[PDC] Prologue
As the celebrations for the new year came to an end, the topic of the entrance exams had become an inescapable miasma that had spread all across the hallways of Hyouga High School, infecting most every student it came in contact with. Some people exhibited their high spirits by sporting their newly minted good luck charms hanging from their bags, while others made careful calculations about which brand of convenience store energy drinks packed the most caffeine per yen before reaching the territory of carbonated battery acid, or maybe grouped together to craft the ultimate mnemonic list to ace their exams.
It was in that turbulent climate that Yukari Kajiki came to rejoice in not having many friends. She could simply kick back on her chair and listen to music while everyone else discussed their latest endeavours at the library or their favourite highlighter colours. Yukari had tan skin, short, dull black hair and stagnant green eyes that seemed to be lost in a different dimension as she sighed from the depths of her stomach and sprawled all over her open notebook, burying the face in between her arms like an ostrich would seek refuge between the blades of grass.
After a few tense seconds, the person in front of her turned her chair around and poked at her arm.
"Hey, Yukari, you're kind of creeping everyone out..." She muttered. "Are you okay?"
Yukari begrudgingly took off her headphones and threw a blank stare at the other girl.
"I will live."
"Don't say that." The lively chitchat was slowly dying down. "You're scaring everyone."
The girl in front of her took the chair right next to Yukari, sat on her side and pulled her from the shoulders to make her sit straight. This girl also had a tan skin, but unlike Yukari, she had luscious black hair tied on a low pony tail and warm chestnut eyes that seemed prepared to peel the hardest of chestnut shells.
"I just... Aren't you tired of all this college talk, Mayuri?" She moaned, her head leaning back like an unsupported ragdoll. "In every class, the teachers are like '
"Well, we are in January already!" Mayuri replied, as she straightened Yukari's head. "That's just how it is, just like how your father was a walking squid encyclopaedia all summer long."
"But, I just..." Yukari sighed. "Nevermind, sorry."
Defeated, Mayuri went back to her own desk in a quiet and slow demeanour.
As their homeroom teacher entered the classroom, he handed students a printout detailing tips and instructions on what to do during the entrance exams, before stating that homeroom would be dedicated to questions and answers that day.
Impulsively, Yukari threw herself in front of her desk, producing a loud thump that startled everyone in class. As she was harshly reprimanded for this, her only response was to silently stand up and leave the class, completely unprompted.
During the lunch break, Yukari was told to visit the teachers' lounge. Their homeroom teacher gestured them to take a seat without bothering to take his eyes off the report he was filling on his computer, only to realise that Mayuri had come with her.
"Mayuri, would you mind leaving me alone with Yukari?" He asked, imperative. "Please, Mr. Shimabara," Mayuri begged. "I am also worried about her."
Mr. Shimabara took off his glasses and rubbed the temple between his eyes as he sighed. He turned around to the both of them and rested his elbows on his thighs.
"Yukari, I have been your literature teacher since you started middle school here. You have always been a very good kid - maybe not exemplary, but you were never a troublemaker..." Yukari limited herself to darting her eyes away as she flailed her crossed legs under the chair.
"Yukari," he called again, stern. She begrudgingly brought herself to look at him in the eye. "See? This is what I mean. It feels like you went overnight from being such a nice, proper girl to almost becoming a delinquent..."
"She is not a-"
"It ALMOST happened overnight," he continued, raising his tone before setting it back to normal. "What brought about this sudden change of heart?" Yukari's eyes darted away once more.
The teacher remained silent, only raising a hand to Mayuri so she would not interrupt.
Eventually, she spoke.
"It is just... I hate all of this talk about universities, entrance exams, careers... It is all so tiresome."
"Yukari, you are already 17 years old. It is time you start thinking about what you want to become in life. I know you think us teachers just love all this 'career talk', but we are just trying to ensure the best future possible for all of you."
He crossed his arms, frowning in concern. He then uncrossed his arms and put one of his hands on his thigh, resting his body weight on that arm as he extended the opposite hand like a storyteller.
“Do you now have any aspirations of your own? When I was your age, all I wanted was to take any chance that came my way to go to Sapporo, live the big city life and meet new people!" He paused for a second before resuming. "Don’t you have any ambitions of your own, Yukari?”
“Not really…?” She twisted her eyebrows, trying to peer into the depths of her heart. Finding them to be empty, she just shook her head and decided to insist. “What if I just stay here and work at an office?”
