When you truly thought about matters, most problems could be traced back to boys.
Of course, it wasn't every boy. For starters, you eventually had to take the ones who had grown up (if only physically) and reluctantly change the designation to 'men'. The majority of men thought they were in charge of everything, and didn't do well when anyone challenged them on any aspect of that. Saikawa had a tendency to challenge first and hear the actual words sometime after, but... if the majority of males weren't so bad, then would there really be as much of a need to challenge at all?
(She challenged girls in equal measure. But this was a day for fuming about boys.)
And she did try to remember that it was just the majority. Which still represented far too high a percentage -- she'd done well in math, and could work out a few percentages on the run -- but had a crucial remainder preventing it from becoming universal. The good ones.
For example, there was Mr. Fafnir. The dark-haired, glasses-wearing lean man was... age was really hard to determine on adults, but Saikawa felt he was likely in his early thirties -- which meant his entry into the gaming otaku community had been on the late side. However, he'd proven to be an absolute natural at the hikikomori lifestyle --
-- maybe that was a little unfair. As Saikawa understood it, a true hikikimori would withdraw from proper society because they weren't capable of dealing with it. Mr. Fafnir could go out and about any time he felt like doing so. He just didn't want to. He felt people were stupid, but games were challenging. So he spent most of his time in front of a monitor and if he absolutely had to go out, brought along a portable. Mr. Takiya, who served as Mr. Fafnir's roommate (and was also counted among the good ones), had once casually mentioned that the older male really wanted a gaming deck -- but was holding off until the battery life improved. Which, in Mr. Takiya's opinion, mostly served as another excuse for not heading outside.
Mr. Fafnir collected the rarest loot drop items in the world, forever letting his mouse turn the crank on a digital gatcha, and -- Saikawa wasn't sure what he did with any of them. She was aware that they could be sold and that might have been how the adult was managing his half of the rent: he always seemed to have money, and he certainly didn't do anything which resembled classic work. But he seemed to hang onto just about everything. He wouldn't trade the most common item out of an overflowing digital backpack unless he was getting at least three times the value in return and even then, he might fume about the sacrifice for ages. And he didn't like to deal with people. Or society. Or the closing hours of Comiket, because the adult had another interest: just like his roommate, he created his own doujinshi and completely unlike Mr. Takiya, had yet to actually sell a single issue. But he kept making comics, and he kept renting out convention tables. Usually while fuming.
He didn't like people. But he had taken to collecting arcade cabinets from every era. He'd started with the most ancient portion of history -- the 1970s -- and kept going through the current day. Somehow, he'd found the trick to keeping them running, storing them all in an abandoned gesen. And after Saikawa and Kanna had mutually caught him at it, every so often, he would choose to open the doors and let kids in to play. At no cost, and that was probably because the prehistoric game center didn't have a license -- but Mr. Fafnir also said that games were meant to be played, and he couldn't give every last one of them personal attention. So it was best to have someone else doing it.
Besides, that way, he had a small army of playtesters telling him exactly what needed to be repaired, and none of them were collecting a salary.
He smirked a little when he said that sort of thing, and tended to add at least half a snarl. But Saikawa felt it was the sort of reaction you got from someone who didn't like to be caught smiling and had needed to find some kind of substitute. If you wanted to find open approval from Mr. Fafnir, you had to look just over the rim of the little pince-nez glasses, gazing closely (and directly) into the deep mahogany eyes with their faint hint of red at exactly the right moment, and -- maybe it would be there. Mr. Fafnir had been known to almost look approving for periods as long as three seconds. Rounding up.
And then you had Shouta, who was very much still a boy and, as Miss Kobayashi had suggested, had sort of come pre-ruined. He was a little older than Saikawa and Kanna: perhaps two years. He'd very much started into the chuni phase, and Saikawa was still trying to figure out how he hadn't been kicked out of school. Because Kanna's white hair was natural, and Miss Kobayashi had still been called in for a conference with the principal: it had taken a very loud argument to put away threats of educationally-mandated dye.
Shouta went out into the world every day while sporting too-long-for-a-boy straight falls of lavender. And he hadn't been expelled, or held back on eternal demerits and detentions. Nothing at all.
...then again, Miss Kobayashi was just a programmer. Shouta's father ran her company. And you didn't have to be very old to work out the connection between Money and Rules: getting a lot of the first meant dealing with less of the second. Shouta's scholastic hair acceptance was probably the direct result of Bribery. And even with the relatively low-key chuni problem -- for Shouta, that centered around occasionally discussing magic as if it was real --
-- monstrous river serpents were real --
-- she'd fainted once in Shouta's presence, during a camping day trip, at the exact moment when she thought she'd seen the serpent again and when she'd finally woken up, the other two kids had tried to tell her something about low blood sugar and hallucinations --
-- he was a nice boy. Shouta was okay with hanging around girls who were a couple of years younger, because...
