[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Sisters At Play

 Series: QP Shooting/Natsumi & Mei
Genre: Humour, Slice of Life
Length: 4092 words
B/D: This is another one in the chain of Natsumi/Mei stories where they're sisters, for QuincyUSA.

Mei took pride in knowing everything about her sister, for a given definition of ‘everything’. She chose this definition very carefully, and in fact would adjust it several times a day depending on which bits of everything she may or may not know. Currently, things outside the definition of ‘everything’ included her sister’s location, what she was doing, and why she had abandoned her in the middle of walking around the amusement park. Were the amusements not amusing enough? Was it the crying children? She could remove the crying children, if that was the problem. She could even remove the amusements if she put her mind to it. But alas, no answer was forthcoming, and Mei’s finely-honed sister senses could detect no trace of any errant chefs on the rides.

This was a shame, because she currently had great need of one of Natsumi’s many special skills. She had bought a couple of ice cream cones for her penguins, reasoning that two antarctic birds on the wrong side of the equator might want something delicious and cold on a hot summer day. She had even sprung for sprinkles, using the last few coppers of her allowance.

Therein lay the problem. The penguins were particular about sprinkles. Red would only eat blue sprinkles, and Blue would only eat red ones. At home, this was not an issue. Mei would simply buy a jar of assorted sprinkles and present it her sister, who would disappear into the kitchen and come back thirty seconds later with all the sprinkles sorted into separate jars for each colour – like some grand magic trick. How did she do it? This, too, was included in the everything that Mei did not know. Maybe she used magnets. Enough magnets could fix anything.

Bereft of magnets, allowance, and sisters, Mei decided to conquer a nearby bench and establish it as her base of operations. The penguins skulked after her, looking glum. They didn’t cry or squawk, which was the worst part. They had to be reasonable about their completely ridiculous demands. They went to be reasonable under the bench, much to her relief; it was at least a little bit shadier than the rest of the park, and she couldn’t see their sad little faces as they crunched up the ice cream cones.

At least it wasn’t crowded. Ebimanyou Town’s amusement park was, by all measures except ticket sales, a perfectly reasonable amusement park. It had all the usual things you would expect of one: overpriced food, people wearing full-body mascot costumes in the mid-day heat, and many, many roller coasters.

This was its downfall. Most roller coasters were designed to simulate the fear of falling, the adrenaline rush of g-forces acting on the body, and the raw terror of being brought up to a dizzying height and forced to look at the ground as your metal box did corkscrews and loop-de-loops with you inside it. Some even made you feel like you were flying, soaring above a strange and nightmarish landscape at speeds the human body was not particularly happy with.

None of this was particularly impressive if you could actually fly, which described about half of Ebimanyou Town. Most of the citizens were also regularly shot at, or at least, shot around; you could get a better adrenaline rush from wandering around the town centre than you could by strapping yourself in at the amusement park. But the owner, rather than admitting their mistakes, simply doubled down on them, and continued to construct ever more intricate and impressive coasters that nobody ever rode.

But in the end, it wasn’t a bad park, really. People liked the log flume. You could at least drown on the log flume, if you tried hard enough and the staff were suitably distracted. One kid almost managed it once. She’d very sneakily flung herself into the water while two of the staff were having a heated, bare-knuckle brawl over who could go on break first. It was the stuff legends were made of, and it had solidified her reputation in middle school as a cast-iron badass.

The most popular ride, however, was easily the ferris wheel. There was just something about ferris wheels that Ebimanyou-ites resonated with, which was why the circus had five ferris wheels and zero clowns. It was very profitable; you had to feed a clown, but you didn’t need to feed a ferris wheel. There were rumours that they had fed the clowns to the ferris wheels, and this was why Krila was the only person crazy enough to work there, but that rumour was largely unsubstantiated and any red noses found in the machinery were entirely incidental from a legal point of view.

