[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Ultimate Weapon Girls III

 

Genre: Slice of Life
Length: 4179 words
BD: After a long, long time, I've finally returned to finish this arc. In the end, it's not quite what I initially imagined, but a story of any kind beats no story at all.

There were, ancient wisdom said, two certainties in life: death, and taxes. Sora, who had neatly sidestepped both, was thus empowered beyond the realm of ordinary people, and could pursue her ambitions unburdened by the forces which fettered the rest of mankind.

Luckily, these ambitions mostly extended to sleep and ice cream, neither of which were difficult to acquire in any reasonable quantity. However, even a simple heart like hers needed something more from time to time; she, like any other person, had her flights of fancy, her passing desires.

Right now, her ambition was to play with Sham’s ponytail.

The ponytail had appeared overnight, an entirely new addition to Sham’s head. It matched Sora’s, which had been instilled in her by an unholy recipe of sprays, pins, and furious muttering; it was important, Sham said, that they matched, which was why their idol outfits were mostly the same, with the exception of what colour vest they had and some minor alterations to account for the fact that Sham was rich in bust but poor in height.

“...and that concludes our review of the many forms of cuteness!” Sham declared. The staff room of their concert venue had a whiteboard, which she had used for a last minute lecture on the truly important things in life. It was covered in scribbles, which Sora very charitably identified as handwriting. “Pop quiz! Define ‘gap moe’!”

“That’s when you say ‘ora!’ while you’re lifting me up.”

“H-hey! It just helps with the weight, alright? I won’t do it in the real performance. And even if I do, it’ll be an ‘ora!’ in a cute voice,” Sham protested.

Sora let this information filter into her brain, like a fish filtering plankton on the seabed, and resumed her musings on the ponytail. Where had it come from? Any way you looked at it, Sham didn’t actually have that much hair. Was it real? If it was touched, would it poof out of existence like a magic trick? It wasn’t there yesterday, she was sure of that, and it probably wouldn’t be there tomorrow either. Which meant her window of opportunity was shrinking, and swiftly.

“Anyway, there’s one last thing I wanted to say before we go out on stage. It’s something I think is super important, so hear me out, okay?”

If she untied the ponytail, would she get to see what Sham’s hair would look like if she grew it out? Maybe it would just unscrew, like a lightbulb, and you could plug in another one later. That would be convenient. You’d never have to brush your hair, which, for a girl whose hair was quite so stubborn as Sora’s, sounded like an excellent proposition.

Ponderously, like an oil tanker making a 180 degree turn, she returned her train of thought to what Sham was saying.

“I know you’re not that comfortable with singing. But I really think dancing is great for you! Not just because it’s fun, or because it’s good exercise, or because you look super cute when you flub the steps, but because it’s a way to communicate,” Sham explained. “I mean… not to be rude or anything, but you’re not super great at talking to people, right?”

Sora considered this. Personally, she was of the opinion that she was fine at talking to people, because she did so efficiently. People mostly knew what she wanted without her having to say much at all; in terms of word-to-meaning ratio, she was doing quite well for herself. If they didn’t get it, it was fine. It usually wasn’t that important. But she did get frustrated, sometimes, with how hard it was to articulate things. Language was hard.

“Not super great,” she conceded. Medium great, perhaps, or even just medium at a push.

“Right? But dancing lets you communicate what’s in your heart without needing words at all. You just let your body speak for you,” Sham said earnestly. “I want you to experience that. So today, when you look out into the crowd–”

“There’s no crowd,” Sora interrupted, furrowing her brow.

“Well, there’s Suguri and Hime–”

“That’s two. Two’s not a crowd. Three is a crowd, and two is a sandwich.”

In Sham’s mind, this was untrue. If two was a sandwich, you only had bread and bread, which was a pretty poor sandwich in her opinion. You could fold a slice of bread over the filling and sort of make a sandwich that way, but that only counted as half a sandwich if you asked her. Three was both a crowd and a sandwich, which was why it had magic powers. Everybody knew that.

Still, opinions on sandwiches were some of the hardest to change, and she didn’t have time for the inevitable debate that would follow, so she bravely soldiered on with what she was trying to say. “–look out at Suguri and Hime, then, and hold what you want to say to them in your heart. It’ll show through in your dance moves, I promise – and the better you get at dancing, the more they’ll be able to see what you want to say.”

