Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ My College Romantic Comedy Was Wrong, As I Expected ❯ My College SNAFU: 9 ( Chapter 9 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

Chapter 2

 

Spring arrived and I did too, at Share House Kitayama, again. It was the same room, the same place. I stocked up food, this time with lidded clear plastic bins to keep out the bugs and my name on labels on the front. I had a label maker. I didn’t make a big deal about it, but I put things together. I also posted a list of chores with a sign-up sheet so we could volunteer first. Kyouya seemed to approve of this idea and cleaned out the cupboards with disinfectant before installing sticky paper so our glassware would go somewhere clean rather than on decades of college mold spores clamoring for voting rights.

I cooked myself dinner and shared it with Kyouya. I suggested we get a TV for the living room side of the kitchen area and a used couch or something to rest on. Something cheap that didn’t smell bad. I cleaned up and put things away. It got dark.

The girls arrived late, each awkward and lovely in their respective ways. Kyouya went to bed, because it was late and Aki looked half asleep, headed upstairs herself. I introduced myself to Nanako and helped her move her boxes in so she could get some sleep. I went to bed, recalling well the hilarious morning that would come.

Kyouya’s yell that morning drew Nanako and I to his room. Aki had gone to bed on his futon and looked quite comfortable. Like a married couple. Nanako looked scandalized, and I had to remind myself she was a nice girl from Lake Biwa, not a gyaru from Tokyo.

Should I move things along ahead of time or let them develop? Did what happened here matter? Or was this something the ROB was manipulating? This time there was no Saki, and no Haruno stalking me. I had carefully disengaged from Yukino, so the spite wasn’t going to drive her down here. I was no longer interesting. And I’d been regretting a life without her ever since I’d time travelled. But I was in a crazy place that looked similar to the one I’d left.

The Higgs Boson hadn’t ended the world last year. I’d mostly forgotten about it because of the lingering trauma over the Tohoku quake and my exam preparations. My head is full of all kinds of media. I will no longer be dull at cocktail parties, if I ever get asked to one. I can finger snap with the best of the Bohemians. I am growing my hair out into a Japanese style male ponytail. In my last life that was something Saki did for me. I also got better fitting clothes and paid a seamstress in Chiba to get them right for my shape. I’d worked out. I had abs now. I had the ability to run several miles without dying. I could lift things and not hurt myself. I was prepared for the future. I even had a Vaultman tee-shirt.

So backed us out of the room and went to prepare breakfast. Kyouya and Aki joined us, blushing, and I served us miso, rice, and egg apiece. We prepped bento and I poured hot coffee into a thermos for my long day. We walked up the hill, enjoying our day, not singing because I’m not going through that again, and Aki commented on the sakura at the entrance and some school myth or other. We climbed and I still remember everything. The Fine Arts Club scammer would con us into his room and the girls would join. And that was fine. They had a good time there. I was going to look for a literature club. Find some people to bounce ideas off of, and help me with my writing. I still haven’t decided if I was going to write Oregairu again or not. I could, but it was a headache and the money wasn’t really very good for all the effort. I suppose I could take a more hands-off approach and not work on it so hard beyond the actual prose and make it more polished. I knew it all, after all. I’d written most of it already, a year ago. I could put it forward for the Debut Novel award, again. I could get an agent and let him deal with all this crap.

Our first class has the usual speech by the same Kano-sensei, and the warning that only eight students had found jobs of one hundred and forty that graduated. A grim figure, but irrelevant to me. The people in my dorm were reasonably talented. Success was a matter of continued practice, good art techniques, and contracts which would insure they got paid. And that was taught here.

I ended up writing two versions of my debut novel. One a full novel, with all the descriptions, and one the light novel with the faster pace and minimal descriptions. The longer novel I was able to go into real depth on the surroundings with greater thoughts presented on the nature of time and youth, and how high school was such a drag and the relationships so very fragile, transitory, and ultimately doomed. I went into more depth on the characters, providing insights into what they were saying and the lies I found later they concealed in their evasive answers. I made it more obvious, more gloriously selfish and corrupt. I did not present Soubu as a cauldron of heroes. I showed them as they really were, with all their insecurities. And I wrote this novel and I really liked it, and so I sent that to a literary agent asking for representation, and they suggested I put this to the Debut Novel competition so I submitted it.  

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I learned I’d won the Debut Novel prize via a text message from my agent while our team were struggling with a Single Reflex Lens still camera to make a three minute film at a train station in Nara, with skies promising rain later and strict time limits from the actress, her little sister, and grandmother who were cheerfully helping. Trains kept zipping through. We shot the train using Nanako’s cellphone camera, which had the best resolution of all our phones.

Kyouya was quite amazing. He took my flimsy script, which I still think I could make better now I’m very familiar with Checkov and had done this once before so I even included the narration tweaks and timing so I could keep the length in limit. Three minutes is extra hard to tell a story. Every mistake shows. Every cut in editing matters. My computer this time was able to run those programs and I could actually help. This cut down the stress on Aki and Nana and Kyouya so we turned a disaster into something really great. We still only got third, but this time we were proud of it, and we really impressed our class.