Miss Kobayashi refused to go into details. But you didn't have to be around the Magatsuchi siblings for long to recognize that Miss Lucoa was very affectionate towards her little brother. She rumpled his hair, pulled him in close for hugs, and just about always failed to notice just how much he was struggling to get away. She put on displays of adoration which would have approached the border of acceptability in private, did it all in full public view, and usually wound up staring after a fast-fleeing Shouta, desperately wondering what she'd done wrong.
(Miss Lucoa had once asked Saikawa about that. They'd spent an elevator ride in mutually establishing a certain age group of boys as near-feral idiots who argued about bananas a lot.)
Shouta didn't mind female company, and was one of the few boys who could truly say that he liked to have girls as his friends. But he visibly preferred the company of girls and Kanna, who tended to be direct, had once defined Shouta's comfort zone as "No curves." Which meant kids a little younger than he was -- or Miss Kobayashi, which really annoyed the adult. And even so, he wouldn't play Twister with them. Going hiking, playing board games, just hanging out while the adults talked, that was fine -- but Twister guaranteed you were going to fall on someone eventually , and Shouta's desperate attempts to avoid the game suggested he was afraid of making contact with anatomy which didn't exist yet.
Shouta was a little weird and very twitchy, especially around his older sister.
(Miss Lucoa didn't look like she was related to Shouta. At all. Even if you allowed for hair dye and the sort of gyaru addiction to dressing American which could no longer admit that pants existed, Miss Lucoa was just so obviously foreign. But maybe she'd been adopted a long time ago, with Shouta as a late natural birth into the family. Maybe everyone had met at the same adoption agency...)
But he was also nice. Shouta could be good company, and his presence in the extended group occasionally made Saikawa fret a little. She was looking forward to puberty, because it would be one step closer to marriage. She didn't want the changes to drive anyone away.
But Kanna would still be there.
Kanna wasn't changing...
Most problems could be backtracked to boys.
The three children crossed the bridge, clearing the river. There had been no serpent, and that absence continued to maintain no matter how many times Saikawa glanced back in attempted ambush. It was as if the thing was hiding from her. Maybe that was why it had turned up during the camping trip, in those three seconds before she'd fainted. The local woods had felt like a place where Saikawa wouldn't be.
It was a hot day, and getting hotter. They still hadn't found a food cart. But there was a public park close by, a little off the main path. There would be water fountains at the park, and vending machines at the edges. It was a place to get a drink. The fact that Saikawa was the only one who was visibly sweating didn't mean she was the only reason for taking the detour. The foreign boy had never sampled Japan's most popular soda, which meant he was hopelessly out of touch with the entire world. Kanna had already said that she wanted him to have some and to Saikawa, that was why they were taking the detour. Having Kanna regularly checking on her and asking whether she was thirsty had nothing to do with it.
So they'd set out for the park. And they'd been just about all the way up to the entrance before Saikawa had recognized which park it was.
She didn't like the park very much. Not any more.
Saikawa had been the one who'd introduced Kanna to it: a multi-sports outdoor facility with playground rides off to one side. She'd described the place as one of the city's hidden gems, a place which didn't see as much traffic as some of the more central greeneries. And the park had done its immediate best to make her into a liar, because it had been in use by a group of adolescent males: old enough to either be in senior high school or playing delinquent from it. (Saikawa had Views on delinquents.) They'd been roughhousing their way through a dodgeball round, completely failed to consider that a badly-thrown ball could wind up anywhere, and Kanna had smoothly intercepted the stray rubber missile just before Saikawa could get hit.
The five teenagers had come over to recover their ball. One had tried to apologize. Another hadn't. He'd said it was time for the babies to go home.
Saikawa's ears had instantly intercepted the words, figured out a response, and sent the perfect insults directly to her mouth. Getting the brain involved just took too much time.
She'd said a few things about the teenagers. The term 'mazakon' had been tossed around with more speed than the dodgeball, and... there might have been some other words, because saying someone was a momma's boy wasn't always enough. She sort of remembered taking it up a few notches from there. And she'd challenged: dodgeball match the next day. The terms? When the teenagers lost, they would have to abandon the park. Let younger kids play in peace --
-- they'd thought it was funny. (She'd still been eight. Less intimidating than Ilulu, without the potential for anywhere near as much shin damage.) They'd said as much.
So she'd found more words. And she'd blasted every last one of them at the males until they accepted her challenge, five-on-five for the next day, they'd walked out laughing about the chance to whip rubber spheres at her face and because they were heading out of the park, Saikawa had stopped talking.
Which finally gave her the chance to hear every last thing she'd said.
She'd just challenged five adolescent males to dodgeball. Boys twice her size, and rather more than twice her mass. Anyone that much bigger could also be presumed to throw twice as hard. Minimum.
And they wouldn't just be throwing at her.
Saikawa had turned back to face Kanna. Slowly, shaking her way across most of the distance. And she'd immediately considered the rather simple and totally practical solution of never going back to that park again, possibly followed by moving out of the city. With Kanna in tow, because she always needed to have her priorities straight and besides, that was obviously the best way to make sure Kanna never, ever got hit by the ball. Any impact would have been Saikawa's fault. She didn't want to live with that.
