[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Air Hockey

Genre: Slice of Life

Length: 3775 words

B/D: Just a normal, friends goofing around kind of story.

Nath was bemused. Nowadays, she seemed to spend her time in a near-constant state of bemusement, bordering on surprise. The introduction of Sora, and all the miscellaneous nonsense associated with her, seemed to ensure that. But today she was particularly bemused, and it was all Sham’s fault.

Sham, it seemed, had an inborn talent for making Nath feel wrong-footed, and she had demonstrated it that morning by turning up at her home and declaring that they were ‘besties’, a status that entitled her to hang around in Nath’s apartment and stroke her cat. Quite when they’d become besties was a mystery; Nath assumed it had happened when she went to Sham’s house for the evening, but as she recalled, not much had happened besides Sham playing the piano and drinking herself under the table, mostly without outside intervention. If she could solve all her problems like that, Nath might have taken work as a diplomat.

Still, the sentiment seemed genuine even if it had apparently come from outer space; the odd tension that she always seemed to feel between Sham and herself had disappeared, to be replaced mostly by Sham being noisy. Roger also seemed quite happy with this new and very affectionate member of his fan club – not that Nath would ever allow the cat’s feelings to dictate her own responses, of course. 

So she had sighed, and shrugged, and accepted that Sham was just her bestie now and that was how life worked. It was a free upgrade, like when there was a mistake in your restaurant order and they threw in a side salad free of charge. She’d gotten Sham à la mode with her serving of Sora du jour, and all she had to do was sit back and enjoy it.

That, by itself, was apparently not enough for life to throw at her; within fifteen minutes of Sham knocking on her door, Sora was letting herself in through the balcony window. Nothing had been arranged. Nothing was planned. They had just independently decided to turn up unannounced within minutes of each other. Nath chalked it up to them sharing the same bizarre wavelength.

“Good morning, Sham,” Sora said as she closed the window behind her. If she thought anything was at all out of the ordinary, her voice didn’t betray it. “I see you’ve met Roger.”

Sham had indeed met Roger, and was currently wearing him as a hat. Or perhaps Roger had just commandeered her as a mount. It was difficult to tell with that cat. In her heart, Nath believed he was a simple animal; he had an openness to his face, a pleasant directness when he wanted food. But he did seem to have an abnormal gift for manipulating anybody within ten feet of him. Not, of course, that she had ever experienced such manipulation herself.

“Do I not get a good morning?” she grumbled as Sora sat down.

“Nath mornings are always good mornings.”

“Ohhhh.” Sham nodded her head as she imbibed this great Soratic wisdom.

“What does that even mean?” Nath asked, although she knew better than to expect a response. Sora was already raiding the cupboards for cereal. She didn’t particularly like cereal; she had apparently had a bad experience with it under Suguri’s care. But she liked to watch Roger lap up all the milk after she was done eating, so whenever she came over she would bravely help herself to a bowl of sugar-enhanced processed grain from Nath’s supply.

“What’s our plan for today?” she asked in-between mouthfuls.

“I think,” Sham said, after a moment of intense thought, “we should go out and do something super fun!”

This, to Sora, seemed like it had all the makings of a fine plan. It was simple, elegant, and endlessly applicable. A plan like that came about only very rarely, although thankfully they were very easy to recycle. If Suguri had taught her anything, it was that recycling was Important.

Nath, needless to say, was less enthused with the plan. Her plan had been to spend the day relaxing in the comfort of her own home, probably in minimal clothing, and start sorting out her summer trip for the year. Instead, here she was, watching her cat pilot Sham around the apartment and waiting for Sora to finish eating her cereal. She began to press for more details.

“What do you mean, what’s fun? Come on, Nat. You’re old enough to know what fun is!” Sham replied, her voice sparkling.

Nath’s eyebrow, a harbinger of impending doom, began to raise. “Did you just call me ‘Nat’?”

