had already stormed out of my room.

I got dressed and went to the living room, where an even bigger surprise was waiting for me on the table. Grilled salmon, scrambled eggs, white rice, and miso soup. Breakfast was, indeed, ready, and it looked amazing.

Our rule had been to make our own breakfasts, so all I usually ate in the morning were leftovers from the previous day’s dinner or snacks from the convenience store.

“You made all this?” I asked Kokoro, who was standing in the kitchen with an apron over her uniform.

“I have to—you won’t eat a proper breakfast by yourself!”

“What’s your problem?! You woke me up, and now this? What are you even trying to do?!” I roared, my gratefulness somehow turning into anger. Being treated like this for no reason, rather than pleasant, was just scary.

“Sheesh... I’m trying my best to play the part and you just have to go out of character, don’t you?” Kokoro, back to her normal voice, said with a sigh.

“What?”

“Why are you so dense? It was you who told me yesterday that Ringo was the most popular character, right? So I just tried being her instead! How could you not get it after I’ve already done the same thing with Yumeno☆Saki?”

Now that I thought about it, this was exactly like Ringo from PopKing.

“So that’s what you were trying to do...”

Wasn’t YS enough? I thought she’d give up trying.

“And that thing about otaku boys liking childhood friend characters—I think I got it. I mean, if I were a guy, I’d like someone like Ringo too, who always looked after me like this,” she said.

It had become obvious that she wasn’t just pretending to be interested. She’d really learned a lot from watching PopKing.

“Now let’s hurry up and eat, or we’ll be late for school!” she said, switching back to the tsundere/Ringo voice.

“Uh, sure. Thanks,” I replied, and started eating.

“It’s so good!” I said, blown away by her breakfast.

“Oh, I almost forgot. Here!” Kokoro said, taking something out of the fridge and handing it to me.

“A bento?”

“It’s a balanced meal, so make sure to eat all of it!”

In PopKing, Ringo always prepared the protagonist’s bento, but I didn’t think that Kokoro would go that far.

“Th-Thank you...” I said, surprised, taking the lunchbox. Needless to say, it was the first time anyone other than my mom had ever made me a bento.

“Now get to school!” she said.

“What? But it’s thirty minutes earlier than the time I usually leave—”

“I have to change, take off this wig, and fix my hair! That takes time! So go!” Kokoro demanded. Not a single shred of Ringo left.

“Isn’t that your problem?! Why do I have to leave earlier?!”

“You’re all ready! Why do you even care?!” she said, practically kicking me out of my own house. I was surprised by all the trouble she’d gone through to mimic a perfect otaku girlfriend, but still, what she was doing didn’t seem very rational.

You can learn what otaku boys like from Ringo, sure, but do you really need to roleplay her like that? It was a bit crazy.

That being said, having a girl wake me up and cook me breakfast and make me a bento, even if that girl was Kokoro... it wasn’t half bad.

＊　＊　＊

I’d just sat at my desk, still taking my books out of my bag, when Takeshi Aisaki, my classmate and friend, approached me.

“Morning, Kagetora.”

“Oh, Ai. Mornin’.”

He was the only one in my class I could talk about otaku stuff with.

His name, Takeshi, literally meant “fierce,” but he looked, sounded, and acted in such a soft, charming way that all of his friends (including me) thought it made more sense to call him by the first letters of his surname: Ai. It sounded more like a girl’s name, but that was the point—he was cute, just like a girl.

“You look awful today,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Isn’t it a bit early for insults?”

“I’m only pointing out that impressive pair of dark circles under your eyes. Were you up late watching VTubers again?”

He asked because it was something that he’d do himself. Ai was also an otaku. The annoying part was that he still had tons of female friends, despite making no secret of his hobbies. It had to be down to his cute appearance and mannerisms... Obviously, I hated him for it.

Notably, there was one exception to his cute mannerisms, namely that when he was talking with other boys, and me in particular, he would say the harshest things without batting an eyelid.

“Not really, no...” I replied.

