I muttered and hummed and tried to work my way through the case all the way home from school. For all intents and purposes, there was nothing I could do for my sister at this stage.
Incidentally, I had to wonder: was teaching my sister to play games for her sake? Or mine? She seemed pretty into it, but I had difficulty picturing my little sister getting into shooters and being a lifelong gamer like me. To her, video games were just one more way to pass the time.
See, here’s the thing. I felt too frustrated to just sit and wait out these two months. Even if I tried to put a positive spin on it, I couldn’t give myself a pat on the back for, what—convincing her to go back to school eventually? (Although that sounded like something Ajisai-san would say.) I really hadn’t done anything. Was there nothing I could do?
Like, what if I just straight-up asked her what the deal was? Okay, never mind. She’d just go, “Would you get off my case? I’m trying to study.” Which made sense. Testing season was just around the corner. But man…I don’t know, I thought.
I flashed my commuter pass to get through the ticket gate and went out to the train platform. My sister still weighed on my mind as I started to pace up and down. Just then, I noticed a girl slumped lifelessly against one of the pillars.
I yelped and ran over to her. This looked all too familiar—especially the silver hair! This could only be one girl!
“Lucie-chan?” I exclaimed. “What are you doing here?” She moaned, and I cried, “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”
I could barely hear her voice, it was so weak. She was causing a scene—okay, so my screaming wasn’t helping, but still—though she was in such a bad state I couldn’t begin to care.
Between desperate, gasping breaths, she stuttered out, “I’m hungry.”
I went silent. The only thing I had on me was the last of the pastries I bought earlier. I pulled it out of my bag and brought it to her lips. The moment it touched her mouth, she chewed it up as fast a pencil sharpener.
[Three minutes later]
“Thank you, Renako-sama,” she said. “I’m better now.”
“Good!” I said.
She stood up before me, as radiant and pretty as I remembered her. Wasn’t she on the verge of death like five minutes ago? What kinda black magic…
Anyway, I said, “What the heck’s your problem? Teenage girls don’t just collapse in the street in modern day Japan. I thought something police-worthy went down!”
“I was waiting for you to walk by,” she said. “And you did. Maybe it’s fate.”
“Don’t start talking about fate when you’re so pretty and so…close…”
“Or maybe it’s because I sit here every day for hours. That could be it,” said Lucie.
“Yeah, that sounds like our winner,” I said. “Wait, come again? You’ve been coming here every day to look for me?”
“Yes,” she said matter-of-factly. Yeah, as one does, I guess!
“Um. Why?”
Lucie-chan beamed. It was so bright I could practically see the flowers bursting into bloom right here in the station. Ack! A pretty girl!
“I wanted to play with you,” she said. She rummaged in her tote bag for a moment and pulled out a game console. I’m sorry, did I say one? I meant two. Two freaking game consoles. Hello?
“This one,” she explained.
“Um. Did you bring those from home?” I asked.
“Yes. With charged batteries too.”
She looked pleased with herself—almost too pleased—and me? Consider my gasts well and truly flabbered.
You’d have to be a total weirdo to hang out in the train station all day, hoping to catch me just to play video games. Not that she hadn’t been a weirdo before, but you get what I mean. Still, I guess it made some sense. You know, she just got to Japan, she didn’t have any friends, and she enjoyed talking with me that one time. Honestly, I felt kinda honored. I might’ve done the same thing if I’d been in her shoes. However, my whole body was screaming “Stranger danger!” and it was all I could do to mask that.
Lucie-chan fixed me with a blank stare. She looked like a robot awaiting orders.
“O-okay,” I said. “But we can’t play here. Why don’t we go to the park?”
“Okay, Renako-sama.” She picked up her bag in one hand and took mine with the other. “I’m happy to see you.”
“Y-you are, huh?”
“Yes. Because we can spend an even longer time together today. I’m happy about that.”