“What a waste!” Mayuri blurted out.She quickly covered her mouth and looked at their teacher in fear.
“That is a valid career path! Isn’t it, Mr Shimabara?”
“No, she is right,” Mr Shimabara admitted in a sigh. He leaned back on his office chair, stroking the grooves on his nape. “Now, do not get me wrong - being an office worker is a perfectly valid career path to take! But as someone who has known you for a few years now, I really believe you should move out of this town.
“You see,” he continued, resting his elbows on his thighs again as he leaned forward, “there are some valuable life lessons that can only be learnt when one is forced to leave his or her family behind, and the sooner you learn them, the better equipped you will be to face this harsh world we live in. You may be scared to leave the comfort of your house, the warm embrace of your family and the familiarity of your town, but it is only on the road where a man can truly know himself. Or a woman, in this case,” he smirked, rejoicing in his own wit.
Mayuri silently stared at him, her hands held together, eyes glistening. Yukari stared at her own swinging legs, trying to fight a knot in her throat and a piercing pain on the roof of her mouth.
“If you are so keen on joining the workforce now, so be it! But do yourself a favour and leave this town. Shoot for the stars, now that you are young! This is the only time in your life when you can afford to miss the target. Once you are older, you will want to marry and raise a family, and by then your life will turn upside down. There is only one chance to be bold and stupid; your parents will deal with the aftermath if it all comes south. But you will come back a woman."
Yukari nodded begrudgingly, her eyes darting away once more. Mayuri put her hand on Yukari's shoulder and made her a head gesture to leave.
“I don’t know,” Yukari moaned as they left the teachers’ office. “Mr. Shimabara made it such big of a deal that now I am scared of choosing anything… I thought it would be okay so long as I could get a job and figure it out from there, but now I am afraid of making the wrong choice and losing years of my life to it.”
“But that’s the opposite of what he said, Yukari! He was saying that you should just follow your heart now to not regret it!”
“But my heart is not telling me anything!”
“You’re just overwhelmed. I know what we’ll do: we are going to pack the fishing equipment and hit the gulf outside of town! Just the two of us,” Mayuri grinned.
“And how are we making it to the gulf, exactly? You can only go through the road.”
Mayuri smirked as she rummaged through her schoolbag. She mimicked a drum roll with her tongue as she pulled out a card holder and slowly revealed a moped driving licence. Yukari immediately took it out of her hands and examined it closely.
“No way!” Yukari exclaimed. “When!?”
“I have been studying in secret during the weekends! I took the exam right before the summer holidays,” she clamoured as she puffed up her chest. “You’re the only person outside of my family that knows.”
“But why…? I mean, you cannot take a motorbike to Sapporo, can you?”
“It’s not for college, silly!"
Mayuri gave Yukari a friendly nudge on her arm with her closed fist.
"In the big city I can move around by metro, anyway. This is so we can move around more easily when we’re together in Hyougashi!”
“Ehm… We?” Yukari hesitated for a moment. “S-Surely you’d rather go out with someone more thrilling than me,” she chuckled nervously.
Mayuri playfully puffed up her cheeks as she poked Yukari a number of times in the forehead. Her frown then turned into a mischievous smile. “Like who?” She smirked.
“I don’t know, but-“
"Say that again...?" Mayuri tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, bringing it closer to Yukari as she asked. She had a peach-coloured hearing aid inserted in her ear canal, whose bright LED light pierced into Yukari's eyes, forcing her to squint.
"I said I don't know! But-"
“Of course you don’t, silly, because there’s none!” Mayuri put her licence back inside her card holder as she beamed with the pride of a gold medal. “Case closed.”
When Yukari opened the door of the house's storage room, she was assaulted by a dense cloud of dust that irritated her eyes and throat, throwing her into a fit of cough that forced her to turn around and breathe the fresher air of the hallway.
There had been a time when the house's storeroom was envisioned as a spare bedroom by a newlywed Kajiki couple, where they could house a guest or two overnight when they came to visit Hyougashi. Being as it was mostly a small fishing town with no celebrated figures to speak of, Hyougashi had nothing in the way of a tourism or a hospitality industry, beyond a few small bars and a sushi restaurant which prided itself in only using fish from the local harbour and was the de facto place to hold banquets during special occasions. As a silver lining, the lack of a tourism industry had kept the town free of satellite landlords, meaning that housing was affordable and the locals could enjoy the natural beauty of an unaltered shingle beach just outside of town.
