Chapter 9 - There’s Nothing Like It

In the end, all Kai did was answer Nanaka’s questions until it was time to go home.

“I wonder if there’s anything we can do on the weekend?” she asked.

In response, Kai put her in charge of finding the specific points they needed to improve upon as preparation for writing the specification document. Of course, he planned on doing that as well, and wanted to compare their suggestions to each other afterwards.

However, there was another issue. As the planner’s side moved forward, there was more and more need for Aya, their programmer, to come to the club instead of her part time job.

But seeing how resolute she was in her decision, Kai couldn’t think of any way to convince her. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know that the club was on the brink of disbandment; she knew, and she’d still made that choice. And the biggest hurdle for him was that... he sort of understood how Aya felt.

“...Mai deeah burazaah?”

“What’s wrong, nee-san? What’s with the broken English?” When Kai got home, his front door was unlocked and Misako was there waiting like she always was.

He figured she had some kind of reference material for her novel, because she was waiting for him in a frilly apron dress—something one would only expect to see in a maid cafe. The absolute territory on her slender legs and her artificially emphasized bust might have had him the least bit excited if she hadn’t been his sister.

Unfortunately for him, it was his sister. Kai thought he heard her say something like, “Welcome home, young master,” in a very respectful tone of voice, but it was a pain to play along with every gag she came up with—and more importantly, his top priority was to figure out a way to get Aya to come to the club—so he ignored her.

He ignored her as he locked the front door, put his bag up in his room, poured some coffee, and opened up his laptop in the living room where he began to search his brain for ideas.

The entire time, Misako seemed to want attention and tried tailing him through the apartment. She made a ruckus when she walked in front of the living room table and purposefully tripped, but Kai ignored her. He completely ignored her. After a while, ignoring her became so natural that he forgot she was even there.

“Do you know why rabbits die?” she suddenly asked.

“...Malnutrition,” he answered shortly.

“Close! You’re one word off! Rabbits die due to malnutrition—that’s right, which means they basically die from loneliness! Your sister is but a rabbit! I’m—”

“‘Loneliness is malnutrition of the heart,’” Kai quoted. “Should an author really be using such run-of-the-mill metaphors?”

“.........” Pure silence. Misako fell into a silence so deep that Kai couldn’t even hear her breathing, despite the fact that she was directly behind him.

It wasn’t that he didn’t care at all, but he knew that paying her any attention would play into her trap, so he continued to ignore her.

“...”

Now, the issue at hand was Aya, whose resolve was steadfast. Exceedingly so, and that was a fact. Usually, students would be unable to spend a lot of money in games if they played through the BOX.

“...”

But there were loopholes to any rule, and the simplest way around it would be to have a smartphone that wasn’t registered as a student phone. That would be enough to bypass the spending rules. By choosing to not link your terminal through the school network, you wouldn’t have any restrictions on her spending. Of course, that also meant you wouldn’t get any of the free points related to school activities, so you’d have to spend your own money no matter what. That meant most students wouldn’t bother doing so.

“...”

In Aya’s case, the points afforded through the system weren’t even close to being enough. Instead, she chose a part time job and opted out of linking her terminal. So, then she’d be able to use her paycheck on games. What on earth was he supposed to do in the face of such enthusiastic whali—

“......sniff...”

—Huh? Out of the blue, Kai heard the sound of someone crying behind him. And sure enough, when he turned around, his older sister was crying. She looked like a flooded wreck with how badly she was bawling, and Kai felt guilt well up inside him just from looking at her.

“N-Nee-san?” he ventured cautiously.

“...sniff... Wahhhh... Hic...”

There was no sign of her stopping. Quite the opposite, in fact. When he tried talking to her, she started crying with even more intensity than before.

“But I... I worked so hard... on my... sniff... on my manuscript... so I could come over... and I was so excited... but you... ignored me... sniff... you said I was a... sniff... failure as an author... sniff... so mean... sniff...”

“I-I didn’t call you a failure or anything!” said Kai, attempting to defend himself. “I was—”

As soon as he began panicking to try and calm her down, her sobbing cleanly stopped, and Misako’s face sported a mischievous grin. “Were you worried?”

“...I mean, yeah,” he admitted.

“Hmph. It’s your own fault for treating your sister so poorly. By the way, I really was hurt when you ignored me,” Misako lamented. “The defendant ought to tread more carefully in the future.”

“Then as the defendant, I’d like to request a defense attorney.”

“Huh? You want to see your older sister dressed up in a suit like an ace attorney?”

“...Sigh.”

