Ryotasu raised her right hand, smiled, and saluted.
You know, Ryotasu always wore clothes that emphasized her chest. I loved it. Those were totally boob-bags. I thought those things only existed in H-games. Not that I’d ever played one.
And then there was another interruption from the counter.
“Gamota, you’re staring.”
“Hey! You’re a much bigger pervert than I am, Master Izumin!”
“Yup, that’s right!” Ryotasu agreed. I was happy she understood.
“What do you mean, ‘That’s right?’ Why? Why? WHY? Ryotasu, how could you agree with him?”
“Poyaya?” Ryotasu crossed her arms below her chest and tilted her head, making a pose like she was thinking. “Poyaya” was probably another one of her meaningless phrases. She had different phrases that she used depending on her situation and mood.
I would’ve preferred she speak in Japanese, but it was still cute. Everything about Ryotasu was cute. And since she was cute, it was okay.
Ryotasu sat down next to me, still maintaining her thinking pose. She was looking up at the ceiling— or so I thought, until I felt a toy ray gun poking me in the ribs. The Poyaya Gun, she always called it.
“Hey, hey, Samurai Gamonosuke!”
Who the hell was Samurai Gamonosuke? No one had ever called me that in my life.
And anyway, her face was way too close. She was asking for a kiss! She had to be! Ryotasu was in love with me! —But her face was still way too close!
“Um... Ryotasu?”
“Po-ya?”
“You’re too close.”
“Poyaya?”
“Distance-wise.”
“Poyah.”
I didn’t know what she was saying, but she seemed to understand me, and backed away a little. The ray gun was still poking into my ribs, though.
“Hey, hey, when do I get my frozen yogurt?”
“Well, once I get my affiliate money in, I guess.”
I decided to look and see when that would be.
“Today’s view count is... NGGAAH!” Some famous affiliate blogs got hundreds of thousands of hits a day. Compared to that, my numbers made me want to jump off a bridge.
“Monthly view count is... MGHAH!” That number was just as bad.
Unless I did something about these numbers, I could probably make a heck of a lot more money working at that frozen yogurt place.
“I guess the real money’s in porn... But wait. God controls all things. Some day, occult sites shall surpass erotic sites!”
“God is Ero-him Essaim, after all!” Ryotasu put her hands together in prayer, and wiggled and contorted her body.
As I watched her shake her body out of the corner of my eye, I slammed my finger down on the F5 key. “Hitting the button sixteen times isn’t really going to change my view numbers, though!”
The numbers weren’t exactly zero, but some months the deposit fees ate up all my money. I had a long way to go to achieve my goal of being an independent NEET.
“Our views aren’t going up very fast. We’ve got a long way to go before all-you-can-eat frozen yogurt, Ryotasu.”
“I see...” Ryotasu looked depressed. “My yogurt...”
I felt bad, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I decided to ignore her.
I checked the blog.
There were more comments now.
“Wait, is it him again?”
“That’s right! His name is... S! A! R! A! I! SARAI!”
“Yes...”
Sarai was a regular commenter at Kirikiri Basara, and the smartest one we had.
To be honest, most of the debunking work on the site was done by him. He was someone I could count on.
In fact, whenever Sarai showed up and commented, the view count would go up a little as people came to read it. So while I felt grateful as the owner of the site, I did feel a little jealous that I wasn’t the star of my own show.
Male pride was a complicated thing.
“Oh, whoops. I’m getting emotional.”
I read through Sarai’s comment with the usual mixture of dread and anticipation. The page was filled with one of his usual long comments.
“This photo is a typical example of a simulacrum. I can say, without the slightest doubt, that this is not a spirit photograph, and what’s more, most so-called spirit photographs can be entirely explained via the simulacrum phenomenon, which is also known as the pareidolia effect.”
“Too long, didn’t read.”
“Wow, Sarai is always so amazing, huh?”
Hmm?! Ryotasu’s eyes were wide with amazement as she read Sarai’s debunking.