I still couldn’t get a read on the look in her eyes, but she was so up-front with her affection that my traitorous face took it upon itself to smile. Like, we’re all seeing this, right? This girl seemed to really, really like me. Perhaps I was her only friend here in this foreign country, and she clutched at me like a drowning man.
For whatever reason, this reminded me of back when I was in elementary school. I used to boss around my little sister’s friends (she had tons of pals even back then) like I was the neighborhood bully. I didn’t have any friends in my own age range, see. Just another part of my dark past, one I thought I’d sealed away forever.
Maybe I was so busy riding the big sister hype train that, when I couldn’t do anything for my real little sister, I’d started babying Lucie-chan instead. Maybe I was using her as a substitute little sister to prop up my own self-esteem.
I could feel Evil! Renako skulking and snickering in the shadows, so I forced a big, fake grin onto my face as I said, “Okay, here we are!”
I took Lucie-chan to the park near my house that I often stopped at on the way home. We sat down on a bench side by side.
“What game do you want to play?” I asked her, too perky.
“This one,” she said.
She started it up, and I saw that it was the latest hunting action game to get big. Its co-op play was the big draw, and it was easily accessible enough that it targeted everyone—young and old, male and female. Naturally, I hadn’t played it myself. I would play multiplayer games if they had a singleplayer mode too, but when something was billed as only multiplayer, I got kinda wigged out. Why? That’s a long story.
Junior high me looked down at the screen and scoffed. “It says I can play singleplayer, right? Which means single player. (Like, I could play with other people and get, what? Two percent of the fun? lol who would ever want to do that?) Something something gaming is for everyone—but word to the wise, gaming industry? Don’t forget your core demographic: the loners. Lol. Lmao, even.”
Shut it, you! I told her. Begone, foul specter, ye who are too stuck in your prejudiced ways! Variety is good for the gaming industry. Besides, you like party games, right? It’s good to have games you can play with friends!
“Okay!” I said. “Sounds like a plan. I’ve never played this before, so I’m hyped.”
“Yay,” said Lucie-chan.
I jabbed the power button in an effort to dispel the last of those deep-set and nonsensical convictions. I made a quick account for myself and booted the game up.
“By the way,” I said, “you didn’t just happen to have two consoles lying around, right?”
“No. I bought a new one for this.”
“A-ah. I see. That, uh, sure is a way to spend money. Actually, I know someone else who throws cash around like that. She’s so rich she can dump a couple dozen thousand yen on a game and only play it once.”
“Don’t worry,” said Lucie-chan with a beaming grin. “I charged it to my credit card.”
Wait, that was even worse! “Isn’t that still coming out of your bank account?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“It’s not a magic wand! You can’t just give it a wave and expect everything to fall into your lap for free!”
Lucie-chan looked up from the game and glanced skyward at the fluffy white clouds drifting along in the autumn breeze.
“Come to think of it, I guess I don’t know much about finances,” she admitted.
“Ah.”
On one hand: same. Me. Big mood. On the other hand, Lucie-chan was already a Full-Fledged Member of Society. How the heck was she getting by?
“You get gold every time you play a match in the game,” she said.
“T-true. The more effort you put in, the more you get out of it.”
“But this would prove unsustainable in real life, for money is not the same as endlessly reproducible digital bullion. It would lead to an oversaturation of currency in the economy, causing runaway inflation, skyrocketing costs of goods, and an eventual decline in average QOL. Right?”
“Whoa. For someone who doesn’t know much about finance, you’re quick on the draw.”
Lucie-chan put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I see,” she whispered to herself. “Money holds no inherent value. It’s just a social construct…”
At this point, she was talking things so far beyond my understanding I didn’t have the heart to ask what she meant. This girl may have been ignorant as all get out, but she connected the dots at light speed.
“Okay,” she said. “I see. I offer services of high demand and low supply, which has earned me a large amount of personal capital thus far.”
“Gotcha. The free market,” I said, flexing every buzzword I knew. I felt like a red panda standing up on its hind legs to try and look bigger and scarier than it really was. “The general theory of states and market competition something-something. That thing.”