Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ My College Romantic Comedy Was Wrong, As I Expected ❯ My College SNAFU: 14 ( Chapter 14 )

The following morning led to the school gates via bicycle, a good workout and loosened up my muscles from the workouts yesterday. I had my gym uniform folded up and went there after arriving to drop it off in my locker, then climbed to 2F and settled in well before the teacher got there, writing several pages on my gonzo novel on the perils of feminine wiles. It seemed appropriate. Saki said hello and I greeted her, enjoying the view. She’d already modified her uniform to fit her better and looked both nice and fashionable. Sensei arrived so I saved my novel file and closed it down again, switching to the notebook and worksheets and opened the textbook for hilarious layers of lecture on the meaning of meta. Meta is something authors use, often as metaphor, but also similar strategies to comment on the nature of the story itself without resorting to something tacky like a prophecy and hinting at the end in ways the reader will pick up more subconsciously. It’s a useful writing technique and I’d mastered it some loops back. It’s part of the reason that Okami Arts pushed all the required readings at students. Japan is a referential culture, drawing in and adapting the best of the world to suit its needs, often perfecting those arts and sciences to succeed because Japan is not good at wars of conquest or winning arms races. We are good at making reliable cars and smaller electronics. And more recently, exporting our media around the world.

And what is the meta of getting trailed by a knife missile and the Culture sending their Bond here? This implied the minds could communicate backwards in time? Not necessarily. Haruno could have warned them early on this loop. She’s probably worked out a small transmitter and an open field to greet them. Zak shows up, zonk pulse to the world to cut down on particle contamination and they setup a field office because of the potential trouble. Also, no big ships showing up with “We Come to Party” messages, so Earth and the Solar System are probably in quarantine. Zak probably can’t leave until decontamination is completed. At least Hiratsuka sensei looks happy. Her spine wiggles a lot more than I’m used to seeing, and her hips swing and twist, which emphasizes them and her bust. The labcoat conceals and reveals almost as well as lingerie, without actually revealing much at all, and the dark professional suit hides the shadows and shape just so that you have to really look to see how she’s really shaped. Also, it seems the boys in the class are mesmerized by her movements and the girls look sour about it.

This is of course when Shizuka passes out the pop quiz and the girls all get more points than the boys because they actually heard the lecture while the boys were fantasizing. I am amused and passed my quiz paper forward once time is up. Japanese Literature is still my subject.

Morning classes continue. Lunch arrives. I encourage my clique to join me at a place I’d discovered, the club room. Yui is excited and Saki eyes me carefully. Saika begs off to do some tennis practice with his club. I traipse across school grounds and into the old building with the club rooms and up that dusty worn staircase, arriving at the club door. I knock, then enter without waiting for an answer. It slides open and Yukino bites back a retort visibly restraining herself. Yui and Saki enter with me.

“Good afternoon, Yukinoshita-san. This is Yuigahama Yui and Kawasaki Saki. They are friend from our class, 2F. Yui, this is the service club. We do favors for people to help them do stuff. We don’t do it for them, but teach them how to do it themselves.”

“So like tutoring?” Yui asked.

“More like life skills and social requests, but only up to a point,” I clarified. “I was planning to eat lunch here and work on my novel.” Saki perked up at that.

“Are you working on Oregairu?” she asked, revealing she was indeed awake.

“What’s that?” asked Yui, who didn’t know, and Yukino who only knew the other title.

“I’m titling it Infinite Recursion. It’s a time travel story. I am hoping to submit it to the Debut Novel contest later this year.”

“Isn’t that just a couple months away?” questioned Saki.

“Yeah, but I think I’m better at writing than I used to be. I’m going for Gonzo style this time. The Full Burroughs, only without all the weird drug hallucinations and pornography.”

“That’s… ambitious,” Saki admitted.

“Full Burroughs?” asked Yukino confused.

“Bill Burroughs invented Gonzo Journalism during the Vietnam War. He was a serious drug addict but he wore a suit so he confused people. He was the original author of Naked Lunch and Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas is about him.”

“We can’t stop here… this is Bat Country,” quoted Saki. I grinned at her.

“Exactly.” I am pleased she remembered that quote from a few lifetimes ago.

“That’s very odd. And you are going to write in a similar style?” Yukino asked.

