by Shouji Gatou
And sure, it’s a stage show, so the audience is far enough away that you can make girls look enough like us with makeup to pass... still, I found myself thinking, could some run-of-the-mill dance school dropouts really do what we did? The B-team auditions would be in two days, and obviously, we’d be taking part in the judging.
“Anyway, get some sleep,” Kanie-kun said. “Sento told me about the fire, by the way. Are you still looking for crash space?”
“Yeah, I...”
“I can make room for you somewhere in the general affairs building. I’ll be pulling an all-nighter tonight anyway, so if you want a spot on the meeting room sofa...”
“No, thank you!” I said quickly. One night with Isuzu-chan had left me exhausted. Imagine how much harder it would be to sleep around Kanie-kun! Not that I think Kanie-kun would take advantage of me or anything, but he seemed like a hard guy to relax around, in a different way than with Okuro-kun in security.
I mean, he’s my boss, and he’s super hot. Not that I think it’d go anywhere... But I mean, even if we were in different rooms in a big building, I’d spend the night on the sofa tossing and turning, just knowing he was there! Even if nothing happened, I wouldn’t sleep a wink! And what if we ran into each other on the way to the bathroom during the night?
You get what I’m saying, right?!
Okay, so maybe it’s hard to explain... the point is, I wouldn’t be able to relax knowing he was nearby! (I bet that’s one of the real reasons he doesn’t have a girlfriend.)
But while I was trying to figure out how to answer...
“She’s staying at my place toniiiiiiiight!” ...my coworker Sylphie barged into the conversation.
“Ohh. Sylphie, huh?” He commented. “Is that already worked out?”
“Yep!” Sylphie responded, grinning.
No, it’s not worked out, I thought. This is the first I’ve heard about it.
“Salama. You don’t wanna?”
“Er. Well... I wouldn’t say that...”
“Then it’s on!” Sylphie exulted. “You and me, tonight! I’m nervous, but relaxed!”
Which is it? I wondered.
“Okay. Go for it, then,” Kanie-kun told us. “Try to get some rest.”
“Leave it to me!” Sylphie gave a thumbs up.
Sylphie was the Spirit of Wind. She was the most mysterious out of all my colleagues, the type of person it was impossible to have a real conversation with. Honestly, most of her behavior was a mystery to me. If you said “Good morning” she might say “Lion Pharmaceuticals!” If you said “Lion Pharmaceuticals?” she would respond “Get some rest!” In the greenroom before performances, she would light sparklers she’d brought in and spin around, shouting “flaming top!” It was seriously off-putting at first. I’m sorry to say that the thought that she was mentally challenged entered my mind once or twice.
The truth, though, was that she was totally smart. She could take part in our daily messages and chats—I didn’t really understand the replies, but they were in proper Japanese—and she knew some pretty difficult vocabulary.
Sylphie was also physically brilliant; she was the best dancer out of all of us, and she could do anything you asked of her. She was always cheerful and bouncy. She had a great body, too; I mean, supermodel-class great. Her hair was a shining platinum blonde, and her breasts were on par with Isuzu-chan’s or Eiko-chan’s. She had pretty decent style, and was always put together in some cute outfit or other.
During break times, I sometimes caught her playing with video editing software in her underwear, and she’d be using the English-only version. Then sometimes, when I glanced at her email, she would be replying in some language I didn’t recognize, but looked Russian.
But for all the things I didn’t get about her, one thing I knew for sure was that Sylphie loved her co-workers. Anytime Kobory, or Muse, or I were cold to her, she’d shrink up and get super depressed. Then, when we’d try to comfort her, she’d cheer right up again. She’d grin and, apropos of nothing, offer us some kind of sweet (these days, it was fresh yatsuhashi from Kyoto).
In the end, I just figured she was the savant type, and a nice one at that. At the very least, none of her behavior seemed calculated; she wasn’t trying to put up a “mysterious” act to attract attention. She couldn’t be.
Um, so, I guess all in all, Sylphie was just a garden variety weirdo. (That was exhausting in its own way.)
