Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ Valley Quest ❯ Valley Quest: 2 ( Chapter 2 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Chapter 2

(four weeks later)

The usual morning rush ended. My maid service arrived. I didn’t really need him but I wanted to give as much time to my newborn son as I could, without shutting down my café. I was funneling cash his way for good public relations. He had squinty untrustworthy eyes and looked like a yakuza thug, and apparently was the son of one. He and his very short wife owned a small inn that was spotlessly clean and had a guest cottage for frequent visitors, including a semi-famous idol and movie star named Ami. The husband and wife sometimes fought like cats and dogs, or tigers and dragons for the proper Asian idiom, but their makeup times were almost sickeningly sweet. Apparently Ryuji and Taiga needed space from her Dad, who hadn’t approved of her marriage, though her grandparents had. The Takasu’s were good neighbors to our new couple, the burly Biology teacher at the local high school, and his wife who taught math. She was expecting. This house was a cute little gingerbread Victorian.

My son was finally sleeping enough that I could work, with him in a cradle under the counter. He didn’t seem to mind because I was close by. My customer base had increased and I had contracted for the construction of outdoor seating and fancy glassware from New Seize, and fine porcelain from that potter, Luna’s husband.

There was a boarding house which recently opened called Maidenhall. It was run by a couple from Tokyo who were mildly magical. Both girls, very much in love, college age. They moved here due to some experience with portals and the otherworldly, different from the Gate and its more rational denizens, but something a lot more supernatural, like ghosts and monsters. A very weird place. It gives me the shivers when one of those portals open up. The couple possessed, of all things, a tobacco plantation, and a tobacco harvester combine/tractor. Apparently they bought that first. Neither smoked. It was hot enough in the summers that the plants did well, though they could only produce every third year because of the need for crop rotation and their small field. Tobacco is pretty hard on the soil, and the need for soybeans and other green crops to restore the soil was time consuming, though the soybeans made for local miso and soy sauce. They rolled cigars and sold them at their inn. They also took boarders, and there were a few, including a couple from Tokyo heavily invested and slightly famous for their children’s books, which they illustrated. One of them was a reasonably famous enka singer with several albums to her name. Another enka singer.

The high school renovation project was gaining traction, funding, and official support. Work was also being done restoring the roof and floors of the elementary school which had gone so far as to be reduced to a single room for its 9 students. With new families and babies needing education in a few years, and new teachers, the school was getting its overdue renovations and repairs. Fixing up the modern high school and opening up classrooms was going to be a big deal, especially for that shrine maiden at the north end of the valley, who took social awkwardness to new levels. She bicycled a lot, but it was 5 miles from her shrine to the nearest village, and another thirty miles to high school, so she’d need to learn how to ride a motorized scooter. She was too short for a motorcycle.

There was already a club for scooterists at the high school, two different models of supercub and a mini-cub for the extremely small daughter of the other German/Italian café and sandwich shop in the area. Nice kids, and took well to the new teachers. A new part time teacher was hired to offer riders-education training. Everybody just called her sempai and she never seemed to take off her white helmet, even if she was wearing a sailor fuku. The potter seemed to know who she was. The bus drivers were busy, but they didn’t have the money for enough buses to supply all the need for long-haul trips from the extremities of the valley to the central town, where I lived.

My personal phone rang. It was Yukinoshita, my dear friend. Her crush on my brother had turned into a burning flame of unrequited love, and a series of romance novels based on him and her. This was especially awkward for Niisan and Yui, who were busy with their kids. I provided a kind ear. It was better than her having a crush on me, or my prior self anyway. Our relationship was… awkward. Almost as much as her relationship with her own family. Her marriage to Totsuka was a distraction, to my thinking, though he was extremely sweet. And it shut down her family with all those omiai meetings. Totsuka didn’t seem to mind that his wife was obsessed with my brother, or that she’d become a successful romance novelist. They were married and she was pregnant. They’d have beautiful kids, no doubt about it.

“Tanya?” asked Yukino. “I have a favor. Or a warning. My… sister is coming to visit you.”

“Does she know niisan is still in Chiba?” Yukino’s crush on my brother was kind of understandable. Her sisters crush on him was obsessive. Haruno was convinced that Hachiman was the only man for her, that he was perfect for her needs.

“Any idea why she’s coming to me?” I asked Yukino.

“I think she believes that she needs your permission to court him,” she said, sounding exhausted.

“That ship has sailed. Has she met Yui? Seen the children? Can’t she find someone else to fixate on?” I asked. Yukinoshita sighed on the other end of the line.

“Haruno has a very limited group of friends, and other than me, she tends towards obsession, very much like Shizuka Sensei. If it wasn’t for Onizuka showing up like that and marrying her, she’d still be crazy.”

