[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Good Girl

Genre: Slice of Life

Length: 3627 words

B/D: And here's the QP story I was working on as well. It's not a continuation of the baseball series -- which will be a series, eventually -- but just an idea I wanted to do.

It was a cold night, and Aru, snuggled very deep under the covers, was considering a change of career.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like being a holiday rabbit. She loved it. It gave her a chance to bring genuine joy to the faces of children, where it would stay for about fourteen seconds and then be devoured by the nascent evil of excessive consumerism. It gave her direction and purpose; no matter how aimless the rest of her life might become, she could always be sure that she was Santa, that she had a place in the world set out for her. Most rabbits, she noted sadly, didn’t have a place in the world, but did have a place at the table.

But sometimes she thought it might be quite nice to transition to, you know, other holiday related career paths. Ones that made better use of her unique attributes. Like being the Easter bunny, for example, although she was rather hoping that the eggs weren’t produced in quite the way she assumed they were, in which case she would take an indefinite rain check on that idea. Or, perhaps, one of the rabbits who pounded New Year’s mocchi on the moon. Now there was a job: honest labour, regular hours, no requirement to make complex moral judgements, and you got a massive hammer as soon as you signed up. There were a lot of things Aru could do with a massive hammer.

Right now, the first thing she would do with a massive hammer was smash her phone into billions and billions of atom-sized pieces, because it kept ringing. She understood that ringing, usually, was considering a feature and not a bug, but at half past two in the morning she felt rather differently about it. Besides, smashing the phone with a hammer was technically the lesser of two evils; the other option was to smash the caller with a giant hammer, which would probably take longer to clean up afterwards.

After two ring cycles, she regretfully burrowed her way out of the nest of duvets, seized her phone and, bravely resisting the urge to toss it at the wall, pressed the answer button.

“QP, what is it?” she asked.

“Hi, Aru. Sorry to ring you so late. Um. I was just wondering–”

“Yes?” Aru asked, and resigned herself to the question she knew was coming next.

“Am I… Am I a good girl?”

Aru covered the mouthpiece for a moment as she composed herself, reaching deep down into her heart to drink from the well of Patience that she had built there. She treated patience like an old, broken detective treated the contents of his hip-flask: limited in supply, hard to replenish, and dangerous if taken too liberally. Sometimes, it was healthier to get angry. But she didn’t quite think she’d reached that point. Not yet.

“QP, you know you can’t keep doing this, right…? It’s a school night. You should be asleep. We should both be asleep,” she said, as reasonably as possible. “This is the third time in two weeks…”

“I know, but me and Syura were watching that one movie where the two dogs and a cat get lost and have to find their way home, and it just got me thinking, so I just… I wanted to know if I’ve been a good girl this year. That’s all.”

“QP… I understand, but just because you’re friends with Santa, it doesn’t mean you can abuse my powers. Anyway, it’s only March.”

QP didn’t respond, but the tell-tale sound of muffled whining floated over the receiver. If the dog girl had one fault – and she definitely had a lot more than one, but for the sake of simplicity, one fault – it was that her ego was too big for her body. In fact, if one went by the usual ego-to-bodyweight ratios, QP really ought to have been born a giraffe. But most of the time, her inflated self-estimation was inert; she simply accepted that she was cute and loveable and awe-inspiring, and got on with the rest of her life. She didn’t brandish it like a weapon; she didn’t hide behind it like a shield. It was just there, existing.

But an ego like that needed a certain amount of maintenance, and even with QP’s thickheadedness, it still took a few knocks from time to time. Sometimes, it seemed, QP just needed to be told that she was a Good Girl, and naturally, she looked to Aru – or, rather, Santa, the final arbitrator on which Girls were Good and which were Bad – to provide it.

And she was a good girl. Probably. It was actually a matter of contention. On the great scales of Naughty and Nice, QP weighed in at ‘Cosmic Pudding Entity whose Domain quietly staves off Pudding-Related Confrontations and the inevitable Complete Societal Collapse they entail.’ In other words, she could get away with a lot of Naughty before she even started moving the needle of Santa’s judgement. On a more personal level, Aru was just a tiny bit biased over whether one of her best friends and confidants was a good person or not.

“Look, QP,” Aru said soothingly, “unless you’ve done something really bad since the last time you asked, you’re probably a good girl.”

“Yeah, but… I keep wondering. Am I good enough girl? Could I be being more good? What if I started to fight crime?”

