8. drifter

As I approached the lukewarm comfort of a foreign bed, I found an Igasu standing before the door of Room 1408. Upon noticing me, she hopped towards me. She carried a basket thrice her size on her back. “Hello!” She greeted. “Is something wrong?”

I shook my head. I’d done my best to memorize the way back as we were herded for dinner earlier, but I’d still gotten lost for a bit. I was freezing. On second thought, it’d be marginally less stupid to tell her this. “Cold.”

“Oh!” She hopped around me. “Your spacesuit is soaked! But no worry, I brought a change of clothes with me. I was juuust about to deliver it to your room.”

Spacesuit…

As she opened the door, I noticed there were two doorknobs: one for her kind, one for ours. One was smaller and lower than the other for obvious reasons. She leaned back to let the basket fall off her shell upon reaching the middle of the room. “You’ll find two sets of clothes: one for tonight, one for tomorrow. There’s one for each of you. They’re all labeled. If you’d like, you can give me the spacesuit. I’ll have it dried and delivered before you leave tomorrow.”

“Thanks…”

She stood there, ‘smiling’.

…did she want me to take the uniform off or what? Right now?

“Do you need help taking it off?”

“Um. No. It’s fine?”

“What’s fine?”

“The… the… I’ll do it later.”

“Do what later?”

“W-wash the spacesuit.”

She blinked. “Oh! Do you know a spell to dry clothes? On your first day? That’s impressive! No wonder you wounded a cataclysm monster.”

How did she–

A what–

Was everyone going to bring that up? I nodded. She nodded. We stood there in existentially dreadful silence until I knelt to look for the clothes with my name–and there they were, labeled in both Japanese and… “What’s the name of this language?” I asked.

“Korovan.”

It’d never felt so fucking stupid, holy fucking shit. I mumbled out a thank you, then fled to the bathroom. The tub there resembled a hot spring to an uncanny degree. It wasn’t big enough to be public… or something… I didn’t even know anymore. While there was a toilet and a roll of paper beside it, tragically, I couldn’t find any showers. There were kettles with hot water and a bucket inside, though, so I used one of those before taking a dip in the nonsensical hot spring.

The ceiling was littered in gibberish–my bad, Korovan writing. It’d be worth learning how to read it, I supposed. We wouldn’t be going back home anytime soon.

Would my parents feed the goldfish? My dad loved Tarantino (the cat) more than mom and I, so at least that was covered. Hopefully they would. They’d be fine for tonight, a bit alarmed by the next morning, and then…

I sank into the water.

Did no one else think about those left behind? Hisui and the rest were so… nonchalant about it. I could understand if some people willingly signed a contract to leave their life behind, but so many of them? There were, what, a hundred outlanders at that dining room? Did no one care at all about their parents? Their friends?

I’d left my phone inside one of the night table’s cabinets. The pamphlet from earlier had mentioned ‘finding a connection’ to the other world. If… if they could do that, then…

…no, best to not consider that a real option.

Anyway… perhaps they all wanted to flee. Yukimura, who seemed so sociopathically nonchalant. Aoko, who seemed so harmlessly stable. Hisui, who seemed so… good at everything? I’d already figured out she was kind of dumb, but she also wasn’t? She went toe-to-toe against the student council president when it came to their grades, to the point that whoever got the best scores was a coin toss. Based on how she’d zoomed during the fight with Tissu, I could see where her star athlete self-label came from, too. She was also… well, she was beautiful. And that ass, and those thighs–

–wait, no, I was getting sidetracked. It seemed bizarre to me that someone like that would want to escape, that it would be so easy for her to leave everything behind, possibly forever.

And to think there were a hundred other people like that… just today…

By the time I got out, my fingers were pruny, but the not hot spring had helped. A lot. A lot. New world, new Ishida. The clothes consisted of underwear with paw prints and what seemed to be a yukata. It was the exact same color as Connie. They also included a very rudimentary toothbrush and… toothpaste…? But why was it neon green…? Radiation poisoning was better than going to sleep with a dirty mouth, I supposed.

