Asobi ni Iku yo!

Year 200x July 18th, America

One Unknown———Lost on radar———

“Infer possible point of annihilation.”

“Above the skies of j.a.pan.”

“What kind of thing... its magnitude and velocity, is this data correct?”

“Yes. Clearly, this aircraft does not fall under any type of data that our country possesses.”

“It began slowing down rapidly on its own, what kind of...?"

“Yes, that is all, Lieutenant Commander-dono.”

“Lieutenant Commander-dono, I’m pretty sure that between ourselves and those red polar bears, no country has any s.p.a.cecraft that exceeds our country"s capabilities...right?"

“That’s how it is, by itself, America is on top in s.p.a.ce.”

“Then, what is...?”

“Have you radioed it in?”

A voice cracked like a whip throughout the radar room.

“THIS IS A CODE 7 SITUATION WE"RE IN!”

“Yes sir!”

“Hot!!!......”

Originally, a U.S. Military equipment headquarters was situated here, which had been moved to Haraisage. A large tent, originally for fieldwork, remained with a plastic tarp like the kind you could find at the store underneath it. On this tarp, a person carelessly and slowly brought a can of c.o.ke to their mouth.

It was summer in Okinawa.

Blue sea, the heat of the concrete below baked everything above it, coming even through the sheet of plastic.

The day before, having been a little too addicted to a game, a man with a small frame was dazedly surprised about the heat.

On the bright side...the heat helped him to forget the edgy feeling of frustration that had been d.o.g.g.i.ng him recently.

Vaguely feeling anxiety about the future, the true colors of that feeling were indeed similar to frustration.

That said, just because you knew the feeling"s ident.i.ty, it"s not like you could do anything about it.

“HOT!”

Kio murmured, having had too much of this and not wanting to think about those problematic feelings too much.

Gold-like sunshine pierced the pores, while the feelings were blown off by a nice breeze from the sea.

On a hill overlooking the sea, sat the Kakazu family tomb, the kind of turtle tomb typical of Okinawa. [1]

While literally a tortoise sh.e.l.l, it kind of looked like an abstract figure of a woman"s uterus too... The tortoise sh.e.l.l tomb sat in a vast courtyard with a small elementary school-type playground at its center.

There were many people in the Kakazu clan, so many that even after World War Two, with people moving over the Pacific, this much land was still needed to gather together at the same time.

Today was the fifth elder of the Kakazu family’s one year death anniversary.

His surroundings were bustling with men and women, having all different faces and ages.

The anniversary group could be said to have a solemn air about it. Nowhere could you find tears, just focused and busy social mingling.

After all, the funeral vigil seat also said, “Our skill at being sad won’t go over to the other world with our dead ones,” so laughter with a slight Okinawan tone remained from three people, who were lined up where you could slightly hear them.

“It’s summer, all right.”

Kio muttered, poker faced. The sun, pa.s.sing high overhead caused everyone to constantly sweat, though an ocean breeze cooled everyone off, making it less offensive as long as you sat still in the shade of a tree.

From somewhere came the smell of burning meat. Some of the relatives had apparently set up an elaborate barbecue set.

Somebody started strumming the three line[2], opening their throat to begin singing a quiet island song to match it.

In these parts, languages flew about, seeming to become even more varied. They ranged from j.a.panese, Okinawan dialect, English, Spanish, Tagalog, Finnish, and more.

The languages were not unusual. People who had left the limited home of the Kakazu family and moved overseas to buy property for whatever reason had still come to represent their seat in the family.

Whatever shape or form they came in, the fact was that they had come to honor the one who had pa.s.sed away in Okinawa.

“Yo~, having fun?”

‘Pon’ Kio felt his shoulder get hit.

“Oji-san.”

A bright red ‘Aloha’ on a white Bermuda style outfit presented itself on a forty year old man with very brown skin and an even more cheerful smile.

Kio said to his uncle who had hit him, Miyaki Yuichi. His last name was different because his mother married outside the family name, but he was still a man of the Kakazus. He worked in some obscure business, though n.o.body knew what that was, but was wealthy, and strangely enough, good at caring for those he cared about.

“Year after year, no one gets tired of getting together.”

Soft spoken, Kio replied.

“Ah, well, it"s not for the old man.”

Yuichi laughed, one hand holding a disposable thin plastic cup full of beer.

“So, high School, going good?”

“Yeah, somehow.”

That said, even though high school exams felt like something that happened a long time ago, the nervousness and struggling...he still felt that kind of thing.

“Then, how is the girlfriend front? How about, that girl next door...Minami-chan, was it?

“Tha, that’s still impossible.”

Finding himself blundering into a vivid story suddenly, Kio drank from his c.o.ke.

“Besides, Manami-chan and I didn’t have that kind of relationship from the beginning.”

“What"s this? A neighbor and childhood friend who still comes over to play, and you"re just accustomed to it? The high road, that’s the moral high road. Have you been playing games recently that talk about that sort of thing? The next step in life is university, you can decide then to be a winner or loser with the moral high road. Yeah...”

“What are you talking about?”

There appeared on Yuichi’s face a luxurious grin that was far too overkill.

“If only just, it were possible to say that you are an adult. In that time, you have a limited three-year window to do fun ecchi stuff with your heart pounding, just from holding hands."

“O, Oji-san—!”

With that said, being a young boy’s uncle who was ‘growing up’, I especially noticed.

