Chapter 4 - Here Again

“Whew, that really surprised me.”

Nanaka took a light step forward and smiled. “I don’t really know how to describe it, but Shiraseki-kun... you give off a cool impression, so I thought you wouldn’t have any interest in phone games.” In other words: dark, gloomy, low energy, hard to talk to, disinterested even when you do talk to him... she saw someone with all the qualities of a rock on the sidewalk and had optimistically translated that into ‘giving off a cool impression.’

Kai knew he would probably never learn such powerful conversational arts. How impressive. “...Aoi-san, you don’t exactly look like you’d play them yourself,” he told her.

“Oh, s-sorry!” she exclaimed. “I know it’s wrong to judge a book by its cover.”

“N-No, I wasn’t saying that so you’d apologize, I just... Sorry.” This reply was met with silence, and Kai followed after her quietly without bringing up any conversational gambits of his own, figuring that at this point, it was probably best to avoid saying something strange. He sealed his mouth shut like a clam and decided not to open it, even if he were asked. Eventually, he’d forget how to speak altogether and turn into a stone statue. Surely at that point, the people around him would also understand him to be a statue; it’d be meaningless to talk to him, and so nobody would. If he opened his mouth, it would just be a trick of the mind. Statues don’t open their mouths. No one would get hurt, and no one would be troubled. Perfect.

While Kai was daydreaming like an idiot, the pair reached their destination, and Nanaka pointed at the door in front of them. “This is the club I’m in,” she announced.

“I thought the literature club was the last one?”

“I’m so sorry, I completely forgot about my own club.” She let out an awkward laugh and scratched her head like she was petting herself. “Anyway, come on in!”

The door opened, and he—could not follow her in. The path was blocked. First of all, there were volumes of manga and magazines all over the floor. A stack of flyers must have been wedged between them because they, too, could be found scattered about, leaving them no bare floor to walk on. There was a table with snacks, drinks, and assorted merchandise and figurines messily laying atop it in the middle of the room, and two computers in the back, with two girls lined up shoulder to shoulder sitting at them.

“Geez!” Nanaka fumed. “Why is it so messy again?!”

One of the girls turned back to look at her with a weary look. “Yo,” she said. “Culprit here, reporting for duty.” There were light bags under her eyes, and her height when standing was absurdly short; she was probably under 150 centimeters. Despite there being school regulations against it, her hair had been dyed blonde and was tied up with black ribbons into a pair of twintails that swayed perkily. Her clothing was even more of a mess, with it being debatable whether she was wearing her uniform or whether she had it draped over her shoulder. Strangely enough, she didn’t seem scary or particularly delinquent-like, but it went without saying that she had her own set of issues.

The person next to her continued staring at her own monitor without saying a word. The white headphones she had on sandwiched her voluminous black hair. It seemed like she couldn’t hear anything.

“Hmmm-huh?” said the blonde girl, looking at Kai. “Who’s he?”

“Oh, that’s right.” Nanaka had been picking up the flyers on the ground, but stopped to wave Kai in as if she’d remembered he was there. “Shiraseki-kun, please come in,” she invited. “There should at least be enough room near the entrance to stand in, now.”

“...R-Right.” Once he’d stepped in and closed the door, the clubroom felt incredibly cramped.

“This is Shiraseki-kun,” Nanaka told the other two members. “He’s a transfer student who came to check out our club!”

“...H-Hi,” greeted Kai.

“Nice to meetcha,” said the blonde girl. “I’m Oushima Aya, but people call me junkie. It’s super rare to transfer schools, yeah?”

“J-Junkie...?” Kai stammered.

“‘Gacha over three meals a day, I might throw up and die, but a junkie pays to play.’ It’s a nickname I lovingly got from that. I’m a gacha junkie, so they call me junkie. Where’re you from, senpai?”

“Ah, right,” said Kai, reassured to know that she was just a gacha addict. “I went to a school in Tokyo called ‘Tsukigase High School.’”

“Tokyo, huh?” she commented. “Must’ve been rough mov— Wait, Tsukigase? Like, the Tsukigase?”

“The Tsukigase?” Upon hearing that, Nanaka tilted her head inquisitively. “Is it famous or something?”