In its heyday, the couple’s friends would often come to visit the beach together during the hot summer days and sleep in the guest room during the night.
Those carefree summer days eventually became a sweet memory of the past as everyone -including the Kajikis- began to have children of their own to look after.
It was then decided by a tacit agreement that the guest room would be used to store the baby pram while not in use, and its fate soon followed.
Upon seeing Yukari's desperate attempt to breathe fresh air, Mayuri took the cue to cover her mouth with a handkerchief before stepping inside, aiming to open a window to dissipate the dust miasma permeating the room.
"All clear, Captain!" Mayuri screamed through her handkerchief in jest while raising her flat hand to the height of her forehead, mimicking a pirate greeting. Yukari was torn between thanking her for her selfless sacrifice and taunting for talking like a sailor, but settled on returning the salute with as much of a straight face as she could muster.
"So where are the fishing rods, Captain?"
"...let's just open boxes," conceded Yukari as she stepped inside. "My parents never label anything here."
The boxes contained all manner of forgotten trinkets from the past. One of the boxes contained a mix of fishing prizes, picture albums, dog-eared charts and worn notebooks. Another box was filled with diverse baby dressing items, such as woollen rompers, tiny socks and booties, which would probably have been in better hands had they been handed down to someone else. The thought of this gave Yukari shivers, as she imagined an older version of herself being pregnant and her parents handing her that exact box. She then closed the box and discreetly shoved it away whlist holding her urge to stick a
Meanwhile, Mayuri noticed a small gift box in a corner of the room, standing alone on top of a big box. Curiosity quickly took the best out of her as she took the box and carefully peeled off the tape holding the gift wrapper in place, hoping she could just tape it all back together once she was over.
Within the wrapper lay a blue leatherette box with the words “Druids” and the kanji for water etched on the front face. Inside the box was a deck of cards, each one of them inserted into a plastic sleeve with a transparent front cover and a rigid, opaque purple back. The cards inside looked pristine, having no dents on either the edges or the surface.
"Yuu," called Mayuri. "Come on you never told me you know how to play Druids?"
"Come again?" Yukari bolted upright, her mind still muddled with the dreadful visions of pregnancy and motherhood. Noticing the deckbox in Mayuri's hands caused little more than a frown on her face. "I don't know... My sister used to play it, but I never really learnt the rules of the game."
"This must have been a gift for you, but it was never opened."
"I guess something my parents whipped up, thinking I would want to play with her."
"I really doubt it," objected Mayuri, showing one of the cards, sleeved. The card was called 'Ariel, Priestess Left Behind', and depicted a young woman clad in deep blue clerical robes carrying a silver trident. "You have to know a fair bit about card games to even know sleeves exist. And these have rugged backs - they cost a pretty penny."
But none of Mayuri's arguments made it to Yukari's ears, as she was completely absorbed by the sight of the card in her hand. She stood completely still, unblinking, her breath caught by an image that dug deep into her memories as she remembered peering at the table while her older sister played card games with her friends. It took her a few seconds and a shake of her head to come back to reality, where her old friend had already placed the card back inside the box with a bemused expression, having clearly noticed she was not being listened to.
"Sorry, Mayu, I-"
"In any case," interrupted Mayuri, trying to hide her annoyance, "this could be a message from your sister, Yuu."
"Come again?" Yukari's lips twisted upward, her heart beginning to race.
"Well, you are in a bit of a crossroad right now, aren't you?" Mayuri stated as she sat on the floor, her legs extended. "You really want to march on the beaten track ahead of you, but people keep jerking you towards the unmarked woods surrounding it."
"Yes,
Mayuri's voice mellowed as she explained, "perhaps this is your sister trying to reach out to you, giving you a memento so you are more willing to step into the woods. We cannot accompany you, Yukari, but she can," she concluded, extending her arms with the deckbox in her hands.
The room fell silent for an eternal couple of seconds, as the tension in the air solidified around them. Yukari plummeted to the ground butt-first, clearly trying to puzzle out some snarky remark to chase away the feelings brought to her by her friends' words and her sister's forsaken gift. In the end, all she could do is sigh deeply.
"I hate you all," she muttered in defeat, a thin smile showing on her face.