That night was another intense experience. Sylphie lived in a cheap old apartment building in Amagi City proper. It was probably over 30 years old, the kind of building with creaky steel-frame stairs, a laundry machine at the end of the communal hall, and each apartment as a one-bedroom deal.
Things got weird when I noticed that the names on all six of the post boxes read ‘Sylphie.’ When Sylphie checked each of them, I asked her incredulously, “Y-You rent them all?!”
“Yep!” she told me cheerfully.
“All six apartments?!”
“Yep! So convenient.”
What the heck? I wondered. Even if they were cheap, given recent market prices, they’d probably run 40,000 yen per room. And if she rented six of them... wouldn’t that be 240,000 yen?!
“You can’t pay that kind of rent!” I said.
Sylphie just smiled. “I got circumstances. It’s just 30,000 pesos for the rent on them all!”
“Pesos?” I asked. How much is that, then?!
“Watch your step inside!”
“Huh?”
Sylphie offered the warning as we arrived in front of the cheap door to the apartment at the far end of the second floor. Quietly and carefully, she opened it. Inside were rows of dominoes. Yes, dominoes. Thousands of them. There was hardly any space to walk. There were stoppers placed every few hundred blocks, but they didn’t seem very reliable.
The kitchen and living room were likewise full of dominoes; the apartments appeared to have been modified to link the neighboring and lower rooms, and the dominoes continued all the way through them, as well.
“Dominoes?” I asked. “Why dominoes?”
“It’s a challenge,” Sylphie told me.
“But why?”
“Heh heh heh. My life is all about challenges. You just don’t get it, Salama-kun!” She held up her index finger and clicked her tongue triumphantly.
“Um, so... it’s a challenge, huh?” I hazarded.
“Exactly!”
“How many have you set up?”
“Thirty thousand!”
She must have spent every night for the past month lining up domino after domino. I did a quick search and learned that the current Guinness record for domino-toppling was 320,000; Sylphie was nowhere close to that, but it was still a pretty amazing feat.
“Yeah, well,” I told her. “Do your best?”
“I will!” She flashed me a v-sign.
We decided to go to bed right away. We’d gone to Sylphie’s favorite okonomiyaki place for dinner and stopped by a nearby communal bath, so there was really nothing to do but sleep. (It turned out the real reason we did all that was that the kitchen and the unit bathroom were full of dominoes.)
“By the way,” I asked, “where do we sleep?” There wasn’t any room to lie down. Even the bed, stripped of its covers and mattress, was covered in thousands of dominoes.
“There,” Sylphie told me. Over the bed hung a hammock, strung between the walls. The idea was to use the minimal available foot spaces to get into the hammock, and sleep suspended in the air.
“Sorry, I think I’ll sleep outside,” I insisted.
Sylphie’s eyes immediately filled with tears. “You don’t like hammocks?”
“It’s not that I don’t like them,” I told her. “I’ve just never slept in one before.”
“Hammocks are fun!” she insisted.
“Oh? Um... I guess they could be fun?” I considered for a minute. “But I probably couldn’t sleep soundly in one. I’m just really tired, you know?”
“You
can knock them down...” Sylphie sighed.
“Th-The dominoes?”
“Yeah,” she told me. “You can knock them down. I won’t get mad!”
I was glad to hear that, but I didn’t want to knock them down! If I fell out of the hammock, it would be a tragedy! There were stoppers, so it wouldn’t take down all the dominoes in the apartment, but it would still be eliminating a couple days’ worth of Sylphie’s hard work!
Sylphie stared at me with tear-filled eyes. I didn’t know what to do. “Hammocks... are good,” she said.
“Um... right.”
“Hammocks... are great.”
“Um... sure,” I agreed awkwardly.
We stayed locked in position for another minute or so. I had a growing fear that if I left her like this, she might knock over all the dominoes in a fit of ritual suicide. Well, I didn’t really think Sylphie was that kind of girl... But I was starting to feel like taking her up on the offer. She had her weird points, sure, but she was genuinely a good person.
“Ah......... okay. I’ll sleep here,” I conceded. “I might... end up liking the hammock, you know?”