The ferris wheel was why Mei and Natsumi had come to the park in the first place. Finally pulling his head from the sand and pointing it towards the sky, the owner had seen a giant, ferris-wheel sized hole there that needed filling. And fill it he did – with a glittering, neon-laced eyesore that stretched up towards the clouds and shook its fist in the face of God. The cars were so big they had dining tables in them. Lately, the trend on social media was to bring in and eat a full meal before the wheel completed a revolution. As a blogger and a chef, it was a trend that Natsumi could not ignore.

Then she had disappeared. Evaporated from sight while Mei wasn’t looking – no mean feat, since the opportunities were so precious few. The delightfully scented cooler bag containing their dinner disappeared with her. It was maddening, and Mei definitely felt like she was going mad. What was the point in carefully honing her sister senses if they failed her at the first real obstacle?

She lay back on the bench and flailed a bit. There was always room in her life for some intermittent flailing.

She wasn’t quite done beating seven shades of helium out of the surrounding air when she felt her hackles instinctively rise. She flicked her head up, and found herself face to face with a stare as grim and cold as her science teacher’s Monday morning coffee, of which she regularly managed to sneak a sip.

Donut Duck.

Donut Duck, legally distinguishable from any number of other ducks whose first names might begin with D, was the park’s mascot, and they had spent an inordinate amount of time and money trying to get rid of him. Alas, this was impossible. When the amusement park was born, Donut Duck was assigned as its guardian god, and were he to be relieved of his employment, the spirit of Donut Duck would forever haunt the hallowed halls of the food court, making the fries salty and the drinks unsatisfying. No amount of voodoo magic could remove him; Donut Duck endured, against the wishes of the park staff, as the true owner of the land.

He had the black eyes of a deep-sea fish, a round and bulbous belly that defied Mother Nature, and arms that rippled with chiselled muscle. A really, outrageously, uncomfortable amount of muscle. Donut Duck was not just toned; he had even gone beyond the realm of swoleness. He had achieved the impossible, by being both a duck and a huge slab of walking beef. Donuts were not what he consumed. Donuts were what he produced by bending lengths of steel rebar into a shape that was more pleasing to him.

He stood, like a lone pillar of concentrated gains, his deep black eyes peering into her very soul. He was only standing because he was too far away to effectively loom; looming was a very close proximity kind of thing for anything that wasn’t an actual geographical feature. But he was trying very hard to loom. In fact, he took a step closer so as to loom more effectively. And then another step. And, lo, a third. Mei almost thought he was walking towards her – somewhat effeminately for a giant muscle-bound duck, she had to admit, but walking towards her all the same.

It occurred to her that she should, perhaps, be vaguely afraid of the enourmous waterfowl striding towards her. The penguins definitely were; the combined vibrations of their fearful trembling made the bench feel more like a massage chair. But Mei herself just felt… well, hungry. Was hunger an emotion? She wasted several precious seconds considering the question. The duck was now well within looming distance.

Perhaps she was so relaxed because she was, in body and soul, a resident of Ebimanyou Town. Perhaps the love of danger had been instilled in her on a molecular level, as with many of its other residents; perhaps she felt confident that the streets had prepared her for any battle, regardless of how large the opponent.

Or, perhaps, she had learned the real lesson of the streets of Ebimanyou: that the stupidest explanation was generally the correct one. With that in mind, she raised her gaze to the duck, looked him dead in the black, dead eye, and said, with a voice that neither trembled nor quivered:

“Nacchan?”

The duck slowed. It took a while for it to stop; evidently, something so large could build up quite a bit of momentum. It took its huge head in its own hands, and effortlessly tore it off – revealing the cheerful face of Mei’s favourite sister.

“Hm… I thought you would be more surprised than that,” she said happily.

“My sister senses were tingling,” Mei replied. Actually, that was a lie; her sister senses seemed to be on holiday at the moment. True, she had felt a little hungry when she looked at Natsumi, but that was a Pavlovian reaction to a girl who so often presented people with snacks. “Why are you Donut Duck?”

