Over the Dimension

by Jin (Shizen no Teki-P)

  The concept reminded me of the anime on TV in the afternoons, the one with that kid and the monsters that flew out of the capsules he tossed around. I liked how the smaller ones would transform into bigger ones, or sometimes they’d combine together to form more complex monsters. I remembered being enamored by the show as a kid. In fact, didn’t I draw basically nothing but the creatures from that anime back then? Yeah. I came up with a few original beasts of my own, too.

  …This could work. If she didn’t mind creatures like that being the enemies in this game, I could come up with some ideas. In fact, maybe twenty in a single afternoon wasn’t such a dream after all.

  “Yeah…Thanks, Takane. I think I can make something out of this!”

  I put my fist in the air. Takane snorted approvingly in response.

  “Well, get to it! Can’t have any kinks ruin our festival, y’know.”

  Our plan for the school festival was to create a sort of competitive shooting game. Instead of trying to reach a certain point total, challengers would try to amass a higher score than the class champion, i.e. Takane.

  The reason we opted for these rules was because we had only one prize to give away—a single taxidermy specimen of a fish that Mr. Tateyama spent our entire festival budget on. With that in mind, if even a single challenger won, that would be the end of our event right there. It’d turn into an awkwardly gloomy school festival real quick if that ever happened.

  This meant that we couldn’t afford to give away our prize until the very end of the festival. But if we set the requirements too high, the potential for customer complaints unnerved me.

  That’s where Takane’s “competitive” idea came from. As she put it, “If a cute girl like me is their opponent, nobody’s gonna whine about losing that much.” From a social aspect, she had a point, I supposed. That still meant it’d be all over if she lost, but Takane was so confident in her skills that, as long as she didn’t go easy on anyone, she’d never lose. So she claimed, anyway.

  So, really, the atmosphere around the class right then was, more or less, “We could spend all day counting the things we’re freaking out about, but it’s not gonna help get them done.”

  We had to make a shooting game in one week for the school festival. We had no time and very few people to work with. I thought it was ridiculous to even attempt it, but it was weird, how I felt about it all:

  It totally thrilled me.

  “Yeah…Let’s make this the best show we can, Takane.”

  “Well, duh. That’s the only thing we can do.”

  Takane grinned at me. I could feel my own lips doing the same.

  “…Oh right,” she continued, clapping her hands suddenly. She’d clearly remembered something or other as she looked down at me. “What should we call this, anyway? You said you’d think about it yesterday.”

  Oh. Yeah, I did. I forgot to tell her…I retrieved a file from my bag and handed Takane a single piece of drawing paper from it.

  “Huh? What’s that—? Whoa! you drew a logo? Wow, you really can do stuff like this! Um, let’s see…”

  I’d spent much of the previous night coming up with a suitable title, but now that I thought about it, Takane would be the first person to actually say it aloud.

  How would it sound, coming out of her mouth? It kind of excited me.

  Holding the paper straight up, the rock music still leaking out from around her neck, Takane gave it a try.

  “…Headphone Actor.”

  I suddenly noticed the sound of the second hand on the bedroom wall clock, forcing its way into the silence.

  Looking up, I saw that it was one in the morning.

  Must’ve nodded off for a bit…

  I leaned against my seat’s backrest and stretched my arms up. The chair, a new gift for this school year, creaked in response. Come to think of it, I had grown a little the last time I measured my height, hadn’t I? Not that I need much more of it. Why did my body keep doing that, anyway? It made me stand out too much; I kept running into things…There was nothing at all good about it.

  Shifting my weight from the backrest to the seat, I groggily rubbed my eyes, my vision blurring out as I did. My desk, lit up by a small lamp, had a nature encyclopedia taken from the shelf and a piece of drawing paper on it, littered with eraser shavings. In the center of it was Meowtarus, the last enemy I had finished drawing. Number nineteen.

  “…Nice. Yeah, this works.”

  I really had to hand it to Takane, I suppose.