The real reason why I’d stayed up so late was that I’d been marathoning PopKing with Kokoro, but I couldn’t tell him that. The fact that we lived together had to be kept secret, at all costs.

“Oh, so I take it you still haven’t heard about the latest VTuber phenomenon, Emily Saionji. She only set up her channel yesterday and she already has tons of followers. Everyone’s talking about her,” he said, showing me a picture of said VTuber on his phone. She was a beautiful girl with blonde hair and blue eyes.

“First I ever heard of her, but wow. She’s cute.”

“She’s supposed to be half-Japanese, half-English, and the person voicing her is also bilingual. Since she’s fluent in both languages, she’s also gaining a ton of followers from overseas. Her voice is really cute too, so it’s probably a young voice actress reading the lines. Oh, and she belongs to the same company as Yumeno☆Saki, so the production value really shows. Papa did a good job with that character design...”

“A half-English character that can actually speak English? That’s pretty rare. You’re always up to date though, aren’t you?” I said, already planning my binge on Emily’s videos after school.

“With all the VTuber fans on Twitter and stuff, you end up knowing whether you want to or not. Oh, I almost forgot! Check this out. It’s from my last con,” he said, swiping to another picture.

“Huh?!” I exclaimed, snorting with laughter.

It was a photo of a cosplayer dressed up as a popular character from FG0. The character was a cute girl, but not this cosplayer. The cosplayer wasn’t even a girl, cute or otherwise—it was Ai.

“Someone put my picture on the ‘Cutest Cosplay Girls From Anime FestiCon 2018’ thread—again. I pulled it off so well that except for you and anyone else that knows me, everyone thinks I’m a girl!”

“Dammit, Ai. Of all the characters you could choose... and what’s with all that skin you’re showing?!”

Ai wore guys’ clothes most of the time, but he liked to crossdress. His crossdressing, however, was strictly limited to cosplay. He was what people called a “crossplayer.”

He wasn’t bad at it either. His female characters were so convincing that he’d gained a pretty substantial following as a crossplayer, with more than ten thousand followers on Twitter.

In the picture he’d just shown me, he was wearing a white bob cut wig, cosplaying FG0’s heroine in her fighting suit. The costume showed his arms and his thighs.

Seeing my male friend dressed like that always threw me for a loop, and the fact that he was actually cute just made it worse. How was I supposed to react?

“Hm? Kagetora? What’s up? You fall in love with my cosplay or something?”

“As if!”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Even I’m surprised that it came out this cute. If you want to see it in person, you’re always invited to come to a convention with me,” Ai said.

“Why would I want to do that? Your middle-aged, camera-wielding stalkers will get jealous. You know how obsessive those guys can be! They’re all over your Twitter!”

You just needed a glance at his account to find another creep, stalking him day in and day out.

“Do you check my profile that often? That’s unexpected...”

“Of course I don’t! Your stuff just comes up on my timeline! That’s all!”

He laughed with that irritating charm. “The fans aren’t that bad though. I just ignore the weird ones and block the scary ones. The worst ones are those weirdos sliding into my DMs asking if I want to meet them IRL. I’d reply if they were other cosplayers wanting to go to a con with matching outfits or something but...”

“I guess being a popular cosplayer is hard work.”

So... cosplayers meet each other like that? Matching their outfits at conventions? Not that I was a cosplayer or anything, but it was interesting all the same.

“Say, Ai... Do cosplayers end up, you know, dating each other after going to cons together?” I asked, unable to contain my curiosity.

“Oh, sure, that happens. There’s this cosplayer girl, a friend of mine, who recently hooked up with a guy just like that.”

“For real?!”

“You aren’t thinking of cosplaying just to get a girlfriend, are you?” he asked.

“I’m thinking no such thing!”

It did sound like an interesting prospect, but I didn’t have the guts to do something like that in the first place, nor did I have the looks to pull it off. And I didn’t want to be one of those guys who pretends to be into something just to pick up girls...

Our conversation was brought to an end when our homeroom teacher entered the room, starting the class.

