[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Eye Test

Genre: Humour

Length: 2566 words

B/D: Goofing around with QP and Syura, since I haven't done a QPverse story in a while.

“I think I need glasses,” Syura said, apropos of nothing – which, by and large, was the way that Syura preferred to operate. She had been poking experimentally at her school lunch for three minutes, in the vague hope that her fork would dissolve and she wouldn’t have to eat it. It included several things, most exotic and of shadowy origins, but notably a heaping serving of tapioca pudding. QP was against tapioca pudding because it had appropriated the name of pudding from the One True Pudding that she idolised, and was considering running a political campaign to have it banished from the cafeteria. She had also learned, to her great horror, that in some parts of the world there were people who call an entire meal pudding, but then the meal itself might contain no actual pudding at all. She had sworn a solemn oath that one day, she would end it – and probably them, too.

QP blinked, before realising that demonstrating the correct use of her eyes might be offensive to the vision impaired, and stopped. Then she wondered if Syura could even see her blinking, and deciding that the answer was no, took up blinking again after a ten seconds of agonising, itchy eyeballs.

“But shopping for them is such a pain. They always want you to do an eye-test,” Syura continued, with a tiny shrug of her tiny shoulders. She preferred to call herself petite, partially because it implied she had any say in the matter at all, and partially because the words ‘skinny’ and ‘hikki’ went together much too well for her particular liking.

QP decided to showcase the depths of her sympathy by yawning, loudly. She’d had a late night last night. Ordinarily she kept a pretty early bedtime, but only because every time she saw the moon, she felt obliged to bark at it until it went away again. “Can’t blame you. I do enough tests at school.”

Syura’s eyes twinkled merrily, a sure sign of playful arguments to follow. “You fail enough tests at school, you mean.”

“I don’t fail! I just answer laterally.”

“I mean, I get it, QP, but maybe try answering correctly instead?”

QP sniffed. It was an impressive sniff, from a girl who knew all there was to know about sniffing. Being a dog had its upsides. “Well, I’m not the one flunking home economics.”

Syura, the rumour held, had been touched by a witch in a former life. There could be no other explanation for how every pot she used ended up full of bubbling green goop. The teacher, who was exactly as broad as she was tall, had given up all hope and begun allowing her to bring in cup ramen, then grading her on that instead. It meant less cookware with holes mysteriously eaten through the bottom.

“Excuse me, QP, but I am a gamer, and we have a very strong cultural identity. Cooking isn’t part of that identity, so I refuse to do it,” she said, puffing out her chest.

“So,” QP replied, in her slowest and most patient voice, “what you’re saying is that you’ve decided to perpetuate a negative stereotype?”

Syura’s ahoge flopped as she realised the implications. “...urk…”

“That’s probably the reason you need glasses, too. Your eyes have gone square from looking at a screen all day. In fact, I’m surprised your eyes aren’t cubes by now!” QP said, and then actually imagined the problems of having eyeballs with sharp edges. Suddenly, she felt a lot less like eating lunch.

“Actually, the reason I need glasses is–”

“It’s because you’re a nerd, right?” QP cut her off. “Actually, now that I think about it, a whole bunch of people I know wear glasses. Mr Arthur, that bullying cat, that weird pervert who thinks I’m a guy… and that’s not even counting Krila, who lost her eye in that tragic accident.”

“Uh… Hate to break it to you, but I’m pretty sure Krila’s eyes are both present and functional.”

“That’s crazy. Why would Krila, of all people, lie?” QP’s tail wagged fiercely as she said it. She was, if nothing else, very protective of her friends. Syura was, if nothing else, very appreciative of the fact that QP’s tail wagging provided a lovely little updraught right around the skirt area – never quite enough to show the details, but always just enough to make her mouth water.

“Hmm… Oh. Oh, noooooo. Syura, what if it’s my fault?!” QP carried on, ignoring the fact that Syura had chosen to drool rather than answer. “What if my elegant bullet patterns are so beautiful that they’re actually harming people’s vision?”

It took almost five seconds for Syura to snap back to reality from an enjoyable daydream, and QP had been shaking her for three of them. Eventually, when she got sick of hearing her own brain bounce around into her skull, she considered the question. “QP, uh… Not to say that your bullets aren’t pretty in their own way, but elegant…? I mean, you don’t even really make patterns. You just sorta vomit firepower and move around a lot until you win.”