  After all those hours spent hemming and hawing over character design, the simple suggestion to base them off animals was like tapping into the mother lode in my imagination. I figured I did a good job of reflecting the unique traits of each animal I picked for my rogue’s gallery. They all seemed to come alive on my drawing paper, although that was probably just the pride of their creator coming to the surface.

  As I worked, the whole process grew more and more fun. I could barely stop my hand from moving, it all went so well. I couldn’t even guess how long it had been since I’d lost myself in drawing. It felt great.

  “Well, one more, and that’ll be twenty. Man, Takane’s gonna go nuts once she sees how fast I’m going…”

  She didn’t look it, but you could actually excite her pretty easily. I salivated at the thought of what kind of reaction she’d have. Just imagining the look of shock on her face made my cheeks warm up a little. She had yet to give me so much as a compliment, but maybe this portfolio would change her mind a little.

  Mulling this over filled me with creative juices despite the late hour. Right. Time to tackle the last guy. My breathing accelerated as I turned to the next page in the encyclopedia.

  “…Huh. That’s weird.”

  The page had stopped on a cow. I already covered that with “Heiferheave,” number eleven, so that wasn’t going to work. Did I skip a page when I wasn’t paying attention? I turned the page again, but I already used the bear on that one for my “Bear-Rilla” hybrid (number three), so that wasn’t going to work either.

  …Hang on.

  Struck by an eerie foreboding, I brought the encyclopedia closer and turned to the table of contents, scanning the list of animals running down the page. Dog, hawk, pig, turtle. Dahh! I knew it!

  “Aw, man, I already referenced all the animals in here…”

  Well, that was careless of me. I still had one monster to make, but I had used up all the animals in this book as a motif. Now what? I had already declared to myself that I was drawing twenty monsters before I stopped. I couldn’t just say “Sorry, can’t do it” now.

  What’s more, the final monster was supposed to be the last boss, so to speak. A creature stronger than any of the characters that came before it. I couldn’t approach this the same way as the others.

  Ugh. If I had known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have been so gung-ho about combining characteristics from different animals into each one. I mean, come on—Bear-Rilla? Why didn’t I just stick with one or the other?

  As my mind spiraled down this nonsensical pit of insecurity, I heard a ringtone boom across the room. Turning, I saw my phone blinking from the middle of the bed. I hurried over to pick it up, taking another look at the wall clock. Still one a.m. Who’d be calling now?

  I brought the phone to my ear, not bothering to check the number.

  “Um, hello?”

  “Oh, I figured you’d be awake. Sorry I’m calling so late.”

  It was Mr. Tateyama. He didn’t sound too flustered, but there was still a bit of awkwardness to it. I sat down on the bed and stretched my legs a little to get comfortable.

  “Oh, no, it’s fine…but is something up?”

  “Mm? Well, uh, just something about the school festival.” He sounded evasive. “Something” about the festival? What? Before I could ask, he dove straight into his story. “Hey, so I heard from Takane that you were working late last night on this, too, huh? So…uh, I just thought maybe you were pushing yourself hard again ton
ight.”

  Oh. That sort of thing. I tried to sound as bright as possible in response.

  “No, no, there’s nothing hard about it. In fact, it’s so much fun, it feels like my body’s moving by itself.”

  It wasn’t a lie, either. That was exactly how I wanted to describe how smoothly things were going. But I also knew that wasn’t the main point of my teacher’s question.

  As expected, Mr. Tateyama continued, clearly having trouble finding the right words to frame his topic.

  “Well, yeah, but there’s no point destroying your body over this, y’know? If you wanna enjoy the day of the festival at all, it’s important that you rest up when you—”

  “…You really don’t have to worry, Mr. Tateyama,” I interrupted before he could finish. Instead of replying, my teacher gave a small sigh.

  The silence continued for a moment, making the clock’s second hand seem even louder than usual. The well-regulated rhythm of its click, click, click was a little creepy. I don’t know how or when that got started, but it did.