When morning classes were over, we began eating lunch.

“You brought a bento?! Now that’s rare!” said Ai, ogling my food rather than his own.

“Well, you know, I figured that every once in a while...”

I opened up the box and looked at what Kokoro had prepared for me. It was a textbook example of bento. It had rice on the left side, and on the right it had rolled omelet, cherry tomatoes, spinach, and fried fish sausage.

“And it’s all homemade?! I knew that you cooked, but I’m pretty shocked you’re so good at it,” Ai commented.

“Haha... I guess so...”

It looked good, sure, but where was the meat? How was I supposed to eat lunch without any meat?

“Kagetora?”

“Ah, I’ll just go buy some fried chicken real quick!” I said.

“What? Isn’t that bento enough? Well, I guess that’s too much rice to eat without meat.”

I felt kind of bad buying more food, as if Kokoro’s bento wasn’t enough, but everyone knows that meat is the most important part of a guy’s diet.

＊　＊　＊

The school day was over, so I headed back home.

“Hi...”

“Hi there,” Kokoro, who was playing with her phone on the couch, still in her uniform. She must have been done with roleplaying Ringo.

“So? What did you think?” she asked.

“Huh? You mean the bento?”

“Well, that too, but I mean in general! You said that boys like girls like Ringo so... H-How was I? Would that make an otaku guy happy?” she asked, blushing.

This morning she acted like it was the most natural thing in the world, and now she’s blushing?!

“Well, you stayed in character all the way through, and you really sounded like an anime childhood friend. It was good,” I admitted, and she grinned.

“Hah! See? When I put my mind to it, I can totally become the perfect girlfriend!”

She gets carried away way too easily...

“Oh, and... thanks for the bento,” I said, taking the empty box out of my bag and rinsing it in the kitchen sink.

“Sure... Did you like that too?”

“Y-Yes... It was tasty,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie, but I was scared that, if I told the whole truth, she’d go all “You ungrateful jerk!” on me. Then again, if she’s going to cook me bento again in future, it’d be better to be honest with her...

“It’s just... maybe it’d be even better if it had some meat in it,” I said, carefully choosing my words.

“What?! You ungrateful jerk! I even made it all healthy and stuff!”

Oh, c’mon! She was the one who asked for my opinion!

“Yes, healthy, of course...” I mumbled, heading for my room to change before the conversation turned into an argument.

“Oh, and,” she stopped me, “I’ll be cooking dinner for the rest of the week.”

“What? Why?” I asked. We’d already agreed on taking turns each day...

“Yesterday you said that otaku boys like it when girls take care of them, right? There were loads of scenes with Ringo cooking in PopKing, too. So I want to get super good at cooking before I get a boyfriend!” she said.

“O-Oh, okay then. So I just have to do the dishes?”

“Yeah.”

Kokoro went out by herself for groceries, while I stayed in my room playing gacha games.

At around 7 p.m., I heard her call out to me from the living room.

“Dinner’s ready!”

I went downstairs and found a meal waiting for me on the table. It was a hamburger steak topped with a fried egg.

“It looks delicious!” I said, sitting down. “Did you cook this because of what I said about meat earlier?”

“I-It’s not just that, I mean... I just thought that if boys like meat then I should practice cooking it,” she replied.

And to think she’d sounded mad when I told her.

“It is delicious!” I said after taking a bite. I wasn’t exaggerating, either. The cheap hamburger steaks I ordered sometimes at family restaurants had nothing on this.

I was pretty hungry to begin with, so it didn’t take long for me to empty my plate.

“O-Oh... You really liked it, huh?” Kokoro commented.

“Yeah! It was great!” I replied, finally noticing that she’d been staring at me the whole time.

After dinner, while I was doing the dishes, Kokoro sat on the couch, looking up something on her phone.

“Now I’ve learned a bit about otaku guys,” she said once I was done, “I just have to look for a place where I can actually meet some, but... it’s not so easy.”

She showed me a webpage with a list of parties similar to the one we’d met at.

“Hm? Why not?” I asked.

