[Fanfic,100% Orange Juice] Traditional

Length: 2339 words

Genre: Slice of life/humour

B/D: Originally I meant to be writing a 500 word story to go along with a little drabble collection, but this grew into its own thing. I'll write another drabble up and post the collection tomorrow. Just light, fluffy fun.

 Sora, Nath has begun to observe, has a very particular way of phrasing things. Perhaps it’s because she’s unfamiliar with the language; perhaps it’s simply her nature. But when Sora gives out an invite, it’s never for the thing she says it is. “Agricultural studies” becomes picking berries by the river. “Fighting robots” turns into an afternoon at the batting cage, facing down the pitching machine. “Advanced inter-spherical manoeuvres” is actually throwing yourself into ball pit and swimming through the resulting combination of plastic and confused five-year-olds.

“I thought we were ‘treasure hunting’?” Nath asks, when she’s presented with a feather duster.

Sora nods. “Mm. First we clean the treasure, then we hunt it.”

Of course, the easiest option is to find Hime, who usually tells it roughly like it is, but Hime has strapped herself into a hazmat suit, and everything she says comes out with both an echo and a muffle, which is a small miracle of nature. “We’re cleaning the attic,” she says, using a combination of sound and hand gestures.

Suguri, as it turns out, has a very laissez faire attitude to attic management. If the attic leaves her alone, she leaves it alone. Apart from when she puts things inside it, and then takes them out again decades later.

“I do some light cleaning every fifty years. There’s nothing to worry about,” the silver haired girl says, strapping a pistol to her thigh. “Hime just wants to do a clear-out. That’s all.”

This is enough to convince Nath that wielding a feather duster with her teeth is, perhaps, not what she wants to do with her day, and she bravely volunteers to stay downstairs and sort… whatever it is that gets thrown down at her.

“Good idea. Nath’s a gourmet, so she can figure out what’s good,” Sora replies.

“I’m pretty sure she’s not going to eat it, Sora.”

“Nath, don’t let Hime tell you what to do. You can eat the treasure if you want.”

“I’d like it if she didn’t. Some of that stuff is important.”

“Yes, yes, Suguri. Important enough to be put in the attic and not looked at for half a century. Well, ladies, shall we begin?”

With no further ado, all three are up the ladder and rummaging, their footsteps booming like an elephant’s through the ceiling above. Nath waits patiently for the first thing to go wrong, and she is, of course, rewarded quite swiftly.

“Hime,” Sora’s voice says softly. “There’s a huge spider on your back.”

“...ahahahahaa. W-well, a spider is nothing, really. How huge is ‘huge’, if you don’t mind…?”

“I saw one like it in the nature magazine. They eat birds.”

Even through the floorboards, Hime’s intake of breath is audible. “Suguri. Can you please do something about this huge, venomous Earth creature you’ve cultivated in your attic? Immediately, perhaps?”

“...Should I shoot it?” Suguri says, calm but audibly amused.

“It’s okay, Hime. In the magazine, it said the venom wasn’t that bad. They just have really big teeth for a spider. They can bite through a mouse’s skull.”

“Sora.”

“They can also fire their hair at you, like little arrows, and it really hurts. Nature is amazing.”

“Sora!”

“Do you think this one can fly? Some spiders can fly, but I think this one is too heav–”

The conversation is interrupted by Hime descending the attic ladder at Mach one, hurtling out of the front door, hurling what must be a very confused spider toward the horizon and then rushing back up to the attic. Nath counts one, two seconds, and then hears a heavy thud – suspiciously like the sound of Sora being hit with a flying dropkick.

The work continues, although occasionally Suguri pops her face (which is so grey with dust that it matches her hair) out of the attic door, with requests like:

“Nath. Could you please fetch me the bolt cutters from the kitchen?”

“Nath. Can you bring me a pitcher of lemonade, please? We need something acidic.”

“Nath. There should be a pickaxe in the tool closet. Can you bring it?”

Eventually – just as she thinks Suguri will ask her for a black powder keg and a few blasting caps – Nath sees Sora’s head poke out of the attic. She looks as though she’s been working in a coal mine. “We found some treasure. We just need to finish prying it loose, and then I’ll bring it down.”