“That’s what I’m going for. It’s generally good if you don’t descend into incoherent word salad.”

“Word salad is what happens to stroke victims when they’re having a stroke, or don’t fully recover after one,” recognized Yukino. She is well educated mostly due to trying to prove herself and she is the sister of the foremost genius in Japan.

“Drug abuse is like a stroke only without the brain bleeding,” I offered, wiggling my hand around to indicate that this is an approximation.

“So how are you getting this effect without a bunch of brain burning chemicals?” asked Saki, curious herself. Yui was just watching this tennis match of wits displayed.

“I’ve come up with a protagonist living serial recursive lives as an involuntary time traveler and suffering through variations of a sometimes painful high school and later college romantic comedy affecting those around him different ways with each run through. And the layers of change have lasting impact on him because he remembers the last go-rounds.”

“That’s a very specific and yet vague description,” said Yukino thoughtfully. 

“So is this Doctor Who fanfiction or what?” asked Yui, finally catching on.

“It’s original fiction, not fan fiction. I intend to get paid for this,” I corrected.  

“So there’s a lovestory?” Saki asked.

“Yes. I’m still working that out. There’s an overarching plot and a series of romances with a more lingering one. Which will eventually dominate the story,” I admitted. Saki looked disappointed at this news.

“So it’s a time travel story that’s a romance story,” clarified Yukinoshita.  

“Yes. And I’m writing it Gonzo style,” I said.  

“That’s going to be pretty weird. I’m going to eat lunch now,” decided Yui and pulled up a chair to the only table in the room. Saki also pulled up a chair on the opposite side and extracted her lunch. I ate mine too, and Yukino eventually chatted with the girls. Probably the first friendly conversation she’d had in years. Catlike. Yukino is a catgirl without the ears.

Lunch eventually ended and we returned to our classrooms. PE came and I worked out doing lots of laps of cardio and showered after because I stank like a chemical factory. Have to take my PE clothes home again. Need more sets. I did lower weights and more repetition at the gym, again building cardio and endurance, and biked home afterwards. Gym clothes into laundry and homework before it was time to start dinner preparations. The parents were working, and Komachi was cutting veggies so I assisted in our small kitchen, trying not to bump into each other.

Dinner was tasty with small talk about our respective days and a boy she’d met named Taishi. She started this early? I mentioned knowing his sister from class. She seemed impressed by this.

“She’s a friend. Probably a good friend in time.” I told her about Haruno’s sister and Yuigahama the gadabout. Another century old word from lake district in New York state. Early 20th century feminism is a period we were required to read, if only because of its later effect on Hollywood movies and male-female bantering dialogue during the golden age of cinema, later killed off by Hollywood’s union-busting activities and the Red Scare in the 1950’s. It sort of came back in a few TV shows after that but only Gilmore Girls pulled off the speed for the comedy to work. I’m getting off track again.

A good author should know something about everything, and research stuff to make themselves knowledgeable enough to mock its failures in an offhand way. That is the route to being a proper snob, or a Cad, or possibly comedy sidekick. I am supposed to aim for that aren’t I? I am totally the sidekick in Haruno’s technothriller life.

“If you plan to go to Soubu you should do your homework and start studying. Their entrance exam is hard.”

“That’s two years away,” dismissed Komachi.

“Time flies when you’re having fun.”

The following morning I stepped out my door and found Zak and a suitcase which didn’t hang correctly, even if it looked more like a suitcase.

“Morning Zak, Skaffy. Mind if I let my sister know she has to get a different escort to school?” Zak grinned, gesturing to my door.

“Komachi, I gotta talk to some people, so call Taishi to walk you to school,” I yelled inside. Exasperated assent noises.

“Okay. So what’s up?”

We started walking towards my school.

“I understand you know something about the group I represent?” he queried.

“The Culture. Post Singularity semi-immortal AIs with giant spaceships that meddle in galactic civilization like tourists, and carry around millions of humanoid-ish sapients as pets. And you’re with Contact and Special Circumstances and are personally responsible for the destruction of several empires, overthrow of planetary and system governments, installing puppets, and basically are a spaceman James Bond knockoff. So more or less.” Zak looked nonplussed at the description so he smiled wider to cover for it. He’d gotten some surgery done so he merely looked Korean rather than alien. And in Japan, nobody sees Koreans because in Japan, Koreans are non-people. It was a good disguise.

