Content prep: reckless underage drinking

Things have become troublesome.

Yuuya applies disinfectant and pastes on another plaster. He knew he’d bruise, but he didn’t realize he’d get this many scrapes; pretty much the only places the skin didn’t tear were covered by his clothes. Even then, if it hit hard enough, like the clip to the shoulder, there was still a little scraping.

As a result, his arms are covered in white squares, exhausting the supplies in his bag. He even had to wrap his ankle in bandages. That’s what he gets for stuffing a bunch of knives down his pants.

All of this, combined with his black eye, bring up a serious complication:

How is he supposed to go home?

His brother is going to have a stroke. How can he just show up at the family dinner table looking like he just got on the wrong side of a street gang? At best, his brother is going to try to hunt down the culprit, and as much as Yuuya would enjoy seeing Fangirl Bait get his just desserts for being a pipe-wielding violent psychopath, it seems he might be a figure of some influence; how else would he avoid expulsion for attacking people at random?

It’d be nice if he was just the son of the principal or whatever, but he might be the son of some politician. It’s dangerous.

And, again, his brother is going to be worried sick. Combining an annoyingly doting guardian figure with gratuitous violence is the worst possible idea. Yuuya is adverse to the idea simply out of the desire to keep his brother’s life stress-free.

The bruises are going to take at least a month to go away, though, which is almost as alarming as coming home looking like he just got mugged. This sucks.

Yuuya still calls his home phone and leaves a message anyway.

“I won’t be coming home tonight, sorry. Dinner’s in the fridge. I’m taking a vacation.”

He snaps his phone shut and leans on his knees with a long, shaky sigh.

He wants to go home.

Anyway. He opens his browser to a few social networking sites and flips through Nashioka events at practised speeds until he finds something solid. High-maintenance and high-difficulty, but solid.

He’s crashing for the night at someone else’s place, now, so he needs to be able to pay for it. Luckily, he’s got some practice in that regard.

Threads are completely unaffected by just about anything but a Reikawa, so Yuuya can find the threads he wants with just a quick look above the building he’s staking out. He doesn’t utilize it often, but his ability is seriously beyond convenient for tracking people.

Eventually a Drama Blue comes out, and for once, it comes from the ‘supplier’.

Snap.

“Uwaaaah. What a scandal.”

The two leaving look up at Yuuya, perched on the wall holding a camera. He had been out of sight thanks to the tree in the way, landing him a nice shot. Not that they would have noticed him even if they saw him sitting there from a distance.

“W-What…”

“Compensation dating, huh.”

Right. The best way to make money:

Park outside a love hotel and target a man who appears to have the most to lose from having his dirty dealings revealed.

The reliability of this technique is usually questionable. You’d get a more solid result from extorting from train molesters, to be honest.

But besides being infrequent and hard to spot, catching, isolating, and threatening an adult man with a career-ruining bit of blackmail can be — depending on your age, height, weight, sex, attractiveness, how many people you brought with you, and how good you are with a camera to begin with — anywhere from reckless to suicidal.

Staking out a love hotel is more of a problem in simple practicality. Japan is a place of many apartments and households full of people; it’s simpler for a lot of people to use hotels like this to fulfill their carnal urges. Usually, it would take forever to find someone who is genuinely up to no good, and in that time you’d get chased off by the staff. On top of that, the blackmail might backfire horrendously if you go after someone prone to violence.

Thankfully, Yuuya is a Reikawa, and Reikawas do not have any of these problems.

He’s been sitting there for two hours now, and of the three dozen horny people who have come in, not a single person seems to be aware of his existence. He may as well have been a boring stone gargoyle.

And then, there’s the matter of targets. Again, something simple for a Reikawa. Yuuya just has to cross-reference threads to character design.

So a politician-looking guy who looks kinda shifty, wielding a Drama Blue thread with no Violence Purple, walking out with a youthful-looking girl.

“This is without a doubt a scandal, right?”

The girl beside him bolts. Clever.

The man can’t do as much, and simply waves angrily at him. “You…Delete that!”

“Ah? Should I? How much money do you think I’d get if I sold it to someone? The tabloids or your wife? Which is the bigger issue?”

“You bastard—!”

“I could just sell it back to you, though.” Yuuya outstretches a palm. “Cough it up. Compensation for all the money I’m losing, y’know?”

The guy is sweating like a pig. “H-how much…”

“Well. I have something specific in mind. So. 15,000 yen or so should do it.”

The man is so relieved so suddenly that he laughs out loud. “O…only that…!?”

“Well. I just don’t have the money on me, and if I ran around extttorti- extorting politicians for huge sums, I’d die.”

“Hehegh…You’re still a bad kid, you know. Your parents should have raised you better.”

“My dad skipped out and my mom taught me to put food on’th— on the table. I’m fine as I am.”

