“Tomorrow’s your birthday, isn’t it, Kou?”
“My birthday?” Renge brought the subject up out of nowhere, and I glanced over at the nearby calendar. It was August 24th, which would imply that the 25th was my birthday. “Is it...?”
“It is! By the way, mine is May 2nd.”
“I know. You forced me to celebrate it with you.”
“Oh, good! If you remember, then ‘forcing’ you to celebrate it was worth all the effort!”
“Augh, ow, ow!” Renge grinned as she pinched my cheek as hard as she could. Apparently she hadn’t taken kindly to me using the word “forced.”
I’d become a lot more sensitive to pain since arriving in this world. It was so hard to move my body around that it felt like I was constantly carrying a pack full of weights, and I tired out in a fraction of the time I used to. I couldn’t say for sure if I’d been weakened or if my body was adapting to suit the peaceful world I’d found myself in, but either way, the effects were very noticeable.
“That hurt...”
“Hee hee! You pushed your luck a bit too far.” Renge chuckled as she released me, and I slumped to the floor. I really didn’t find it funny, for the record. Renge was still young enough that you could call her a “girl” without sounding condescending, and yet she was somehow strong enough to crush an apple one-handed. Freaky. “Now then, Kou—this will be your first birthday since you joined my household, so I’ve done a lot of thinking about how best to celebrate it!”
I hesitated. “If this is going to get messy, I don’t wanna.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I have no intention of going overboard! For one thing, only an absolute imbecile would think about going outside in this miserable heat.”
I paused once more. “Haven’t you spent every single day since summer vacation started lazing around at home? This feels like an excuse—don’t you think you should, y’know, go outside every once in a while? This indoor lifestyle you’ve got going can’t be healthy.”
“AAAAHHHHH! I can’t hear you, I can’t hear youuu!” Renge plugged her ears and put on an extremely unconvincing not-listening act. It seemed she was perfectly aware of how slovenly she’d been recently. As it just so happened, she was in full sloth mode at that very moment, lying facedown on the sofa and moving as little as possible.
“Kou, you’re going to be a really boring person when you grow up if you’re always this obsessed with logic and sound arguments.”
“Am I?”
“Throwing in a joke every once in a while makes you look like a deeper and more well-rounded person, probably!”
“‘Probably’?”
“The ‘probably’ there was me throwing a joke in. See? Just like that!” Oh, okay, I think I get it. Good to know. Renge was certainly a lazy slob, but she had moments in which she was extremely levelheaded and reliable. Maybe that balance between her reliable side and her ridiculous side was what made her a well-rounded person.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Well, now I feel a little guilty... Meh, it’ll probably be fine. Anyway, back to your birthday!”
“Right, sure.”
“We’ll spend all day lazing around and watching one of my favorite anime! How’s that sound?!”
“It sounds like the same thing we do every day.” My personal circumstances being what they were, it was decided that I wouldn’t attend middle school at all. I spent almost every day in Renge’s house, and she’d made a habit of forcing me to watch “anime”—a form of video-based storytelling that she was apparently obsessed with. She was attending school on a day-to-day basis, of course, but ever since summer vacation started she’d taken up permanent residence at home. Her plan for my birthday really was exactly the same as our daily routine.
“And on top of that, I’ll serve you a hand-cooked meal packed absolutely full with my love!”
“With your ‘love’...?”
Love. It wasn’t a word that put me in the best of moods, to say the least, but I knew the love she meant was a familial one. I mean, probably—not like I could read her mind. In any case, I thought back on it and realized that this would probably be my first time experiencing her cooking. Her house had servants... I mean, butlers and maids who would prepare all the meals, generally speaking.
“Do you even know how to cook?”
“But of course!” She poked her head up from the sofa just enough to shoot me a self-satisfied smirk. Seeing her so absolutely full of unreserved self-confidence made me feel like I couldn’t trust her at all. Funny how that works. “The world of cooking is a world of instinct! In other words, it’s a world in which a multitalented, beautiful genius like myself naturally excels! My cooking is so exceptional, it’s made numerous people howl with joy in the past!”
“Has it...?” Renge was supposedly known as a genius in the outside world. If she was that confident, I really didn’t have any reason to doubt her...and yet, somehow, I remained unconvinced. My own “instincts” I’d honed over the course of my life up to that point—the self-preservation ones, that is—were blaring their warning sirens at full volume, telling me that something was wrong.
“Have you decided what you’re going to cook?”
“I’ll leave it up to instinct!”
I paused. “What about, like, a theme? Like, Japanese food? Western food? Meat dishes?”
“I’ll leave that up to instinct too!”
“...”
I decided not to think about it.
The next day, I walked into the kitchen to find Renge surrounded by a massive pile of ingredients she’d ordered from an online supermarket. Her father, Gouki, had said something about having very important business to attend to at work and left early in the morning after wishing me both a “happy birthday!” and a “best of luck.”
“All right, Kou, watch and learn! This is how you handle a cooking knife!”
“Right,” I said, a bit skeptical. I didn’t know much at all about cooking, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about all this.
There are plenty of perfectly valid ingredients out there that have bright, vivid colorations that prompt an instinctual “that’s poison” reaction, and those that produce an absolutely gut-wrenching stench. “Cooking” as a field could be described as the practice of putting together ingredients like that and making them edible.
Even with all that said, when you look at something that should by all appearances be inedible and think about eating it, there’s always a moment where your stomach tries to punish you for that decision in advance. That is precisely what I was experiencing.
“R-Renge? Are you planning on using all of that stuff?”
“Why, of course! Every ingredient on this table is a delicacy, special-ordered both domestically and from overseas!”
“D-Delicacies, huh? Don’t those, y’know, need to be prepared in some special, specific way to make them turn out right?”
“That’s where my intuition and instincts come in. After all, the very first people to ever try eating all of these ingredients had no idea how to prepare them either! Just think of me as one of those culinary pioneers.”
I was getting really worried. “Umm, I don’t think you should make light of the thousands of years our predecessors spent accumulating cooking experience...”
“‘Fools learn from experience, but the wise learn from history,’ is it? There’s truth to that, I’ll admit.”
I heaved a sigh of relief. Super high-class ingredients like those are in a lot higher demand than supply lines can keep up with, hiking the cost way up. People with the technical skills to properly prepare them are few and far between too, so the price of that expertise gets tacked on as well. I had no doubt that there were at least a few of those hyper-specialized ingredients in Renge’s pile, and not even a genius like her could prepare them by winging it through instinct alone.
“But don’t people also say that anything’s edible if you cook it for long enough?”
“Who the hell says that?!”
“By the way, I haven’t stocked any poisonous ingredients this time. No pufferfish here! Be sure to try this at home, kids!”
“That means you knew this was a bad idea! This was premeditated, wasn’t it?!” Renge started chucking every single one of the high-grade ingredients she’d procured into a stockpot. She looked like a character right out of a fairy tale—specifically like an old, withered witch deep in the dark, scary woods, cackling as she stirred her evil magic potion.