Chapter 14: I’m Sorry

As per usual, Aya’s implementation went beyond Kai’s wildest expectations. Their strategy for dealing with Eru came together immediately, but they didn’t have much time to make it happen. More precisely, they did have time, but the longer they focused on this project, the more they’d feel the impact on their Summit application.

The result of their tight schedule was...

“’Scuse me!”

“Excuse me! ♪”

“E-Excuse me.”

...The three girls made their way to Kai’s home.

“Whoa, this place gives off the same vibes as you, senpai,” Aya said, marveling at Kai’s room. “There’s nothing extra around here.”

“Wha—hey!” he exclaimed. “Stop digging around my room! There’s nothing here for you to find...!”

“Kai-kun?” For whatever reason, Aina was back to her cutesy persona. He figured that she simply chose how to act depending on her mood that day. She went on to ask, “Should I clean your room again? It’s not like I’ll have anything to work on at first. ♪”

“...‘Again’?” Nanaka questioned.

“Yup, ♪” sang Aina. “When I came here a few days ago, I cleaned up and made him lunch. Hmm? Nanaka-chan, have you never come here before?”

“Huh? Um, I’ve been here before,” Nanaka said defensively. “A-And I’ve even... taken a bath here.”

“...I see. Kai-kun!!! I worked up a little sweat because of how hot it was outside, so can I borrow your shower to start things off?” Aina asked.

“No,” he responded bluntly. “How about we start by working...?”

Their current task wasn’t something that they could split up to work on. In order for Aya to make progress, she needed to wait on Nanaka, and Nanaka herself had to make adjustments to her retouching as they went along. That also meant the voice lines they included were subject to change as the project progressed.

Initially, they intended to finish everything with one all-nighter at Kai’s. However, with minimal progress, everyone went home to grab a change of clothes and they ended up working for three days straight.

Near the beginning, Aya and Aina had goofed around a good amount, but they quickly fell in line to focus on their assigned parts. Everyone was tired, but also energetic. In their bodies and minds, there was a burning flame that was hotter than the summer sun outside, and there was no sign of it cooling down. It only burned brighter the closer they got to completion.

Over the three-day period, the girls (sans Aya, who couldn’t cook) were kind enough to take turns making meals. Around dinnertime on the last day, Aina and Aya were heroically discussing the project’s finishing touches despite being high off of their own sleep deprivation.

“I! Told! You!” Aina shouted, “The way this line was delivered doesn’t match the character’s expression!”

“Are you gonna retake it again?!” Aya groaned, “This is more than enough for that Kuro-baby!”

“How many times do I have to say it has to be perfect because it’s for her?!”

Kai made the decision to leave their spat behind and help Nanaka buy groceries for dinner. He couldn’t cook, but the least he could do was carry the bags for her. The setting sun was still remarkably fiery, and the lukewarm summer breeze carried the cries of cicadas to them as they stepped outside.

“Hey,” Nanaka said to get Kai’s attention as they walked along. He turned to see her blurry outline dyed a deep red in the evening light. “This is all so exhausting... but isn’t it kind of fun?”

“...Yeah, it is,” he admitted.

“A part of me feels like we’re not supposed to be this noisy,” she observed.

“I’m... well—” Kai said, grasping for the right words. “—Used to it, thanks to my sister.”

“Haha... I guess you’re right,” Nanaka agreed as the pair stopped to wait for a crosswalk signal.

Even without closing his eyes, Kai’s head was filled with the boisterous uproar—and it echoed louder in his mind than the cicadas that had been chirping only a moment ago. To begin with, creating a game was fun. It was an ordeal when two opinions collided, but even then, it was more common than not to look back fondly on such serious debates. Hot, loud, and fun: these were the words that were supposed to describe his time here.

Kai turned up to the midsummer sky to see the mantle of night beginning to fall, with little stars blinking into existence. Evening and night blurred together across an indistinct border to paint the faraway heavens, completely filling Kai’s view. And yet, he couldn’t help but feel as though something was missing...

“But...” Nanaka murmured, “It’s a little bit lonely.”

“Lonely?” he echoed.

With a small nod, she said, “It’s a little lonely... since Eru’s not here.”

“That’s...” Ah, I see. “...Yeah,” he said. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

◇

By the time they returned to the apartment, Aya and Aina had put an end to their battle, and the app they planned to show Eru was finished. They couldn’t imagine that Eru would simply show up if they asked her to come, so they had Nanaka invite her over. After all, Nanaka’s house was the only location they could think of where they might draw Eru out.

When the three girls went home, Kai found himself alone for the first time in a long while. His apartment felt bigger than it usually did. Had Eru been present, it surely would have felt even bigger still.

“I want you to look at an illustration.” The next day, Nanaka called Eru over with a statement that was technically a lie (but not a complete lie). The other three arrived thirty minutes early to wait on standby in Nanaka’s room.

