by Nisioisin
By the way, our shared sensations only went one way, from me to Shinobu. It didn’t work in the other direction. If Karen kneed me, the damage was reflected on Shinobu, but if I caressed Shinobu’s flat chest, there’d be no feedback.
An awful example, but ease of understanding is the priority here.
“What? Parley? You’re always doing this,” I complained. “Whenever I want you to come out you never show, but as soon as you see me starting to do something, you decide to pop out. Who are you, the reverse Bob in a Bottle? ‘You don’t sneeze, I don’t please, that’s the way it goes’?”
“I think I’d be Illana,” Shinobu said, finally recovering. For a former aristocratic vampire, she was oddly steeped in Japanese culture.
Oshino’s elite tutoring had produced dramatic results in a very short period of time, but a slight imbalance was observable due to the forced cultivation.
“My lord and master, ’tis only natural that I do not appear at the hour of thy choosing. Our daily cycles are opposite.”
“Oh yeah, you’re a night person.”
That was a funny concept to apply to a vampire, but they hated the sun and loved the moon. It was ingrained behavior, a survival instinct that she couldn’t help but maintain even after ceasing to be a vampire.
Just the way humans fear fire.
A phony term like “night person” that belonged to human culture was far too paltry to describe a true creature of the night.
“Aye, I am a night person.”
“……”
Shinobu, where is your vampire pride?
Says the guy who took it away from her.
“But what about now?” I asked her. “It’s broad daylight. Heck, this is probably the time of day when the sun is strongest.”
“Aye. I would appreciate a little sunscreen. And mayhap a pair of sunglasses. My eyes blister.”
“Okay…” I don’t know, lately Shinobu seemed to be turning into a sad-sack cartoon vampire. Before long she’d be drinking tomato juice instead of blood.
“I obviously have a fair reason for dragging myself awake at this hour.”
“A fair reason? I don’t know what that might be, but I recall you interfering with my perfectly innocent attempt to canoodle with Hachikuji. Why should I parley with you about anything?”
“Hmph. As someone in the same category, I could not look the other way. Maybe while I sleep, but I was awake.”
The same category.
Was that the Lolita category?
“Can’t it wait until later?” I requested. “Until after I get a little studying done?”
“’Tis a thorny matter. It importunes fast action.”
“What… Fine, tell me.”
I was such a softy.
I wasn’t even pouncing on an excuse to slack off… I was actually beginning to enjoy studying (Hanekawa’s doing).
But I guess Shinobu was my weak point.
My biggest complex, you might say.
Though it was in my shadow, we were basically together around the clock. We had to get along going forward, so it was important to meet each other half way.
I swiveled my chair back around and faced Shinobu, who now spoke in a grave tone.
“According to intelligence I have become privy to through channels most secret, Mister Donut is holding a hundred-yen sale this very moment.”
“……”
Hey. Her secret channel was clearly just the ad that came with the paper. I’d seen it too.
“My lord and master, pray let us depart immediately before they sell out.”
“Calm down, those kind of stores don’t sell out so easily…”
I couldn’t believe she was interfering with my studies for this. Shinobu’s love for Mister was a tradition that stemmed from her days in the abandoned building with Oshino, but she was graduating from passive waiting and getting proactive about it.
She sure had gotten lowbrow, fast. At least seek blood instead of donuts.
I’d often used them as bait to lure her out like a crawdad on a fishing pole when she’d sunk into my shadow and refused to come out, but all that over-fishing was taking its toll.
She’d become picky about food.
“The talk in certain quarters,” she informed me, “is that there are new specials. We must make forth on this.”
“Certain quarters… This source of yours just consists of store flyers. Quit pretending like you’ve got some vast network. Did you drag yourself awake just to tell me that? It couldn’t wait until tonight?”
She’d even obstructed my rendezvous with Hachikuji.
That was her fair reason? Then my best guess as to why there’d been no reaction from my shadow after Ononoki left was that the former vampire had simply been dozing off.
True, when I thought about it, Mister Donut was already closed during Shinobu’s regular waking hours.
“Fine, fine, I get it,” I said. “I’ll go buy you some before dinner. It’ll be a nice break for me. You like the golden chocolate flavor, right?”
“Nay.”
Shinobu shook her head emphatically, obstinately.
Hmm?
I could have sworn that’s what she told me─was I mistaken? I remembered thinking golden like her hair, so I was almost positive it was golden chocolate…unless there were others in the golden line at Mister Donut that I just wasn’t aware of?
But that wasn’t why Shinobu had shaken her head. She had a terrible request to make of me.
“Ye can take me to the store. I wish to see them with my own eyes and choose for myself.”
