[Fanfic, 100% Orange Juice] Free Lunch

Title: Free Lunch
Words: 1705
Series: 100% Orange Juice
Genre: Comedy
BD: I wrote this mainly as a lark and decided to post it as a valentine's day special, although it's very much a joke of one.

Even in a world full of mythical beasts and godlike battle-maidens who could strike down the unworthy with only a few sparse clusters of glittering bullets, there was one rarity greater than any other: the legendary 'free lunch'.

Aru knew this. She knew that other, less savoury things often masqueraded as free lunches to trap the unwary, like a mimic assuming the form of a treasure chest before it gobbled down a greedy adventurer. But then bunny in red was, well, in the red, and a lunch she didn't have to pay for in cold, hard cash might be worth the price extracted.

“So, Aru,” Syura began, assuming her businesslike smirk. “I assume you want to know why I invited you for lunch today.”

“I want you to tell me what you want so I can refuse outright before we start negotiations,” Aru replied grumpily.

“That's why I like you, Aru. You always cut straight to the chase. Oh, Krila, if you're hungry you can eat the rolls.”

Krila, although bemused at being summoned by a girl she rarely interacted with, needed no encouragement. The lady in black was also, perenially, in the red.

Cleared of any obstacles to her moral dubiousness, Syura adopted her most businesslike voice, which was not particularly businesslike at all. “What I want in exchange for this lunch is very simple. From you, Aru, I want information. Specifically, how far you've gotten with QP. And Krila... well, I don't actually know what I want. I felt sorry for you, I guess. Just try to act like a normal person long enough to gossip with me about my best friend's love life, and we'll call it square.”

Krila nodded vigorously. “I shall make the attempt, but I warn thee, the mantle of banality may be too great for my dark soul to –”

“I'll take it. Aru, you can start.”

Aru glowered, and tapped her index finger against the pristine white tablecloth. “The answer is nil. We're friends. We were hungry at the same time and place. We ate lunch together. She paid. The end.”

The waiter arrived, brandishing breadsticks and condiments. Krila seized upon them with a force that might well have been demonic. Aru had never before seen a girl consume an entire breadstick without chewing, but she was pretty sure it broke public indecency laws. Aru and Syura looked at each other.

“Krila,” Aru said quietly, “Has anybody ever told you that you should consider performing at birthday parties?”

“With the right audience, I think we – I mean, you – could make a lot of money,” Syura added.

“Of course!” Krila said, squeezing her doll close to her chest. “I have performed my Dark Shadow Boundary Dance on numerous occasions. All I require is a sacrifice of tiny sausages and chunks of cheese, impaled on the same length of unholy wood.”

Aru decided that Krila was an utterly innocent babe and, as a gesture of mercy, decided to omit certain words in the last sentence from her memory.

After a moment of bemused silence, Syura returned to the point at hand. “But you went for lunch together! There was a time, a date, two pretty women that I most definitely don't feel attracted to on any level. There must be details, and they have to have been scandalous. All details are.”

Aru looked around the crowded restaurant, at the linens and the candlesticks and the happily besotted couples surrounding their table, and began to worry about a number of things. Her stomach, however, continued to growl, and she settled for just appraising the nearest convenient escape route rather than fleeing immediately.

“What am I supposed to say?” she asked, holding her palms up. “The food was good. The company was good. We talked about socks. She has radical opinions on socks that I don't necessarily agree with and wouldn't want to repeat around innocent children.”

She broke off to look meaningfully at Krila, before continuing.

“I don't really know what details you expect me to have, or how they could be anything interesting.”

Syura heaved a deep, indulgent sigh, like a teacher about to bestow a valuable lesson upon a wide-eyed schoolchild. “Well, there's the question of what restaurant it was, and who picked it. Remember before you answer that I'm buying you lunch.”

Aru groaned. There was the leverage she had been expecting. If Syura decided she didn't want to pay, Aru didn't have the funds to cover it. She'd have to dine and dash, and as an upstanding citizen and as a business owner who understood the true weight of the transgression, she couldn't allow herself to do it. Her hands were tied. But, she thought, there was a way out. If she simply ate as many complementary breadsticks as she could, she could leave before the meal was served and still not be a bad person. It was a risk, since if she ate too many breadsticks and stayed she would ruin the value proposition of the meal by not being hungry, but it was a gamble she was willing to take.