They waited for Eru to show up, only for her to enter by saying, “...Huh?” Packing all of her emotion into that one word, Eru clicked her tongue. Her brow furrowed into a tight wrinkle, and the glint of her eyes sharpened into crescent moons as she glared at Aya, then Kai, and then Aina. Finally, she stared down Nanaka, who was waiting right next to the doorway.

Nanaka began moving one beat faster than Eru, managing to grab her hand just as the words, “I’m leaving,” escaped her mouth. Nanaka shook her head from side to side in denial. Once again, Eru observed her surroundings: Aya, then Kai, and then Aina. After doing another pass over each of them, she heaved a sigh and asked, “...And?”

“Here,” Nanaka replied, handing her a phone.

“...A smartphone?” Eru questioned suspiciously.

“Tap on this app,” Nanaka instructed.

“This one, dear?”

“Yup.”

There was only one icon on the home screen, and Eru tapped on it dubiously; the instant she did so, the suspicion and anger faded from her eyes as they opened wide in surprise, and she slowly shriveled onto the floor.

“E-Eru?!” Nanaka’s panicked reaction represented everyone present. They knew she would be surprised. It would have been an issue if she wasn’t. That was why they’d all put blood, sweat, and tears into their work. However, the sight of Eru feebly peering into the screen betrayed their expectations in every way, and caused Aina to visibly stiffen up. Aya did her best to not let it show, but her fingers began tapping away at an invisible keyboard.

“This is... my...” Eru mumbled. After opening the application, the screen displayed Eru’s ruined drawing... without a single blemish in sight.

“You know those people who retouch old paintings...? I think they’re called restorers. It almost feels like I’ve become one of them... No, wait, just feeling like it isn’t enough. Don’t worry... It’ll be okay. I’ve been learning from Eru’s art all this time... I can do it.”

Aina had collected the scraps of Eru’s piece to put them together as carefully as possible, but there were still portions where the lines didn’t flow perfectly or bits that had been lost. It was a far cry from its former glory, but the one who had restored it had been Nanaka.

They uploaded the image onto a computer, and Nanaka had digitally filled in all of the parts that were missing. She had painstakingly connected every broken line, pixel by pixel, and painted over missing colors by sampling nearby segments to create a seamless transition. Though the damage on the drawing hadn’t been catastrophic, it hadn’t been easy to fix. And yet, Nanaka completed her task with unwavering focus.

Nanaka had humbly mentioned that she was only able to put it together because she knew all of Eru’s habits and idiosyncrasies from mimicking her, but stealing those habits and reproducing those idiosyncrasies was a skill in its own right. There was no doubt that the quality of Nanaka’s artwork had improved.

It hadn’t seemed as if Nanaka had noticed her own improvement, though, as she’d continued to beat herself up as she progressed. All she’d said was, “I can’t believe she drew this in middle school... Eru really is amazing.”

That being said, the team had managed to strike awe into the original artist; their first hurdle had been cleared, but this was just the beginning. If they were only going to restore the drawing, they wouldn’t have needed to turn it into an app.

“!” An inaudible sound of surprise escaped Eru’s throat as her fingertips were drawn toward the character on-screen. It burst the second she made contact, shining particles of light enveloping the character. Gradually, the sparkles raining down from the top of the character’s head melted away to reveal a 3D model of the same girl, which had been rendered to retain its 2D appearance.

“God, that drilled runt at Kongouin really ran her mouth, so I figured I’d teach her a lesson,” was what Aya had said several days ago. “She was all, ‘Wooow, our graphics are sooo amazing~ Our 3D work is sooo faithful to the beauty of our illust—blah, blah, blah.’ Huh? She didn’t say that? Well, whatever, she said something along those lines,” Aya had insisted. “Anyhow... it’s common courtesy to pulverize them when their pride is at their peak, don’t you think?”

With a devilish grin, Aya had unveiled what she had been working on since seeing Kongouin Mirei’s livestream: a rendering engine that converted 2D drawings directly to 3D. On paper, her words seemed to be absolutely contradictory, but Aya had already finished developing that technology on her laptop. When Kai first saw a sample 2D image rotate in 360 degrees and naturally wave at the camera, he was convinced that Oushima Aya was some sort of magician.

“C’mon, this isn’t anything to get worked up over,” Aya had insisted. “We already have tech that’s similar to this. Senpai, you’ve heard of Live2D, haven’t you?”

Of course, Kai had. It was commonly utilized in the home screens and cutscenes of social games that put a lot of resources into the presentation of their characters’ charms. On top of that, it had more recently gained traction among VTubers for streaming purposes. If you’ve ever seen a 2D illustration smoothly moving around and thought, “What the hell is this?” then it was probably Live2D.

However, the technology for Live2D was only meant to move a single image (although there were often many separate layers making it up), and its portrayal was limited to 40 degrees in either direction—any more than that and the picture fell apart. In essence, it was a trick to make 2D seem like 3D.

Additionally, the fact that there was only one main drawing being moved around meant that large movements dipped into the uncanny valley. VTubers had a real person behind the 2D image, so when they nodded too deeply or turned too suddenly, it wasn’t rare for a viewer to be pulled out of their immersion due to the jerky motion.