“You see all these? There’s loads of them, but not a single one of them admits anyone underage!”

“Oh, that’s what you meant. Yeah, it’s difficult to find parties that you can join as a high schooler.”

The otaku party where I first met Kokoro was an exception, and it had taken me half a year to find it. I’d been looking for a girlfriend for a while, so I used to check those kinds of websites every day. Most only accepted participants aged twenty and up, and you had to be eighteen to even join the less strict ones.

“What’s the point of working so hard if I can’t meet a single otaku guy?” she said, sighing. “It’d be easy if I just, you know, had a friend who could hook me up with someone, like my friends do. But you said you don’t have any otaku friends, right?”

“None that’d meet your standards, at least. And most of them are online friends, except for Aisaki—”

“Aisaki?! So you do have real otaku friends! What kind of guy is he?”

“Hm, he’s a classmate of mine. He’s just slightly taller than you and he’s the cutesy, overconfident type,” I said.

“That’s not really my type, yeah...” she said, clearly disappointed.

Was she still counting on me introducing her to someone?

“What about you though?” I asked. “Don’t you have any female otaku friends?”

“I already told you I don’t! Maybe there’s some on Twitter, but I’ve never met any of them...”

So I can’t count on her introducing me to someone either...

“Oh, right, about Aisaki—he’s a cosplayer, actually, just like you. He only cosplays girl characters, but he’s kind of low-key famous in that niche.”

“Really?! He’s a crossplayer?!”

Even imagining Kokoro and Ai cosplaying together... They’d be really popular.

“Yeah. And he said that a girl he knows found a boyfriend by meeting up with another cosplayer.”

“A-Are you serious?!” she gasped, so excited that she sprung up from the couch.

“Why didn’t I think of that?! I should set up a cosplay Twitter account and ask super hot cosplayers to pair up with me! I have some outfits that are popular with guys, so that could work!” she said.

“Super hot cosplayers...?”

“Yep! There’s a cosplayer I love who’s so handsome and always has awesome costumes! He has, like, twenty thousand followers, and I’ve been a fan of his for a year now!”

Would she go through all that trouble just to meet a cosplayer? She must be really desperate. Or maybe it’s me who should be more motivated...

“But you said you already have an account. Don’t you post your cosplay pics on there?” I asked her.

“Sometimes I do, but I only have a handful of followers, and my account is private anyway. I need a new one!”

“But why would you keep your account private?”

When you make your account private, only your followers can see what you post.

“Because I don’t want my friends or my parents to know that I’m an otaku! I’d totally get found out if they saw my cosplay pics!” she explained.

Oh, right, she’s still hiding the fact that she’s an otaku.

“But then making a cosplay account would be pointless. If you make it public, people will find out you’re an otaku, and if you make it private, you won’t find any new followers.”

“It’ll be fine!” she said. “I just need to make sure that people can’t recognize me!”

“How’s that work?”

“Even if they see my cosplay, it’ll be okay as long as they can’t tell that I’m the girl in the picture. I’d already be wearing a wig, makeup, and colored contacts, so I’d just need to retouch them a little bit to make it even harder to tell!”

“You can edit photos like that?”

“Sure! You just need an app! It’s not even that hard! Okay, now that I know what to do, there’s no time to lose! I already have a couple of cute outfits with me... Oooh, and I also need some full body pics, so can you take them for me?”

I was impressed by how quickly she put whatever she planned into practice. I wish I were more like her...

“I can help you take them, but if that’s your plan for finding a boyfriend, what am I supposed to do? How am I going to find a girlfriend?” I moaned, feeling completely left out.

“You could cosplay too! There aren’t that many male cosplayers, and if you became a mega hot one with awesome costumes, you’d be super popular with otaku girls!”

“Have you considered that I may not have been blessed with the best of looks?”

She took a long look at my face, then looked away.

Hey! Don’t be that obvious! I have feelings too!

Unconcerned, she scurried away to her room, preparing for her photo shoot.

A while later...