“We went to that little tavern place by the market. The one where you sit on barrels instead of chairs. QP suggested it,” she answered at last, trying to sound as defeated as possible. If she seemed like she'd lost, she could maybe get away with being sparse with the details and Syura would assume there was nothing else to tell. She quietly stuffed a breadstick into her mouth.

Krila's eyes widened. “Oho! I happen to know that those barrels are in fact casks of dark essence, in which swim the Serpents of the Braided Venom Willows. You have my respect for surviving such a trial, as does the Holy Beast Maiden.”

“Krila, I don't know what you just said. I just heard a string of nouns,” Syura said cheerfully. “But what I do know is that that place is super romantic.”

Aru looked at the candlelit dinners being dispensed around them, and wondered if, like the average videogame character, Syura just didn't have the equip slots necessary for a sense of irony.

“What did you eat?”

“I had braised vegetables. She had steak.” Aru ate another breadstick.

“Ugh. That's so unfair. She should be, like, a ball of dough by now. You get meat, or you get sweets, one or the other. And if you get both, you get fat,” Syura groused. Krila, upon hearing sweets and steak being discussed in the same sentence, began to drool. “Did she try and make out with you?”

With the most absolute calm, Aru picked up her glass of water, took a hearty swig, and immediately sprayed it back out.

“Such commitment!” Krila murmured.

“I guess it's true what they say. A true artist makes their own opportunities rather than waiting for opportunities to show up,” Syura nodded.

Aru, having achieved the required dramatic effect, set her glower to stun. “Don't you think that question skipped a few steps? You could have asked if we held hands, or gazed deeply into each other's eyes, or anything, but you went straight to making out?”

Syura shrugged. “Go big or go home.”

“I agree! What would you rather face, Rabbit of Crimson Moons: a dragon, or a really big dragon?” Krila asked.

“Right now I'd rather go home. I've had enough breadsticks to make this worth my time,” Aru said, standing up.

Syura's mouth hung open in a little gasp as she leapt to several conclusions, all of them wrong. “She did, didn't she? Did she have dog breath? I bet she had dog breath. You should carry some mints around in case she tries to kiss you. I know I do.”

Aru groaned, attracting suspicious looks from any number of surrounding lovebirds. “That is, in order, wrong, probably wrong, and really weird. I'm leaving.”

“Waitwaitwaitwait!” Syura gasped, lunging over the table and catching hold of Aru's sleeve. The candle wobbled precariously and would have toppled, but for the timely intervention of Krila. With a speed and clarity that she had clearly purloined from a ninja, she shot out a hand and seized the candlestick. Unfortunately, she squandered any kudos from her endeavour by suddenly realising that not so very far from a sword, and immediately attempting to wield it in the name of the forces of darkness.

“Aru, I'm sorry. Listen, I probably pushed you too far, but... I just wanted to do the romantic gossip thing, like in all the VNs I read. I never get the chance to, because my best friend is QP and she's totally like a dense RPG protagonist when it comes to romance.”

“I agree with you there. She's like a dwarf star. You just can't avoid getting caught in her gravitational field.”

The two looked at each other and, for a moment, smiled. Krila stole a candlestick from another table and began dual wielding, finally living her lifelong dream of levelling in the rogue class, so that one day she could prestige into an assassin. For a brief moment, the world was at peace.

The chef, having heard the commotion, marched out of the kitchen with her kitchen knives in hand; Aru recognised her as Natsumi, and briefly marvelled at how small the world was. The knives began to fly, and the world returned to the natural order of things.

***

“Hi, Aru! I came again today. Hey, what happened to your face?”

QP, her face full of concern, pointed at the band-aid on Aru's cheek. The bunny winced, and searched for an excuse that didn't involve being violently ejected from a restaurant with two weirdos.

“I cut myself shaving,” she said, studiously looking in any direction apart from QP's.

“You shave?” QP asked, blinking.

“My legs, yes.”

QP's brain worked for a moment, before filing the anomaly under 'too much effort' and continuing on the path of the conversation she had planned on having. Aru noticed her fiddling with the hem of her dress, and felt her own heart sink.

“Sooooo, um, I don't know if you know this, but there's a rumour going around that you and Syura were eating together at a romantic restaurant, and I just wondered...”