“Well, we’re besties, so I have to give you a nickname, right? Besides, it’s shorter.”

“My name is one syllable. You’re not even saving any time.”

“Oh, sure I am. I know! You can call me Shae-Shae.”

“That’s longer than your actual name!”

Exasperated, Nath looked to Sora for an intervention; when none came, she looked to Roger instead. Obligingly, the cat trickled down from his perch on Sham’s cranium and landed on the table, the better to lap up his tribute of milk. Never before had Nath felt so powerless in her own home.

Still, the price she paid for having interesting friends was an interesting life. So she sighed, tickled the cat under the chin, and prepared for another chaotic day.

Sham, having apparently been promoted to trip advisor, had promised to bring them to the funnest place she knew. Instead, she had delivered them to what appeared to be just a solid wall of noise.

Technically, the whole construction was a barcade, but it had, at some point, had a bowling alley clumsily grafted on in a feat of architectural mad science. Both parts of this Frankenstein’s monster seemed to be doing good business, based on the amount of sound they produced. There were glasses being clinked, pins being bowled, little bursts of exultation for lucky strikes and moans of sympathy for gutterballs. Down in the arcade pit, mock motorcycles revved their digital engines through tinny speakers, light gun booths echoed with the simulated groans of the living dead, and always, always, there was the inimitable ‘tink’ of pitched battle at the air hockey table.

It was, generally speaking, the kind of place Nath didn’t step into in the light of day. Almost everything there was pretty dependent on having hands and some level of manual dexterity to go with them; until recently she had entirely lacked the first, and her supplies of the second were still dangerously low. When she raised the issue to Sham and Sora, she found them less than sympathetic.

“It’s okay. I believe in you,” Sora said, although she was more than a little distracted by a twelve year old girl shooting a zombie in the face. She didn’t really know how to feel about it; on one hand, it was a child shooting an imaginary gun, which was really too close to the whole ‘child soldiers’ thing as far as she was concerned, and she was still a little iffy about things that related too closely to any kind of apocalypse, zombie or not. But the gun sounds were goofy and cartoony enough not to make her feel uncomfortable, and it had been a while since she had shot anything in the face. Was there still a place in her life for recreational face shooting? She thought there might be. It was a conundrum.

“I know, right?! Come on, Nath. I bet if you put half as much effort into these games as you do at pretending to be grumpy, you’ll be a master in no time!”

“I don’t pretend to be grumpy,” she protested. “I am grumpy.”

Sora and Sham exchanged a look, then rolled their eyes simultaneously. This, Nath decided, was unacceptable. There was being on the same wavelength, and then there was weaponising it.

“Well, anyway! If you’re not confident with your hands, we can play with your feet! Come on, Sora. Let’s take her to the dance pads and teach her to love the boogie!”

“Roger.”

“Hey. I’ll go the dance pads with you, but you leave my feet alone. I need them in case the whole ‘hands’ thing doesn’t work out.”

Sora tilted her head. “Oh. I don’t think I’ve seen your naked feet before. That’s weird.”

“First of all, it’s bare feet, not naked. Secondly, why would it be weird for you to not have seen my feet?”

“I don’t know. It feels like I would have.”

“…You probably did, come to think of it. I went barefoot at the beach.”

“Ufufufu. She was probably looking at the other naked bits.”

“Sham.”

“What? I was talking about your tummy! I know that’s what I was looking at. You have super great definition, you know? To be honest, I’m jealous. You ought to show it off more often! Come on, let’s have some body positivity! We’ll be the tummy liberation station–”

“Sham.”

Luckily, Sham had not quite finished digging her own grave before they reached the dance machines, and by the time she had breathlessly explained them to Sora, any murderous impulses Nath might have felt had been dissolved by the idol’s cheerful enthusiasm. As much as Sham seemed to have a talent for getting under her skin – and it was a talent she seemed to be using with gleeful abandon – it was hard to stay mad at her. It would be like staying mad at a cat – unpleasant, and ultimately pointless.