“What do you think?! I’m Megumi from Saekano!” Kokoro said when she came back. I was lost for words.

Megumi Kato was the protagonist of Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend. It was a popular light novel series that also had an anime adaptation.

Kokoro had nailed Megumi’s pure and innocent look: a red cardigan over a white dress and a short, brown wig with a beret. It took everything I had to hide my excitement toward seeing a character that I happened to love. It looked as if Megumi had jumped right out of the screen and into my living room. Yesterday’s Yumeno☆Saki cosplay, in all its unapologetically unrealistic otakuness, looked amazing on Kokoro, but so did this tamer, more innocent-looking one.

“Weren’t you supposed to know nothing about anime that guys like?” I asked her.

“I just caught an episode of Saekano on TV and I got really into it, so I went and bought the costume for my favorite character! Anyway, can you take those pictures?”

“Uhm, sure...”

“As for the background... Hm... Okay, let’s do it here, where there’s just this wall!” she said, sitting on the couch with her back to the wall and handing me her phone. It was open on an app I’d never heard of: “SNOW.” Kokoro was already a beautiful girl, but the filters in this app made her almost ridiculous.

“Make sure I look cute! I’ll check them at the end!” she said.

“Okay then,” I replied, taken aback by how stuck-up she was being.

I put my finger on the shutter button. For an otaku, being able to take pictures of a pretty girl cosplaying a character you love was such a delight that I barely believed it was happening to me, but I had to contain myself. If I let my hands shake too much, the pictures would just come out blurry.

So I steadied myself and started taking pictures, one after another, as Kokoro shifted through various poses.

“Hm, I’m not really feeling this one anymore...” she said, completely switching to a position where her elbows rested on the table in front of her.

Leaning forward like that, with her dress pulled down tight over her cleavage, made her boobs look remarkably bigger. I was sure that if she bent any further, she’d be showing me her bra.

Huff... wow... sh-should I tell her? I thought to myself, but I didn’t have the courage. She’d probably just tell me that I’m a pervert and not to look at her boobs...

It’s hard to notice in her uniform and stuff, but Nishina’s boobs are pretty big, huh...

“I’ll sit on the floor next!”

“O-Okay!”

She sat directly on the floor and I resumed my duties as cameraman, taking even more pictures while trying not to sweat.

That dress she’s wearing... it’s really short. I can see some bare thigh between the hem and the top of those stockings... I wonder if she’s wearing shorts underneath—wait, w-what am I thinking?! If she knew I was thinking of stuff like this, I wouldn’t hear the end of it...

“Looking cute isn’t as easy as I thought,” she said as she crossed and uncrossed her legs. Every time she did, however, her very short dress flapped in such a way that I was dangerously close to seeing her underwear. There was no way I could concentrate on taking pictures anymore.

That dress has ridden so high up her thighs and I still haven’t glimpsed any shorts... maybe, she’s not even wearing any?!

Next, she pulled up her knees, hugging her legs to her chest. If she does that, I’m definitely going to see her panties!

“Ah!” she said, realizing her mistake and quickly straightening her legs, holding her skirt down.

“Y-You didn’t see anything, did you?” she asked me nervously, blood rushing to her cheeks.

So she really isn’t covering her panties with shorts?!

“I-I didn’t! I didn’t see anything at all!” I replied, furiously shaking my head.

“Just show me the pictures you’ve taken so far!” she said, her voice a noticeably higher pitch as she yanked the phone from my hand.

Nice way to treat someone who’s doing you a favor, I thought, being careful not to actually say it aloud.

“No way! They look terrible! You could have changed the lighting or moved around a bit or something!”

“Huh?! What are you talking about! They look perfect!”

“This is even worse than taking selfies! And—Hey! My dress is so low in this one! Why didn’t you tell me?!” she said, flustered, as she looked at her elbows-on-the-table picture.

“But I, uh... you know...”

“M-my boobs were so close to showing! You should have told me!” I’d never seen her face so red. She was probably as angry as she was embarrassed.

“You were the one leaning all over the table like that! It’s not like I told you to!”