“……”
Right, if she just wanted me to buy them, she could have left a note. She’d fought off her drowsiness to appear in the middle of the day because she hoped to make a personal visit.
“It’s pretty bright outside,” I warned. “Are you sure you can handle it?”
“Perhaps my eyes sting a little. But I am hardly a proper vampire now─not even sunscreen, but a simple bonnet, should be more than adequate.”
“Huh…”
Maybe for her, but not for me─well, I say that, but I suspected Shinobu might request something like this soon. I guess the day had come.
Parley my ass, baby girl. She just wanted to be spoiled.
Like I said, I knew Mister Donut was hosting a hundred-yen sale─I’d seen the same ad that Shinobu had. I actually meant to pick some up soon.
Shinobu was probably pestering me like this right now because this morning, just in time (a late “night” for her), she’d witnessed me giving in to my usually hostile sister.
Just as she’d imitated the sleeper hold, she must have figured I was an easy mark. The fool, she must have thought, he is in a happy dream and his guard is down just because his sister was affectionate to him.
Shinobu was a crafty one.
Hrmm.
Perhaps as an act of largesse to commemorate Senjogahara’s rebirth, I could honor such a minor request.
But Shinobu stood out, so I didn’t like to take her outside. On top of her blondness and foreignness drawing attention, she was as pretty as a doll. In a way it was worse than chatting with Hachikuji.
In all honesty, if we’re being truthful, turning down her bratty request was a simple matter… We had a strange master-servant relationship where each of us was simultaneously the other’s master and slave, but strictly in terms of the chain of command, I stood on top.
That authority was unimaginably coercive. I’d experimented in a variety of ways, but at present, it seemed that Shinobu Oshino was well and truly subservient to Koyomi Araragi.
It was more than just a right of command but a wholesale transfer of rights. Vampire rules were frightening.
So if I answered her with a flat-out no, Shinobu had no choice but to back down. My potent authority, however, meant that I shouldn’t wield it casually, and I couldn’t brush away her requests. In a way, power that was too powerful was vulnerable. Strength could be weakness.
“It would behoove thee to grant my suit, would it not? Ye may not want me to meddle always in your trysts with the pigtailed maidling.”
“Hah, you’re taking her hostage?! My beloved Hachikuji?! You scoundrel!” Well, actually, she wasn’t taking her hostage but into protective custody. “But you forget… I usually run into Hachikuji during the day. Do you think you can stay up forever? Two or three days maybe, but always?”
“Hmph, ye have a point.” Shinobu folded her arms. Vampire appetites were fierce, and that extended to sleep. Desire came first for them.
“Besides, you’re underestimating me. I’m not the kind of guy to bow to threats.”
“Fine, then I have another notion for thee. With my unstinting aid, thou could have thy way with the little maidling.”
“Urk. That’s a pretty attractive offer.”
A little girl’s human rights were being trampled on with relish in a nondescript room in an ordinary house. It was a horror story. Or did Hachikuji have no human rights?
“Keheheh. ’Tis a sweet thought, is it not? Abetted by my special power, thou could fulfill thy erotic urges with all the maids of the land, her included.”
“Nrk… You’re tempting me.”
Right, Shinobu looked like a little girl, but she was Draculina underneath. There was a succubus element to her, and she didn’t particularly balk at sexual topics. If her appetite for food and sleep were so strong, that only made sense.
Dammit… I was kind of all over the place at the time, but why hadn’t I noticed over spring break when she was her adult version and in grownup mode?!
I would never stop lamenting that bitter past, that grave misstep.
“Hm? But Shinobu, you’ve lost most of your vampiric skills. What could you possibly do? In general you can’t use your ‘special powers,’ can you?”
Energy drain and not much else, wasn’t it?
In a broad sense, that was just her version of eating.
I wasn’t going to let her snack on Hachikuji, my forever-preserved rations.
“Let us see…” Shinobu knitted her brow.
She looked perplexed. Once upon a time she’d been a legendary vampire capable of extraordinary, omnipotent feats. She seemed overwhelmed in the face of her current powerlessness.
“I could conceal myself in thy shadow…and peep up her skirt from the ground to spy out the color of her underwear,” she suggested feebly, and it was indeed a shabby plan.
The whole thing stank of small potatoes and was beginning to make me sad.
“Aye, call it underpants transparency!”
“Using administrative lingo doesn’t make it any more persuasive, okay?” I sighed. “Enough already, I get it. The stars just have it out for me today. I’ll take you to Mister Donut.”
I was probably wasting way more time arguing with her like this, anyway─and it wasn’t just that it was getting too sad for me, although that was of course the main reason. Now that I thought about it, I had something I wanted to ask Shinobu, myself.