She already fought crime, at least from Aru’s understanding of things. Admittedly it was pudding-related crime, mostly perpetrated by members of Waruda, but she was still single-handedly disarming a criminal organisation. Before Aru could say this, however, QP continued:

“But to do that, I’d need super powers. If I ask for super powers for Christmas, is that a thing you can do?”

“Super powers,” Aru repeated, flatly. “You mean, other than flying, and being able to fire magical bullets, and having an innate understanding of the hearts of rabbits, and whatever else you got as Sweet Guardian?”

QP at least had the good grace to hesitate for a moment before she replied. “Yeah, but those aren’t really super powers. They’re more like hobbies.”

This was enough like moon-logic that Aru’s thoughts drifted briefly back to her mochi-pounding ambitions, which QP took as the thoughtful, encouraging kind of silence rather than the just plain bewildered kind.

“I guess I could be a superhero without powers. Like Batman, except, you know, a dog. And not a man. But I’d need a costume. Can you help me think of costume ideas?”

Aru’s voice became wooden. “QP, it’s 2am.”

“Yeah, but I’ll be super quick, I prom–”

Now there was a hint of iron in it. “QP. It’s 2am.”

“Just for a min–”

Now her tone was steely, hard and cutting. “QP. It is 2am.”

“...Okaaaay. I’ll come over after school tomorrow and tell you about it then,” QP said, deflating slightly. “Sorry for keeping you up so late. Goodnight, Aru!”

The phone clicked off. Aru put it very gently back on the night stand, closed her eyes, and settled into the immediate, heavy sleep of the exhausted.

In her dreams, she had a giant hammer. And she was very gently tapping QP on the head with it.

“Syura, am I a good girl?”

Syura lifted her head from the desk, which was very difficult. The movie that had tipped QP into existential crisis had kept her up late, and then she had tried to do some debugging on her latest game, which had kept her up even longer. The problem was that the dragons who were supposed to be breathing fireballs were suddenly breathing wasps, which she didn’t even remember coding the assets for, and which immediately started to fight the dragons. That by itself would have been a funny little interaction she could leave in the game – maybe strip it out and retool it into a jokey little boss fight with a wasp-breathing dragon – but the problem was that the wasps kept winning, because the dragon couldn’t hit them without fire breath and every time it tried to breath fire it just made more wasps. The wasps only did one damage per attack, but there were hundreds of them. Eventually the dragon just died through scratch damage, and one lucky wasp received enough exp to become a legendary monster in its own right, usually taking the opportunity to slay everything else in the cave and go on a horrifying rampage in the game world, until it met another legendary dragonspawn wasp and fought it for dominance. It was the darkest timeline, and she didn’t know how to fix it.

Having successfully created Fantasy Wasp Conquest Simulator, she planned to un-create it after school, on a ration of two-and-a-half hours of sleep and with her head filled with algebra homework – a feat that would be completely impossible, if she hadn’t dosed herself with a truly impressive amount of caffeine. Probably more than was strictly safe, really, although she was still young and spry, so it would probably work out. Was caffeine a hallucinogen? She hoped not. But when the effects hit, she was sure she’d find out.

“Sure. Whatever,” she said, after QP’s question had percolated in her brain like coffee in… in some kind of machine that produced coffee. She didn’t really know anything about coffee. As far as she knew, it was a natural by-product of capitalism and vending machines, and that was the way she liked it.

“Syura!”

She opened one bleary eye and found one of QP’s big, soulful, less bleary eyes staring back. It seemed she had also assumed the head-on-desk position, with her nose about two inches from Syura’s. It was a very boopable nose, rounded like a button. QP very rarely put her face this close to hers, for any number of reasons that were sensible and not very fun, and the effect it had was pronounced.

“Come on, Syura. Get up and take it seriously. I need some advice on this.”

“Oh, yeah. I’m up,” Syura mumbled. “So, what’s your problem? If you’re worried about being a good girl, just do good stuff, right? Shift your alignment towards Lawful Good, that kind of thing.”

QP frowned. She had always argued that dogs were Lawful Good by default; they were naturally fond of packs and hierarchies, and there was no dog that wanted to be a bad dog – just dogs that were good dogs for bad people. She was only part-dog, so she only got part of the effect, but fundamentally she considered herself to on the same kind of spectrum, even though she sometimes broke a few little laws where noise levels and property damage were concerned. But that was like penalising a firefighter for chopping down a door to rescue somebody from a burning building – there was a greater good to think about.

