Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ My Unfortunate Whale Vision ❯ TWO ( Chapter 2 )

Chapter 2

Classes the following day began with frequent scheming glares during homeroom with Hiratsuka sensei.  As usual, I kept my eyes on my studies sitting among the pre-aged illusions of my classmates, all of them fat, wrinkled, bereft of physical appeal. The world is an ugly place. I see it every day, in all people, pretty much.

Hiratsuka sensei’s homeroom was followed by the usual parade of exhausted and demoralized teachers. Each with their subjects listlessly explained to the classroom of students. And we’re the best high school in Chiba City, with the highest quality students. Imagine how it is for teachers at the lesser schools.

I did assignments during breaks and ate my lunch alone, enjoying blessed peace. Men love peace. Why do so many get married and lose peace forever? She’s only hot for a few years at the beginning. After that first child and “baby weight” they never seem to lose, ever, women are a millstone around a working man’s neck, drowning him in debt, obligation, nagging, and unpleasantness. Sure, they might turn friendly to men a few days a month, as Father has explained to me privately, but its only a few days. The rest of the month is indifference if you are lucky, hostility or petulance if you are not.

To be fair there were a few actually beautiful girls in my class. One was Kawasaki, a slender tall girl who smirked quietly, kept to herself, and rarely spoke in class. She didn’t show the signs of impending land whale, and her mother was likewise fit at what was probably a hard working forty years old. Saki often wore a blank expression of indifference, which at least meant her face wasn’t betraying lines more suitable for a festival mask. This did not mean I want to date her, but it does mean staring at her did not repel me like Sagami did, in the back row. That one’s mother was the fattest I’d seen and Sagami ate a lot of sweets in her lunches, implying a similar body shape was due once her metabolism slowed down, probably after Baby-Trapping some salaryman, a good earner.

Women treat men like pimps treat whores in movies from America. All they really care about is if you’re a good earner. And don’t even start on the genetic lottery of whose kids those are. If mandatory DNA paternity testing were law in Japan, a few men would be looking at a lot of child support payments, and a lot of salarymen would understand their children weren’t theirs in the first place.

Staring at me would probably repel Saki, however, so I kept my eyes to myself. So few students would stay fit as they aged. The other students were future whales, even Totsuka Saika, who otherwise had a kind personality and was mostly overlooked by the females in our classroom. Many of them were shallow and doomed to carrying an extra 30 kilos by the time they were 25. Maybe five of those kilos would be sloppy fallen boobs in desperate need of the fabric engineered support to coax them into some kind of shape, but the rest of the fat rolls and secretarial spread will be major turn-off for any men in the area. Too bad.

There is freedom in understanding truth. There is freedom in being able to recognize traps well in advance, to seeing the dangers and having plenty of time to maneuver around them, to keep clear and escape. As long as I don’t fumble and multiply by zero, an American phrase about financial mistakes costing you everything, and marriage is a financial mistake for men, without fail. Partnership? What nonsense. Women are parasites, not partners. Yes, there are no children without women. But whose children are they? Hers, obviously. But are they yours? Are you willing to gamble that THIS time she didn’t cheat on you with the gardener or fish monger or paper boy or taxi driver? Women like adventure, and random unprotected raw sex with a stranger is their favorite adventure. Their preferred pornography could be best summarized as woman meets two men: the nice one and the bad one. She sleeps with the bad one then marries the nice one, having the bad one’s baby, teehee. Repeat endlessly and you’ve described women around the world. Not just Japan, but everywhere. So every man who marries lives with this reality or buries his head in work and alcohol and cheats too. He loses either way. And I know this reality to be true. When you can see the future, and see the obvious lack of familial traits between fathers and children, it smacks you in the face.

How bad is my body awareness vision? I can’t even enjoy movies anymore. I first noticed the problem two weeks after Orimoto’s rejection at a Saturday Afternoon Matinee showing of one of those Die Hard movies. The heroine being rescued by the gruff hero was a fat office lady, I was baffled. Even the posters were being displayed to my cursed eyes by a fat women dragging down a guy with a far better chance of survival without having to bullet sponge for her enormous jiggling bulk. Action movies are just gross now. I mean, I suppose the upside is I’m not spending money on them anymore, and they’re fantastic motivation to hit the gym myself, but with my bad leg I’d had to take a break until it heals, only doing core and upper body. I have to wear loose clothes to conceal my efforts from those hungry parasites in my classroom, but with the warm weather approaching that’s getting more and more difficult.

When classes ended I sighed and headed for the club room, prepared to write another essay and do my math homework, including self-study on spreadsheet design and calculations. It was a huge pain, but spreadsheets are important in the real world. Engineers use them. Make the computer do the math. Same with the accounting and invoice programming I was learning. Every small business either learns this or pays someone else to do it for them, which is a huge market. The trick is not to get ripped off by some cheapskate who skips out in the night over their bankruptcy and loan debt. Never sign on with a company. Always contract, so you’re immune to lawsuits. The advice I got through bulletin boards on the dark side of the Japanese internet was often very useful, including the long blacklist of companies who screw over their employees. It is most of them. It wasn’t always Yakuza either. Just ordinary evil.