“When is Shizuka due?” I asked, wondering.

“Next month.”

“Isn’t that her third?” I wondered out loud.

“Fourth. You’ve been out of touch a while,” corrected Yukino.

“Is Haruno jealous? Or does she not understand how things work?” I asked my friend.

“Just talk to her. You’re good at this. You were always good at this,” Yukino requested. I sighed.  

“I used to be HR before you met me the first time. I have lots of training and experience, though it’s taken some time to really put that skill to work in a healthy way,” I admitted.

“Any idea when she’ll get here? The town keeps growing. She using the train or a bus? Or a private car?” I asked.

“She borrowed the limo that hit Hachiman. She has a license, but it will probably take four hours before she gets to you.”

“Well, thanks for the warning,” I said. We talked about a lot less troubling topics and the joys of motherhood. We talked about retirement from the armed forced, and being mercenaries, and the progress of my lawsuit against the JSDF for breach of contract, theft, and grand larceny. I mentioned that Saki was extremely happy with motherhood and called my husband often with pictures of her twins and the hilarious tales of Batou attempting to cook meals each week. He was just as ambitious with food as he had been about writing, and was equally skilled, which is to say extremely terrible. Yukino complained of the troubles of a crushed bladder and begged off so I said my goodbyes to my good friend and turned back to my work.

The Hasegawa siblings opened my café door. He looks really tired.

“Coffee. My usual. And some pastries for Kobato and Maria-chan. What do you want Sena?” he asked. I Turned to his wife. She was an heiress, daughter of the owner of the nearby Catholic boarding school, very exclusive, very expensive, not normally accessible for the local families.

“Hmm. Black coffee please,” she said. I poured the two elders coffee and make hot chocolates for the little girls. They were squabbling again, but they were that kind of friends. Kodaka practically raised his little sister. I saw something of my own brother in how he cared for her. He cooked, he cleaned, he looked after the house and made sure the bills were paid. He’d been forced into that position because his father was a travelling spice wholesaler and his mother had died from cancer a few years after birthing his sister. It was sad, but he struggled on despite a reputation for being a yankee, this despite his roots showing that blonde is his natural hair color. His wife, Sena, had the sort of voluptuous body that caused jealousy in other women, probably including Yukino.

“Can I post this?” he asked, holding up a missing person flyer again. This was his third one. I nodded and watched him remove the prior image of his childhood friend Mikazuki Yozora and replacement with the newer picture. Sena frowned sadly about her frenemy. She’d won the competition and married him, but Kodaka was still conflicted about his friend fleeing the region, as far as he knew.

I brought the hot chocolates and pastries to the table for the little girls who were frolicking again, and they happily sipped the sweet drinks and managed to get chocolate filling all over their mouths. Kodaka wiped each of them in turn. He really did love those kids.

I left the couple to their conversation and enjoyed the look shared between my cleaner and Kodaka, both shrugged in recognition of the burden of having hard eyes. If my brother ever met them they could start a club. Or maybe a support group.

Edward arrived in a cowboy hat, tight leather vest, cowboy boots and tight blue jeans. She even had a pistol belt with cartridge loops. Edward was a tall gangly French girl with red hair and a big grin. She was a member of the Orbital Gun Association, and known to the national security council, so allowed to wear a gun or do whatever she wanted. Her Orbital Gun had been used to draw a smiley face on the continent of South America, back on her original Earth. She had pictures to prove it. The OGA weren’t meeting today, but she’d probably just gotten back into town.

“Komachi-chan!” she announced loudly. She was usually loud.

“Welcome back to town, Edward. How were your travels?” I greeted her. She was a good customer. Drank lots of coffee.

“Make me a triple mocha for my thermos?” she asked, offering over the dirty classic vacuum jug and a thousand yen note. I accepted the jug and began to partially dissemble it for thorough cleaning. It smelled foul and I flipped on the fan to drag the smell out before it ruined my customer’s experience. A good five minutes of cleaning products and scrubbing made it squeaky clean. I then dried and moved on to prepping a large mocha, three servings worth.

“Be sure to finish this before five hours are up. Some of these ingredients will spoil by then,” warned her, again. She nodded, noting the image of the bounty on the board, still without a suitable reward to interest her.

I finished the preparations and decanted into the thermos, offering the container and her change and receipt to the foreigner.

“Thanks, Darlin. I gotta go. Some work to do,” she said and sauntered out in her cowgirl outfit. Cowgirl Ed, she called herself. “See you space cowboy!” she called out and exited my café. The others hardly noticed. I happened to know she was an astronaut as well as a bounty hunter. Not from around here. Something happened to her friends and it ended in tragedy.