“I don’t know if I’ll be good at this,” Sora said as Sham started scrolling through the charts. “I don’t know many dances. Is there one that’s a rave? I know how to rave. Hime taught me.”

“Don’t worry about how good you are. Just try and have fun! Ooh, they’ve got one of my songs on here! Oh, but it’s that remix… ick. Ah, I guess I should pick one at a lower difficulty… Here, here! Nath, pick between these two for your first dance!”

Nath looked at the screen, and then glanced at Sora. “...I don’t suppose there’s any way I can get out of this, is there?”

Sora shook her head solemnly. So she sighed, and very gingerly put a foot on the dance pad. It seemed stable enough, even when she put her weight on it, but it was difficult to trust any machine If she didn’t know what it was rated for. The cost of a replacing it if it broke wasn’t that much of an issue to her, but getting a reputation as the woman who broke it would annoy her to no end.

“What’s wrong?” Sham asked. “It’s not like it’s gonna break.”

“Easy for you to say. I’m heavy.”

“Mm,” Sora chimed in. “You can’t suplex her, even if you try.”

“Why, exactly, do you want to suplex me, Sora?”

“I don’t want to suplex you,” she replied innocently. “But there’s people you can suplex, and people you can’t. That’s how it is.”

Nath thought about this, and decided that if she had been put on the grand cosmic list of people who did not have to fear being randomly suplexed by Sora, she wasn’t going to argue about it. Sora’s mind worked in strange and mysterious ways; any protest might get her unsuplexableness revoked. 

When the music began, Nath got the sudden sensation that she and Sham lived in completely different worlds. It wasn’t a rare feeling, although usually the world Sham ostensibly lived in was fairyland. But in the rarefied environment of a dance battle, she was an undisputed queen. She moved with energy, efficiency, aplomb; apparently the chart really was too easy for her, because she was finding time to do a completely different dance in between the inputs. Meanwhile, it was all Nath could do to stiffly follow the chart as best she could, each motion a slow and individual effort in comparison with the flowing way that Sham moved. Sometimes she lost the beat entirely, and found herself waiting for long, frustrated seconds while the notes scrolled off the screen before she found a place to step back in. When the song finally ended, the gulf between their scores was embarrassing.

“Ahhh… that was a blast! I really got into it. You did super well for your first time, too!” Sham’s face was flushed, and she seemed to have worked up a sweat despite herself. If she was lying, she was at least doing a good job of it. “Sora, you try next!”

Thankfully for Nath’s wounded pride, Sora had wandered off in the direction of the air hockey table, and was watching with interest as a thirteen year old girl soundly trounced her father in pitched battle. The girl was weaker and her shots less accurate, but she was craftier, less predictable, and didn’t have three decades of wear and tear on her central nervous system to slow down her reactions. Perhaps they were witnessing the birth of a future champion, a colossus who would usher in the golden age of air hockey. Sora liked to think so. In her heart, everybody had the potential to be a protagonist.

“Sora! So this is where you got to. You didn’t want to watch us dance?” Sham asked, trying to sound hurt. It was hard to sound sad through a cocktail of adrenaline and endorphins, but she tried.

Sora finished saying goodbye to the future air hockey champion of the world, and faced her friends with an expression that was more puzzled than troubled. “Oh, you finished already? That’s strange. Did the machine break?”

“Ahaha… A standard track only lasts three to four minutes, you know?”

“Oh.” Sora’s brow furrowed. “Whenever Hime dances, it takes an hour, at least. I thought I had more time.”

“You shouldn’t base your expectations on Hime,” Nath said, smiling faintly. “She’s not exactly a normal person.”

“That’s right. She’s better than normal.”

“Well, I won’t say anything about that. But you’ll be disappointed if you expect everybody to act like she does.”

“I see.” After accepting this version of reality to be the one she currently inhabited, Sora’s eyes flicked to the air hockey table. “Sham, let’s play this one. It looks fun.”