“Stop that. That sigh was so heavy it could split the Earth in two,” she said accusingly. “Anyway, what have you been mulling about since you came home?”

“It’s not something you’d understand, nee-san.”

“Oh boy! I wonder why! Maybe it’s because I cried earlier! Your sister feels like she’s being treated like a nuisance and her cute little brother won’t talk to her so I’m sure she’s gonna cry again! Wahh!”

“Oh, fine!” He didn’t have any other choice, so Kai explained everything about the situation with Aya to his sister.

But Misako didn’t play social games at all.

In fact, she barely played games in the first place, so her reaction was just as Kai expected. “Yup, I don’t get it,” Misako cheerfully admitted. “She’s got so many screws loose that it sounds kinda fun.”

“I told you you wouldn’t understand,” Kai grumbled at her.

“I like people who are true to their desires, but to say that she’s too busy at work to come to your club when it’s about to be disbanded... That takes some will. Still... is that gacha thing that important?”

“Yeah, but I’m sure you wouldn’t get it, nee-san.”

“It’s just a game, right?”

The way she phrased it caused something to snap in Kai. “... Look. I know it’s ‘just a game’ to you, and even I think Oushima-san is going too far... but I know where she’s coming from, a bit. Just the tiniest bit. I know the feeling of despair when you don’t have enough currency on hand to roll the gacha and you miss out on the swimsuit version of one of your favorite characters. That alone would be fine, but after that you find out that the character you missed was really strong and it becomes a human-rights-character for a while and then you can’t bring yourself to look. Oh, a human-rights-character means that ‘Any player who doesn’t have them doesn’t have human rights,’ because they’re so much stronger than other units... well, just think of it as a super powerful character. Then, once you realize what you’ve missed out on, you get this sense of, ‘I’ll never go through this humiliation again!’ But no matter how hard you bite your lip in frustration, that character isn’t coming back, and it doesn’t change the fact that you missed them. Reality is cruel. Every time you log in to that app, you see your friend list full of that character, and it’s this endless torture of inferiority......... That... is not a good feeling... Ah—”

Damn, I said too much. Kai instantly regretted it as he thought of the ways Misako would tease him, but all she did was flash him a gentle, happy smile. “...Basically, it’s really important,” he finished, “depending on the person.”

“Hm, I see. If you know that much, then the answer is simple. I don’t really get it, but there’s nothing like it for you to substitute, right? Then the only solution is to give her the money that she’s after. Wouldn’t everything wrap up if you gave her money?”

“Nononono—” Kai rushed to say.

“It’s not that crazy of an idea—or, so I’d say if this were a business. My editor pays me a fee to receive my manuscript. In the same way, you pay her a fee to have her program for you... ideally, at least.”

“...We’re a club, though.” It was against the regulations for a social game club to hire help with actual money.

There were cases when schools would cooperate and call upon outside developers, but that never involved liquid capital. It was done through non-monetary bartering, where a school might borrow a programmer and in exchange lend out one of their illustrators down the line.

“...Hm?” he said after a moment. “...Substitute?”

“What is it, Kai?”

“It’s nothing... Hmm, but, I see. Of course. That’s... the only way.” He couldn’t believe it, but this mess of a conversation with his mess of a sister had led him to an answer.

Misako caught on and presented him with a smug grin. “See, what’d I tell you?” she said. “Happily chatting along with your sister led you to the answer, didn’t it?”

“...This time, and only this time, I can’t say you were wrong,” Kai was forced to admit.

Thinking too hard can lead to inflexibility, and the flow of new ideas can get clogged. Taking a moment to relax and talk it out with another person is important, was a lesson that Akane had repeated to him many times. Kai tended to have a bad habit of thinking himself into a corner on his own, according to her.

If he hadn’t spoken with Misako, his solution wouldn’t have come to him so easily and he would have gotten lost in his own thoughts. “...Thanks, nee-san.”

Despite his sincere words of thanks, Misako played up a surprised expression and started cackling with laughter. Kai was so embarrassed that all he could do was look away.

◇

Since he had a plan in mind to convince Aya, Kai was able to spend his weekend focused on pinpointing the issues they needed to fix.

He would have liked to have statistics on hand detailing the number of views on the Gacha and Leveling menus, or data on how many times the links that made up their leading lines were accessed to find out what parts weren’t acting as intended. However, that data didn’t exist, and the only person that could get that data was spending all her time at her job.

It was sad how much of a pipe dream getting information was. But at any rate, he still had a decent estimation without the numbers.

