by Nisioisin
“Never.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve called for the time and gotten the weather forecast instead, though.”
“Same thing.”
Never underestimate the challenges posed by simplicity. It’s precisely because the numbers are only three digits that people sometimes mix them up in a panic.
“Of the ten numbers beginning with two ones,” I continued, “1-1-0 and 1-1-9 are the easiest to remember. That must be why they took the three most urgent services and shoehorned them into two numbers. The scenario you mentioned is probably a lot better than a police car showing up when you meant to call for an ambulance or a fire truck.”
“Really? If someone’s injured the police could arrest the assailant, and if there’s a fire they could arrest the arsonist.”
“Why do injuries and fires have to be crime-related for you?” Her idea of justice was dangerous. Her premise was criminal behavior.
“But then, if you were injured and a fire truck showed up, you’d get angry and yell, ‘What are you gonna do, hose me better?!’”
“I’d never yell that even if I got angry.”
“If an ambulance came to a fire, you’d get angry too. ‘What, did you just assume that I got burned?!’”
“That sounds like a reasonable assumption.”
“It’d be different if a police car showed up. You wouldn’t get angry. They’d arrest you.”
“For a defender of justice, you bend pretty quickly to the state.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I was just talking in general. Tsukihi and I never bow to authority. The Fire Sisters have clashed with the police plenty of times.”
“Yeah… I’m the one who always has to pick you up from the station.”
Geez, I didn’t want to be reminded. I’d ended up befriending a female officer for no reason.
“But Karen, aren’t you forgetting something? What if a fire truck or an ambulance showed up in the middle of a crime? Wouldn’t people get really mad then?”
“Hmm, you can’t win them all. It’s so hard to make everyone happy. Well, the perp would get scared off by the sound of the sirens, so I guess it’s okay?”
“Like a panic buzzer?”
“Like a panic buzzer. So yeah, they should separate ambulances and fires. You’re right that 110 and 119 are easy to remember, but what about 111? That’s pretty handy, isn’t it? Why don’t we make that for fire?”
“‘We’? I don’t have that kind of power. Besides, I’m not sure, but isn’t 111 probably already assigned to something? Come to think of it, all the numbers starting with ‘1-1’ must be taken.”
“Maybe, but I bet 111 is just the number for some lottery. I don’t see why they shouldn’t have to give it up.”
“If you’re playing on ‘one’ and ‘won,’ you’ve got the mind of a grade school kid.”
Give me a break.
Our banter would sound hopelessly moronic to someone like Hanekawa, who no doubt knew the answer to all this.
This conversation went beyond halting. We were headed straight into the bushes.
“What they usually say,” I went on, “is that 110 and 119 were chosen to help people calm down since they tend to be in a panic and can hardly think straight when they’re calling those numbers.”
“Huh? What do you mean? Quit talking nonsense or I’ll punch you.”
“Aren’t you being a little too impatient with your older brother?!”
“I am?”
“I don’t deserve a knuckle sandwich for explaining things in order… Anyway, this is from before cell phones and touch-tone phones, way back in the day. Apparently there used to be these artifacts called rotary phones. Maybe you’ve seen them on TV?”
“Ah, rotary. I might have, I’m not sure. That word ‘rotary’ does sound pretty retro, though.”
“Right. And on rotary phones, dialing the numbers ‘0’ and ‘9’ took time. They were set up so you had to rotate a dial.” Not that I’d ever seen one in person, either, but apparently the “0” and “9” were placed at the end of the dial.
“What about ‘1’?”
“Hm?”
“If the ‘0’ and ‘9’ took time to dial, what about the ‘1’? Did that take time to dial, too?”
“No, the ‘1’…was on the other end, I think.” Meaning it actually took the least amount of time to turn. Hrrm.
“Shouldn’t they have made the emergency numbers 009 and 000 in that case?”
“Well, 009 sounds like you’re calling for a cyborg… The fact that it’s an emergency only makes the situation feel less serious.”
“I get that. I totally get that.”
“You do? You actually do?”
“What about 000?”
“Everyone knows you can’t use one number in a row for your PIN. There are too many people out to scam you these days. You gotta watch out, okay?”
“We were talking about phone numbers.”
“That reminds me, Karen-chan, I have something interesting to share with you about three-digit numbers.”
“If it’s not interesting, I’m going to punch you.”
“How about a less scary rejoinder!”
“Get on with it.”
“Actually, it’s just some math trivia I learned from Hanekawa. Think of a three-digit number. Any, including 110 or 119. Now repeat it.”
“Okey dokey.”