“Yes!!!” Sylphie jumped for joy. The impact of the landing knocked down around 500 dominoes. Thankfully, the stoppers kept damage to a minimum. “It’s okay! It’s okay! All good! All good!”
“Sorry, though...”
“It’s all good!” she insisted, as if no damage had been done at all. But it seemed like she still wanted to stay up late into the night lining up dominoes, so I went to sleep first, in the hammock.
“Sedam bira nal mafsa basilano menu yageh...” It was the middle of the night. Sylphie was reciting some kind of chant as she lined up the dominoes, one by one. I lay in the swaying hammock, working hard to sleep suspended in the air.
“Edo larnum...”
It was really distracting. Who could sleep, hanging feet off the ground, listening to someone talk like that?! ...Me, as it turned out, and surprisingly easy.
The hammock also turned out fine. I got my best sleep of the past few days, as a matter of fact. Swinging. Swaying. The rhythm had me drifting off immediately.
Hammocks are really something! Don’t mess with hammocks! They’re the most comfortable thing in the world!
Of course, when I woke up in the morning, still half-asleep, I ended up dropping out of the hammock, dealing a fatal blow to the dominoes below me. I think I took out a few hundred.
Sylphie didn’t breathe a word of complaint, though; she just said, “I’ll put them back up!” and smiled. (I did catch tears in her eyes, though.)
You’re a good person, Sylphie, I thought. But don’t invite me over while you’re doing a domino challenge!
“Want to stay with me again tonight?!” she asked. Of course, this time, I had to turn her down.
The hammock had helped me recover a lot of my sleep debt, but I still took half the day off. I had to look for a new place. I’d been searching the Internet for the past few days and managed to put together some likely sites, so now all I had to do was call up a real estate company and see them in person.
I saw about five in central Amagi City: one-bedroom apartments, some with a separate living room, in the 60,000 to 70,000 per month price range. They all seemed good, but none of them quite felt “right.” I didn’t like being on the first floor, and the one on the second floor had a landlord that seemed annoying, and the one on the fifth floor was in an old building with no elevator—it was all that kind of thing. As I headed back to AmaBri for that evening’s performance, I made up my mind to go back to square one and do more looking around next week.
As I entered the greenroom, I ran into Muse first.
“Ah...” There was an awkward silence between us. Things had been like this since she’d turned down my request the other night. We’d kept conversation and greetings to a bare minimum—Muse would try to talk to me, and I’d shut her down.
Childish, you say? Well, excuse me! I’m kind of sulking, here! It was awkward for me, too, and I just didn’t know how to talk to her!
“S-Salama,” Muse stuttered. “Did you go to the real estate office? How did the viewings go?”
“Meh,” I shrugged. “Not great, I guess...”
“I see... so you don’t have a place yet?”
“Nah. I’m gonna do some more searches and look around again next week.” I played around on my smartphone (though I didn’t have much to do) while I answered. At times like these, my smartphone was the perfect tool for feigning disinterest; just moving my thumbs around on the screen felt relaxing somehow. I know it’s rude and all, but still...
“Salama... L-Look... I looked around for apartments, too,” Muse told me. “There’s a pretty good one the next town over...”
Her offer annoyed me. “I said I’m fine.”
“But... but...”
“I’m not a kid,” I said shortly. “I can find my own apartment.”
“Ah... right.” Muse fell silent.
I knew I was being petty. But in that moment, here’s how it felt: You’re freaking out, watching me struggle to find a place to stay. You just want to find me something as soon as possible, so you can clear your own conscience. Well, forget you. I can’t deal with your two-faced “friendship” right now. I came close to actually telling her that, but fortunately, that’s when Kobory and Sylphie entered the greenroom, ending our conversation. As for the performance after that—most customers probably didn’t notice, but we were kind of out of sync.
Around closing time, Latifah-sama visited us in the greenroom. Moffle-senpai and Isuzu-chan were with her.
“I heard everything, Salama-san!” the princess said, her fists clenched. “That your home was set ablaze... If I had known earlier, surely I could have come to your aid. How could no one have informed me? I can hardly believe it...”