“Oh… I found a park employee passed out in the suit,” Natsumi said. Natsumi was a very kind girl, and charitably did not mention the seven or eight bottles of fortified wine that had been strewn around the comatose employee’s body. “I took them to the medical centre, but… the boss was very pushy, and I ended up picking up their shift for the day…”

This, too, was a very charitable description. The boss was, in fact, not pushy at all; in fact, he had mostly been in tears, having read the park’s financial report five minutes earlier.

Presented with an employee who required a stomach pump and a suit which had to be worn to appease the spirit of the park’s mascot, he bravely thrown himself to his knees and begged piteously for Natsumi’s aid, promising her every reward up to and including the life of his firstborn son. (As a gay man, he wasn’t particularly planning on producing said son, but the thought was there).

This only left the question of how Natsumi was actually moving the suit, given that it was about twice as tall as she was and probably just as heavy.

“It has some kind of servos inside it, I think?” was Natsumi’s answer.

In future weeks, Mei would find her curiosity sufficiently piqued by this statement to look on several conspiracy websites, on which she would eventually find evidence (“evidence”) that The Government (which government was never explicitly stated) had recently sold a decommissioned suit of experimental powered armour to an unknown buyer, after deciding that powered armour was cooler than it was useful and that applying more guns to their problems would be significantly easier.

For now, though, she was more curious as to where today’s dinner had gone.

“Oh, there’s a storage compartment inside the stomach,” Natsumi replied. The storage compartment, like the park employee, had been full of wine when she found it, but she had emptied it out and put today’s meal in there for safekeeping. She had rather feared that Donut Duck’s massive hands would crush it into a fine, nutritious paste if she tried to carry it normally.

“Gotcha,” Mei said, hopping off the bench. She ambled over to her sister and her enormous costume, and very gingerly tried to wrap her arms around her midriff. She could only reach about halfway, but the thought was what counted. “Let me know if you’re going to run off. I was worried.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean to. I just saw somebody in trouble, and…”

Of course, she couldn’t resist the urge to help them. That was Natsumi all over – caring from head to toe. Other people found Natsumi’s cooking to be her best point, or her cheerfulness, but for Mei – as a slightly biased sister – it was definitely the way she took time out of her life to care about others. Even if it ended up being inconvenient sometimes, or forcing her to become a huge, muscular man-duck.

There was a brief scuffle as the penguins, having found their reserves of bravery five minutes late as usual, shot out from underneath the bench like primary coloured torpedoes and scaled Donut Duck’s mighty body. With each penguin occupying a shoulder, they put their flippers under Natsumi’s chin and tried in vain to haul her out of the suit by her neck, presumably to ‘rescue’ her.

“Hello, you two,” she said, and nuzzled the soft, downy feathers on their bellies. If her chin ached from being pulled, she didn’t show it. “Shall we go and see the ferris wheel? The food won’t stay warm forever.”

Mei nodded, and after waiting a moment for Natsumi to screw the duck’s head back on over her own, they got underway. It took approximately six paces for them to realise there was a problem.

Mei was not short, in her own opinion. And her opinion was the only opinion that mattered, because she would use a combination of charm and extreme violence to persuade anybody who didn’t share it. In fact, she maintained, she had the genetic blueprint of six foot one basketball prodigy, and she was just waiting to grow into it. Her future contained long, toned legs and the ability to reach cereal boxes on top of the cupboard without jumping for them, and nobody could convince her otherwise.

But for the moment – just for the moment – her legs were not long and toned at all. In comparison to Donut Duck’s legs, well… it was like comparing toothpicks to chopsticks. The six paces that Natsumi had taken were more like fifteen paces for Mei, and she was very quickly falling behind. (The penguins, adorable traitors that they were, seemed content to hitch a ride on Natsumi’s shoulders, and occasionally peered backwards at their struggling master with some level of avian pity.)