Sham grinned and cracked her knuckles, which elicited concern from Sora and mild jealousy from Nath. But what it should have elicited was pure, unbridled fear. Sham’s knuckles were the sound that robots heard before they became coffee machines. It was the sound her managers heard when she wanted to stop being a cute, easily manipulated idol and start talking business. It was the sound perverts heard before they discovered that, contrary to popular belief, the security detail was not there to protect a retired ten-thousand-year-old soldier from people who had never once fired a missile. The crowd thought they were, and even the security team thought they were, but they weren’t, and Sham had a way of reminding people. It was, in fact, a very scary sound.

The fact of the matter was that Sora had bitten off more than she could chew. Over the millennia, Sham had played air hockey on at least three – maybe even five! – occasions, whereas Sora had played it a sum total of zero. So it followed that her skill was infinitely more than Sora’s, since there was no multiple of zero that could ever reach the lofty heights of five. That was how maths worked, and Sham believed in the unlimited power of arithmetic.

“How about a bet?” she asked, spinning the… strikey, paddle… hitting thing with her fingertips. “If I win, you have to do whatever I say for a whole day.”

Sora nodded as she ambled to the other side of the table. “Okay. If I win, you have to buy me a root beer float. No, wait. You have to buy us all root beer floats.”

“Wait,” Nath interrupted, her eyes narrowed. “This doesn’t seem like a balanced bet.”

“Is three root beer floats too many?”

“Your end’s fine. Sham’s seems a little… exploitable.”

“Gumumu… You’re just jealous. You want to monopolise her side-tufts for yourself, don’t you?! I understand! They’re super charming! Totally irresistible! You just want to twirl them around your fingers whenever you see them! But you can’t get in the way of our bet, Nath. I’m going to win, and then her side tufts will be mine to do as I like with!”

Sora and Nath reacted with the only emotion appropriate: complete confusion.

“Sham, you’d make a great supervillain,” Sora said seriously, apparently determined to see her friend in the most positive light.

“Yes, well. If you win, I’m making sure your twenty-four hours get spent under my or Suguri’s supervision, since apparently you need a responsible adult.”

“That’s not fair,” Sham sniffed. She considered pouting, but didn’t consider it warranted. Sora had a pout that was effective; Hime’s, reputedly, was weapons-grade. Sham’s was against the Geneva Convention and needed two separate launch codes to operate, both of which were, unfortunately, in her possession. “It’s our bet. You don’t get to add rules.”

“But she’s the referee,” Sora said, as if it were something she had ever mentioned at any point in time before that exact second.

But now she had said it, it was so: Nath was the referee, and had been since the dawn of time. She had never been anything but the referee, which was very inconvenient for her. Having danced for Sham’s amusement and therefore discharged her duties as a ‘bestie’, she had been considering sidling off to the bar bit of the barcade and grumbling at their prices. The bar owners would believe she was grumpy, even if her friends refused to. But, having become the referee, she had no choice but to watch the match and… well, refer, ostensibly to a set of rules she didn’t actually know. It did allow her to impose a semblance of sanity on Sham’s betting, which was a mercy and a blessing to all concerned.

There was a coin flip to decide who served first. Sham picked heads, and won; Sora stared off into space, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. Perhaps she was planning a grand strategy. Perhaps she was calculating angles, engaging in a rousing session of sports psychology. It wouldn’t matter. Sham knew, in her heart of hearts, that she was going to win, and she was going to win because she wanted it more. The prize was an opportunity to poke Sora’s cheeks and twiddle her side-tufts and do all sorts of fun activities, most of which she could probably sneak past Nath.

With that noble desire in her heart, she gave the puck just the lightest, gentlest tap, and then immediately swiped it into a banked shot that went hurtling towards Sora’s goal, bouncing off the metal bumpers with a resounding ‘tink’.