  Speaking of seconds, I managed to calculate it in the back of my mind once. I only had about 30 million seconds left. That made it sound like a long time, one would think, but it’s weird how hard it was to estimate time lengths unless you actually experienced them for yourself.

  Ugh. It’s late. I couldn’t keep him on the phone forever. I decided to just tell Mr. Tateyama point-blank what I wanted to say.

  “I mean, whether I rest or not, I’ve got one year to go before I die.”

  My illness certainly liked sticking to a schedule, at least.

  When it killed my mother, it apparently waited until the exact moment the doctors said it would in their diagnosis. And they said “one year,” so I figured, hey, that’s about what I had to look forward to, too. For now, at least, nothing about it made me whine or cry about my fate. I probably had my father to thank for that.

  My father was a fairly offbeat kind of guy.

  He worked at one research lab or another, and for as long as I knew, he always played life straight and narrow—no lying, no telling jokes, nothing like that. But it was still a huge shock when he came up to me, right around when I was ten, looked at me with a straight face, and said, “You’re probably going to die six years from now.”

  We still lived together, the two of us, but my father was so busy with work that we rarely saw much of each other. So a live-in helper handled things like food and hospital trips for me instead.

  That was about all I knew about my father, really, but from what I’d heard, my father had begun to turn a little…“odd,” as people said, around the time my mother died.

  Thinking over all those various things—sure, I’ll admit it makes it sound like I’ve lived a pretty lonely life. I spent a lot of it by myself, and there’s still a lot I’m totally incapable of.

  I had more than my fair share of middle-aged women I’d never met before shed tears and say things like “you poor, poor child,” so I imagined that was probably what most people thought about me.

  But really, I didn’t think my life was all that bad.

  Lately, especially, there’d been a lot more to enjoy about school. There were things I actually wanted to do now.

  Talking about how I had x months to live or whatever…Look, you could die in a car accident tomorrow, for all anyone knew. There was never a guarantee that you’d live out your natural lifespan.

  It was just that…something about the sound of “one year to go” really hit home for me. It meant that this upcoming school festival would also serve as my last student festival.

  I didn’t think there was any point in volunteering to run this shooting-game thing if there was a chance we couldn’t do it. Now, though, we actually did have a chance.

  “So, you know, I really wanna work hard for this festival.”

  Mr. Tateyama groaned wearily in response. It wasn’t the kind of thing he could’ve just shrugged off with, “Ooh, that’s rough. Hang in there, kiddo” or whatever. How could he? If I were him, I’d probably have trouble responding to that, too. Sorry to put you in the hot seat like this, I guess.

  But Mr. Tateyama never scolded me or said “Just deal with it” or anything. I think I had a good idea why he didn’t, too.

  “…Mr. Tateyama, you said you were trying to look all gung ho around the administrator. That was kind of a lie, wasn’t it?”

  My teacher didn’t respond. So I continued.

  “You had to say that to motivate Takane to take action, didn’t you? And if she wasn’t on board, I would’ve just said ‘Forget about it’ so I wouldn’t rock the boat. You created that whole setup on purpose, didn’t you?”

  I’d actually spotted Mr. Tateyama speaking to the school administrator in the hallway once. How would I describe the conversation? It was…grim. Stormy. The administrator was a no-nonsense, results-oriented kind of guy, apparently, and he was spouting off buzzwords like “advancement rate” and “applicant appeal” and so on like a machine gun. Mr. Tateyama had withstood this barrage silently before replying with two or three clearly hostile parting words and storming off.

  That whole episode made it hard to imagine Mr. Tateyama bowing his head at the administrator, trying to curry his favor all of a sudden.

  Takane liked trashing his good name now and again, but Mr. Tateyama was a nice teacher. He looked out for us. The whole reason I made it into this school was because my father was an old acquaintance of his, and when it came down to it, he was the only grown-up I was able to discuss my problems with.