“Dammit! I should never have asked for help from you!”

“And that’s how you thank someone for helping you?!”

“Don’t worry, because I’m never asking you for help ever again!” she said, storming up the stairs and into her room.

Talk about ungrateful...

Alone with my thoughts, I wondered if it was true that getting to meet a handsome male cosplayer was as easy as uploading a couple of pictures to Twitter.

Were I born with a handsome face and chiseled jaw, I’d be able to become a cosplayer and get all the girls I wanted. Well, I wouldn’t even need to cosplay, actually. I’d be fighting them off to begin with. Yeah... dreaming won’t get me anywhere.

“I did it! I made it look super cute!” Kokoro, several minutes later, came back into the living room and rammed her phone under my nose.

Wasn’t she mad at me? Has she changed her mind already?

“Whoa...” I gaped, staring at the cosplayer on the screen. You couldn’t even tell it was her.

She had made her eyes unnaturally bigger and brighter, her eyelashes longer, and her fake hair even shinier. The real Kokoro was a beautiful girl, but after all this post-processing she looked so flawless you’d think it was all CG.

“What do you think? Isn’t it the cutest of cute?!” she asked.

“It’s a bit unnatural. It doesn’t even look like a human.”

“But you can’t tell it’s me, right?”

“I’ll give you that...”

“Perfect! Now I just need to create that account and post today’s pictures! Then I’ll get to know Bambi, my favorite cosplayer, and we’ll go out together, and...” she continued yapping about how perfectly her plan was going to unfold.

I looked at her in silence. She was so desperate to get a boyfriend that she’d somehow left creepy behind. There was possibly even something a little inspiring about her passion.

Unfortunately, Kokoro’s cosplaying plan wouldn’t work for me. Passion won’t make me handsome...

＊　＊　＊

One week later, after dinner.

“Look, Ichigaya! I got over a thousand followers! It’s amazing, right?!”

Kokoro showed me her Twitter profile.

“I started uploading cosplay videos, and they get tons of likes!” she said.

“Oh. That’s great.”

“Another cosplayer even invited me to pair up with her! You know Yuuki Aito, the VTuber, right? She cosplays her, and she’s so cute! So I’m going to cosplay YS and she’s going to cosplay Yuuki and we can take pictures together and stuff!”

Yuuki Aito was another popular VTuber, second in number of followers on YouTube, right after Yumeno☆Saki. Even Ai cosplayed her once. Unlike YS, however, she was a more tomboyish kind of character. The idea of seeing two VTuber cosplayers together sounded like a lot of fun, and I definitely wanted to see pictures of that, but...

“...and I’m totally on my way to becoming a proper cosplayer, you know?! There are sooo many characters I want to be! But I’ve only dressed up at home so far, so I want to go to a con next! Then I get to meet my followers! Won’t you come with me? You can be my cameraman! Going by myself is a bit too scary, you know?”

“Er, Nishina... What about your plan?”

“Huh? Plan?” she asked, genuinely confused.

Did she forget about why she was doing all this?!

“Your plan to find an otaku boyfriend! Isn’t that why you made that cosplay account in the first place?”

“I...” she mumbled, as distress spread over her face. “I didn’t forget about it! But when I followed Bambi, he didn’t follow me back. There’s this clique of cosplayers and they’re always chatting between themselves, so I can’t just barge into the conversation. And his fans treat him like he’s God or something! Imagine what they’d do if an unknown cosplayer like me invited him to pair up for a photo shoot! Also, if he said no, it’d make me so depressed...”

“But then wasn’t this cosplaying thing pointless?”

“N-Not at all! I’m having fun doing it and I even made some female otaku friends!” she said, as if she wanted to convince herself more than she did me.

“I think you’re losing sight of the objective here.”

“M-Mind your own business! I like doing this! I’m having fun, so who cares?!” she snapped angrily, holding back tears.

Just as I thought, cosplaying to find a boyfriend was a bad idea. With all that effort she’d put into it... I feel kind of sorry for her.