“The six-digit number you end up with will always be divisible by seven. 110110 or 119119, it doesn’t matter. Give it a try.”
Seven was a solitary number, but since it was solitary, nothing remained─when you put it that way it sounded pretty deep. But honestly, it was just a mathematical trick.
“Huh,” Karen grunted. “Let me give it a try… Uh, wait…I’ve got three left over.”
“How can you mess up single-digit division? What a waste of a neat piece of trivia.”
And so on.
And so forth.
As described above, around noon on August fourteenth, on our way to the Kanbaru residence, I was engaged in an unproductive, harmless, and not particularly interesting conversation with Karen, on whose shoulders I sat─
When at the same vantage point more than seven feet off the ground─
Another point of view suddenly presented itself before me.
“You, fiendish young man─there’s something I’m keen to ask. Can you spare a moment?”
The tallest person I’ve ever met, it goes without saying, is Dramaturgy, the vampire hunter. In addition to his seven feet, thanks to the traumatically terrible impression he left, I recall him as being closer to eight or even ten feet tall.
To be precise, whether or not Dramaturgy qualifies as a person is open to debate…
In any case, if you’re wondering if she, who had appeared before my eyes, rivaled even Dramaturgy in height, that is not in fact the case. Purely in terms of stature, she didn’t look much taller or shorter than me.
She was merely propped on top of something that added to her natural height─just as I was propped atop Karen’s shoulders.
This person was─standing on a mailbox.
“I’m fixing to get to Eikow Cram School. Can you tell a body how to get there?”
Kyoto dialect─and not the pidgin accent my sister Tsukihi slipped into, confused, in the morning. From what I could tell, it was the genuine article.
The shorthaired woman wore a cool, detached expression.
She looked to be about in her late twenties. She was clothed in a muted pants and top, with a striped inner and a pair of classy, heelless shoes. Overall her outfit was clean and prim, like something a grade school teacher might wear─there was nothing particularly unusual about her.
That is, of course, if you ignored the fact that she was standing on a mailbox.
“Umm…”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. For some reason, I sensed that the comic-relief stretch was coming to an end.
Enough fun and games?
Was playtime over?
Well, after more than a hundred manuscript pages of goofing off, even I was starting to feel a little full.
“Hey, fiendish young man,” the woman said. Still in Kyoto dialect, her words sounded pushy, but her expression was laidback. “Didn’t your folk rear you to be kind to a body in trouble?”
“Um, well…”
I was at a loss for words. Of course, I had been taught to be nice to people in trouble, but the lady didn’t really look to be in trouble. And I certainly wasn’t taught to be nice to people who stand on mailboxes.
If anything, I needed to tell her to stop that.
On the other hand, though I wasn’t standing on a mailbox, I was perched on the shoulders of my sister, a middle schooler. It was the fair outcome of a fair match, but the unlikely situation was hard to justify. To an objective observer, at least, treating a mailbox as a stepping-stone was somewhat preferable to putting your little sister to like use.
You couldn’t fault the woman for calling me fiendish. In fact, it was sort of impressive that she’d asked me for directions.
“I’m Yozuru Kagenui─have you heard of me?” the lady introduced herself out of the blue.
Usually, you didn’t introduce yourself just to ask directions (nor did you stand on a mailbox─but maybe neither was as unusual as making your little sister carry you around). Was this lady famous enough to receive special treatment when she gave her name?
If she was, her fame rivaled an actress or politician’s.
She didn’t look like either.
Being pretty clueless about both celebrities and politics, however, I didn’t have much faith in my judgment. Maybe I was facing a VIP.
I glanced down at Karen to check her reaction.
“……”
A blank slate.
Hmm. Come to think of it, Karen was just as clueless when it came to celebrities and politics.
Tsukihi would have been a different story. She was practically glued to the TV─though your middle-school sister being familiar with the ins and outs of politics in addition to show business would be less endearing than freaky.
I took another glance at the lady─at Yozuru Kagenui.
She did have a pretty face.
Was she a pop star known for her Kyoto dialect?
Or maybe a politician known for her Kyoto dialect? Well, most politicians from there probably spoke that way, so there’d be nothing unique about that.
It wouldn’t do not to introduce myself in turn.
“I’m Koyomi Araragi,” I replied for the time being.
“I’m Karen Araragi,” my sister followed suit. Just when I thought she was a good girl who knew her manners, she continued, “Some folks choose to call me one of the Fire Sisters, but what can I say.”
To my great dismay, my sister was the sort of oaf who shared her nickname with a complete stranger. The fact that she worded it like it was gossip made it even more cringeworthy. To begin with, it was mostly just my sisters calling themselves that.
