One day, Kotou asked me to hang out during lunchtime. Having Kaito’s ever-hyper childhood friend breeze right past him to ask me to hang out instead threw me for a bit of a loop. What’s a best friend sidekick supposed to do in a situation like that?
Wait, though. Could it be...? Is she trying to set up a surprise for him or something? Maybe she’s trying to do something special to make her beloved Kaito happy and wants to pull me in as a collaborator!
I nodded, instantly sold on my own logic. That’d perfectly explain her wanting to talk to me and only me. All her weirdness aside, I guess she had a girly side to her after all! I mean, I already knew she liked cooking and stuff, but you know what I mean.
“Heeey, Kotou?” I called as I walked up to her. She was standing in the corner of one of the hallways, just where she’d said she’d be.
“Ah, Kunugicchi! Shh! Keep quiet and come with me!” She grabbed my arm and dragged me off without another word.
“Hey, whoa, where’re you taking me?”
“Somewhere where nobody else’ll see us!”
“Why?! Actually...yeah, that makes sense. Real cautious of you.”
“Wait. What?! You don’t mean you figured out what I’m going for, do you?!”
“I think I’ve got a pretty good guess, anyway.”
“Mnnnghh... You win this round... But whatever! That’ll make things quicker anyway!” She grimaced for just a moment before immediately turning her attitude back around again, then pulled me away once more.
“So, where’re we going, specifically?”
“The gym storehouse!”
“The gym storehooouse?!”
The gym storehouse: a notoriously private place on any campus, and a spot that’s perceived in very different ways by those who currently attend school and those who’re out of the system. I’m to understand that people who aren’t active high school students see it as a place where students go to perv it up in secret, but to people like me who still go to school, it’s a place you only ever visit when you have to set up or break down gear for gym class.
In other words: it’s basically just a pain, and that’s not even getting started on the dust and the stench of moldering sweat. It really couldn’t have a worse image in my mind. The only people who could do the nasty in a mold garden like that are the sort of folks whose houses look like garbage dumps...probably.
Anyway, it goes without saying that I had no clue why she’d go out of her way to take me there of all places. That wasn’t much of a surprise, though—Kotou was a true wild child who ranked at the top of the list of people whose thought patterns I couldn’t decipher at all. For all I knew, she might’ve been planning to set the storehouse on fire in retaliation for some horrible experience she had in gym class somewhere along the way. Speaking as her friend, I’d have to do everything I could to stop her if that really was what she was plotting.
So anyway, long story short, there we were at the storehouse. We were on lunch break, but nobody was out and about playing around with the balls that were kept in there. I dunno what that says about our student body—is not messing around during lunch break wholesome, or what?
“Okay, looks like the coast is clear,” muttered Kotou as she glanced around, then opened up the storehouse. We stepped inside, and she immediately turned around and locked the door. Wait, isn’t this...a locked room?!
“Wait a second—you’re not planning on murdering me, are you, Kotou?!”
“What? Why would I do that? I don’t want you on my criminal record, Kunugicchi!”
“Wow, way to turn that into an insult! You couldn’t have phrased it like ‘I wouldn’t kill my precious friend’ or something?”
“My ‘precious friend’?”
“Ouch! Ouch!” Right in the heart! The fact that she didn’t sound like she meant anything bad by it made it even worse! “Anyway, I knew it—this place really does reek of mold... Hey, make sure nobody’s hiding under the pommel horse, okay? That’s the usual formula in these situations—somebody’s lurking around in here and then all of a sudden we show up...”
“What ‘usual formula’...?” She cocked her head, crouching down to check. “Nope, nobody’s down there.”
“Phew! The other usual formula’s for a crazed bomber to have slipped into the school and be staking out in there. We’d be totally screwed if we got that one.”
“Do crazed bombers really turn up that often?” She sounded exasperated with me, but she was also carefully checking every place in the room where someone could possibly be hiding, and quite a few that were way too small for anyone to hide in as well, just for good measure. I really wouldn’t if I were you—that’s exactly the sort of behavior that leads to you finding the Bug That Shall Not Be Named but Starts with the Letter C and totally freaking out!
“All right, check complete! At the present moment, you and I are the only people within this room!” she declared confidently.
“What’s with the narration? Are you setting up a magic trick or something?”
“Time to cut to the chase—take a look at this!”
“Huh?” Kotou shoved her phone into my face. The whole screen was occupied by some sort of weird symbol that was shifting in a sort of unsettling manner. “What am I looking at?”
“Huh? You’re not feeling anything?”
“Am I supposed to be feeling something?”
“Like, you don’t suddenly wanna obey my every word without question, or anything like that?”
“Why would I? Is that supposed to be, like, a police badge? What are you, an undercover cop?” Nah, that couldn’t be it. The image on her phone was unsettling in a way I couldn’t quite describe properly, and it definitely didn’t project any sort of authority. Kotou pouted, clearly disappointed, but I seriously had no idea what she’d been expecting in the first place. She mumbled in irritation as she sat down next to me on the gym mat I’d appropriated as a chair.
“So, what’s that supposed to be?”
“A hypnosis app.”
“A hypnosis app?!” I never could’ve seen that answer coming. A hypnosis app, as in...like, what the hell?!
“The instructions said that whoever I showed this picture to would be instantly hypnotized and would do whatever I told them to.”
“So it’s one of those porny ones.”
“Yup, one of those porny ones.”
If you spend enough time on the internet, you’ll probably run into one of those borderline pornographic pop-up ads before long. Little comics featuring hypnosis apps being used for unscrupulous purposes have become a trend in them lately. Feels like there’ve been more and more of them recently.
“And care to explain why a high school maiden like you would know about those?”
“I mean, c’mon, they pop up all the time! You end up remembering them whether you like it or not.”
“Okay, but y’know the thing about pop-ups these days? I dunno how exactly they get the info, but the ones you get shown are based on your own search history. You wouldn’t be seeing ads with hypnosis apps and smutty stuff if you weren’t browsing sites like that on your own, right?”
“It’s not like ‘high school maidens’ don’t look up porn, you know?” She gave me a “no shit” sort of look. I can’t say I saw that coming, but, I mean, she had a point. Puberty hits girls just as hard as it does guys. Guess we’re all the same when it comes to being interested in that sorta stuff.
“You’re definitely the first person I’ve seen actually get their hands on a hypnosis app, though.”
“I just looked it up on Gurgle Play. Popped right up.”
“Of course it did.”
Allow me to explain! Gurgle Play is a smartphone app that allows you to download other smartphone apps! Yes, that’s right—it’s an app that makes apps, thereby transcending the principle of equivalent exchange! “Gurgle,” by the way, is a website that lets you search for things on the internet. You’re probably wondering what it has to do with Gurgle Play, and, er... Go ask your mom and dad about it! Bonus fact: when you search for something on the internet, we call that “gurgling it.” Try using that phrase at school tomorrow! All your friends will be super impressed!