I would have enjoyed celebrating this with Saki or Haruno privately, but I gritted my teeth and put that energy into writing the sequel to my debut novel. I planned to make my high school years into a trilogy, and college as a separate book. Very few people on the campus noticed, but the guys and girls at Literature club congratulated me on the win, and I got a private congratulations from our screenwriting professor, the old codger who’d taught thousands of eager failures and a few winners.

“This makes it worthwhile, I suppose. How long have you been writing this manuscript?” sensei asked me seriously. As usual, he cut to the heart.

“I started last year. I kept polishing it because I want it just right.”

“Well, don’t slack off on the second one. Sophomore Slump is a dreadful disease, and can ruin a career, lad.” This was good advice, and a healthy warning.

The money from the debut novel prize wasn’t a lot, but there was a scholarship which helped pay for food and a bought our share house a big screen TV for the main room, and a BluRay player so we could have movie night, and stereo plugged into it, and a microphone for Nanako and Aki to sing karaoke. The karaoke machine could measure tone, a common feature, and would help train her to correct her pitch, which was currently awful, warbling, and hurt the ears. She was nice girl, but that doesn’t mean she started out as a great singer. The upshot was I didn’t need a lot of money to get by, and I could focus my time on my novel rather than get distracted by black lace.

I suppose, if I’d been that guy from Pet Girl of Sakurasou, who literally came to this school and broke his Nora’s heart back in Tokyo, I’d work at a host club bar, seducing office ladies for cash and hurting the women who cared about me. I’m not that guy, and I got scholarships so I am not doing that. It’s not a lot of money, but it covers expenses and food as long as I’m frugal.

Kyouya got my old job at Lawsons with Nanako, again, who probably flirted with him while he was oblivious to her intentions. How many times does a woman have to rest her boobs on your head before you catch on that she’s interested in you? I’ve seen her do this. Aki is oddly quiet about it. I think this may be a much calmer romance without me messing it up for them. Of course, he’ll have to choose at some point, and both girls are nice, like Yui was, only more talented.

There are signs that Kyouya might be my ROB. Just maybe. There are times where he’d pause at events like he was expecting something else, or other times when he had the answer to a complicated problem ready, as he had with my Checkov script and the SLR mistake. It really was a clever bit of art. He found ways to spend solo time with each of our roommates, encouraging them carefully, like a real friend would, so he cared about them and their futures. And ROBs don’t typically care about their toys.

I sent Komachi pictures and mail and talked to her on the phone every week so she wouldn’t go mad with loneliness. She pretended this was a big hassle but I know better. Things with Taishi and the Service Club, which the two of them were running now, involved various student problems but resolved with better social skills than I generally bothered with. She complained that my selfies made me look like a bad boy who broke women’s hearts, directly alluding to Saki being lonely and still single and pining for someone she never confessed to. Me, obviously. She also said that Haruno turned up around town and checked in every month while Komachi was working for the service club or dating Taishi, which is probably the same difference. Odd she was turning up like that. I wasn’t involved with her sister. I’d been very careful to withdraw from that mess in a way for minimum ripples and trauma. So what was going on?

I went home that summer, my room reserved for the next two years of the full degree in literature and related media publishing, since Manga and Visual Novels and games are valid branches, as are anime which arise from novels. Japan is good at that. Sword Art Online, which had been a big influence on my chuuni phase lifetimes ago, was multimedia starting as a web novel in 2002 and published that way until 2008, at which point it was anime and manga and printed light novels and various related things. For being Battle Royale with video games, it had done well and made the author money, even if the more recent arcs bored me to tears and I’d stopped watching. Still, it was cited as an example of how to leverage your material into additional media and eventually cash in your pocket. Or pay off your house.

Nanako was struggling with voice acting. I helped her sometimes. She was frustrated with Kyouya who was spending more private time with Aki and her illustrations, showing her around the prefecture. He was from here, I had to remind myself. She mentioned she’d gone to visit his house and stayed over a few nights, met his sister and parents and didn’t seem concerned about the implications, but Aki was a very level-headed girl. Nanako was freaking out, and it was hurting her practice. I helped her. I wasn’t trying to seduce her or anything, but she acted like I was starting to get to her after we spent our twentieth day in a row getting her lines right. I taught her some annotation tricks I’d read about in the test prep last year, lots of different color highlighter pens and sticky notes out the side, and a good binder to hold things in order rather than a clip or staple like the more jaded professionals used. Many of her team were NOT helping her for some reason, probably personal jealousy or something, and it was hurting her feelings, as a woman. We used the training booths at school because the house was too noisy and I wanted her to feel comfortable in a studio environment.