A wad of bills is slapped into his waiting hand. Yuuya dangles the camera by the strap, and the politician-looking man quickly deletes the pictures. Yuuya bounces it back into his palm and stuffs it back into his bag.

“…S’rry for bothering.”

“Get a part time job if you have time for this kind of thing!”

Yuuya shakes his head and dashes off down the fence and around the block.

On cleared land surrounded by lush forests is a western-style mansion so luxurious that you want to ask ‘is this really still Japan?’

The front gardens are the size of most city blocks. The building stretches about as wide, with three floors and a massive glass window uniting two of them in a framed vision of the main stairwell. Hedges line the road, and to the side is a meticulously maintained carpark, filled with gleaming vehicles and circulating limos even as it’s observed.

That’s right. It’s that…

‘Plot convenience rich person house’.

It exists purely to show off the difference between a poor person and a rich person. Rich people houses don’t look like this outside of Nashioka, but because it had the misfortune of spawning within the boundaries of the city, the builders did all kinda of weird shit to it to make it look super bombastic and unnecessary. The only artistic quality it has ‘it has to look like it’s owned by someone who is just, super rich, you guys’.

There’s even a two-storey fountain in the courtyard. It’s out of control.

The entire human populace isn’t constantly gripped by the throes of the Narrative, and normal, actual people do in fact visit Nashioka sometimes, so it’s mostly known as a bed and breakfast for rich people from around Japan and, indeed, the rest of the world. It’s a vacation house for the wealthy. A party house for the successful. Everyone collectively looked at the house, went ‘hang on’, and then exploited it to the best of their ability to justify their fit of rich-person-house-building insanity.

Speaking of parties.

There’s a large procession of well-dressed rich people filing into the building. There are members of all ages, but most of them are teenagers, so Yuuya can only assume it’s the teenage son who’s hosting this one. He doesn’t know much about this family beyond that one teenage son, the eldest who’s inheriting the family business, and the asshole who went to Yuuya’s middle school that seems to actively engage with poor people just to show off how Not Poor he is. He wasn’t in Yuuya’s class, but Yuuya hates him about as much as he hates his classmates.

Anyway.

Big party, bigger house, it is a literal impossibility that anyone would keep track of every single guest bedroom. Even if they do check it, it simply wouldn’t ID in their heads that Yuuya is not supposed to be there.

It’s even less likely now that all that extortion money was spent on an expensive suit and makeup to cover his black eye.

Yuuya tails a large group on his way in, and keeps perfect pace with them as they approach the door. The doorman waves them in, takes their coats, and Yuuya veers naturally to a potted plant. He presses himself against the wall until the next group of people are signed into a guestbook and pass by him, at which point he fluidly falls in line behind them, easily following them to the ballroom.

It is absolutely ludicrous how extravagant this place is.

Lights. Everywhere. Two chandeliers. Every single wall except the one featuring the windows is mirrored. It’s like walking into some kind of horrible rich person fever dream. People are already milling about, since the music hasn’t gotten interesting enough to dance to yet.

Yuuya does a hard swerve to the beverages table. There’s a small table for hard alcohol, moderated by an attendant to keep out the kids.

Yuuya plucks a cup of whiskey out of a man’s hand while he’s deep in conversation with some other rich guy and downs a mouthful with an exaggerated swig. He lets out a few muted coughs, but goes unnoticed. He puts the cup back and nicks a flute of champagne from the hands of a distracted woman instead.

Time for threads.

Yuuya didn’t bring his glasses along, technically. He has the glasses case he usually wears around his neck in his pocket like an old-fashioned watch, but he didn’t bring a pair to actively wear on his face. He gets panicked in other people’s houses. Different genres don’t interact often on the streets, but anything goes once you’re in someone’s enormous fairy tale cartoon house.

So far, everything as expected. A massive collection of Daily Greens and Drama Blues. Sad lady in the corner has a Tragedy Blue. A few Love Pinks, but it’s nowhere near as bad as Nashi High is getting. It’s a very sedate, relaxing, non-threatening party, altogether.

Yuuya doesn’t feel very safe, though.

He puts the champagne flute on a table, fills a plate with a bunch of little cheese things, and takes a glass of wine on his way back onto the ballroom floor.

Yuuya’s eyes slide over person after person, head after head. It’s a rich person event, and it was advertised on the internet. It’s a rich person event at a house known for housing foreign rich people. Therefore…

His breath catches. There, a cluster of four people, completely threadless.

He downs all his wine in one gulp and makes his way towards them. They’re being greeted by some tall brown-haired guy. Yuuya places his wine glass into the hand of a passing waiter, takes someone’s champagne, downs that too, and, not finding any waiters, gives it to someone making a wide gesture to the person they’re speaking with.

He stops in front of the group with his throat on fire and a glowing heat stretching through his centre to fill his head like a hot air balloon.

The brown-haired individual turns, and Yuuya realizes he sees pink cobwebs.

Ah. The youngest son of the mansion.