But Kanna liked the park. She was, in that understated way, happy that Saikawa had brought her there. She said it was special, and she wanted to retain access. Which meant the match was on, and...
There had been an attempt to recruit three kids from their class, filling out the team. Saikawa had done that, and it hadn't worked. She wasn't popular. Plus she'd felt that it was necessary to tell them exactly what they were up against, and it hadn't helped.
Then they'd wound up back at Miss Kobayashi's apartment. Miss Lucoa and Mr. Fafnir had been visiting. The girls had mutually explained events, and Miss Tohru had immediately volunteered to fill a dodgeball team slot. Why not? The boys were older than the two girls, so having the maid along was just bringing up the team average a little.
Then Miss Lucoa had added her voice to the volunteer list. Mr. Fafnir had been... curious, mostly because he'd played a digital version and wanted to see how the real thing compared. Miss Kobayashi, who had the next day off from work, was just going to watch. And they'd all gone to the park the next day, the teenagers had initially laughed at the girls for bringing in adults and then decided to go ahead with it anyway, the ball had been brought out, flung at Miss Tohru --
-- the maid had readily snatched it out of the air. Held the ball, considering her next move. And Miss Kobayashi, who had been standing on the sideline -- had spoken to the servant.
"Tohru."
The maid had turned to face her employer. Curiously waiting for the next words.
"No killing," Miss Kobayashi had said.
(It was a joke. The maid told that kind of unfunny joke all the time, the programmer had picked it up from her, Ilulu had just fallen into the no-humor line...)
Miss Tohru had beamed.
"Okay!"
And then she'd whipped the ball across the field, precisely placing it in a teenager's gut.
The joke of an order had been obeyed. No one had died. But there had been quite a bit of bruising, and not just to the adolescent male ego. Mr. Fafnir picked his shots carefully, the maid just looked for ways to make the targets hurt, and Miss Lucoa liked to run right up to the line before throwing because that way, whoever she was aiming at had time to fear: everyone else on the opposition just got caught up with watching her run and lost any of the focus which could have been used for a follow-up move.
It had been a zero-fatalities massacre. One which left the boys limping out of the park as Saikawa tried to thank Kanna's incredible friends and family, Kanna had said something about those friends being the worst scum ever, and then...
...the adults had decided they wanted to play another round of dodgeball. Just going against each other, without holding back. Kanna had decided to join in, and Saikawa --
-- what did I do?
She... wasn't sure.
She'd been tired, hadn't she? That was what it felt like. As if just barely participating in the first match had completely worn her out, so she'd decided to go into the park's bleachers and lie down there for a while. Taking a nap while the adults and Kanna had it out.
Why wouldn't I have wanted to watch Kanna play?
The Kobayashi family had gotten her home. She was sure of that much.
And when she tried to remember anything more...
She's standing near the staircase which creates the nearest entrance to the riverwalk, waiting to be taken home. She needs to get online. Maybe there's a website somewhere which will prove Kanna right. That all she saw was a special effect from a movie yet to come, and maybe they'll even get to spot themselves in one of the shots when the whole thing reaches the big screen. Or a streaming service. It might take a while to track it down if it's streaming.
But the blonde woman in the too-skimpy clothing is still talking.
Kanna's been sniffling for a while now, and the sound draws the taller girl closer. She doesn't want her friend to be sad. She wants to hug her until the sadness goes away. Maybe some candy will help. She's been carrying sweets with her for months now, just in case.
The girl instinctively steps forward, and the blonde woman in the pink Nigo cap doesn't notice. Gentle, worried syllables wash into listening ears.
"Kanna... I can't keep pushing. Not as often as I have."
"Something..." Another sniffle. "Something -- could break? She could --"
"The dam could break. It would all come flooding back. And..."
The adult hesitates. Mismatched eyes squeeze shut.
"...if she has any sensitivity," Miss Lucoa quietly says, "any at all -- and some of them do -- then this is pushing it. Pushing towards waking up."
The blonde head comes up. Eyelids slowly open, allowing half-squinting green and amber to check on the other girl's location.
She steps back just in time.
On that first day, Saikawa had wanted to show Kanna the park. Older boys had been using it as their private dodgeball court. So you could argue that everything had been their fault. Sure, it had been Saikawa's intention to go there and it had been her mouth which had set off the next day's match -- but she didn't exactly control who else indulged in the facilities, did she. It was clearly just easier to blame the boys.
With this day, Saikawa had been hot and thirsty, when no one else was. So Kanna had decided to bring her to that same park for drinks. And the place was occupied, because it was summer. Even a hot day would find kids all over the park. Some were using the playground rides, others had claimed the track area (along with a few slow-jogging adults), and a big group of kids their own age were in the process of taking over the football field. A white-and-black ball was being removed from a carrying bag, and the foreign boy was staring at it. The expression of someone who had just come across the half-familiar, and was trying to reconcile which half it was.
"Hey!" They all looked over towards the voice, spotted the black-haired skinny boy frantically waving his arms. "Do you wanna play? We're two short!"
A boy had said that.
So really, it was all his fault.