“Huh?” I said awkwardly. “Ah... yeah.”
“Then, you have no place to stay?” Latifah-sama demanded. “You must come and stay with me, then. Ah, do not worry! You may stay as many days, as many months as you like!” The princess was blind, so she wasn’t meeting my gaze, but her expression was determined.
Latifah-sama was a crazy nice person. She was also Maple Land royalty and lived in a beautiful room in the castle. It was a pretty natural offer for her to make, after hearing that my apartment burned down; the only thing stopping me from accepting was the hesitance on the faces of Moffle-senpai and Isuzu-chan. If I had to guess, I’d say they were the ones who’d been keeping the news about my apartment from her.
“Salama. Come here a minute, fumo. Just come on, fumo.” I did as Moffle-senpai asked and left the room. Once we were alone in the hallway, he said: “Sorry to ask this, but would you mind turning her down, fumo?”
“Huh?” I asked in confusion. “I don’t mind, but why?”
“Because it’ll start a chain reaction, fumo.”
“......?” I waited for him to explain.
“Latifah’s a nice person. She won’t stand idly by when she sees someone in trouble; she likely even meant it when she said she’d let you stay with her for months, fumo.”
That sounded accurate. She really was a good person.
“But that won’t be the end of it,” Moffle went on. “If we set a precedent about letting Latifah humor sob stories, things will start to spiral.”
“Huh? I’m not gonna take advantage of her...” I protested.
“Right. I know that, fumo. But worse people than you might—”
“Mii!” Just then, Tiramii-senpai walked in. “Latifah-sama! My house is ruined from water damage, mii! Can I stay with you? Don’t worry, mii! I won’t ask you to rub my tummy!”
“Ah? Um, well...” Latifah-sama looked troubled.
Macaron-senpai arrived next, shouting, “I’m in trouble too, ron! The rumors that I can’t pay my rent because of my child support are highly exaggerated! But it’s still hard to keep up the utilities, ron! Latifah-sama! Please let me stay with you too, ron!”
“Ah? Er, well...” As Latifah-sama dithered, now Wanipii-senpai approached.
“I heard, pii! I heard there was a great apartment where we could live rent-free with a loli royal girl! Is this where we sign up, pii?!”
“Er, ah...” Latifah flailed. “I do not...”
“Please help my poor sad self, mii!”
“If you’ll help me with my rent, I’ll leave, ron!”
“I just want to sleep near you, pii!”
Latifah-sama seemed completely put out. That’s when Moffle-senpai interrupted: “Go to it, Isuzu.”
“Roger,” she replied. Isuzu raised her musket and put precise, fatal shots into Tiramii-senpai, Macaron-senpai, and Wanipii-senpai each.
“That’s what I was getting at, fumo,” Moffle-senpai said, looking down at Tiramii-senpai’s limp corpse. “That’s the chain reaction I mean. An overly generous royal family is a sitting duck for these idiots, so we need to nip it in the bud. No sleep-overs, fumo. Come on, everyone, get out of here.”
“What? Uncle! P-Please, you must...” Latifah-sama protested.
“Salama’s fine, fumo. She’s been staying with Kobory, Sylphie, and you, right?” he asked Isuzu-chan.
“Yes. It’s a different place each night,” she replied.
“She can work things out for a while yet then, fumo.”
“I understand, but... Salama-san, forgive me.” The princess bowed to me in apology.
“Ah... sure. It’s okay, for real...” I genuinely felt a little disappointed, though. Latifah-sama’s apartment was spacious, beautiful, full of guest rooms, and close to work (technically, it was in the middle of work). It was everything I could ask for. Plus, the princess was quiet, considerate, not weird at all (aside from her obsession with croquettes), and she probably slept soundly all night...
Ah, but it was what it was. I was starting to go back to my initial idea of sleeping outside... but just as I was steeling myself for that, Kanie-kun dropped by. “What’s all the commotion?” he wanted to know. “I could hear the gunshots even in the basement...” He was carrying a pile of documents; he had probably come to discuss finances with either Latifah-sama or Isuzu-chan. “Did something happen?”