Something would have to be done.

“I could carry you,” Natsumi suggested helpfully. The suit’s biceps seemed to pulse with approval as she said it. “That way we’ll still get there quickly enough for the food to stay hot.”

Mei’s eyes twitched. There was something deeply wrong to her about being carried by her sister. In her imagination, it was always her doing the carrying, and Natsumi being the carry-ee.

But the problem with being a family of four was that if one sister and two penguins voted against you, you couldn’t really do anything about it. So, without further ado, she found herself scooped up in Donut Duck’s massive arms. Natsumi very gently arranged her until she was laid out over both of them, like a princess – or a bride – and began to take her long, loping steps towards the ferris wheel.

Several things struck Mei about the situation. The first was that she was highly embarrassed. The second was that the duck’s lifeless eyes and intimidating physique were not nearly as frightening if you could hear your sister humming cheerfully to herself inside the suit.

The third was that people had begun to point.

She didn’t mind staring. Staring was natural. A great many interesting things happened in Ebimanyou Town, many of them well worth staring at; almost every restaurant had outside seating arrangements, because a view of the pavement would guarantee a show to go along with their dinner.

But when people started to point, you knew things had come to a head. People who pointed drew attention to themselves, like a lightning rod yanks electricity from the sky for its own private amusement. They were so fascinated that they were prepared to suffer the limelight and the consequences of standing therein, of which a good, hard thump around the face and nose was generally the most pleasant. Natsumi’s pace slowed as she, too, realised she had become a spectacle.

“I wonder why they’re staring,” she said in a low, but still optimistic voice.

Mei looked around her, and assessed her situation. She coughed very quietly. “I think,” she said, very studiously not looking at her sister, “they think you’re abducting me.”

“Hmm… But we’re sisters, though.”

The growing crowd did not see sisters. They saw a girl being kidnapped by a giant waterfowl and his penguin partners, rumbling along at high speed like some kind of avian mafia in search of an escape vehicle. With no better ideas on how to defuse the situation, Mei resorted to flashing a big, emphatic, double thumbs-up at the audience to indicate that she was fine and happy with arrangements. Some onlookers saw the potential for an excellent photo op and pulled out their phones, at which point she immediately regretted her actions.

When they finally neared the ferris wheel, there was a queue in the strictest sense of the phrase – as in, there was a queue, which quickly atomised itself into a fine mist of stunned onlookers as the duck approached. They formed a quiet radius around them – close enough to gawk if anything interesting happened, but far enough away that they wouldn’t be in the immediate blast radius if it did.

“They’re letting us go first? How kind of them,” Natsumi said from inside the suit, although she seemed to take a moment to think about it. She tried to see the best in everyone, but it took her a moment to mentally transform a heady cocktail of cowardice and rubbernecking into ‘other people being polite’.

The employee running the ferris wheel had slicked-back hair and a deckchair from a home and garden centre. He also had the kind of stiff, artificial grin you generally found drawn on balloons with a marker at children’s birthday parties. As they approached it got gradually wider and wider, as if he were attempting to scare them off by showing his teeth.

“Uh. Can we go on the ferris wheel? If nobody’s waiting?” Mei asked.

The man opened his mouth, failed to make any sound, and closed it again. After a second or two, he made another valiant attempt, sadly no more successful than the first. The third attempt went better; some garbled noise managed to leak out of him, which, if re-assembled by a competent enough ear, might have sounded like, “The cars are full.”

“Hm, hm, hm… Maybe I could just climb up? Just like that movie we watched the other day, with the giant ape,” Natsumi suggested.

Mei frowned and shook her head. Natsumi wasn’t a big fan of movies. Mostly, she seemed to view them as opportunities to experiment with new popcorn flavourings; she would sit Mei down on the couch, watch with her for fifteen minutes, and then waft out to the kitchen for some quality kernel-popping action. Even before then, she was usually thinking carefully about what she would do in the kitchen. In other words, she was one of those people who saw movies, rather than watched them, and even then, she only saw thirty percent of any given film.