“Nana-sen, you’re asking me if it’s famous? For real? I was so shook I almost gacha’d,” said Aya. Kai had noticed that she was tapping on her phone while they were talking, but apparently she’d almost rolled in a gacha. “Tsukigase is Tsukigase, the top of the top of all social game clubs in the country. Nana-sen, don’t you play LW? They had that whole shebang with Rondo a while back, so now they’re crashing and burning though. But well, you know, if you’re here ‘n all, you were probably in the social game club, right? Way to go, Nana-sen. You scouted out someone who’s battle-ready.”

“U-Um...” said Kai. Battle ready? he wondered. “What club is this?”

“Huh? Duh, it’s the social game club,” said Aya. “I’m a programmer.”

“.........Social game club?” he repeated.

“Social game club,” she affirmed. “Technically it’s the Meikun High School Social Game Development Club.”

But Kai knew that already. Of course, he knew. It went without saying, it went without being said, that he knew. He knew so well he hated it. After all, he hated it to the point where he ran away, quit school, and transferred here. But, even so... “This is the social game club?” he said again.

It was different in every way, shape, and form from the social game club he knew, which is why he hadn’t been able to tell what club it was at a glance. Aya had kindly explained a good amount to him, but there was no trace of any kind of management or development being displayed on her monitor. The display had a popular browser game running on it. She must have been eating snacks and lazily playing games.

The one who didn’t even turn around seemed to be an illustrator, and she was busy drawing away on an electronic drawing tablet. At the very least, she wasn’t playing around the way Aya was. She was, technically, drawing. But no matter how Kai looked at it, she clearly wasn’t drawing an original character, but rather a fanart of an anime that had recently aired. Even from afar, he could tell that the drawing itself was extremely good, but it was safe to assume that she wasn’t drawing it as a part of her club activities.

“...! Dear me, I’ve done it!”

“Wha...?”

Suddenly, that very same girl put her pen down and stood up, screaming in exultation. She raised both her hands toward the ceiling and kept repeating, “I’ve done iiiiiiiiiiiiit!” over and over. The force of her movements knocked her headphones off, and they caught themselves on her neck. Her violently swaying black hair was nearly as long in the front as it was in the back, and it covered half of her face, leaving only one eye barely peeking out. That singular eye was wide open, staring off somewhere that wasn’t quite here while she continued screaming, “It has arrriiiiiiiiived!”

“Watch out!” said Nanaka, instantaneously jumping to her side.

“Dear me, this is my greatest work yet!” the illustrator gushed. “Cute, cute, so CUTE! Ah, ahh, ahhh... agh?” Suddenly, she collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Nanaka was ready and waiting behind her, as if she knew this would happen, and firmly caught her as she fell. “Phew...” she sighed. “Oh, sorry, Shiraseki-kun. That must have been surprising.”

“Um, no— What’s going on?”

“What a pain. Why’s she always gotta be like this?” said Aya, who’d been covering her ears, and now shook her head disapprovingly. “Don’t worry about her too much,” Aya told him. “Whenever she draws something hella good, she’s got a habit of getting too excited and knocking herself out. All the important bits of her brain keep getting siphoned off by those stupidly big knockers.”

Upon hearing that appraisal, Kai’s vision unconsciously went to check. He hadn’t noticed earlier because of the energy in the room, but the illustrator’s breasts were indeed very large. It might have been because Nanaka’s arms were accentuating them, but their plumpness almost transcended to the level of being powerful.

The girl herself hadn’t so much as budged, and was instead foaming at the mouth like a crab. Interesting, he thought. It seemed as though she really had fainted. Kai felt like being told not to worry was a bit of a stretch. Or maybe this was normal here?

The double whammy of a gacha junkie programmer who stared at the gacha screen while talking and an illustrator who fainted after completing a good drawing. That was what counted as normal here? It really was different from the social game club he knew in every conceivable way.

Every day spent in the development and management for a social game was simultaneously a constant battle against the users’ expectations and a race against time. Break time aside, there was no time to spare for playing around on the clock.

Wait, no, he reminded himself. I’m done with all of this anyway! “E-Excuse me!” he managed to stutter, knowing that he couldn’t stay in a place like this for long. “I’m going home!” He grabbed a hold of his bag and flew out of the clubroom and into the hallway. He thought he heard Nanaka calling out his name, but he ignored her and kept running. He clambered down the stairs and nearly rolled into the front entrance, where he paused just long enough to change his shoes. Afterwards, he booked it to the station at full speed and jumped into the train which had just arrived.