Sora’s expression was dubious. For all her eccentricities, she was at heart a practical person, and believe principally in things she could touch, feel, and shoot at. But if Sham believed it, maybe there was some truth to it.

“Can it be anything?” Sora asked.

“Absolutely. Just… y’know, try it out.” Sham took a deep breath. “I’m… kinda super biased, but I want you to be able to enjoy being an idol. It’s made me really happy, and I want to share that with you. I think that if you can use it to communicate better, it might be something you can love as well.”

“Mm. I’m having lots of fun already, though.”

A moment’s rest. A little pause to let the certainty sink in. To let the habitual smile on her face echo in her heart. When Sham spoke, her voice was heavy with relief. An exaltation. “Ahh… I’m glad, Sora. I really am.”

“Do you try and communicate things when you’re dancing?” Sora asked.

“Of course! I don’t know if it reaches everybody, but I always try. I always have. Like… uh.” She paused. Shook her head. She was getting into dangerously emotional territory, but it was Sora. It would be fine. “I used to… um. Pretend that you were in the crowd. So that way, it was like I was singing to you. I’d do that, and in my heart I’d hope that one day, you’d wake up, and we could talk, and… I could say sorry. Since we parted on bad terms in the war.”

This was where, if Sora was any less than medium great as a conversationalist, there would have been a long, emotional, faintly awkward silence that one of them would have broken with a murmur of agreement, or a laugh, and then they wouldn’t have talked about it again. Instead, she nodded sagely, and said, “I see. That means I’ve been to all of your concerts, in away, so I’m a good fan. I was worried about it since I haven’t bought any merchandise.”

“Don’t worry about that kind of thing. As far as I’m concerned, Sora, you’ll always be my number one, most important fan.”

“I bet you say that to everybody, though,” Sora said, in dry tone Sham was starting to recognise from Nath’s way of speaking. “You’re everyone’s Poppomikki Sunshine.”

“Maybe. But I’m not everybody’s Sham. Just yours.”

“What about Suguri and Hime?”

“Maybe, eventually.”

“And Nath?”

“It’s negotiable, haha.”

She wondered if she’d get away with booping Sora on the nose. Would that be weird? What was a little nose booping between friends? She felt like an eskimo kiss would definitely be too far, but plain old nose booping might just fly.

There were twelve hours until their performance.

As they began to go through their last dress rehearsals, Sham felt on top of the world – although her mind was not always on her dance moves.

Suguri’s clothes had vanished.

Not all of them, thankfully, and not the ones she was wearing, although she really wouldn’t put that past Hime. She had great respect for the way that things just happened around the house without her knowing it, but sometimes her girlfriend’s domestic stealth could be a tiny bit too much to handle.

Still, her closet – reliable, capacious, home to spiders and moth balls and lint – seemed to have completely emptied itself overnight, save for a few very select items.

“Well? What are you going to wear? I don’t mind. You can pick out anything you like,” Hime said smugly over her shoulder.

She did, technically, still have options. There was a dress with too many ruffles on it, that Suguri had buried in the back of her closet because it made her look like a porcelain doll. There was another dress with a slit so far up the leg that wearing it probably counted as public indecency. And there was a suit, which she had won in a raffle and never really bothered to look at since. Right now, she was looking at it as a possible source of salvation. Suits were neutral, non-offensive. She could get away with wearing a suit.

“Ooh, excellent choice.,” Hime said as she approached it, which instantly made her regret her decision. “I’ve been wanting to see you in a suit for quite a while, you know.”

There was mischief in her voice, but it was at least leavened with honesty. Suguri turned. “Why?”

“Well, you know. Forward planning, that kind of thing. I had to see you in either a suit or a wedding dress, and the suit was easier to arrange.”

Suguri did not think she had yet acquired the necessary decorum to be a bride, but she might have had the blushing down pat.