She’d ignored me earlier─but Yotsugi Ononoki. And Yozuru Kagenui. I wanted to ask her about them.
Even if she’d been half-asleep, if those two were somebody, then Shinobu would have sensed something.
As an aberration among aberrations, the king of aberrations─the aberration slayer that she was.
“Fool, ye fell for my gilded words!”
“Geez, tell me how you really feel, why don’t you? Anyway, I’ll signal for you once I’m outside the store. I’m gonna go by bike so you can stay in my shadow until we get there. You probably don’t want to be out in the sun any longer than you have to, right?”
“Aye, the sun is my enemy.”
“Your enemy.”
“One day I shall vanquish it.”
“……”
She may have been small potatoes, but she still thought big for sure.
“It should only take me about half an hour to get there, so try and stay up that long.”
“Fret not. While I wait, I shall play my Nintendo DS in thy shadow.”
“……”
She had a Nintendo DS in there? I didn’t realize my shadow came equipped with a four-dimensional pocket. Think of all the extra storage space.
“Nay, I cannot bring in any material items. The only substance that can enter thy shadow is my own flesh.”
“So how do you have a DS in there?”
“I have the ability to create matter, so a game device is simple enough. For my model, I used the one ye borrowed from the maiden with the forelocks like Yo Nihiruda.”
“How do you even know the leader in that program?”
Sengoku, she meant.
Anyways, now it made sense… Shinobu could create clothes for herself. A game device should be easy enough, and in fact, Sengoku had lent me her DS a little while back.
When I went to her place before to hang out, she only had old consoles like the MSX 2 and the MZ-721, so I assumed she wasn’t interested in more recent games. I happened to mention, though, that I wanted to try out the Nintendo DS because I heard there was a lot of educational software for it. The very next day she lent me her DS along with the software.
So you had one all along, I thought.
It did bother me how it looked strangely new and sparkling, as if it had been bought just the day before. In any case, I used it to study for a little while afterward.
I’d already returned it, but it had been such a huge help that as a thank-you I promised to take her to the pool someday soon.
Cute, wasn’t it? That’s where she begged me to take her. She was still just a kid, I guess.
Oh yeah, she also asked me to be her acting coach for the class play they were putting on for her school talent show. I’d have to do that for her over summer vacation, too.
……
You know, I’m not sure why, but sometimes I got this feeling that enemies were pressing close to the gates─this creeping feeling that something was hot on my heels, driving me into a corner. Like a forest of established facts was rising around me…
All I did was borrow a DS from one of my sister’s friends, but from a distance, did I look like I was in danger?
“Alas, it is only in thy shadow that I can play with the concocted DS─I still cannot draw my powers while outside. Until later.”
With that, Shinobu dove into my shadow.
Honestly, if she could make a gaming device, couldn’t she make herself Mister Donut snacks as well?
I guess it just didn’t work that way. Self-sufficiency might be the cornerstone of life, but sometimes food only tasted good because someone else prepared it for you.
In any case, off I go.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel abused, but since I wasn’t being subjected to domestic violence from Senjogahara anymore, all things considered, I hadn’t met much misfortune lately. If I didn’t strike a balance like this, I’d be a no-goodnik who spent all his time harassing gargantuan little sisters and lost little girls.
I had to shore up my favorability rating. I could certainly chauffeur a vampire.
I got out of my seat, changed from my around-the-house clothes back into my outside clothes, grabbed the key to my bicycle lock, left my room, and went down the stairs─and bumped into Tsukihi walking down the hallway.
Hrmph. Bad timing. I was hoping to sneak out without her seeing me.
She’d just bathed.
The heat must have been too much for her, and she’d decided to take a shower after lunch─Tsukihi had a strong metabolism and tended to sweat easily.
Incidentally, both our parents worked, even over Obon and New Year’s, so during summer vacation my sisters and I had to make our own lunch. I’d wedded Karen off to Kanbaru and also had my fill there, so Tsukihi had managed on her own, cooking and then cleaning up all by herself. Self-sufficiency, indeed. As a member of her school’s tea ceremony club (?), cooking and housework came easily to her.
If you thought, That’s par
for the course for the Fire Sisters, however, you lose… The other half of the duo, Karen, is as horrendous a cook as you might expect (her cleaning skills are okay).
Anyway, Tsukihi must have headed for the shower after doing the dishes.
Talk about relaxed.
A fan of traditional Japanese attire, she was dressed in a yukata and holding a washcloth in one hand, her skin supple and faintly rosy from the hot water. She was plodding along her house’s hallway like she was at some kind of hot springs.