The access stats on the Gacha page would be either significantly high or significantly low. Increasing the amount of leading lines to the gacha meant that—if everything went well—you were increasing the number of pathways to the user’s destination. Kai thought they must have taken it for granted that they’d get a large amount of traffic, but if that were the case, a planner’s job would be easy as cake. It was like how if meat buns were pushed with every purchase at a convenience store, the customers’ demand for meat buns would fall. In essence, it was important to know one’s bounds and to take everything in moderation. If leading the user toward the gacha made them roll, there wouldn’t be a single social game with profit issues on the face of the planet.

They’d remove all the excess links leading to the gacha and replace them with links to more suitable places. Kai used this as the underlying basis to weed out all the issues he could find. As he lost himself in his work, the weekend came to a close.

On Monday morning, Kai woke up earlier than usual. Before he went to school, he wanted to print out the Excel spreadsheets he’d prepared at the convenience store. He could have simply used a printer at school, but for whatever reason, he wanted to do it at the store.

The reason was probably because he was excited. Kai made these documents nearly every day when he was still going to Tsukigase, but since he’d moved and transferred schools, this was the first time in months. The inconcealable truth was that he wanted to see his work take physical form as soon as possible.

He was about to leave his house one hour earlier than usual, when—ding dong—the doorbell rang out of nowhere.

Kai subconsciously tilted his head. If the person outside his front door was his sister, then she wouldn’t have rung the doorbell. In fact, the doorbell button hadn’t so much as been touched by Misako the entire time that he lived in this apartment. Still, he couldn’t think of anyone other than his older sister that would be there. It was too early in the morning for it to be a delivery man, and he couldn’t think of anything he’d ordered recently.

He figured that Misako must have wanted him to think all that and had in fact rung the bell on a whim. Kai wrapped it all up in his mind and found himself sporting a half-exhausted expression as he nonchalantly opened the door to a huge surprise to start his morning.

“Ah, morning!” She raised a single hand to greet him. Her smile was brighter than the morning sun after an all-nighter.

“A-Aoi-san...? G-Good... morning?” said Kai, completely caught off guard. Why? Why was she here?

“Sorry for coming out of nowhere... Wait, were you about to leave, too?” Nanaka asked. “Isn’t it kinda early?”

“I was going to stop by the convenience store on the way to school,” he admitted.

“Oh, I see. Let’s get going then.”

Kai didn’t understand how this situation came to be, but the two ended up going to the store together.

The convenience store was on the way to the train station, and there were a few students in jerseys buying breakfast on their way to their morning training.

Kai didn’t have any plans to shop, so he went straight to the printer. He pulled up his phone and sent the data he’d prepared over to the machine. He initially put in a request for one copy, but he caught a glimpse of Nanaka peering over him into the printer and changed it to two copies.

“What are you printing?” she asked.

“I, too, conducted a search to find places that we should improve,” Kai told her. “Also, I had some extra time, so I went ahead and wrote up some specifications for a few parts.”

One completed copy came out of the printer as they spoke. Kai tapped the papers together to align them and secured the corner with a stapler he brought from home. He double-checked to make sure there weren’t any printer errors and handed the copy to Nanaka.

“Here you go,” he offered.

“T-Thanks!”

Nanaka took the papers with all the grace of a nervous student receiving their graduation certificate up at a podium in the school’s gymnasium. She gave it her full attention, burning a hole through the document with her gaze as she carefully began reading it, page by page. Kai was happy that she was reading it so earnestly, but she was so serious that he began feeling embarrassed.

Even after he’d finished printing his own copy and they’d left the convenience store, Nanaka was still engrossed in her reading.

“Shiraseki-kun!” she exclaimed.

Just as Kai was about to call out to her to say, “Let’s go,” she whipped her head up at him.

“Can I have this?!” she wanted to know.

“O-Of course.” That was the plan all along, so Kai had no objections.

“Um, and...” Nanaka timidly pulled out a similarly stapled document from her bag. The first page read, MiSt Improvement Document. As soon as Kai noticed that, a massive voice inside his mind screamed at him that he’d screwed up.

He screwed up. Big time.

“Um... I tried making my own this weekend... But I’ve never made one before, so, um, I didn’t know how I was supposed to do it and it’s not as nice as—”

“That’s fine!” He stopped her mid-sentence and took the document without waiting for a response.

On Friday, the only thing Kai asked of Nanaka was, “I want you to make a list of as many points you think we should fix as you can think of. A bullet point list is fine.” That was more than enough to figure out what they wanted to do. He wanted her to use the document he just printed as a reference when they started on the actual organization of those points into a proper specification document. That was the whole reason he’d included a few examples where he wrote up specifications.