“So you understand that much. Good. It saves time. Have you worked out why we’re still here?” he asked me. Students walked ahead and behind and paid us no attention. I am guessing Skaffy is running some kind of sound dampener field for privacy.

“I am guessing that Haruno contacted you shortly after she arrived, you did the pulse thing, and then realized that our travelling was creating new bubbles of spacetime in this region of space and the Minds are studying it because it’s something they literally cannot do, or won’t do because it would anchor them to a short period of time rather than their presumably long lives and they don’t enjoy being in jail in a small region of space and time?” I explained.

Zak’s mouth kind of hung open at that. Skaffy whistled.

“That’s… wow. She said you were perceptive. If you weren’t a crippled human we’d probably recruit you to planning.”

“I’m not clear if this will ever end,” I noted, “even with exposure to your pulses, because as far as I know, CERN will still set off the LHC in 2012 regardless. Thank you for saving my planet from imploding into 10 dimensional subatomic superparticles. So what can I do for you today?” I asked.

“We wanted you to provide feedback on ethical standards in your country. Your people seem to diverge on that topic rather widely from country to country, and their media aren’t very well grounded in the reality, preferring idle fantasies and entertainment.”

“I’m not sure I’m a good person to ask that,” I cautioned the aliens. “I’m in a 3% school, best of the best in the region out of a million people. And we’re close to a city with 12 million, who are even more extreme. As a people we have a Hive Mentality.”

“But those people aren’t serial involuntary recursive time travelers. You see a lot more of the consequences of your actions than they do, and are in a nearly unique position to correct them, even as you cycle through time and invent new local universes. This solar system is a bubble with many layers. And your compatriot Haruno has been though many more cycles than you have. She is dependent on your as a moral and social anchor, because she’s been doing this for subjective centuries at this point. She was standing right next to the LHC when it went off. She’s the only one from her original group of scientists that’s still sane. The rest are full psychotic. We have them detained for medical treatment,” explained Skaffy as a suitcase.

“I never asked her how many times she’s been through. I decided it was either impolite or she would tell me when she wanted me to know.”

“Not asking is wise,” admitted Zak.

“How do you know about all this if you aren’t looping?” I asked them.

“We upload reports compiled by Minds that transmit them through a special layer of hyperspace which happens to transcend time. It has very limited bandwidth so we get them as text.”

“You read old BBS logs from your prior selves?” I confirmed. Zak looked uncomfortable.

“More or less,” admitted Skaffy the suitcase.

“Wouldn’t a workman’s toolbox be a better fit?” I asked him before I could stop myself.

“That’s on Tuesdays. Zak insists on being a plumber when visiting your teacher for date night.”

“No wonder she’s sleepy and smiling all day Wednesday.”

“Okay fine. You convinced me. Just don’t ask me to become a playwright and then be the designated ruler of Japan or Earth. I’m not a Czech, as much as I found that bit of modern history amusing. Being a playwright doesn’t make you a good ruler.”

“It worked out okay last time we did it,” taunted Skaffy. Zak looked uncomfortable.

“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t taken up drinking at the Scottish pub all those years ago.”

“Could be worse. Could be Meatfucker up there monitoring us.” Both the spy and the robot stilled.

“What did you say?” they asked.

“It’s in Excession. He goes through the portal into another universe.”

“Ah. The published novel. In the real world he sent through a copied mind as a probe using a stripped ROU. It never came back. The GCU Grey Area is in fact, monitoring this mess.”

I laughed.

“He must be having a grand old time trying to understand this planet. Should I expect to hear about the tragic deaths or comas for massively evil super criminal billionaires?”

“We couldn’t possibly comment,” warned Skaffy rigidly. School gates appeared in the near distance.

“Well, I’m off to school. Thanks for keeping my sensei happy. I’ve never seen her more relaxed, in all my loops so far.” The bubble broke down as I stepped out of it and I checked both ways before crossing the street in the crosswalk, noting a speeding delivery truck which got a flat and came to a stop rather than run over a dozen teenagers.

So now I’m a space ambassador for ethical guidance?