I know you have to look over to read the screen, but Ryotasu, your face is really close! And your boobs! They’re touching me! They’re touching me and I can’t focus on what Sarai’s saying!
If you were to make a pie chart of all the thoughts in my head at that moment, it would have been 3% happiness that my views had gone up, and 6% annoyance that Sarai was stealing my thunder, with the remaining 91% of me going, “Ryotasu! You’re too close to me again!”
I was so excited I almost forgot about the site!
“Oh! Gamotan’s got a naughty look on his face!” Ryotasu suddenly said.
“Huh?! What do you mean, ‘a naughty look’?! I do not!”
“Naughty Gamotans get I-shi-shu!” Ryotasu pointed the ray gun in her hand at me and pulled the trigger.
I felt a sharp pain, and numbness run through my whole body.
“Ow! Ow, ow, ow!” When you were hit with the PYG— at least, that’s what I called her Poyaya Gun— you felt a stinging sensation like an electrostim treatment.
It didn’t shoot rays, but I was sure it shot some kind of electromagnetic pulse.
“Wait! Stop! PYG! No!”
“I-SHI-SHU!”
I had no idea what that meant, but Ryotasu sure was excited.
She still kept shooting even after I fell out of my chair and started writhing on the ground. Maybe she was actually a huge sadist?
“Ow! Ow! Ow! That hurts! Fine, I’ll stop imagining naughty things!”
Satisfied, Ryotasu finally put away her gun.
“Gahh... hahh... hahh... Whew...”
Wh-What jackass gave a girl like Ryotasu a (semi-)deadly weapon?
It was her fault for always getting right up in my face, anyway. What gave her the right to shoot me just because I looked like I enjoyed it? Not that I wanted her to stop.
“Aw, it’s good to see you two kids flirting like that.” The owner had a creepy grin on his face as he teased me.
But it didn’t bother me. I bet any other guy would kill to get a chance to play with Ryotasu like this. I sat back in my chair, feeling like a winner.
Sarai’s comment was still displayed on the screen. I glanced through the rest of it.
“The simulacrum phenomenon is one of the brain and eye’s most basic functions. When the eye sees dots or lines arranged in a triangular shape, the brain interprets them as a face. This is an animal instinct that every person is born with. Since there are several such dots and lines in the photograph, it’s even easier for the brain to interpret them as faces. However, if you look at each portion individually, you’ll see that they’re all tricks of the light or part of the background.”
“I’m convinced. But I hate to admit it. But I’m convinced. I’m convinced, but I hate to admit it.”
I looked away from the monitor and rubbed my eyes again. Sarai’s comments were so complicated that I always felt tired reading them.
“You can tell from the way he writes that he thinks he’s smarter than everyone, you know? I bet he thinks that everybody in the world but him is stupid. If he’s this smart, and he’s got a girlfriend and she’s really hot, I’ll never forgive him. Ever.”
Ryotasu suddenly looked off into the distance when she heard my “profiling.”
“I feel bad for poor Sarai.”
“Y-You feel bad for him?!”
What did that mean?
My heart almost stopped for a second there.
“Ryotasu, you know Sarai?”
“Sure do! I always read his comments on Kirikiri Basara. Not all the way through, though. Ehehe...”
“No, I mean, do you know him in real life?”
“I don’t know him in real life! ♪”
“Oh, okay...”
So it was just her imagination, then?
Still, “poor Sarai,” huh? I had no idea where she was getting that from his comments.
I didn’t see any comments from Sarai yet on the newer articles. There was always a big lag between when I’d post a new article and when he’d comment on it. He was probably spending a lot of time doing research, like your typical nerd.
I’d put up three new articles on Kirikiri Basara today: “Man Livestreams One-Man Hide And Seek, Never Comes Back,” “The Curse of Kokkuri-san Is Seriously Terrifying,” and “Is It True That a Girl Once Lived with a Mummy?” I’d uploaded all of them since I’d come to the café this morning. Since all three of them had supposedly occurred in Kichijoji, I’d taken to calling them the Kichijoji Trilogy.