Why they were dressing up was, as of yet, a pleasant mystery. She’d informed, in no uncertain terms, that they’d be going out for a date, but given no information on what the date would contain. All Hime would tell her was that it was important and that they should look their best, which seemed to be Hime’s catch-all excuse for wearing opera gloves. Where she’d gotten the gloves was yet another of life’s many mysteries, but she was very fond of them, because they made her feel like a sorcerer.

When she’d finally struggled into her suit – it had taken her a lifetime of study to master the intricate mechanisms of the trouser – Hime was already downstairs, in a black evening dress so shimmering that local astronomers would no doubt mistake it for a small constellation when they took flight. Certainly, it brought to mind the sensation of being shoved out of an airlock and tumbling through the vast beauty of space.

“Well, shall we?” Hime asked, presenting a hand for Suguri to take. It was, of course, not a question.

After a short flight, during which Hime’s long and beautiful dress unfortunately made her look like a very glamorous shuttlecock as it streamed out behind her, they landed at what looked like a small town music hall, of the type that does a roaring trade as a venue for wedding receptions and school proms. It wasn’t really the type of place that necessitated suits and opera gloves, or the kind of place you casually went for a date.

Still, if you were around Hime for long enough, you came to expect and enjoy the occasional surprise, which usually arrived all at once and with the subtlety of the 1812 Overture. Suguri was content to be along for the ride until it did.

The surprise was not, apparently, that the seemingly normal music hall was an opulent palace on the inside; their shoes echoed loudly on the faux wood of the laminate floor, and when they were seated, it was on the metal folding chairs that had flattened the bottoms of many band members over their years of tireless service.

The lights dimmed. Hime’s fingers entwined with hers in the blackness. Over tinny speakers that were presumably located in the ceiling, but sounded as if they were currently in the next building over, a backing track began to play.

To be entirely fair, it wasn’t a bad backing track. Somewhere, hidden deep within its musical DNA, were the nascent stirrings of an undeniable bop. It was a young song, a fresh song, a song taking the first steps outwards on a musical journey where groove was the ultimate destination, and maybe the real treasure was the boops it made along the way. It was a track full of potential, and some of that came through, even hampered by an audio system from early last century.

It was something of an imperfect date, Suguri thought. But there were far worse fates than holding hands with Hime in the darkness, letting music watch over them. She could definitely enjoy this.

It was at that moment that Sham took the stage.

Sham had picked the venue. Sham had heard the song over the speakers, seen the folding metal chairs, slithered across the laminate floor in her socks until she got it out of her system. She knew what she was working with.

And ultimately, it didn’t matter. Because a true star makes everything else fade into the background – all the little imperfections, all the niggles and gripes. As long the star can capture your gaze and keep it, you could be anywhere at all. She knew it. She’d done it before, and she’d do it again.

With perfect ease, she brought ten thousand years of carefully honed charisma to bear.

“Ya-ho! Thank you everybody for coming to this extra special live event! Some of you might know me as Poppomikki Sunshine, but for this special VIP show, I’ll be debuting as Sham, idol extraordinaire and defender of all things cute!”

Some part of Suguri dimly registered that she was talking to an audience of exactly two people, in a dingy music hall with an awful sound system. She was saying outrageous things that would be laughed . But she said them with the same confidence she’d have if she’d been at the world’s best music venue with a crowd of millions screaming her name. That was what carried it. It was a kind of magic.

“But that’s not all! Today, I want you to welcome another super cute idol who’s been honing her skills, just for you! She’s still starting out, but she definitely has the potential to take the world by storm. It’s my super cute junior, Soraaaaaaaa!”

For a moment, the magic wavered. Sham could have served tea and cake onstage and nobody would have blinked; it was, after all, her home. But Sora took to the stage like a baby deer flitting across a forest clearing; too fast, too wobbly, too uncomfortable.

“Sora, introduce yourself,” Sham whispered.

“But… they know who I am already...”

“Just do it, okay? Trust me! We’re both super cute, so nothing can go wrong!”

“Um… I’m… Sora,” she said, and then quietly moved so Sham was standing in front of her.

“Uuuuu…”

“Ahaha. It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine! She’s just got a little stage fright, but I’m sure it’ll just melt away once we get to the good stuff,” Sham announced, so convincingly that Suguri almost believed it. “Speaking of…!”

