The next weekend, we entered the Otherside using the gate in Jinbouchou for the first time in a while.
The last time we had come here was Golden Week during the T-san the Templeborn incident. Though we’d begun work on our plan to open holes in each floor of the building to create a safe route to the ground floor, all sorts of other things had since cropped up to impede construction.
Wearing work clothes and carrying suitcases, we boarded the elevator and used the usual process to access the other world. I had the sequence of buttons committed to muscle memory at this point, and could do the whole thing without thinking.
When the elevator door opened, the other world appeared before our eyes: the empty roof, the unobstructed blue sky, and the plains dotted with ruins. I’d grown used to it now, but I still couldn’t forget how overcome I was with emotion the first time we came here.
“Oh, good. It’s sunny on this side too,” Toriko said, raising her hand to the sky.
There were cases where the weather in the two worlds wasn’t fully linked. The rainy season was over in our world, but we hadn’t been so sure about what it would be like over here, so we were relieved. Though we wouldn’t get rained on once we headed down to the lower floors, I hadn’t been keen on the idea of working while it rained.
Unlike Tokyo, which was so hot I would have sworn it was in the tropics, this world was still a bit more temperate; that was likely thanks to the haze between us and the sun weakening its strength a little, as well as the wind that was blowing. With no buildings to block the wind and no air-conditioning units emitting their heat outdoors, the Otherside felt far more livable in summer.
We opened our suitcases and began pulling out construction tools. Then, after checking thoroughly to ensure that the stepladders leading down to the lower levels hadn’t come loose, we climbed down through the holes we had opened up last time to the tenth floor, then the ninth.
Our current direction for the project was to prioritize opening up holes all the way down to the first floor. There was all sorts of other stuff we wanted to do too, like opening larger holes that we could lower larger packages through, installing pulleys, and putting up a tarp on the roof to keep the rain out, but first, we wanted to just secure a safe route down. I didn’t want to risk the ten floor ladder climb up and down the side of the building anymore.
“Well, let’s get to work,” I said.
“Okay,” Toriko agreed.
Once we put on goggles and dust masks, our construction work began. As the blades of electric construction tools ate into the floor of the ninth floor, an ear-piercing shriek tore through the silence of the Otherside. There was a violent pleasure to be found in using the core drill and disc cutter to bust through reinforced concrete. It had been a while, but I quickly got the hang of it again.
We traded places several times as we continued our destruction of the building. Even though it was cool, it was still summer, so we were a mess of sweat and dust in no time. After three hours of work, drinking water and eating salt candies to fight off dehydration, we had a hole that went through to the eighth floor.
I fixed the stepladder that we had brought in place and climbed down there. This floor was just like all the others so far—empty.
“We’re making good progress,” I said. “We could get down another floor today.”
“Yep,” Toriko agreed. “Let’s break for lunch.”
The towel was white from plaster after I used it to wipe my face and neck. We headed to the surface world to eat curry and pick up drinks and ice cream at the convenience store, then came back to the Otherside. Even with the wind, we felt like we were going to dry out if we stayed out on the roof, so we went to take our afternoon nap one floor down on the tenth floor.
I woke up a little over an hour later. The wind felt nice. We’d brought a little cooler with us, so the ice cream and barley tea were still cold. With the surface world facing the hell of temperatures over thirty-three degrees day after day, it was easier to stay sane on this side.
“Sorawo, are you in a bad mood today?”
“Huh?”
I was staring vacantly at the ceiling, my bag resting under my head like a pillow, when Toriko asked a question that left me dumbfounded. On the picnic sheet, there were two empty cups of Häagen-Dazs between me and Toriko, who was lying next to me.
“Why? Do I look like it?”
“When we met this morning, you were even quieter than usual. I thought you might not be feeling well, or maybe you were sleepy, but you’ve been quiet since then too.”
“You sure do watch me closely.”
I was still impressed every time.
“So, yesterday, I was talking to my friend Benimori-san at uni,” I began to explain.
“Benimori-san. What’s she like?”
“When I was agonizing over my...relationship with you, she’s the one I went to for advice.”
“Hmm?”
“Whoa, hold up. You’re scaring me.”
“What’s so scary?”
“The way your face suddenly got all serious is way too scary.”
“What did you tell her about me?”
“Scary, scary, scary. I’ll tell you the story in order, so listen.”
“I am listening, okay?”
Even as I faltered under this unexpected pressure, I explained. I told her how, when I was given a one week time limit, and forced to seriously consider my relationship with Toriko, Benimori-san was the one who heard my childish worries about the difference between friends and lovers. That she had advised me that not every relationship between two people had to follow a preset pattern, so it was fine for us to explore a variety of possibilities and find what worked for us. And finally, how she’d easily figured out the person I was worrying about my relationship with was Toriko.