Aya’s version didn’t have any trace of visual discomfort.

“If you know that much, that makes it easy to explain! Well, going into the nitty gritty would be a bit much, especially since Nana-sen and Aye-aye are giving me blank stares, so I’ll wrap this up quick,” Aya had told them. “This rendering isn’t based off of a single image, but a bunch of them. 3D’s just a matter of what you show the camera, after all. I just shift the layout of a few different pictures depending on the camera’s position, fill in the gaps on my end, and voila, it looks like 3D. So, the basic idea of making 2D look like 3D hasn’t changed, but... if you can fake it perfectly, then all that’s left is the real deal.”

Kai wouldn’t have been able to follow a more technical explanation, either. Aya had mentioned a few constraints, like the fact that it wasn’t optimized enough to process more than one character at a time, or that it required a ton of illustrations to work with... But the character hadn’t changed at all when it transferred dimensions (obviously, as that was the whole point) and there was no way Kai could sweat the small stuff when he saw the character moving so flawlessly.

It was simply amazing.

“Honestly,” he’d asked, “who the heck are you?”

“I’m Oushima Aya, Meikun High Social Game Club’s develop-a-little programmer,” she’d retorted. “Duh.” Aya had been sporting an impish grin, all while Kai had been frozen in awe at her incomprehensibly prodigious new program. Now, that same smile crept onto Aya’s face as she watched Eru glue herself to the screen.

It wasn’t over yet. They didn’t have a card up their sleeve, or anything... it was just that the experience simply wasn’t complete without the final piece of the puzzle.

“Don’t worry,” Aina had reassured them. “This isn’t a question of my acting skills. My voice will fit this drawing.”

In present time, the character inside the phone began to fiddle with a smartphone of her own. They had set her animations up to do so beforehand. On screen, the character nervously took a deep breath as she tapped away at her own virtual phone. For a moment, she hesitated and went into deep thought. Eventually, the lifelike character looked beyond the screen—directly at Eru—and smiled.

The phone in Eru’s hand switched its display, and the entire view morphed to show an incoming phone call through the LIME program. There was no caller ID. She didn’t need it to know who was calling. Eru picked up the phone just as timidly as the character had done moments prior.

“I’m sorry,” said a voice.

Why was that the line? Whose message was it? Who was it for? Aina had refused to answer those questions, but there was undeniably emotion packed into those words.

“This... is a photo of me in middle school. I’ve cut it since then, but I used to have long hair, all the way down to my waist... You get what I’m saying, don’t you?”

Kai had felt a strange sensation ever since seeing the drawing for the first time, almost as if he’d seen it somewhere before. Like the drawing had somehow caught his eye in the past. That gnawing sensation directly connected to Aina’s photograph with the straightest of all lines.

“For this character to speak is for me to speak.”

They had initially tried out a handful of other lines, poses, expressions, and gestures, but none of them had met Aina’s standards, causing her shouting match with Aya to stretch out until the last minute.

With everything said and done, their final conclusion was to show the small bit of animation in the beginning, and lead directly into an experience that was indiscernible from a real phone call. Aina had acted out all the motions for the character, fiddling with her own phone to provide base motions for the animations. On that note, Aya had explained some unintelligible mumbo-jumbo about employing an AI to automate the process, but what mattered was that they had been able to evoke the same image through Aina’s acting.

Aina had a lot of trouble deciding on what to say, but for now, all she wanted was for her words to reach Eru. Every facet of the plan had been simple: restore the character that Eru had poured so much love into, and don’t stop until it was fully revived. On top of the artwork, they’d add Aina’s voice to the mix and Eru would scream, “Oh dear, she’s aliiive!” Then, the shock would make her faint and foam, and their mission would be accomplished. That was the entire plan.

However, neither Aina, nor Aya, nor Kai could stop themselves from jumping to their feet in panic at the scene that unfolded in front of them.

“Ah...” After ending the call, the screen in Eru’s palm depicting the character began to blur. With a quiet drip, a single droplet of liquid burst onto the screen and shattered into light. Eru lifted her right hand to her cheek, as if to confirm for herself what was happening, and scooped up a tear rolling down her face. “Ah... huh...?” she asked, clearly feeling bewildered.

Nanaka ran to her side and embraced her from the front.

“Ah, Na... naka...?” Eru asked slowly.

“...You idiot,” Nanaka whispered, squeezing her best friend tight. With her head resting on Nanaka’s shoulder, Eru’s face began to distort. Nanaka comforted her by saying, “It’s okay, Eru.”

“...Gh,” Eru choked. “Ah, waaaaaah!!!”

“That’s all there is to it.” Those were the words Eru had said to Kai on that darkened beach, but he had known it wasn’t true. No matter the time or place, Eru was constantly giving it her all. There was no way that a girl who confronted every single illustration head-on wouldn’t have been hurt.

Nanaka didn’t say anything, content simply to hold Eru in her arms. Like a mirror reflecting some faraway scene, Eru’s sobs were muffled in Nanaka’s chest, but somehow still managed to fill the room.