The music hit the bridge of the loop, and the two idols took their positions, microphones in hand. Dressed in their matching but accented uniforms, they almost looked like sisters – a confident older sister, and a quiet younger one.

Listening carefully, you could hear Sora taking a deep, but shaky breath near the microphone as the song began in earnest.

“Kawaiku tokimeite ite watashi...”

As the idols began to dance, Hime gave Suguri’s hand another squeeze.

“You know, I didn’t think Sora could make an expression like that. She’s always marching to the beat of her own drum… Ufufu. It’s a treat to see her looking nervous for once. Don’t you think?”

Suguri didn’t reply.

Looking at them both, you would never know they’d fought in humanity’s greatest war. You wouldn’t know they’d taken lives with their own hands, or survived a scouring that wiped the entire planet clean. For as long as they’d known Sora, she always seemed to have that awareness about her – that she was a weapon. A soldier. Things came back to that, revolved around it. It was a weight that was always on her shoulders. Suguri would have bet that Sham held that weight, too – even if she was better at hiding it.

But right now, they weren’t. They were idols. There was the music, and the dancing, and the pageantry, and the audience, and that was it. There wasn’t room for anything else. Those clear, uncomplicated expressions… That was how it should be. The dancing and the singing was beside the point – for her, this was what she’d come to see. What she’d remember from this night.

But still, they danced – Sham leading, and Sora just a fraction of a second behind. Between Sham’s confident vocals and Sora’s soft, almost halting delivery, they established a back and forth dynamic; Sham’s verses kept the song bouncing, and Sora’s were moments of rest without letting the vocals stop.

The music reached a crescendo, and with perhaps more confidence than she’d had in the whole performance, Sora threw herself into Sham’s arms. Sham caught her, turning on one foot and following through with the momentum into a spin, before transitioning into the lift. One, two, three counts she held Sora aloft, and then gently down, resuming the routine without a pause.

There might have been a tiny, muffled ‘ora’, but nobody could be sure.

As the song ended and they struck their final poses, Hime and Suguri’s clapping broke cleanly through the sound of the ailing audio systems of the music hall.

“Thank you, everybody! You’re been a wonderful audience. We’re going to get changed now, but we’ll be out again in a moment for some meeting and greeting!” Sham called.

Sora didn’t say anything. But she was smiling as she followed her partner backstage.

“So, Sora! Did you remember to communicate something with your dancing?”

They had been in the dressing rooms for just slightly m0re than a moment. Although she had kept it together for the walk back, Sora’s legs had come over wobbly, and she folded into a chair at the first opportunity. The nerves had gotten to her after all.

“Mm,” she mumbled.

“That’s fantastic. You were great out there! What did you think of your first live performance? Even with a small audience, it’s super exhilarating, right?”

Sora gave her the kind of look that implied thinking was definitively off the menu for the near future, at least until she’d had a sit down, a cold drink, and eaten something with a slightly worrying amount of sugar. Until then she would sit in her chair and wait for bits of her to stop shaking.

After Sham caved to her demands and gave her a can of apple soda, she gave the question a bit more consideration as she waited for things like blood sugar and adrenaline spikes to cancel each other out. “It was scarier than I thought it would be. But it was fun towards the end. I was getting into it.” She paused. “It might be a good workout. All the worrying would burn a lot of calories.”

“Ahaha… not… not in my experience. I mean, sure, you worry a bit and you move around, but then because you worried you end up eating, and it’s way easier to eat a lot of calories than it is to burn them… Ah, anyway!” The idol, momentarily dejected, immediately bounced back to her usual cheerful demeanour. “Truth be told, I was trying to communicate something to you through my dancing tonight. Kind of like a proof of concept, maybe? Did you pick up on it?”

A long moment passed as Sora combed through the blurred memories and emotions of the show. Neither she or Sham had ever heard the sound of a dial-up modem, but somewhere, out there in the universe, it was being made.

“Mm. Maybe. Kind of… a feeling.” She frowned. Took another moment to figure out how to convert that feeling to words. “When we did the lift. I thought… it was like…”

“Yes?”

“You were saying… ‘I’ll always support you’.”

