“Whoa... it’s good.”
“Really! I’m glad to hear it! ♪” Aina’s small lips relaxed into a smile as she watched him from across the table. “Eat up!”
The food she was offering Kai was a plate of sandwiches she’d made from the contents of his refrigerator. Her homemade sauce was so delicious that Kai couldn’t help but wonder how in the world she’d managed to whip it up with the few ingredients at her disposal.
Aina clearly hadn’t lied about being good at housework, as the laundry and dishes were wrapped up in the blink of an eye. She even cleaned up every nook and cranny of his bedroom while the washing machine was running.
After all that, she still had time to spare, so she made these sandwiches for him, as well.
“So, the thing I wanted to talk to you about...” Aina’s expression suddenly grew serious—though she didn’t look him in the eye—and she got up, silently walked along the edge of the coffee table before sitting back down next to Kai. As he sat cross-legged, his left leg was in range to bump into her knee. In fact, it already had.
“...!” Kai was caught off guard by the jolt of lightning that ran down his spine. When he looked down, Aina’s thin, white hand was resting atop his left thigh. The warmth of her palm felt as though it went straight through the fabric of his pants and made direct contact with his skin.
As Kai turned toward Aina, the pair naturally came to face one another. Aina’s eyes were tinged with melancholy, and he could discern each individual eyelash that ornamented them. And yet, he couldn’t find a single pore on her smooth skin, even from this distance.
If he made a wrong move, he’d end up making contact, so Kai was stuck in place.
Aina took a deep breath to harden her resolve, and said, “I want you... to use me as a voice actress.”
“............Huh?” But—your fight with Kuroba-san, Kai thought, struggling to reconcile the two topics. “...Um...” Was that not what you were going to talk about?
“You mean... in MiSt?” he finally brought himself to ask.
“Of course,” Aina told him. “I want to be a voice actress, no matter what. Once I graduate, I’m going to go to Tokyo to enter a training program... but that’s not enough to guarantee success, right? So, I think it’s important to get some experience now.”
“...Is that why you joined the social game club?” Kai asked.
“Oh, no...! That’s not it!” Aina leaned in and closed the gap between them even further. “I had already been playing Rondo. But after... that, I thought it was curtains for the game until—bam! A miracle! And what’s more, I found out that the person who brought this miracle about was a boy in the same grade, at the same school as me... Right then, I knew it had to be you! I want to be a voice actress in the game you make!”
“L-Like I said before, that wasn’t just—”
“That’s fine! I wanted to be in the MiSt that you were working on!” Aina asserted once more. “So... Kai-kun, I want you to make up a plan that involves my voice. Will you do it?”
This entire time, Kai’s brain had been paralyzed by the sweet fragrance radiating from Aina right into his face. Her whispers slid into his ears to tickle his heart, one after another. He could tell that his heart was on the verge of exploding and shooting out of his mouth. There was no helping it; he didn’t have the experience to stay calm when Aina was so close to him.
“...Aina-san.” Kai took a deep breath and looked her in the eyes, which were twinkling in anticipation of his answer.
“...I’m sorry,” he said, but that wasn’t enough for him to cede. “I... can’t take that request.” Removing her hand from his lap, Kai put a good deal of distance between them before taking a deep breath. One was not anywhere close to enough, so he took another—this time even deeper—and only expelled the air in his lungs once he had quelled his excited heart.
“Do you recall what we discussed at our meeting yesterday?” Kai began to explain. “Our club is locked into participating at Summit, which means we need to work ahead of schedule to complete our managerial responsibilities... so we won’t have much leeway for a little while. After that, we will go to Summit and participate in a development competition. At the very least, that’ll take up our entire summer break. Even afterwards, MiSt is lacking in a lot of fundamental places, so we still won’t have the elbow room to squeeze in voice implementation... This is our current state of affairs. Therefore—”
“Ahaha!”
Kai was about to conclude his statement with, I can’t promise you that, when he heard laughter akin to a sudden blast of wind. Of course, if it wasn’t Kai, then there was only one person who could have laughed.
“Aw, man. You’re so obviously a virgin that I figured it’d be easy to win you over,” Aina admitted. “You’re stronger than I thought.”
“Huh? ...Huh?”
It was as if a different person had appeared before Kai’s eyes. Her face, hair, clothes, body—everything was the same as the Yozakura Aina from a moment ago, but the aura around her was distinctly dissimilar.
“Well, it’s whatever. If you’re the logical type, that makes it easier for me anyway,” she went on.
“...A-Aina-san, is that you?” he spluttered.
“That’s right,” she sang. Her smile had the same shape as before, yet it, too, was altogether different. What was more, this seemed to be her true nature.
“You said you didn’t have any leeway... but I’m sure you’ve noticed? This game needs voice acting,” she pointed out. “What I’m about to explain is something you already know, deep down. Are you ready?” she asked, and went on to logically explain the points of her ‘The Pros of Appointing Yozakura Aina as the Voice Actress for Miracle Stage’ lecture.
First off, the most fundamental issue was that MiSt did not have voice acting.
The truth was that this could actually be seen as a critical flaw. In this day and age, there were as many social games as there were stars in the sky, so the bare minimum requirements to be an average game kept going up and up—not to mention anything beyond that. The specifics varied by genre, but for a character-focused game like MiSt, it was expected that there would be voice acting in some form or fashion.
If the team had extra time and manpower, the story would be fully voiced. If not, there would still be shouts and grunts for battle scenes along with proper lines on the character’s display page. At any rate, the lack of voice acting meant a character-focused game was missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.
Of course, it wasn’t as if adding voices fixed everything, and it wasn’t impossible to succeed without it. Still, if they weren’t beginning from the same start line as their competition, they’d need to make up for the deficit with some other incredible feature.
In that sense, Aina was correct in assuming that Kai had also considered voice acting a necessity. While MiSt had RPG elements, at the end of the day it was a character-focused idol game without voices. Unless they found a truly outstanding workaround, the team would have to overcome that obstacle eventually.
Users want to play the best, most amusing game. A social game that can’t even keep up with everyone else’s bare minimum won’t even be looked at, and that was the simple truth.
Based on such an analysis of the current social game landscape, Aina concluded her monologue by once again pushing Kai to build a plan that included herself as the voice actress.
“Well, I’ve been playing a bunch of social games to appraise their merits, so I get what you mean when you say there are more important points to be fixing,” Aina concluded.
But then she said, “I’m looking forward to your optimistic deliberation, okay, Mr. Planner? I’m sure you got personal experience with how good my acting is, didn’t you? Anyway, I’ll see you later in the club room,” she told him as she headed toward the front door.
Right before leaving, Aina turned around and flashed him the same soft, honest smile that she’d worn up until now—that is, up until showing Kai her true nature.
“Bye-bye! ♪” she sang out.
Like a tornado personified, Aina came and went.