“Well,” she said at last, “I was thinking about that, and I decided to try fighting crime. I just need a good costume to do it in. You’re a nerd, so you ought to know good costumes, right?”

“How many times do I have to explain this? There’s different types of nerd, QP, and I’m not a comics nerd. I don’t know anything about superheroes or whatever, unless they appear in games. And even then, the games usually aren’t that good, so I skip them to play indie releases.”

QP brought her fist down on the table, startling almost everybody in the classroom – including the teacher, who, luckily, was already vaguely afraid of her. There were rumours of her being spotted with delinquents, even beating them up from time to time. The unwritten law was that QP only cared about pudding, and if you valued your life, you’d give her no reason to change that fact.

“Come on, Syura. I thought you’d be all over this, you know? I’m basically asking, if you had to put me in any superhero costume, which one would it be?”

When it was phrased like that, it became a much more attractive question – one that, in other circumstances, Syura would have taken some quality time on. She chewed the end of her pencil – or maybe it was Qp’s pencil, but somebody had a pencil and it was in her mouth and she was taking nourishment from the bracing flavour of wood and graphite – as she thought.

“Well, it’s gotta be skintight. That’s the rule for superhero costumes, right? You don’t really have the bust for one of those cleavage showing ones… so I think maybe a spandex bodysuit might be the thing…”

Her mind drifted a little further along the line, and the more she saw in her mind’s eye, the more she liked it. QP didn’t exactly have a heroic build – mostly she was straight up and down, with the occasional pudding deposit – but she was an active girl, and that meant she was the proud owner of shapely legs. Spandex QP, very suddenly, had become relevant to Syura’s interests.

“No way,” QP said bluntly. “Spandex and all that stuff sucks. You have to poke a hole for your tail, right? And then when you do stuff, your tail moves around, so the hole frays and it gets bigger, so eventually you just have this big hole in your costume where everyone’s looking at your butt.”

Syura\ puffed her chest out and tried to assume an air of authority. “Well, that’s just a part of being a superhero, right? Your duty isn’t just to fight crime or protect people. It’s to inspire them as well!”

“With my butt?”

“With your butt!”

QP went very quiet, which was a bad sign. When she was quiet it meant she was thinking, and a QP with the capacity for logical thought was an entirely different proposition to the QP they knew day to day. Syura shuddered; she felt like she had rolled a natural one for her persuade check. Was it worth rolling diplomacy in a desperate attempt to salvage the situation?

Her heart said maybe, but her head – which, in the interim, had refilled itself with haze and cotton, said no. Forsaking both her friend and her algebra homework, she laid her head down to sleep – and to dream of the great armoured dragowasp, which was now wandering its way out of her RPG and into a shmup, where it was much better suited.

“Krila. Am I a good girl?”

Krila scratched her chin ominously, and then scratched QP’s chin ominously, and then went back to scratching ominous designs in her notebook with a mechanical pencil. Every art class was an opportunity for a new dark creation, and for a member of Waruda, every class was an art class waiting to happen.

Lunchtime, when not occupied by schemes to get food, was also art class, but came with the added challenge of making sure none of the crowding, faceless students looked at her notebook. Nobody ever tried to look at her notebook, but she was still fiercely protective of it, knowing that the evil inscriptions within could cause mass panic and disrupt her dark ambitions. Previously she had dealt with her need for privacy by huddling away in the sallow, murky corners of the schoolyard, but nowadays she just sat with QP, who had powerful bully-repelling properties and who never tried to sneak a peek at the book herself, mainly because books were not pudding and therefore beneath her notice.

“Krila?”

Sighing, the dark apostle turned to scratch QP’s chin again. She was allowed to scratch QP’s chin, because she wasn’t weird about it like Syura was. Syura wanted to scratch QP’s chin for her own perverted pleasure, whereas Krila merely saw it as a gesture of thanks for the various improvements QP brought in her own life. Before she joined Waruda, she had been an awkward loner; when she threw her lot in with an evil organisation, she finally knew the sweet nectar of companionship. Now, by two-timing that organisation with a bunch of mostly neutral but volatile schoolgirls, she was surrounded by friendship and leftover lunch snacks wherever she went. Never before had Krilalaris had it so good; truly, her life had entered a golden age, the picturesque harmony before the inevitable twilight of the gods.

“It is regrettable,” Krila said cautiously, “but I believe it to be true. Despite your nature as a divine beast, I fear the dark and rugose gods that dwell in my heart would never accept your worship.”