“Yeah, and? It’s the simplest, easiest solution. That makes it elegant,” QP said, in a voice that made it clear that any questioning of this dogma would be met in violence. Syura’s first instinct, of course, was to question it, but upon further reflection she decided that such distractions were best pursued in more private, intimate arenas than the school cafeteria. Doing it in public was just gaudy. Instead, she made a big show of nodding appreciatively and murmuring.

“Anyway, we should totally go out and have fun before you go blind! There’s so many things you have yet to see, and we gotta tick them all off before your eyes become cubes!”

Syura was about to tell QP that she’d gotten the wrong end of the stick, before she remembered how serious QP was about stick retrieval. They’d once tried to play pooh-sticks in the forest, which mostly consisted of Syura dropping a stick into the river and then giggling when QP inevitably dove in to collect it. They had been young, then. Simple times, for simple children.

Back in the present, QP had grabbed Syura’s hand and was making every attempt to drag her out of the cafeteria. This was not, incidentally, the playful frolicking kind of hand-holding that Syura would have preferred. It was a little like having your hand bitten by a pitbull – your hand is going with the dog, regardless of whether the rest of your body does.

“QP, wait. I’m not so sure we should skip class just so we can have a date.”

“It’s not a date. Dates grow on trees,” the dog retorted, but she stopped her tugging nonetheless. The net result of this was that they were now holding hands awkwardly in the middle of the lunch room. Somebody began clapping. “Fine, we’ll do class. But after school, we’re gonna get you some glasses, and then we’re gonna have a ton of fun! No excuses!”

With that, the dog girl turned on her heel and marched off, leaving a trail of confused underclassmen in her wake. Nobody had the heart to tell her that she was heading in the opposite direction of her next class, or that she had left her lunch half-eaten on the table with fifteen minutes of break left.

“How aggressive,” Syura murmured to herself.

Eyewitness accounts were conflicted on whether she was swooning or not.

^(o*o)^c3

“So… Since you wanted to show me some things worth seeing, why don’t we go back to my house? I have some really cute outfits you could try on.”

“Syura, I am not dressing up as a maid. It just isn’t happening.”

“Darn. Can’t blame a girl for trying.”

Her advances rebuffed, Syura took a long, luxurious draw of her milkshake. The last class of the day had been Geography, and nothing chased away her crippling terror of maps better than a glass of milk, sugar, ice cream, and crumbled up cookie pieces smashed together with a blender. This had always been her favourite milkshake shop, partially because it had a neat black and white checkerboard floor, but mostly because it had a barely functioning arcade cabinet tucked away in the corner. Old arcade cabinets were the best, she had decided, because they were made in a time when a quarter bought quite a bit more than it did today, and the makers were protective enough of their machines not to include a way to update the pricing.

“I don’t get what your fascination with the whole maid thing is, anyway,” QP grumbled, stirring her shake with a straw. Her movements were relaxed and languid; her last class had been PE, which always served to help her burn off excess energy, unless it lit her competitive spirit, in which case she became a bouncing, incandescent ball of puppyish vigour. At that moment, her only desire was to inhale enough sugar to recover from the day’s exertions and ascend to her true form as a god of shouting.

Syura put her hand on the table and drummed her fingers as she put her thoughts in order. She had active hands. That was the trouble, when you spent some much time pushing keys or buttons: so much dexterity, and so little use for it. She played with her forks, her pens, her clothes. Sometimes she would take down some of her cosplay outfits from the rack and just run her fingers along the fabric – so different to what she wore normally.

“It’s because you’d look good as one,” she said, finally. QP frowned, but didn’t retort; beginning with a compliment had bought her a little time. “You always dress in really cute clothes, but you never wear anything elegant. I want to see that, a little.”

QP’s face assumed the frown of a girl who was, absolutely, not buying it. “You just want me to call you ‘master’, don’t you?”

“Oh, no! No no no no no no no,” Syura said, then whipped out her phone and started pressing buttons. “Oh, but could you say that again, please? Maybe a little louder, and into the mouthpiece?”

The dog sighed, which was unusual. For QP to sigh about a problem, it had to be something she couldn’t spring up and douse with bullets, or otherwise tackle with an outpouring of spirited yapping. “You seem to be having a bunch of fun. Even though I spent the whole day worrying about you.”