  Whether it was actually true or not, the only thing I could picture was that Mr. Tateyama had deliberately tried to create a situation where Takane and I worked together to join the school festival.

  “Besides, it takes a lot of money to make a game,” I said. “Like, a lot more than our budget would’ve allowed even if you didn’t spend it all beforehand. You aren’t blowing a ton of money on this for our sakes, are you?”

  Mr. Tateyama laughed. “Hey, I’m not as charitable a guy as you apparently think. Also, I really did try to impress the administrator. He’s got such a stick up his ass about our class, I just couldn’t help myself any longer.”

  “Ha-ha-ha…Now, that I can imagine. But Mr. Tateyama, if you’re putting it that way…”

  My pressing him for an answer apparently convinced Mr. Tateyama that the jig was up. After a pause, he began to speak.

  “Well, yeah, what’d you think it was? There ain’t a teacher out there with at least some kind of expectations for his students…’Course, like it or not, we got only a week to work with. I hope you’re ready to give this the best shot we can, Haruka.”

  “…I’ll do what I can!”

  “Give it our best shot”—I liked that term. It felt awfully close to “Keep on living,” in my mind. I suppose I knew already that I couldn’t accomplish all that much in a year’s time. There wasn’t any world travel on my schedule, and I was too young to get married anyway.

  But moreover, the idea that I could reach some sort of present goal if I just applied myself enough felt like more of a blessing than anything else in my life.

  “Right…Whoa, it’s already one, huh? You going to bed now?”

  “Um, yeah…I guess I oughta. I was up late last night, too, and I’m startin’ to lose steam pretty fast…”

  Then I remembered.

  Wait a second. I need an idea for my twentieth character.

  I still hadn’t thought up anything useful.

  Keeping the phone to my ear, I stood up and looked at my desk. I couldn’t rely on that nature encyclopedia any longer. What else could I find for inspiration…?

  “…Oh!”

  An idea struck me that made me exclaim aloud. “Whoa,” responded a startled Mr. Tateyama. “I thought you were conking out on me! Something going on?”

  Riiiight. Mr. Tateyama might just have it, actually. In fact, he must have. That was part of his job. But I don’t know…Would he get angry at me?


  Well, might as well ask.

  “Um, could I ask you a favor, maybe?”

  “Sure. What is it?”

  “Do you have a picture of Takane I could borrow?”

  LOST DAYS · 2

  It had been about ten minutes since I began walking down the footpath, which was laden with a colorful array of red and yellow leaves. The feel of them crunching under every step was nicely refreshing.

  I pulled along a fairly hefty overnight bag, but between the leaves and the pleasant weather, I couldn’t have felt better, in both mind and body.

  It was a pleasant off-day, but I wasn’t making my way to some kind of spa or idyllic resort. I was barely passing by anyone, in fact. In a neighborhood as quiet as this one, most of the people I did spot were well into their golden years. Giving each one of them a friendly nod, I dodged an advancing baby stroller as I proceeded on toward Mr. Tateyama’s house.

  We had only six days until the school festival, and I had agreed to stay over at Mr. Tateyama’s place as a sort of impromptu “crunch time” session.

  The reasoning was simple. My teacher had the computer and accessories needed to scan, color, and edit the graphics for the game.

  Mr. Tateyama mentioned he used to make “indie” games during some long-forgotten point in the past, and either way, I could never afford all the equipment to work on this. So I was borrowing it—but I couldn’t exactly lug that stuff back home with me, and it’d be rude anyway.

  Once we started talking about Takane’s photograph, we wound up getting sidetracked into all kinds of other topics. Eventually our plans escalated enough to warrant a work sleepover.

  “Umm, turn right at the post office…”

  Rounding the corner at a small post office as my teacher instructed, I was greeted by the full force of the autumn sun, previously blocked by the trees that lined the footpath. It was fall, but if I kept walking in this direct sunlight, it might just be enough to give me a tan. Not that I’d mind. I always wanted a little more color on my skin, but I never had much of a chance to work on it.