It was called a “specification document,” but the contents were complex, and it could be written any number of ways depending on a variety of factors. Handing a beginner developer a blank sheet of paper and telling them to “write a specification document” would only lead to bewilderment. Even if they had ideas of what kind of screens they wanted, what kind of features they wanted, they didn’t have the necessary knowledge of how to format those as a document. Unless they were intensely passionate, they would probably run face first into a wall and sit there with stars in their eyes.

That’s why, now, Kai found himself hideously embarrassed. Somewhere in his heart, he’d figured she didn’t have that kind of zeal—he’d marked her motivation off as being less than what it truly was.

In Kai’s case, he could simply take the format he used at Tsukigase and change the content to fit MiSt to get a perfectly presentable document, as he did here. But Nanaka didn’t have that experience to fall back on. So, he thought she could simply find the places she wanted to fix over the weekend and use his document today to begin writing up her own. That would be more than enough, and he’d decided on his own that that was the pace they’d take.

He decided that, even though he saw her pull an all-nighter reading reference books just the other day.

“Um, uhh, it’s probably really hard to read.” Nanaka said apologetically.

She was right; it was hard to read. But that was a given. More importantly, the essential information was all detailed and sorted out in her own way, to the point that it touched Kai’s heart. The itemized list of all the potential improvements Kai asked her for was at the beginning of the document, and she had even written specifications in her own way on how to solve those issues. An emotion that you could only call passion flowed throughout the document.

It’ll all work out. That thought naturally came to him.

“Leave Oushima-san to me,” he said out loud.

“Huh?” Nanaka asked in confusion.

If Nanaka had this much grit and passion, he could have faith in her, Kai decided. Even if he wasn’t there, she would definitely complete the specification document.

◇

“What is this? It’s almost like you’re making me out to be the big bad villain or something, pwahaha!” Aya found something about the situation comical, because she started laughing and grinning all on her own.

After school, Kai and Nanaka worked together to capture Aya as she tried to run home at the speed of light and brought her back to the clubroom. Kai and Aya sat at the table across from each other, and Nanaka was in charge of guarding the door so she couldn’t escape.

Kai dropped the stack of papers he received from Nanaka onto the table with a thump.

Nanaka blushed and looked down like she was still embarrassed to show other people her work.

“What’s this?” Aya asked.

“It’s still a work-in-progress, but this is our current specification document.”

“Wow, you really are a planner from Tsukigase!” said Aya. “You work fast.”

“I didn’t make this,” Kai told her. “Aoi-san did.”

“...Huhwha?” Aya couldn’t believe it. She darted her eyes back and forth from Kai, to the document, and then to Nanaka. She froze with her eyes and mouth wide open.

“Nana-sen... wrote a specs doc...? You mean the Nana-sen who showed me an illustration and said ‘I want it to be like this!’ back when we were developing MiSt made a... specs doc...?” Aya asked again, truly shocked.

“Um... I really didn’t know anything back then...” Nanaka mumbled. “Ughh... I’m so embarrassed...”

Kai could see the scene play out in front of his eyes. Aya would ask “What are the specs like?” and Nanaka would show her a picture. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched if she were an illustrator doing character design, but that was awful for a programmer who wanted to know implementation details. Actually, it was terrifying to think that they somehow managed to finish their game. It was pretty much a miracle.

“Lemme see it,” said Aya, taking the specification document to flip through while Nanaka watched her with bated breath.

Kai wanted to praise the fact that Nanaka hadn’t run away; the first time he’d handed Akane a specification document to check over, he’d cracked under the pressure and fled to the bathroom in the middle of her review. He got scolded hard for reasons completely unrelated to the contents of his document.

“...Uh-huh.” Aya tapped the papers onto the table to realign them. “You’re serious about winning the next competition, aren’t ’cha?”

“That’s a tentative plan. We’ll add more to complete the document over the next few days,” Kai explained.

“But I still can’t help,” said Aya, swinging both her arms into a giant X mark in front of her. “C’mere, lemme show you something.” She pulled her phone out of her skirt pocket and began tapping on the screen, which was filled to the brim with countless social game app icons.

“From here to here are the games where I have to get 100% of the characters that come out in the gacha,” she explained. “And then from here to here are the ones that I roll for characters that I think are cute until they come home. And then, from here to here...” Aya went on and on about her gacha plans.