My cleaner finished up with the back room and started working around the front customers without disturbing them. He was unbelievably thorough, even using a toothbrush on that green stuff that grows in corners of windows or on the grout of your tile. He was just that good. The Hasegawa group left, paying their tab and considerably more perked up went about their business. When my cleaner finished I wished him a good afternoon and got to work on my books, which was a nice way to kill time. Haruno showed up, wearing sunglasses and peering around suspiciously.

“Ah Miss Yukinoshita. What brings you to my humble German café?” I asked with a huge smile full of threat.

“Can you spare a little time for me?” she asked. “And make me a coffee. Black.” I sighed but took her money and brewed her a small pot of good coffee from the last of my morning roast. I poured some for myself and sipped at it, sitting opposite her. She chose the Chise chair and tried to move it, wincing.

“What’s up with this chair? It’s so heavy!” she complained. She was still a beautiful woman, full of life and a tendency for tricks. Very much a fox girl without the secondary ears like those through the Gate.

“One of my regulars has special needs. It’s for her. That’s why the name tag.”

I waited for her to explain herself.

“Look, I know he’s married. I know that. I know Yui is a sweetheart and tamed the wild beast…” she began. I cut her off there.

“My brother is not a wild beast. He’s currently serving our country. Why do you persist in this? Can’t you find another man that suits you?” I asked.

“Haa. Well, not yet I haven’t. He saw through me. Nobody else has been able to do that. Mother keeps trying to sell me off to some political contact or other, and I put my foot down.”

“Leaving Yukino to suffer your fate? What about her?” I nagged the selfish woman.

“Yukino’s conflict between you two is her own at this point. How she coped is also her own business,” Haruno deflected. “I did what I could for her while she was still young enough to change course, and she still plowed into the iceberg.”

“Totsuka is hardly an iceberg. That boy is so sweet I used to think he was a girl. You sound jealous for her happiness. Isn’t an older man a better choice for you?” I asked her, curious. She sniffed in disdain. I see where Yukino got that from.

“I have standards.” To be fair, Hachiman is pretty ripped from all that military service, not as tasty looking as Saki’s husband, whom I merely appreciate on a purely aesthetic level, but he wasn’t wrong about his looks like he had been in high school.

“I need a place to stay. For a few days, or maybe weeks. Probably weeks.”

“Well, there’s Seize, across the valley. See the smoke? They have a pretty town under construction, a glass blowing factory, and several inns. There’s a number of inns,” I said, offering brochures for visitors. “And there’s Maidenhall up the street.” I didn’t want to mention that one because Haruno didn’t really fit their profile. She was too much of a thirsty man-eater. Men were so easily manipulated by her typical playful approach. Her parents did her no favors putting her through all those political meetings. Something broke in Haruno, and that Hayato guy had damaged several relationships with a poorly aimed confession, according to what I’d pieced together from Yukino.

A bit later Haruno retreated from my café, allowing me to close up for the day, heading in the direction of Maidenhall. I went home, which was behind and above the shopfront. I rather liked this arrangement. It was old fashioned, but it was common because it worked well. My cleaner had been here too, having polished my stove till it shined, and cleaned my TV screen, and my shower door. Yuki burbled awake in his basket and I fed him after settling down in my comfy chair, waiting for Taishi to get home. He was running a financial service investment company down the block, teaching others how to invest and protect their savings. It also gave us a way to sell some of my gold.

“I’m home,” called my husband’s voice.

“Up here.” He smiled at seeing me and gave me a kiss. Then ruffled the hair of our son, amused at the single long strand which refused to lay down. It was a family thing. Niisan was the same way.

“Haruno just came to town today. She’s still fixated on Hachiman. She’s staying up at Maidenhall.” Taishi looked frustrated.

“She still won’t move on,” he said. He perked up then,” I got to help an idol with her investment portfolio today.”

“Oh? Who?” I asked.

“Someone named Ringo, used to sing before vanishing suddenly. Turns out she was in agriculture school because of a love letter. Thought it was from a boy, but it was actually a girl, and they’re together now.”

“Tough luck for the boy. Anyone we know?” I asked idly.

“Never heard of him. Some kind of tomato farmer. They aren’t locals. Just heard about the town and moved up from Tokyo.”

“Well, good for them. I suspect that Haruno is going to be a daily trial for my patience,” I pondered out loud.

“You can do it. Let me know if you need me to take care of Yuki,” he offered. A kind thought, but Yuki needed a woman with functioning breasts. He needed me. And I’d get painful if he wasn’t there. Nature was doing its thing. Speaking of, I switched my son to my other breast and felt relieved about the pressure easing off finally. The more I fed him the faster he would grow.