“Reality and pure-hearted love as well...go for it now while you can.”

Nodding at something while muttering "yeah, yeah," oji-san laughed.

“Hey, how about that girl over there, how is she?”

A glance in the direction he was pointing showed something strange sitting there.

“Wha?”

The first surprise was her outfit.

A body suit of vinyl, or was it leather, even though it was mid-summer, winding to her waist connected to a belt of some material that was connected to a bursting chest. Plate metal was lightly wound down her long limbs to her waist from her chest and...could it be, red hair and bangs that entered a woven light mesh on her head.

All her features were in the right place. As hard as you looked at her, all you were going to see was something straight out of a model magazine...

“Well then, how about the copper over there?”

As Yuichi offered the girl a paper cup while scratching his head, smiling at the girl who was likely to look good in a school uniform or anything, Kio realized they weren’t that far apart in age.

Then again, there was still that, ‘something strange’, rather, ‘the girl was strange looking’.

Golden foaming liquid pouring down, the body-suited girl drank it all at once.

At her throat, a golden-colored bell, which you couldn’t really see, shook.

“Puhaaa, delicious!”

The girl said with a big smile on her face. The perfectly angular body of the girl moved with a "Hiko Hiko".

If you looked, she had the ears of a cat. Thick red hair reminiscent of wool ran down her back to her hips, "Hiko, Hiko" rang the bell, as she elaborately sat down.

A tail?

Well, maybe a toy like that has become the rage lately?

There was a scratching sound as Kio scratched his head and suddenly noticed.

“O-, superb!”

Covering the plastic tarp the girl was seated on, she was surrounded by empty plastic bottles of beer...

“Oji-san, what are you doing!?”

“Oh, Kio-ka, what"s wrong?”

Not far behind her was Oji-san finishing his drink, the man stepping in as Kio’s parent.

The middle aged man who had come from mother’s family to watch him because he was said to be, "good, similar to your mother, in fact,” with his fat eyebrows sat there, all laughing, "cheep cheep", and giddy on the tarp.

“Letting all the minors drink, isn’t that the matter!?”

“Maa, that’s all right, you drink, you drink too.”

“Ahh, I had to yell at mother for this as well.”

“It"s all right, but the anniversary of the oji-chan means putting aside rank and binging today.”

Usually his own party headquarters, you couldn"t use words when he was like this, and if unrestricted binging is what he wanted, that was recognized as correct. That was just the way it was in Okinawa.

“Geez, it"s not that often that I can get together with the family.”

Kio, while sighing, turned to the girl with the body suit and red hair and asked, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, did I trouble you?”

She replied with an earsplitting grin,

“No, no, that’s not true at all.”

Kio shook his head from side to side, her j.a.panese was fluent.

“This drink is delicious and well...this, what do I call this food?”

The girl pointed with chopsticks she grasped clumsily at the ma.s.ses of plump meat piled on top of the paper plates piled at her feet.

“Oh, that’s tanmo dengaku”.

Yuichi replied.

“Oh yeah, that dengaku is also delicious, so is the kelp wrapped rafute...and those three meats.”

The girl made a sudden loud noise by clapping both hands in front of her ample bosom, her eyes shining and seeming to emit stars.

“So soft and tender, and this soup is the purrrrfect color! I haven’t had meat in such a long time, I’m so glad I got some!"

Her words and her face showed how good a mood she was in. The girl"s eyes narrowed...no, her big eyes changed, becoming vertically thread-like.

Sheesh, anyone watching her smiling, couldn’t help but smile back themselves.

Kio, of course, was smiling back at her.

...Where did this girl come from?

He thought inwardly while at the same time tilting his head.

Outwardly she looked like a foreigner, but her words in j.a.panese were flawless. If you considered the way she split the p.r.o.nunciation of, “haven’t had meat in such a long time,” one or two months couldn’t give you that compelling sound no matter how you looked at it.

Is she Russian...?

After all, because it was the family of Kakazu which was said to have over one thousand members when gathered together, when that was taken into account, it wouldn’t be a strange thing to have one or two people from the Soviet Union.

“U-m...my name is Eris.”

The girl came and stood in front of Kio and, with her self introduction, stiffly lowered her head. When the girl stood up, she turned out to be a tall and pretty girl. With a sweet smell, she had two heavy watertight peaches swaying in front of his eyes.

“A, he, h.e.l.lo, I’m called Kio.”

Standing up straight, Kio quickly lowered his head.

Ah, I knew it, she’s a foreigner after all.

Is what he thought,

“Well, I rushed about that drink after all, sorry.”

Taking advantage of the huge pause in the conversation, the girl tried to incline the contents of the bottle in her hand into the cup he was holding.

“Oh, thank you.”

He drank the contents of the paper cup in a hurry.

It was only after he drank it that he realized two things.

The first one—in the girl"s hand was a bottle of beer.

Secondly—he was told, after all night and the next day, that he was extremely weak to alcohol.

The moment he realized what he’d done, heaven and earth seemed to blur and Kio yelped while falling in place.

Oh, cra...I’m going to have a great hangover tomorrow.

Kio managed to think in that short moment when his brain and the landscape started spinning.

My head feels like a tooth just broke...

Not knowing whether or not they were watching him,

“I...my...I...”

His voice sounded in the distance somewhere, and he managed to recognize the moment when his face touched the ground and he instantaneously lost consciousness.