It was still early into spring, but Kai was drenched in sweat while he swayed along to the rhythm of a train car bound for Niigata Station.

◇

“.........What are you doing, nee-san?” he asked wearily. Kai couldn’t quite think of what a little brother was meant to do when he opened the door to his own home and his older sister came running out to greet him in a naked apron. He figured no one would have come by, but it was enough for him to wonder what she was planning on doing if someone other than himself opened the door.

“Oh, um... Ahem... How was it?” Misako replied.

“You ask me that now...” he grumbled, thinking to himself that the pink apron went well with the field of posies in his sister’s head. Well, at least he was used to it.

“You’re a boy in the middle of puberty,” she told him. “Don’t you feel sexually aroused?”

“By my sister?”

“Those words stand to pit you against every only child in the country who laments their birth and longs for a mischievous older sister!” Misako declared.

“Right... whatever,” said Kai, too tired to argue. “Can you put on some clothes?”

“Fufu, don’t you worry,” said Misako, twirling around.

“Woah!” Kai cautiously opened the eyes he’d closed in order to avoid seeing his sister naked, only to find Misako grinning from ear to ear. She wasn’t naked at all—he could see that she had cleverly hidden her shirt and hot pants so they were only visible from behind.

“Our bit doesn’t end until we get to the punchline!” she sang out.

Kai wasn’t in the mood to keep playing along, so he slipped past Misako to head towards his room, where he hurled his bag onto his bed and pulled his phone out by force of habit. That just reminded him of Nanaka asking him if he liked smartphone games with beaming eyes, so he tossed the phone onto the bed, too.

“What happened?” asked Misako, leaning against the door frame.

“Nothing,” he told her shortly.

“I told you that our bit is important!” The sadness in Misako’s voice was sincere. “You know, I planned on doing the whole ‘Dinner, a bath, or me?’ schtick when you got home, but your eyes looked so dead that I couldn’t pull it off. There’s no way it was nothing. Look in a mirror; you could leave a raw fish out for three days and it still wouldn’t look as bad as you.” Next, Misako keenly eyed the smartphone on the bed. “Did they have a social game club?” she asked knowingly.

“......How?”

“My little brother is so easy to understand.” Misako snickered as she sat down on the bed and picked up the phone. “You know,” she said, “I don’t think it’s a mistake to run away.”

“What’s with you all of a sudden?” asked Kai, sounding exasperated.

“I’m not saying the people who grind away at their bodies and souls to face their problems head on are wrong,” she went on. “But not everyone has the heart to do that; a newborn soul is like an untouched stone. The things that happen in our everyday lives chip at that stone until each one of us arrives at a shape we can call our own. But if the scar goes too deep and the rock crumbles... there’s no going back. That’s why running away to catch your breath for a moment isn’t a mistake.”

“...Then leave me alone,” Kai begged.

“I can’t do that, either. Listen to me, Kai: to run away, it has to be momentary,” Misako emphasized. “If you keep running, one day you’ll find that instead of running to escape something, you’ll be putting in effort or fighting just to run. It’s strange, but that’s how it is. You begin by running because you can’t fight anymore, so if you start fighting just to keep running—aren’t you putting the cart before the horse?”

Kai quietly accepted the phone that his sister handed him, and Misako smiled gently in response.

“And that concludes my excuse to my editor while I ran away from my manuscript and the lecture I received afterward,” she declared.

“What a waste...”

“Haha! If I got my beloved little brother’s mind off his problems, I can’t ask for anything else,” said Misako, springing up to her feet. “Alright! Let’s go buy some groceries for dinner. It’ll be my treat.”

“Are you planning on eating here again?” Kai objected.

“So what? For me, this is my safe space where I can run away to.”

“Like I said before, the manuscript you left at home isn’t going to write itself.”

“Nope! Can’t heeeaaaar yooouuu!” Misako sang out. Then she dragged him out of the house by his hand, and the two went to shop in front of the train station, where the deep color of the setting sun made Misako’s silver hair shine like a star. Kai initially thought that was the reason people kept staring at them, but when he looked again, he realized that Misako was still wearing her imitation naked apron. No wonder people were staring! He hurriedly tried to get her to take it off, but Misako had set her trap and was waiting for him to notice so she could gleefully run away, drawing even more stares than before.