Sora’s hand moved. It must have moved, because her striker appeared directly in the puck’s path. But Sham didn’t see the motion; it was in one place, and then in the other, like an animation skipping frames. There was another judder, a moment where her hand was lost in motion, and then the puck was screaming back to Sham’s end of the table, clattering off the sides and rebounding too fast for her to keep track of. In a split second it had smacked into the back of her goal as she stood, thunderstruck, not even attempting to defend. Was she imagining the smell of melting plastic? Probably. But she couldn’t be sure, and that terrified her on a deep existential level.

Across the table, Sora’s smile was perfect and guileless. It had every right to be. She hadn’t lied. She hadn’t tricked anyone. She just knew things they didn’t, and one of those things was that there was a level of power that no amount of experience could outweigh. It was a level of power she happened to possess. Times changed and people changed, but her specifications, as always, were extraordinary.

Another thing she knew, and which she proceeded to teach Sham over the course of seven blistering goals, was that it didn’t matter how outrageous your opponent’s bet was if you could be sure you would win. As far as Sora was concerned, there had been no bet. Sham had just promised to buy three root beer floats at the end of the game, and that was that.

As the last goal sank home, Sham momentarily broke sporting etiquette and sought a comforting hug from the referee. Unusually, she got one. Even Nath – still smarting from her dance pad experience – couldn’t turn her away after a defeat like that. It would have been animal cruelty.

“There’ll be side-tufts another day,” she said, awkwardly patting the idol on the back. And she was right: Sora’s side-tufts had survived war and calamity. They would endure. She didn’t know if she could say the same about Sham, who looked like she needed rather more than a root beer float to make the world look okay again.

“It was a good game,” Sora said, to nobody in particular. “Nath, you should try.”

Like an old sailor casting their eyes to the stars, Nath cast her eyes to Sora’s chin, and her augury revealed that, no, she would not be getting out of playing air hockey, just like she wasn’t allowed to get out of dancing. Her mind went back to the last time she’d come up against Sora in a sporting event; she’d come home with broken prosthetics, and Sora had been one well-aimed blue slushie away from doing the same to her arm.

“…Alright. But I think you’re a bit too tough for me. Sham, can I play you instead?”

The idol’s eyes, which previously had been welling with tears of frustration, became sly. “Sure! But if I win, you have to do what I say for a day.”

“Why on earth… I can understand Sora, but why me?” She shook her head and held up a hand to stop Sham from answering. She wasn’t sure she really wanted to know. “No deal. If you win, I’ll buy you a drink. If I win, you buy me a drink. That’s as much as I’m betting.”

Sora, having assumed the holy title of referee, nodded on Sham’s behalf. “I’ll play the winner. Try your best.”

Nath and Sham looked at each other, and exchanged conspiratorial – if slightly shaky – smiles as they assumed their positions. Technically, Sham had the advantage, but it didn’t matter. They would hold their heads high as competitors, pull no punches, and try their very, very best.

To lose.

A/N: I recently cross-posted almost my entire library over at An Archive Of Our Own -- you can find Suguriverse stories collected in Tales of a Warless World, my QPverse stories in Adventures in Ebimanyou Town, and my Flying Red Barrel Stories in Adventures of a Little Aviator. I'll be keeping these collections up to date, so if you want an easier way to read the full series (with better tools for readers than this site) head over to those.

That said, I'll probably take a hiatus from OJ stories for a while. One of the things that porting to AO3 has put into perspective is just how much I've written. There's over 100,00 words of Suguri/Sora fic (which is a novel by itself!), 40k words of QP stories, and various drips and drabs elsewhere; furthermore, between my various drafts and stories I haven't posted because they're commissions or other reasons, total wordcount is in excess of 200k. Lately I've been feeling more and more burnt out on the series, and experiments with writing for new things go much easier than doing stuff for OJ, so I think it's time for some new projects. I do intend to do more OJ fic when I feel more refreshed, but after literal years of writing barely anything else, I think I've earned a break.