After a long, long train ride, we finally arrived. We changed to a local train at the bullet train’s final stop and rode that for just over an hour. Only then did we take our first steps into Hokkaido.
“Yoshio, look! Everywhere is white! Whoa! And it’s so cold!” Carol raced around in front of the station as I stood there shivering.
I guess this is why they say kids belong in the outdoors.
My face was too frozen to give her a proper smile, but I managed a stiff grin.
“It’s so cold it hurts.” The words left my mouth as white mist. We wandered around the station for a while before stepping outside, where I had my first experience of truly frozen temperatures.
The station itself was a new building and very clean. The surrounding area was lively and flourishing. It was a far more impressive station than the one back at home.
A large plaza and traffic circle stood just in front of the station, all of it blanketed in snow. The word “beautiful” crossed my mind for a split second, before the frigid wind blew it away. My hometown could get cold, but it was nothing compared to Hokkaido. I’d barely gone outside these past ten years, and I wasn’t used to any sort of weather at all. The cold wind was relentless in its assault on me, uncaring of my sensitivities.
“Let’s go back inside the station.”
“What? We just got out here!”
“We’ve got a lot of preparations to make.”
“Okay…”
Carol was very obedient and rarely threw tantrums, making this trip a whole lot easier than it might’ve been. I thought back to my young cousin and how badly he behaved. He’d go through people’s fridges when he was visiting, eat loudly at mealtimes, and refuse to even try anything he didn’t like. He was such a little monster that even Dad snapped and told his sister not to bring him around anymore. He called the kid “a little monkey”. Compared to him, Carol was an angel. I was really impressed at Rodice and Lyra’s parenting skills.
We went into a station café and sat down at a table in the corner. I ordered us hot drinks, cake, and fried food. The cake was for Carol, and the fried stuff was for me.
“You okay, Destiny?” I gently unzipped Carol’s bear backpack on the seat next to us. Destiny was inside, curled around a disposable hand warmer. I took the breadcrumb coating off the fried food and passed it the meat. It grabbed it with both front claws and sunk its teeth in eagerly. It was keeping that hand warmer close. It must have been sensitive to the cold like normal lizards. “Use the warmer as much as you need to, okay?”
Destiny nodded tiredly. It looked a little fragile, so I took a towel out of my own bag to wrap it up in. Hopefully that would keep in some heat. It had a stack of hand warmers; it could use as many as it needed. I’d taught it how to activate them before we left, and it could use them on its own. A journey with a little girl and a lizard could have been a nightmare, but they were both smart enough to greatly simplify the process.
I pulled out my phone in case I got a call. I’d contacted my boss at the cleaning company to let him know I was in Hokkaido, and he’d told me that work shouldn’t be too busy even when they opened back up again on the 5th. I could relax and enjoy myself for a bit. I’d asked about Yamamoto-san, and the boss told me they bumped into each other at the shrine. Apparently, Yamamoto-san was strangely cheerful and incredibly eager to get back to work. His enthusiasm was partly why the boss was okay with letting me kick around Hokkaido for a bit. I was both relieved and a little disheartened to hear that I wasn’t needed.
“Maybe I’m turning into a corporate drone…”
Anyone who worked a full-time job would punch me if they heard that. We drank our warm tea and rested for a bit, Carol blissfully stuffing cake into her mouth and getting cream on her cheeks in the process. I wiped her face with a handkerchief as she squirmed, embarrassed. It made me chuckle. I wondered what an outsider would think if they saw us together. She was a cute, golden-haired girl, and I was just a dull thirty-year-old. Since Carol seemed happy, most people wouldn’t be suspicious, but no one could deny that we were mismatched. What if the police questioned me about our relationship? It was unlikely, but what if someone thought I’d kidnapped her? I was trying to come up with a solution to the imagined situation when I noticed something in my phone’s log.
“Whoa, so many missed calls. Who are they—oh.”
I had missed calls from Mom, Dad, Sayuki, and Seika. Messages, too. I still wasn’t used to using a smartphone, and I often forgot to check the notifications.
When I’d told my family I was going to Hokkaido yesterday, Mom and Sayuki badgered me about it. They were probably checking up on me. It would take too long to phone everyone now, so I typed up one message to send to my family and Seika together.
“I’ve made it to Hokkaido, and I’m heading for the village now.”
They knew I was going to Hokkaido, but they didn’t know it was to visit a game studio. I also asked Seika not to tell my family about Carol. She agreed, though I didn’t know if that was because she believed me when I said I didn’t want to put up with a lot of questions or whether she sensed that there was something more going on behind the scenes.
Destiny was my second problem. As soon as my family was home, they’d notice it wasn’t in its tank. I knew they’d question me on it, so I had to come up with some excuse.
“Destiny was looking a little unwell, so the villagers asked me to bring it along so they can take a look.”
That doubled as an excuse for me leaving for Hokkaido so suddenly. Dad and Seika understood immediately, being big Destiny fans themselves. I wanted to send Destiny back to the other world along with Carol, and I’m sure those two wouldn’t be happy. Thinking about it made me depressed. I took a sip of my tea to redirect my thoughts.
The most pressing matter was our next move. We’d made it to Hokkaido, but the developers’ building was much farther out. Hokkaido was as big as the distance between Tokyo and Osaka. We’d only made it to the right prefecture.
The most direct route would mean taking a taxi, but that would raise our transport costs even higher. We still needed a place to stay and money for the return journey, and I didn’t want to spend too much more than I already had.