Nath’s eyebrow twitches. “I… look forward to it?”

“Mm,” Sora nods. “By the way. Do you have another pickaxe?”

“Not that I know of.”

“…Do you know how to repair a broken one?”

“No.”

“Muuuu,” Sora says, and retreats back into the attic.

After another ten minutes of banging, muffled shouting, and what Nath hopes isn’t the sound of Hime weeping openly in the confines of her suit, Sora appears carrying what looks may have once upon a time been a box, but is now some sort of half-fossilised table ornament with an indent full of blocky plastic. Blocky plastic that Nath has seen before.

“We excavated Suguri’s old games consoles. She says there’s some real classics,” Sora says, although she looks just a touch doubtful at how much joy a plastic box and some game discs could give her. 

“Let’s set it up in the living room. I think they’re digging out the peripherals now.”

“Maybe you should wash your face, first. You look like they just dug you up, like a potato.”

Sora’s pout is almost lost in the smudgy darkness of her face. “Potatoes are a noble tuber. They taste good, they have at least one vitamin, and they’re only poisonous sometimes.”

Despite her impassioned defence of the humble potato, she trots toward the bathroom with her hair wrapped in a skein of cobwebs – hopefully provided by rather smaller spiders than the one that Hime found. Short of any more howls of terror coming from upstairs, Nath decides that the time is right to go down and – as the expression goes – put her feet up.

=*=

If a look can tell a story, then Hime’s expression is a three book tragedy set in an alternative timeline where she and Suguri didn’t have such a deep and affectionate friendship, that friendship being perhaps the only reason that Present Timeline Suguri is still alive (as opposed to being found hanging on the nearest tree with a noose made of Binding Chains).

“I said I’m sorry,” Suguri pleads, gently. “I’ll clean the attic more often. Maybe once a decade?”

“I suppose I can accept that,” Hime says darkly, “provided that this decade’s cleaning begins tomorrow and is finished within two weeks. If not, I have half a mind to go up there and clean it myself – with the proper tools, of course. You did keep that flamethrower, didn’t you?”

Suguri winces. “I did, but… Ah. Why not try out the video games, and talk about it later?”

It’s amazing, Nath thinks, how the feel of a room can be changed by a simple rearranging of furniture. A flatscreen TV, rescued from the depths of the attics, has been haphazardly propped up on a mound of Hime’s books, with the boxy little games console at the foot of the literary mountain. The loveseat, the beanbag and the barstool have all been arrayed around it; although the rest of the room feels very bare, that particular corner now feels very cosy. Very social.

“Children and guests first. Sora, Nath, the hotseat is yours. As for me, I believe I shall man the beanbag,” Hime says, curling up in its poofy, fabric embrace.

Sora takes her spot on the loveseat, and for a moment, Nath almost feels a faint air of bafflement surround the girl. But then, she is at any one time either baffled or baffling. She turns and looks up at Suguri, perched on her barstool, with a quiet frown.

“Where’s the helmet?” Sora asks.

Suguri blinks. Slowly. “Helmet?”

“I… don’t really get it, but it’s some kind of simulator, right? So there must be a helmet. Hm. Or maybe this thing–” She prods the console with her toe. “Maybe this is some kind of holodeck box? But the room’s way too small for that…”

Suguri’s ahoge straightens suddenly. “Oh! I get it. It’s not a sim. It’s a little more old fashioned.”

“You’re not kidding,” Nath murmurs, easing herself onto the loveseat. Her legs feel much too long for this kind of thing. “Things like this were old fashioned even when I was young.”

“They became retro and trendy after awhile, and I got into them. It’s swinging back towards sims, nowadays,” Suguri shrugs. “Just pick a disc, put it into the machine, and press the button. You’ll figure it out.”

The next minutes are taken up by quiet confusion, the blowing of ventricles and the wiping of discs. Eventually, the console flickers to life, and the TV starts to play a catchy, faintly annoying jingle as cars that haven’t been seen for hundreds of years roar across the screen.

“Oh, you picked the racing game. Nice choice,” Suguri says.

“This is racing?” Hime asks. “But they’re all going so slowly.”