The bit where the titular giant ape had attracted the ire of a swarm of fighter planes and plummeted to his death had not been included in the thirty percent she saw, but nevertheless, Mei was in no hurry to recreate it with her sister. (Admittedly, she thought it was a very unrealistic scene; she’d been bullied by fighter planes from time to time, and mostly solved the problem by shooting back. Humans and apes were basically the same, so logically, if a human could fire a bullet, a giant ape could fire giant bullets. The planes would have stood no chance.)

So they waited. Natsumi attempted to twiddle her thumbs, with little success since they were larger thumbs than she was used to.

The first car that stopped was unfortunately a bust; the passenger, a lone woman with a face like a barked shin, strode out, took one look at the hulking duck awaiting its turn, and then went straight back into the car and sat, huddled and shivering, under the table.

The next one went better, because the passengers turned out to be Syura and QP. QP was not particularly afraid of the duck; in fact, she looked at Donut Duck and narrowed her eyes, as if deciding what to do about him. Syura, however, was a fellow lover of birds, and with some rather expressive eyebrow movements from the penguins, managed to ascertain that Mei was not in need of immediate rescue. With that, the car was theirs; it shifted uncertainly as they stepped on, swaying under the weight of the suit.

As soon as the door swung closed, Natsumi took off the head of the suit and breathed a sigh of relief. “Hmm… I didn’t think being a mascot would be this difficult. It feels very strange to be stared at so much. At least by somebody who’s not you.”

Mei very wisely did not respond to this, recognising that she had been handed the conversational shovel with which to dig her social grave. Instead she sat down, and averted her eyes while the rest of the suit came off. Natsumi was wearing clothes underneath it, of course, but it still felt more polite. There was a clunk as the chef opened a hatch on the duck’s stomach, taking out a cooler bag with today’s spread.

“You could have taken it off earlier, you know. You don’t have to be a park mascot if you don’t want to,” Mei grumbled. “You definitely look cuter without the suit.”

“Hmhmhm. It was a lot of fun, though. It was like a role reversal.”

“Huh?”

“Usually if I get in trouble, you always run in and protect me… But today, since the suit made me look so big and strong, it felt like I’d be the one protecting you instead.”

“You don’t need to protect me. You already do more than enough,” Mei replied, waving her hand at the food on the table. She found herself frowning. “Besides, if you… if you end up doing the fighting, there’s nothing I can really help you with.”

“That’s not true. You always take such good pictures for my blog.”

“Ah, right!” Mei said, hastily pulling out the little digital camera she used for the school newspaper. “I should get a few shots of the food… You’re going to write a post about this, right?”

Natsumi paused, and put a finger to her chin. “Um… maybe not.”

“Huh? Why?”

“I think… sometimes it’s nice to have memories that are just for us. As a family,” she said, nodding to Red and Blue. “So let’s not worry about posting online, and just enjoy ourselves.” She looked back at the hulking mascot suit. “Besides, somebody could discover my new secret identity. Ufufu.”

“Don’t tell me you’re planning on keeping that thing?!”

The penguins relaxed, and the girls sat down to eat in their own private room in the sky. Donut Duck stood watch over them, not as the fearful deity he had become, but the guardian spirit he was born as. And Mei was so distracted with her sister’s ‘new’ secret identity, she never considered that perhaps she had an old one. It was a memory that Mei would tuck inside her mind, a little treasure for her and Natsumi alone.

At least until the day after, when she saw Donut Duck spiriting her away on the front cover of the local paper. At school, rumours that she’d eloped with a theme park mascot were on the tip of every tongue; people were accusing her of having a muscle fetish. She found herself with wrongs to right, and a multitude of skulls to crack.

Mei knew everything about her sister, for a given definition of everything.

But what went through her head sometimes was not included.

A/N: Donut Duck will haunt your dreams.