He doesn’t remember his name and it doesn’t matter, what’s important is that he did not immediately notice Yuuya, and Yuuya has ample opportunity to get the hell out of there. He slides out of the romance-poisoned Character’s line of sight and shoves his way past a couple and a throng of people, until he feels like maybe he’s out of sight and out of mind, now.

He presses his face against the wall, next to a mirror glowing gold with all the lights. His face is hot. This confuses him, until he remembers he’s had half a shot of whiskey, a glass of wine, and two flutes of champagne in under five minutes.

It doesn’t feel like enough, but Yuuya knows enough about his alcohol tolerance that if he consumes any more alcohol, he’s going to end up passed out in the middle of the ballroom.

He feels like he’s going to be sick, and it doesn’t have anything to do with what he just ingested.

No matter who he talks to, they’re all going go, they’re all going to leave, there’s no point and trying to attach himself to some ephemeral passing figure when in the end he’s going to be either all alone or betrayed by the city and it hurts and it’s not fair but that’s how it is, that’s how life is, and he needs to stop embarrassing himself with all these desperate last-ditch efforts to connect with something that is going to leave.

Yuuya sucks in a deep breath of air through his nostrils, stuffs the rest of the cheese things in his mouth, and leaves the room with a bottle of red wine.

The nightscape is cool and colourless. He’s too far away from the main city for it to be coated in the usual green haze, leaving a dark, endless blue sky with the occasional streak of green; since the threads don’t exist in the traditional sense, they’re unaffected by lighting, and even at midnight, their colours are bright and untouched.

Even though he’s too far away to see normal threads, the White Thread is perfectly visible in the distance. Just looking at it makes him feel like his skin is peeling, like every part of him is being ripped up, placed out, and inspected.

Yuuya strolls through the back gardens with exaggerated swinging steps and collapses onto a stone bench. He takes a swig of wine while eyeballing the thread. Well, since no one notices him to begin with, being sloppy is fine, right? Since he usually does stuff like shopping and going for walks to destress, and doesn’t generally touch alcohol at all, it’s okay if he makes a little mistake like this, right? Teenagers are prone to mistakes, right?

Right.

He coughs at the burn of the ethanol and puts the bottle at his feet. Maybe not a good idea to drink it all at once, though.

Where should he go after this…well, he can only fly sleeping in someone’s mansion during an event like this. At any other time, someone passed out in the guest bedroom would be distracting enough to investigate. So if he’s skipping around long enough for his bruises to stop looking so vicious, that’s a month of hopping about. Could he try sleeping in someone’s linen closet?

Or maybe he could just go home.

He wants to go home.

He also wants to leave and never come back.

He wants to…

Yuuya laid in his brother’s arms on the couch, reading. His brother was his pillow, watching TV to pass the time.

Yuuya’s eyes scanned over the book.

He pointed at a word. “What’s that?”

Yuuya’s brother looked down.

“…That’s…Ｆａｗｎ. You seriously couldn’t read that?”

“No, I…Read the whole thing!” Yuuya flushed, realizing only just then how poorly-thought-out his joke was.

He did. The casual warmness in his expression died out as he went along, until he had a deep, shadowed frown on his face.

His brother snapped the book closed.

“Well, that’s enough of that, don’t you think?”

“Noooo, I was reading it!”

“Yuu-chan, this book was written in— what, the 1890s? You should practice your English with something more modern.”

Yuuya climbed out of his brother’s lap. “I want to read that one!”

“Well, I’m sick of it, so you should pick something else.”

“You don’t even have to read it! You were watching TV!”

His brother sat up. “I just think if you’re going to be speaking modern English like Canadians do, you could do better than a British book written in the 1800s.”

“Why does it matter! It’s not like I’ll ever go to Canada!”

His brother froze. A pained expression twisted his face, and then it melted away to anger.

Muffled arguing voices could be heard coming from the kitchen, filling the silence with even more tension.

“Dad wants—”

“I don’t care what dad wants! I like this book!”

“Yuuya, don’t argue—”

“I want to read it! I want to read it!”

“You’ve read it about a hundred times already, can you pick something else for once—”

Arguing rose to shouting.

“No! I don’t want to!”

“Yuuya—”

“Why do you care! It’s just a book! It’s my favourite, why do you even care, I read a bunch of others too, I don’t want to—”

The anger twisted and curled. “Yuuya will you LISTEN TO ME—”

THOOM.

The sound of something heavy dropping hard enough to shake the whole house, and countless dishes breaking.

His brother’s head whipped around.

“MOM!”

He ran for the kitchen, leaving Yuuya alone in the sitting room.

Yuuya glared with damp eyes at his book.

Through The Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There.

He picked it up and chucked it at the wall. It crumpled onto the floor, and he stared at it as the sound of his brother and his dad arguing reverberated from the kitchen.

He wants nothing more than for all of it to go away.