The concept of a gacha was fundamentally luck-based. There were some games that had an upper bound where you were guaranteed something if you rolled a certain amount, but even then, it cost an exorbitant amount of money to reach that point. To put it simply, Aya’s gacha plans were insane. If she didn’t skip the rolling animations, it’d take her a whole day to roll the gacha.

And of course, that wasn’t even scratching the surface of the money it’d take.

“And that’s why I have to devote myself to my part time job,” she finished.

“That... won’t work. Please reconsider.” Kai locked eyes with her and didn’t look away. He knew that looking away first in these kinds of scenarios never panned out well. A sly smirk emerged on Aya’s listless face, as if to ask him, ‘And?’

“...Oushima-san, you need money,” he said. “Correct?”

“I mean, that’s what a part time job is for,” she told them.

“Then if you could get money without working, you wouldn’t need a job anymore, correct?”

“...What are you trying to say?” she asked suspiciously. “Is this some kinda sketchy deal?”

“Your part time job...” Kai knew he couldn’t just say, ‘Please quit.’ That wouldn’t mean anything. She wouldn’t have money. She wouldn’t be able to roll the gacha. That wasn’t the way to win her over.

In that case, there was only one thing he could say: “I’ll do it for you.”

“Huh?”

“What?”

Aya and Nanaka’s befuddled voices rang out together.

“I, too, have experienced the sadness of not being able to roll on a gacha I really wanted to roll on. So... I can’t bring myself to reject your reasoning. After all, you can’t roll if you don’t have money. That’s why I’ll work instead. In exchange, Oushima-san, please do your part as a programmer. You’re the only person in this club capable of doing so. You’re the only one who can do it.”

Kai couldn’t draw. He couldn’t write. Of course, he couldn’t code, either. But he could probably work a part time job. He never had before, but he figured that if Aya could do it, then he could if he tried, too.

He was originally worried about the specification document, but Nanaka’s vigor put him at ease. At that rate, Kai wouldn’t need to do much for it to take proper form. As long as the job wasn’t too tough, he thought it would be possible for him to double-check her progress as he worked.

Kai’s proposal was so out of left field that Aya had the same shocked expression on her face as when she saw the specification document Nanaka wrote. Then, as if she couldn’t hold it in any more, she burst out laughing with her hands on her sides. “Ahahahahahahahaha! What the hell! What the hell is that?! Senpai, are you telling me you’ll give me your paycheck from your part time job?!”

“Precisely,” he agreed.

“Seriously...?! Oh my God, this dude’s for real...! Aha... haha... ha, phew. Oh man, that was a good laugh. Unfortunately, senpai, you’re a biiiiit off the mark.”

“Off the mark?” he questioned.

“You want me to roll with someone else’s money? Come on, what kinda crap is that?! Senpai, you don’t have a clue about the joys of gacha! Listen up! The gacha doesn’t mean jack if you roll with someone else’s money! You pour your blood, sweat, and tears into work you don’t wanna do, but you grit your teeth and do it anyway! The money you save up through that grueling pain gets sucked up into the gacha—in an instant, that utter garbage turns into treasure. That moment is what’s important! That moment is everything! There’s no pleasure or joy or bliss to be found with someone else’s money!”

Aya’s deplorable speech left Kai’s mouth aghast. He had expected something like, “What’s the point if I don’t get the character I want with my own effort?!” but that wasn’t it. What he got was a manifesto by a junkie, for a junkie, and only comprehensible to other junkies. She said he was off the mark, but at this point he didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

“Welp, that being said,” she told them, “I’ll still write the program.”

“...Huh?”

“What are you acting all surprised for?” Aya wanted to know. “That was the whole point, yeah?”

“T-That’s true,” Kai agreed, “But... is... that okay with you?”

“Mm, well, if it was anything like old-Nana-sen’s requests, then I’d say no... but,” Aya said, tapping Nanaka’s specification document with her finger. “This has passion in it. Can’t ignore that.”

“...Ah-chan.” Nanaka was on the verge of tears.

“Also, senpai,” said Aya, “you’re a real playboy.”

“Huh? Me?”

“Saying that you can’t refuse my thinking ’cause you know what it’s like to wanna roll... not even my parents have said something like that to me.”

Kai thought to himself that it made sense that any respectable parents wouldn’t be able to understand their daughter if she chose to work at her part time job over helping at her nearly disbanded club.

“That made me a teensy bit happy. That, and...” Aya sped up her words in embarrassment as she added, “Programmers are creators, too. There isn’t any creator dumb enough to throw something out after being told that ‘You’re the only one who can do it.’”