They kept causing a scene until they reached the grocery store, where the siblings decided that buying ingredients and making something from scratch was too much work. Instead, they bought some bento boxes from a chain restaurant and went home. Misako went home immediately after dinner, possibly because her deadline really was that bad.

“...If you’re that busy, you don’t have to force yourself to visit,” Kai grumbled after her. Once he was alone, he opened the BOX with his phone. The BOX was a government initiative, undertaken to create a unified distribution platform for all smartphone games in the country. Both corporate games and student-made games were distributed through it.

He opened his home page and noticed that he had received some points. It seemed to be for his final semester test at Tsukigase High. When the “IT Facilitation Act” began pushing students to develop social games through club activities, one of the biggest issues had been spending. Even before the system came under examination, there were plenty of stories of students using their parents’ credit cards to rack up a massive bill.

In order to make the act more than a fairy tale, the government had set about solving this issue, and their solution was very direct. They would monitor students’ phone terminals through the school system and disallow in-game purchases through the BOX. If you couldn’t buy anything, there shouldn’t be any issues. There were a handful of loopholes, but it was a simple solution. In exchange, students would receive points they could use in the BOX based on their contributions at school.

Basically, students were rewarded with points if they did well on exams or in their clubs and such. These points were usable in any application that was available through the BOX, and it was even possible to use them for shopping.

There were criticisms at the time that the system impeded on students’ freedom, or that students would simply use their money to fool around. However, the schools that implemented the system saw noticeable increases in academic performance. Perhaps the concept of being rewarded with points through studying offered an easy answer for the many students who asked themselves, “Why am I learning this?” As more and more schools adopted the policy, national test averages had risen proportionally, and the voices of dissent gradually faded away.

“...Phew.” Kai made it a daily routine to keep up with all of the games in the top 100 rankings. Of course, he also updated the log on his laptop while doing so. All of that combined made up his daily chores. Finally, he finished up his work and turned off his computer. He was about to turn off his phone as well when his hand stopped.

“...” He mulled it over for a second, and decided to look it up after all.

Kai laid down in his bed as he searched for Meikun High School in the BOX and got a single hit: it was a social game called Miracle Stage, with magical girls and idols as the motif. It was also pretty close to being dead last in the rankings. The game’s art was astoundingly good, but the lack of any gameplay screenshots in the introduction page gave Kai a bad feeling. There were as many “art trap” games as there were stars in the sky.

He felt a little disappointed as he tapped the download button.

◇

By the time he realized it, there was light pouring in from underneath his curtains. It was morning. “...What am I even doing?” he asked himself. He remembered rolling around in bed, playing the game. But before he knew it, he was at his desk with the laptop open.

This was his first lesson from Akane: “Play a social game, but do not let that be the end of it. Keep a record of what you thought, of what you felt, of its strengths and weaknesses. Play it again. Record again. Pile on more and more until it becomes a treasure you can store and pull out at any time. That treasure will be yours and yours alone.” She had spoken that last line with some sort of conviction.

That was a major reason why his routine now included data logging in addition to merely playing social games. The spreadsheet on his screen was full of analyses on everything to do with Miracle Stage.

Kai checked his watch and realized that it was almost too late to make it to class on time. He quickly washed his face and got himself ready before heading out to school. The sunlight stung painfully in his eyes. During his time at Tsukigase, it was common for him to pull an all-nighter to fix in-game bugs, but he hadn’t done so in so long that his body had forgotten the violence of the morning sun.

Kai slapped his wobbling legs into shape and hurried onward. The number of Meikun High uniforms grew as he approached the station and by the time he was on the train platform, he was practically drowning in them. Out of that massive crowd, he saw Nanaka from behind. Considering what happened yesterday, he couldn’t bring himself to talk to her. He knew they’d see each other in class, but he wanted to put it off as long as possible.

Just as he tried to slip away from the line of people waiting to board the train, she turned around and made eye contact. Kai wasn’t the only one to notice; he recoiled and his body started running out of reflex as Nanaka hurried to close the distance.

“Shiraseki-kun!” she called out.