“Bingo! You got it in one!” Sham whooped. “How’s that for idol power?! Great proof of concept, right?”

Sora’s brow furrowed. “Not… really. I think it’s cheating, a little bit.”

“Oh? Do you think I’d cheat and say it was right no matter what?” Sham, possessor of a mighty pout, levelled it at her best friend. “I’m shocked! Super shocked!”

“It’s not that,” she said, shaking her head. Her hair, having finally exhausted the combined strength of Sham’s cosmetology supplies, ejected two hairpins as she did. “It’s just… you told me something I already knew, I think. So it’s like a leading question.”

A ripple of pure happiness shot down Sham’s spine. Sora had never seen a human being do a booty wiggle of happiness before; she usually associated it with bees. But she was of the opinion that Sham would make a very good bee if she put her mind to it, and didn’t question it any further.

“Ehehehe. Well, maybe. You can always use your message as a proof, right? What did you try to say to Hime and Suguri? Oh, I bet I know! You were saying thank you for them looking after you all this time, right?”

Sora’s brow furrowed. “No. They get mad when I do that. They say family is about only saying please and thank you for the small things. The big things you get whether you want them or not.”

What counted as a small thing or a big thing had never been specified, which was why it changed from hour to hour. Sometimes bringing the TV remote was a big thing, and sometimes putting out fires in the kitchen was a small thing. It all depended on who won the argument afterwards.

“So, what did you try to communicate to them?”

Sora puffed up her chest, as she sometimes did when explaining one of her feats of intellectual dexterity. “I looked out at them, just like you said, and I thought about what I wanted for dinner tomorrow.”

Sham reeled back. “That’s… um… that might be a little bit specific for this kind of thing, haha…”

“You said it could be anything,” Sora replied sternly, folding her arms across her chest. “This way is a good test. If they get it right, I know it works.”

Silently, Sham prayed that Sora had wished for something simple, like toast, or bacon and eggs. She’d heard rumours of the Sora’s bacon consumption. They made her head spin.

“W-well… let me know how it goes, okay? Communicating things through dance takes a bit of practice. Speaking of Suguri and Hime, are you ready to go and meet your adoring crowd?”

“It’s not a crowd. It’s a sandwich.”

Suguri and Hime, Sham thought, were definitely not a sandwich, because it seemed like very little got between them. But that was a debate for another day; the wheels in her head were turning, and just as she had adopted a quantified scale for measuring cuteness, the Sandwich Theory of Romantic Relationships was beginning to take shape in her head. Who was the top slice, and who was the bottom? What was the significance of spread? All these and other questions remained to be answered, and Sham was exactly the idol to do it.

As they wandered back out to meet all two of their fans, she continued to ponder her theory. She didn’t even notice Sora fiddling with her ponytail – or the quiet, slightly disappointed murmur she made when it failed to unscrew.

“So? What did you think?” Hime asked, squeezing Suguri’s hand once more. The idols were still in their dressing room, but Suguri hadn’t gotten out of her seat. “Originally I just wanted Sham to put on a show for you, but she insisted on making Sora a part of it, too. She got so enthusiastic that I couldn’t turn her down.”

Suguri sighed. Deep. Contented. So Hime had set the whole thing up. Of course she had. Hime, always nudging people in little ways, drawing them together, putting them in motion. Her Hime. She squeezed back.

“Tonight, the people I love are shining,” she said. “I couldn’t be happier.”

Near the stage door, Sham held an arm up to stop Sora, and put her finger to her lips.

It seemed like Hime’s date was going very successfully indeed.

Though, personally – as an idol, and self-professed expert on matters of love – she might not have used quite that much tongue.

A/N: Between the last thing posted on this blog and this, I ended up having a lot of burnout, which I'm still trying to shake off in my own way. You can kind of feel the tiredness setting in towards the end of this story; at the moment, this is about the limit of how long I can go in a single segment.

As a result of the sheer length of time between the last entry of this series (and the aforementioned burnout), I feel like my style has changed a bit. I'll be trying to adjust my reading diet in the future to get a little bit of the spark back from previous works, but for now, this is what it is. There may be a few oddities with formatting, but that's because Blogger/blogspot's back end user interface has changed entirely, including the text editor.