I arrived after my long limping path to the door of the Service Club. I pulled out the chair after setting up my computer and began work with scarcely more than a nod of acknowledgment to Yukinoshita, who appeared to be trying the silent treatment in response to my own yesterday. This suited me fine, because that’s all I want from her. Her look today was slightly slimmer from the prior day. Major diet or exercise changes could result in appearance differences in the various people I met. Skip some meals or take up a sport and maybe those fat rolls would vanish. Eat donuts or cake and a back of potato chips, though, and the bulging fat appeared once more. I suppose this means the universe is non-deterministic, so the Calvinists would be wrong. Choices do matter.

The door slammed open right as I was working on a long calculation string dependent on multiple sheets of my software. I didn’t want to interrupt until I finished it. Voices of sensei and a girl I sort of recognized from class rang out loudly.

“Hikki? Why are you here?” asked the girl. I clicked the OKAY button and observed the calculation run, and output matched expected. I clicked save. Okay.

“Who is Hikki?” I asked them. The pink-peach tinted bottle hair girl was more fit than I was used to. She was at risk of thunder thighs in the future, and possible chin wattles like sensei’s future showed, but her eyes were bright and kind and unusually cheerful, which was surprising. Most people had dull and broken eyes in their future, to go with their external ugliness. Despair as their bodies bloated and repelled each other along with their selfish personalities were a sure fire method to their lonely Cat-lady futures. Or life of endless child support payments for some other man’s kid just because the court system supports female sex predators and their paternity frauds. Japan really sucks. About the only good thing is many men die by 50 from their high sodium diets giving them stomach cancer. Japan leads the world in stomach cancer. Every bowl of ramen is like drinking sea water with meat chunks boiled in it. Bad for your kidneys too. Kidney stones are common here.

Pinky stomped her foot. “You, dummy!”

I stared. Her cheeks were puffed up, a bad look, very childish, and probably one her husband will have to put up with.

“That is not my name. I am Hikigaya. Who are you?” I requested.

“I’m Yuigahama. I’m in your class!” she complained with outrage. I quirked an eyebrow. Oh, one of those fawning backstabbers from the noisy clique in the back, near the Protagonist seat where that demented Yaoi fangirl sat.

“Right. Next to Drills,” I answered, recalling her chair.

“Miura!” she corrected.

“Whatever. She’s got Drill Hair and a bad attitude and an obvious crush on that sports guy, Smiley.”

“What?” she asked, confused.

“You started it,” I pointed out. “Nicknames are fair game, right?”

“That’s.. not! Guh!” she threw her hands up in anger. I suppose if this were an anime she’d be cute or something, but here she was just another chunky NPC female with anger issues and dark roots.

“Setting aside our deviant male, why are you seeking assistance of the Service Club today?” asked Yukinoshita.

“I… nevermind. I wanted to learn how to bake cookies but I guess, I mean.. I’m not sure anymore,” the girl admitted. She side eyed me as she said this, like I had something to do with it.

“Considering just how helpless most of the students are with basic self-care, that is probably a good skill to have,” I said carefully. Yukinoshita glared at me for some reason. The Yuigahama girl blushed with embarrassment.

“I know my girl power is low. You don’t need to rub it in,” she muttered.

“I’ll retrieve the keys. Meet us at the Home Economics classroom, Hikigaya,” ordered Yukinoshita. Sensei accompanied the icy girl towards the faculty rooms and we descended the stairs to the room in question. A few minutes later of awkward waiting the two girls appeared, opening the door and we entered. It had a wall of windows and clean surfaces, plenty of emptied trash cans with fresh liners, and many ovens and stovetops. Pretty much what you would expect from a home economics classroom or any typical Japanese family kitchen, if somewhat larger. The Ice Princess started an oven warming up and vent to various labelled cabinets extracting cookie sheets, bowls, ingredients, and unlocked the walk-in fridge for butter.

Watching one competent cook try to teach a half-hearted Gyaru how to measure ingredients, the concept of mixing, the act of forming cookies of the same size. Every step was wrong, and my lips kept twitching into a mocking smile I was trying to smother to retain the proper levels of courtesy.

Don’t poke the bear. Don’t poke the bear, I kept telling myself.

“I don’t understand this,” complained Yukinoshita, adjusting her glasses in what I realized was a nervous tic. “I explained and showed you every step of the process and you got it this wrong.” The cookies were also dark brown, burnt. Cooking them too long as an obvious mistake, and easy to fix, by setting a timer a few minutes less, or adjusting the oven temperature. Maybe both. How do I know? I cook for my little sister.

“I suppose we should ask who you are making these cookies for?” I asked Yuigahama. She flushed.

“Friends? Maybe as gifts?” she said vaguely.

“Hmm. Well, then you want presentation grade results, so precisely made cookies which taste good and look perfect will be important. That’s extra work, and you’ll want to practice a lot to get things just right before you put them in pretty bags with a ribbon, or a tin with wax paper. You’ll also want to use ingredients that cure properly and won’t run or spoil if they stand at room temperature for a few days. We seem to be out of time today, so come back tomorrow and we can do this again,” I suggested. It was a total loss for my study hall time, but if I think of it as practice training employees it isn’t a completely useless experience.

We cleaned up the mess and put things away, then closed the room up, retrieved our bags from the club room, and left the campus. I took the various buses home, wishing I had a more convenient way to travel. But as a modern Japanese teenager, these years of crowding and lines of smelly people builds our national character.