“It… probably looks fast to regular humans.”

“H… How do I drive? Nath, can you drive? Teach me,” Sora says, upon stumbling her way through the menus.

“Hmm… Can I drive? I’m not really sure. I know I’ve never driven a car, but I remember at least one country where I was legally considered a forklift, and I had to get a license to ‘operate’ myself. I don’t think that country exists anymore, though,” Nath says, standing up. “Suguri, you take the controller and teach her the ropes. I’ll watch.”

Suguri ducks into the vacated seat and begins a rapid-fire explanation of the controls and concepts of the game, and of cars in general. For a moment Nath thinks she’s going to go one level deeper and start explaining things on the level of basic physics, but Sora nods as if to say that although a lot of things are going above her head, they’re not so very high that she can’t catch them with a little practice. The controller changes hands as they alternate laps of the practice course; Suguri kisses the apex of every turn as if it were her first born child, while Sora happens upon the tactic of bouncing into the walls until she’s pointing in roughly the correct direction. There is a long, slow lap just after Suguri explains the difference between front wheel, rear wheel, and four wheel drive; Sora’s car has four wheel drive, so she naturally assumes that it has all the torque and traction of a farm tractor and drives it straight through the gravel in lieu of turning.

“I don’t get why I have to brake. I thought I was supposed to try to go fast,” she says, before ploughing into the barriers at a hairpin turn. She leans her body in the seat as she turns, and Nath can’t help but grin. Of course Sora would be the full-body kind of player. “I go a lot faster than this when I fly, and I never crash or need brakes. Cars are weird.”

As Suguri answers, Nath can’t help but notice that the silver haired girl is leaning into the direction of the turns, too. Before she knows it, she’s watching the players more than she’s watching the screen – two girls with wide eyes and flowing hair, twisting and turning in sympathy with a car that doesn’t exist in any world but the virtual.

“Silly, aren’t they?” Hime whispers across to her. “It’s good to see them like this, though. Suguri is usually so reserved, but we seem to have stumbled upon her hidden weakness.”

“Mm. I’m glad I came. Even though all I’ve done is sit down.”

Perhaps they were a little too loud. Suguri shifts her weight almost imperceptibly in her seat. “Oh. Sorry. We’re leaving you two out, aren’t we? Here. I’ll set it up for a race. Nath, you can play Sora. It wouldn’t be fair for me to race her.”

Nath sighs, and gets to her feet. She was bound to have to do some work eventually. She sits on the floor instead of the couch, and feels a strong, momentary temptation to use Sora’s knees as a headrest. “By the way, Suguri,” she says as casually as she’s able. “What’s your best time on the Mountain Loop Circuit?”

There is a moment of silence as the penny drops. “Two minutes thirteen.”

“Pretty impressive. I got two-oh-nine once. That was a long time ago, though. I figured that if I was going to make the effort to learn to use a pad with my feet, I might as well get good at it,” she replies. “I got rid of all my consoles because I was wasting too much time on them. Even though that was why I got them to begin with.”

“Wine and video games…? Nath, you have bad habits,” Sora scolds gently. She reaches out and ruffles her friend’s hair a little.

Nath grins. “Had bad habits. They’re under control. Here. Try and follow my line, and brake when I do. I’ll show you how to beat Suguri, no problem.”

“Teach me, Sensei.”

Nath begins to set a line, sweeping up the half-seconds left behind from Suguri’s method, and her student follows, learning quickly. Before long, even Sora is beginning to break a record here and there.

“Don’t worry, Suguri,” Hime whispers, taking her hand. “I’ll still let you beat me at videogames. Sometimes, at least.”

The silver-haired girl grimaces. “Thanks. Although I might put them back in the attic at this rate.”

“Oh, not before I’ve had a turn, I hope.”

“I guess… what kind of games do you like to play?”

Hime turns, and touches her finger to her chin in contrived thought. Eventually she says, Suguri’s hand still wrapped in hers:

“Why, a dating sim, of course.”

B/D: All games featured in this story are products of Syuracorp, all rights reserved. Originally the collection this was going to be in was Sora themed, but this sorta grew in an ensemble piece.