QP didn’t say anything for a moment, because that would disrupt her chin-scratch, and she did love a good chin-scratch. But as soon as Krila’s fingers stopped moving, she gave a sigh of dreamy contentment and continued her enquiries. “But I could always be more good, right?”

Krila frowned. This was a dangerous line of questioning. QP’s current level of goodness was already high, but it was at least a meandering, aimless kind of goodness – a strictly reactive benevolence, bestowed only when an occasion for it appeared. In other words, it was still mostly compatible with Krila’s worldview, because for a good 75% of the time, QP’s goodness as completely inert.

“What if,” QP continued, “I was a superhero? Then I could wear a cool costume, and make people’s lives even better! Wouldn’t that be awesome?”

“No!”

This was a shout that, in any other cafeteria, would have brought all other conversations to a halt. But Ebimanyou School was full of very passionate, shout-y individuals, and the student corpus had just learned to deal with it. It was a source of great irritation to a lot of people, since it meant their dramatic exclamations lacked a certain gravitas without a hushed awe to follow in their wake.

“If you were a superhero–” Krila choked on the words themselves, but carried on. “If you were a superhero… we would be mortal enemies, you and I. Never again could I pacify you by scratching your chin, and never again could you supplicate the dark gods by offering up your fruit snacks to their apostle. Ruination… it would bring ruination upon us both!”

She slammed her fists down on the lunch table, which was less than advisable, because the lunch table was usually cheaper than the lunches that were balanced precariously upon it. There was a loud, metallic creak as the table legs conferred upon whether to buckle beneath the force of Krila’s soap opera acting. In the end, with two votes nay and one abstaining, the table held – for today.

QP held her hands up in appeasement. “I-it’s fine, Krila. It was just a hypothetical, you know? Hey, calm down. You can help me eat my animal crackers.”

Krila gave a deep, nasally sniff. “…Can I have the giraffes?”

“And the lions, just like always.”

The lunch room held its collective breath, or would have, if anybody cared.

“...I can accept these terms. The contract is made,” Krila said finally, and took a giraffe cracker. A tear dribbled down from beneath her eyepatch as she carefully broke the giraffe’s neck and consumed its head.

Krila was, at heart, a simple girl. So long as she had friends, dark rituals, and animal crackers, the world seemed okay again.

It was a slow day in the Rbit Room. Aru, who was developing her secret talent of condensing the secrets of thousands years of accumulated bunny warfare into a 5-7-5 haiku, had run into a creative block. Her fountain pen paused as she scribbled down yet another alternative form:

An umbrella is

when bullets fall like spring rain

but upwards instead???

On the whole, though, it had given her a chance to recover from the loss of a night’s sleep. She had refilled the Well of Patience, descended the Steps of Hostility, and was now brewing the Tea of Reconciliation for when QP turned up after school, no doubt with her head full of dreams and her her heart full of potential heroics. When the doorbell finally rang, she was ready to accept QP’s nascent superhero ambitions with open arms.

“Oh, that? Actually, I decided not to be a superhero after all,” QP said, experimentally dipping an animal cracker into the Tea of Reconciliation. She looked at the cracker gorilla, who had been thoroughly conciliated, and consumed it with a grimace. Even with their combined might, she and Krila had been unable to vanquish the unending tide of animal crackers; even Aru’s tea, usually a potent aid to digestion, wasn’t doing the trick.

“Why?”

“Oh, you know. I thought about it,” QP said airily. “But I figured: wouldn’t I be super liable for collateral damage or something? I already spend all my allowance on pudding, so I don’t think I could afford it. That’s why all the best superheroes are millionaires.”

“And fictional,” Aru added.

QP ignored her. She had a rare talent for ignoring things or people who were inconvenient to her, and often showcased it. Instead, she pulled a notebook from her bag, along with a random handful of coloured pencils. “I’m still making a costume, though. I figure that even if I can’t be a superhero, I can at least play superheroes. I think Krila would really like that.”

As she settled down and began drawing up designs for a mask and scarf, Aru felt her heart soften a little. She took a sip of the Tea of Reconciliation, and, even though it tasted of faintly stale animal crackers, she felt its warmth seeping deep down into her soul. She reached out and – very gently – began to scratch QP behind the ears.

“You’re a good girl, QP,” she said. And this time, she believed it.

A/N: I decided to give this a heartwarming ending, after it suddenly became 'wait a minute, Krila has character development somewhere under all that nonsense'. I'm as surprised as you are.