 

++++++++++

 

As expected, Haruno arrived at my shop an hour after I opened. I open early, at 5:00 AM for the farmers. Many of them arrived with a thermos, cleaned and ready for filling with my good fresh black coffee, and a doughnut. They paid and headed for the fields. Most of them worked rice fields, but often had greenhouses with delicate veggies or squash or tomatoes or other veggies for the house or farmer’s market. Some sold to wholesalers, which was easy but not very profitable compared to the effort of a farmers market, which was the highest profit. New Seize was a serious buyer, at least, though canny traders. They were super excited about all the opportunities for farming. Something about their Earth had resulted in terrible soil fertility. They had to abandon their town to cross over to here, and the portal shut afterwards. A guy called Major Klaus had married a sweet blonde second lieutenant with glasses shortly after they arrived here. Her platoon, all girls, seemed very happy about that, well except for one of the younger girls who was probably jealous about the match. The next oldest was a beauty herself, with a tinkling bell around her neck, and I got the feeling some of them were war veterans like me. I had pointed out there was no veteran’s association but there could be one if they were sufficiently open minded who could join. With the increasing numbers, we might need a hall.

“Good morning, Miss Yukinoshita,” I greeted Haruno.

“Call me Haruno,” she pleaded, looking kind of sickly.

“Coffee?” I offered.

“Yes, please,” she requested. I poured her a cup and she drifted to a table. She gradually perked up as the sun rose and seemed wide awake after finishing a second cup. I kept brewing pots until my daily farmers drifted out. After that it was the housewives, often in small groups before heading to their shops or back home to mind the children. It was times like this which proved I’d made the right choice leaving the JSDF to stew in their mess and settle down here with my shop.

“So, what are your plans today?” I asked the elder Yukinoshita. I snapped a picture of her staring out my window and sent it to Yukino. She’d appreciate it, at least.

“Don’t know. Think I’ll walk around the town.”

“It’s going to get warm. Bring some water and a hat. It might rain later,” I suggested. She paid her bill and drifted out, leaving me to my morning customers. When things slowed down and I’d finished cleaning all the coffee making equipment, I closed up shop and gathered little Yuki with a walking carrier around my neck and we took a walk around town ourselves. It was a nice day. Sweaty, with the occasional dragonfly zipping by, and the constant sound of ciccadas and less constant roaring of diesel tractors and put-putting of field engines pumping water, usually. Agrarian life wasn’t so different in Germany in my second life, only more tractors here. And more food to eat. I did say I was starved there. Not a fun time. Much better here. I thought about the latest part of my memoirs, officially my popular novels, but after my testimony at the Diet? Its non-fiction. My publisher said that they were going to create a boxed set once I finished the parts in Germania, on alternate Earth. They wanted another set for my adventures through the Gate. Probably not worth a full boxed set. It would just make a single novel, even if I include all the drudgery bits, or how great it feels to fly. And they’d probably try to hide all the criminal wrongdoing by the JSDF supply officers, bad decisions, outright treasonous actions, and broken contracts in an ongoing court case. I would probably need to delay publishing that until it was resolved to avoid tainting the decision and potentially causing a retrial or summary judgement in their favor.

I must admit I am still a crappy driver. I have very little practice. The Honda Jazz I’d gotten so I could hide the fact that I could fly from the locals, was a really easy car to drive, but it also, ironically, required a focus from me I was very unused to. I normally kept my head on a swivel looking for muzzle flashes from incoming artillery or AA, or spot anti-mage killer squads trying to snipe me down on a fast attack run. That happened a lot, those attempts. I tended to want to run shields outside my home, very much transparent, but still active and ready to ramp up power, to stop snipers. There had been attempts on me, even after moving here. It is why Chise and I have hand signals sometimes. The Americans and the Chinese are both angry with me about their hot spring humiliation. I was the highest ranked officer on the scene, so they blame me that a demigoddess killed so many of their special forces in a few frenzied minutes. It was that or Itami would be facing some serious crimes defiling a 900 year old child. And doesn’t that sentence just scream contradiction? I think Sasami would get the joke, though.

A little girl and her friend went by, blowing through a recorder, asking questions on the nature of philosophy and the universe itself. Cute little kid, extremely earnest. Her friend seemed a little confused, trying to compose an answer to a hard question.

“Is this really the country?” asked the girl with a mouth shaped like a triangle.

“Well, we have wifi,” admitted the girl next to her, deciding that was a good answer. I checked my phone. Signal had gone to zero for the 5G network, but wifi showed multiple zones. I checked into the strongest one and get some messages from Taishi a moment later. I snapped a picture of the view, and of the baby’s sleeping face and sent them back to him. He settled down again.

The two grade schoolers went their way and I continued mine.