“Why do you want to be a voice actress, Nanako?” I asked her one day. I’d been up late working on my manuscript, adding lots of details on the trip to Chiba mountain camp and explaining the mathematics of friendships, and how transitory they are. Thinking about Tsurumi Rumi and her broken heart, so like mine, only trapped in a form that needs other women instinctively. She hadn’t learned to be a bear yet. That came after, and she was showing signs at the Winter Fest disaster.

“I wanted to express all the emotions of a character,” she said, quoting the textbook. I’d read her textbook chapter on this so I knew it.

“You’re struggling, and I wonder why. I see you happier when you sing, even if you’re still bad at it. The school offers voice training. Even Karaoke can be a good training if you leave the pitch option on and score yourself on the ability to stay on pitch and timing.”

“I’m… I’m not ready to do that. I want to finish out this semester project first.”

“I can respect that. Finish the project. Make a decision after. Just don’t fail the project. Do the best you can do and see if it feels right or not,” I suggested.

I kept Nanako under my umbrella that afternoon as we walked home together after classes ended and we wrapped up her practice session. I gave her my jacket so she’d stay warm. At the Share House I changed clothes and prepped some hearty stew with broth and veggies and a little meat. The whole house sat down to eat together and Nanako seemed in better spirits.

Two days later she took the train up to Tokyo and turned up at a professional voice recording studio for the team project. She did her lines well and didn’t cause any fuss with her team, no recriminations or anything and returned home healthy but subdued.

“So? What did you think?” I asked her.

“I… did the job, but it just felt like a job,” she said. “You do what they tell you, you do the next thing. You repeat with variations, you work with a group together. Engineers do various things with huge mixing boards and there’s cables all over the place you try not to trip over them. The microphones are very sensitive. I had to change my shirt because the collar was audible on the recording as noise. There was one girl from another company who wore a teeshirt with a fried egg logo and she was a pain because she was more experienced and not a student. But I don’t think I like this work enough to make a living at it.”

“So you’re going to switch majors?” I asked her.

“Yeah. To singer recording artist track,” she said. She was kinda subdued because of the time lost at the voice actress stuff, but I knew from the future she’d be good as a singer, eventually.

“I put some 80’s and 90’s tunes on the Karaoke machine so you can practice at home too. As long as its fun it will be easier to practice and maybe get somewhere.”

She thanked me and went to her room and got started on laundry. Trips to Tokyo. I mused about this, wondering how Saki was doing in fashion.

My room windows offered an excellent view from my writing desk, down across the town and out to the Pacific. I got a nice breeze when it was warm, and a wonderful howl when it was not. It was a good environment for writing about my past and the lies and desperation of youth sizzling into crispy mediocrity. So many of those people were not living up to what happened last time. In a way, this might be somewhat a result of my influence or its lack. I wasn’t prodding people. I was seeing their baseline lives without me.

This was harder since they weren’t getting public recognition, other than Orimoto Kaori being arrested for public drunkenness, and rumors about her working for some shady compensated dating out of a Maid Café in Shinjuku. Odd. I’d thought her a nice girl, but maybe not, not after her behavior and sharp rebuke by Hayama a couple years ago. Haruno had instigated that at the donut shop when those two twits had found Haruno and I chatting about Yukino and her issues, and mine I suppose. Haruno always acted like she knew way more than she should, only she didn’t exactly say she did. She just acted with knowledge I didn’t know how she’d gotten ahold of. She knew stuff. It was probably all those political meeting she went to with her parents, glad-handing sleazy businessmen and influence peddling, as you do when you’re a member of the Diet. Corruption is your job. At that thought I felt kind of sorry for her. In my last life, Haruno had said she liked me because I never bothered to lie and saw through her. That I reminded her to be honest with at least one person so she could stay herself behind all those masks. It was a confession I’d hushed with some potent lovemaking that night and she’d cried after we finished like some terrible burden had been removed from her soul, or perhaps a new burden was added. I will probably never know, now.

Nanako was getting better at singing. She rarely missed a note anymore, thanks to training sessions with a voice coach twice a week through the school, and lots of Karaoke practice, scales, and using her computer to teach her voice and memory. She was also louder than before, and while on pitch I still had to use headphones when I wanted to concentrate on either homework assignments, essays, or reading complicated textbooks about software packages not terribly related to novels but part of the degree for scriptwriting and manga production. Less interesting means hard to learn. I suffer for my art, I promise you. I was nearly at the end of my second novel’s major edits and tweaks, with inquiries from my publisher about a coming soft-deadline and I assured them I was nearly ready. Sales figures from my debut novel were encouraging and there were positive reviews from the more serious literature critics on the book and its style. I need to retain that style in the second of the trilogy, and I think I’ve gotten that right, with enough plot to justify the second book and interest towards the conclusion. I could go with fictional happy ending or miserable breakup, but I think I won’t. I think I’ll learn the epiphany about misery and wanting to save the girls from myself and my broken narcissism.

Naturally, it was at this point when Haruno showed up at my dorm without warning.