Kai heard her call out to him from behind, backing him further into a corner. He was already past the ticket gate by now, so it wouldn’t be easy to get back outside. His only choice was to go back up the stairs to a different platform.

“Please, wait!” she begged.

“Why?!” he cried out, wondering why she was chasing after him in the first place. When Kai was a child, he once ran away from a large dog because he was scared. The dog chased him down and pushed him over. At least then, the reason had been obvious: the dog wanted to roll around and play.

Then what was the reason here? Why was she chasing him? Surely, she didn’t want to roll around and play with him; Nanaka probably didn’t even have any positive feelings toward Kai. He’d run home despite the fact that she did her best to show him around, after all.

Did she want to complain? Did she need to get all her negativity off her chest by scolding him? He would understand, if that were the case. Human beings were a life form surprisingly full of complaints. Kai had more than his fair share of that during his first job at Tsukigase, where he’d worked in user support. A single bug could lead to a torrent of insults and abuse sent through support tickets, as if there were people lying in wait for them to make a mistake.

That had been... rough. The ones that said things like “unplayable,” “I want a refund,” or “give me back my time” were manageable. But sometimes, there would be messages that just casually said, “I hope you die.” No matter how hard you worked, there would still be voices calling your management trash or your game dog shit.

Nanaka must have wanted to say something like that. There’s no other reason she’d chase after him so desperately. But Kai didn’t want to hear it; he didn’t want to be called shit, or trash, or to be told to die. The only thing he could do was run aw—

“Huh?” He’d been so lost in his thoughts that he kicked his foot into a step on the stairs at full speed. He managed to regain his balance by spinning his arms around in a windmill. Even though he somehow avoided falling over, he didn’t have time to relax as his phone fell out of his pocket.

Right before it hit the staircase, however, a light hand slipped into view and caught it. “Um...” Nanaka stretched out her hand to give him the phone in a way that looked like she was still trying to feel out the situation.

“Here.”

“T-Thank... you very much,” said Kai, reaching out to take his phone. But Nanaka didn’t let go; instead, they locked into a small tug-of-war. “Aoi... san?”

“Do you hate me?” she blurted out.

“...What?”

“You ran away so suddenly... so I thought maybe I did something yesterday to make you hate me...” she panted.

“W-Wait, wait wait wait, no, that’s not it!” As a matter of fact, Kai thought she was the one that hated him. How had she come to that conclusion? ...Wait, he realized. She tried to talk to me and I ignored her. On top of that, I ran away as fast as I could. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that I hated her. Not at all. Huh. So that’s how she felt. Kai was in the wrong after all. “Yesterday, I... well, I was a bit surprised...” he tried to explain. He wasn’t lying. There was a lot to be surprised by.

“I... see,” said Nanaka, breathing a sigh of relief from the bottom of her heart. Then she waited for Kai to put away his phone and tried to muster up her resolve. “Um, Shiraseki-kun. If you wouldn’t mind... would you please join the social game club?” She bowed her head and further added, “Please.” In her outstretched hands was a single piece of paper. Kai had seen it before. At the very top were the words Club Application Form, and the Club Name field had the social game club written in.

He slowly reached for the paper, but pulled back his hand before he could take it. “...I’m sorry,” he said slowly. “I... can’t join the social game club.”

“Is that because... we’re not good enough?” she guessed.

“Huh? No, that’s—”

“It’s not true!” She must not have meant to shout, because she gave a small apology right away, and then took a deep breath to control her emotions before continuing. “Those two are amazing. It’s just... I can’t do anything. I’m the club president and the planner, but I don’t know anything about social games. I didn’t even know what an amazing school Tsukigase was... That’s why they don’t have anything they can work on. I know it looks like they’re playing around...”

Nanaka thrust the club application form toward him again. “Please! I’m... not good enough. Please lend us your strength...!”

Kai wanted to start running, vault over the ticket gate if he had to, and get away from her. But when he noticed how her hands were trembling, whether out of anxiety or plain nervousness, his own legs wouldn’t move. This wasn’t something he could run away from. Her words had moved him. He wanted to respond to her earnestness with honesty of his own, even if his answer wasn’t a good one.

“...I ran away from it all,” he admitted. “I didn’t want to join the social game club again... I don’t have the right to. So... I’m sorry.”