Syura scratched her head. “...Didn’t you spend the whole day eating and playing, though?”

“Yeah, because I was so worried I had to take my mind off it!” QP said, slamming her palms on the table and leaning over so as to more easily shout in Syura’s face. Her tail swished furiously behind her. “What are you gonna do if you go blind, Syura? How can you code if you can’t even see the keyboard? It’s impossible!”

Syura tried her best to smile. She knew from long experience that when QP shouted, the worst thing to do was shout back, because she was probably better at it. “You know I can touch type, right? Just because I’m friends with chickens doesn’t mean I’m a hen-pecker like you.”

“...urp…” QP replied, and sat back down.

“Besides, you think a little thing like that would stop me from following my dreams? Ha! I am a bona fide, dyed-in-the-wool game ninja! Who was the one who beat all those arcade games on one credit? Me! Who achieves one hundred percent completion on every game she buys? Me!”

“Who failed her first programming assignment because she’d been up for 48 hours grinding MMOs?”

“M – Shut up! Anyway, my point is that I like being challenged. It’s why I hang out with you. It’s tough to find somebody as cute and passionate as me, and you’re the closest thing available,” Syura said, in what she intended to be a touching sentiment.

“Thanks. I think?”

“...also-my-eyes-are-totally-fine-you-just-got-the-wrong-idea,” Syura said in one breath. For a moment, she thought she had gotten away with it. Then QP’s eye twitched.

“Pardon?”

“You’re pardoned.”

QP’s eye was still twitching. “No. I meant, say that again.”

“Maybe, but you have to call me ‘master’ first.”

QP’s tail was smacking against the back of her chair. “Say. It. Again.”

“Well, I mean… All I said was that I needed glasses, right? And when I tried to tell you why I needed them, you cut me off. I can see just fine, but there’s a convention next month and I’m–”

“...You’re cosplaying,” QP finished, flatly. “I was super turbo worried about your dreams and future and ambitions and stuff, and you were thinking about cosplaying!”

Syura suddenly became aware that she had half of her milkshake left, and decided it would be a fine idea to drink it as quickly as possible. Purely because she enjoyed milkshake, of course, and not because she believed there was an outside chance that it was going to get dumped in her lap. It certainly wasn’t an excuse to avoid looking QP in the eye. It was a shame she couldn’t, but everybody knows you have to maintain unrelenting eye contact with a milkshake when you drink it. It’s just not polite otherwise. When she had finally run out of milkshake and was forced to look up, she found QP’s withering gaze had not left her.

“Look, okay. I get it. I really appreciate that you were thinking about me and stuff, and next time you cut me off in the middle of saying something I should totally tell you to shut up so I can explain. I’ll make it up to you. Why don’t we go back to my house, play some videogames, and you can help yourself to my special after-game snack supplies?”

QP crossed her arms, and considered the offer carefully. “And you have pudding? You won’t make me dress up as a maid?”

Somewhere in her mind’s eye, Syura saw the glimmer of opportunity. “I do have pudding. And you know what? I’ll dress up as the maid, and you can be the master, and I’ll serve you some pudding like a real maid would. I won’t even have any myself. How does that sound?”

For a moment, QP was silent; the habitual, easy smile that came to her face when she heard the word ‘pudding’ failed to appear. “No. You have to have at least one cup. Pudding’s super great when you eat it by yourself, but it’s better when you share it with friends. Pudding should bring people together.”

And then QP was back to her old, happy self, cheerfully extolling the virtues of the thing she loved most, in the loudest voice she had. She was a pudding elemental, an evangelical preacher of desserts. And, quite importantly, she had just tacitly agreed to dress up as the master of the house. It wouldn’t quite be the short skirt and maid outfit of Syura’s dreams – but a fine tie, a man’s shirt and some very snug trousers? Oh, she could work with that. She downed the last dregs of her milkshake, and reminded herself to buy a pair of cheap reading glasses tomorrow.

But for today, she already had plenty that was worth seeing.

A/N: This really was just me goofing off, huh? Pooh sticks, for those of you less British than I am, is a game where you drop sticks in the river and see which one passes a specific point -- usually a bridge -- first, so named because Winnie the Pooh did it. Also, I finished this on my birthday, although the day had technically ended before I posted.