“Hmm… A fiendish older brother─and the little sister a hornet. Amusing.”
“……”
Huh? Did she just say─hornet?
“Hyahaha. But that looks to be settled now, so I’ll not stir that pot. Well? I hate to keep jawing on about this, but do you know where Eikow Cram School is, or not?”
“Oh, uh…”
Ei…kow… Eikow Cram School…
Unfortunately, I’d never heard of it… There were a few cram schools near the train station, maybe it was one of those. Should I just point her in that direction?
She did look like she was traveling.
On closer inspection, her hair appeared to be lightened slightly, so at the very least she didn’t seem to be a local.
No one in our town dyed our hair. I doubt you could even buy hair dye around here.
When Karen turned hers pink on a lark way back when, apparently she’d done it with regular paint. It was colored over with India ink, so it must have been a crazy marbled mess right afterwards.
As middle-school debuts go, it was a straightforward blunder, and I imagine she still winces at the memory─unless she’s forgotten about it completely.
Dying her hair on a whim, chopping it off on another. My sister loves to trash her equivalent of life.
“Let me see, just a second,” I muttered.
There was no reason for me to go to too much trouble just because I was asked for directions─she was an adult, after all. Wouldn’t it actually be rude if a kid like me acted like she was helpless? I mean, she could just use the GPS on her cell phone.
But perhaps, like a certain someone who used to live in our town, Kagenui sucked at anything tech. Perhaps she belonged to the rotary-phone generation (←a most definitely rude thought).
I glanced down at Karen again, but she was keeping quiet, happy to let me deal with the situation all on my own. While she was very much the philanthropic type and didn’t begrudge an act of kindness to a stranger, this wasn’t the kind of issue that could be solved through violence, which rendered her useless.
Sheesh, what sort of defender of justice did that make her…
“Just a second,” I said. “One of my friends is a wondergirl who knows where all the cram schools in the country are located.”
At the end of the day, I was about as useless as Karen.
When in trouble, rely on Hanekawa.
Tsubasa Hanekawa, my classmate and our class president. A model student among model students boasting top scores in the national mock exams─no, who didn’t even boast about it because she was in a league of her own.
She’d helped me in all sorts of ways since I met her during spring break. In fact, this summer vacation too, she was helping me all the time, in the progressive tense, as my tutor for college entrance exams─from dawn to dusk, good morning to good night, even in my dreams.
I did ask her to take Obon off, though.
Still, like Kanbaru, although for entirely different reasons, Hanekawa had no hometown to return to─and was probably at the library focusing on her own studies at the moment.
It was time for a phone call!
A phone call to Miss Hanekawa!
Oh lucky day!
You might consider me a nuisance for calling my savior, Tsubasa Hanekawa, over such a trivial matter, but trivial matters are what I want to discuss most with Hanekawa!
At least…
At least it was better than getting her embroiled in something serious like what happened last time.
That said, I needed to keep the call brief today and cut out the chitchat. This part of the story didn’t feel like a comic-relief sequence. I just had to ask where Eikow Cram School was, and frankly, to hear her voice.
“Yes, this is Hanekawa. Araragi? Are you studying like you’re supposed to? You’re not slacking off? Ah, good. Me? Of course. I’m just doing some light lunchtime learning.”
Lunchtime learning… It sounded like a segment on a TV show.
Despite her nation-leading scores, Hanekawa had no intention of applying to college, so these were probably private studies.
“Private studies” was some phrase when I thought about it…
Hmm. It was noon, the hottest time of day. Was Miss Hanekawa only wearing a single, thin layer without a bra for her private studies? Maybe she just got out of the shower, and her hair was all wet and slick─
“Araragi, you’re not thinking dirty thoughts, are you?” she quipped on cue. I swear, she had ESP. I couldn’t even fantasize safely. “Also, it sounds like you’re outside. Are you sure you’re studying?”
So sharp.
Well, I wasn’t slacking off, though. I made sure to finish my morning drills before leaving, and I meant to get back home and study once I dropped Karen off at Kanbaru’s.
“Also, Araragi, it sounds like you’re speaking from a position about three feet higher than usual. Please tell me you’re not making Karen carry you on her shoulders?”
Too sharp!
This was getting into horror territory!
I mean, hold on. Did a few feet really change how your voice sounded? It wasn’t like I was talking to her face to face, so my voice wasn’t coming from overhead or anything… Sure, voice is sound, and since sound is vibrating air, I guess a change in air pressure would alter your voice… But did another person’s worth of height make for such a drastic change?