I tucked the spacesuit uniform into the bag where said clothes used to be, which would probably stink it forever, but where else was I supposed to put it? And then I got dressed, and then I went out, and then I usurped one of the top beds as an act of extreme violence.

There were no pillows. I used the blanket as one. It was cold. It was warm back home. There were pillows back home, and I didn’t feel this unbearably lonely.

It was my fault, though.

I tossed around until the other three parasites showed up, so then I turned to the wall, and had to pretend to be asleep. I’d never missed my headphones more.

“...leaf storm could get you sued, and mushroom thrust sounds phallic.” That was Yukimura. “I like shroombeam, though. It’s kind of funny.”

“I’m just not sure how to actually shoot beams.” That was Hisui. “I guess I’ll ask Connie tomorrow. I’m sorry you couldn’t find any names.”

“Ehh. It’s hard to come up with something fun if I’m a healer. I don’t even know if I have an element yet.”

“Ice.” That was Aoko. “There were little snowflakes around you during the trial.”

They sat around the table again, scribbling. Since Korovans didn’t seem to have discovered electricity yet, they used will-o-wisps inside small glass containers.

“Ice…” Hisui trailed off. “Snow… cryo? Glacio? Frost?”

Yukimura groaned. “Don’t remind me. I’d just bought the monthly for that thing.”

“More like yearly,” Aoko said. “And you lost the 50/50.”

“Shut up.”

And she obeyed. Well, talk about poetic… justice… I didn’t even know. Either way, that was a faux pas. Yet again, Hisui was the one to fix it. “Snowsong?”

“Ohh… maybe, maybe.”

“I like snowsong,” Aoko said. “Isami has a nice voice, too.”

“I know,” replied Hisui, “That’s why I chose it. Nino, uh, the treasurer is still sad that he joined the manga club and not the choir. Or, you, Kawakami. You could’ve joined the soccer team.”

“Uhh… long story.”

“Very long story,” Yukimura said. “Hey, Hisui, why did you end up at the student council, anyway? They’re all assholes over there. I thought you were one until today.”

They really were.

“So for middle school, I ran for student council president and lost, so I was gonna try again this year, but then Yusuke decided to run for it too. I wasn’t gonna win against them. Um, him. And no one else wanted to run for vice-president, so yeah…”

“Yeahhh…”

Student council president, Hoshimiya Yusuke, was the reason why mites had sex in our faces. He was the reason why splinters existed. He’d been the one to leak my past… record… when I transferred to this school because he ‘wanted to preserve the safety of the students’ or some shit.

Why were we thinking about that, anyway? About him? We’d never see him again.

We were breaking the E rule: Do not repeatedly mention that other world. You don’t belong there anymore. You never did.

If Hisui had signed the contract to escape, why was she bringing up our world?

Perhaps they thought about it, too; perhaps that led to the following silence.

“...we should sleep.” That was Hisui.

“Right. Ah, I forgot.” That was Yukimura. “Supposedly, there’s stuff for us to bathe in the bathroom and pajamas and stuff. I’ll go first.”

Aoko went second.

Hisui went last.

…or so they thought, because I’d actually gotten to it first. Ha.

As Hisui took a bath and Yukimura and Aoko talked about things I didn’t care about, I thought about how Hisui was wet and naked less than five meters away from me, but I also found that I couldn’t care less. Tomorrow, maybe. With a different, better mindset, maybe. New world new clothes new day new Ishida.

Soon after, the will-o-wisp had died. Hisui lay on the bottom bed. Hisui bottomed.

…yeah, I still didn’t give a shit.

Nor could I sleep.

I wasn’t the only one, either; one of them left the room.

“...Ishida.”

Not Hisui. She’d gotten off her bed. She’d stopped bottoming. She was now poking my back.

“Ishidaaa…”

I grit my radiation-poisoned teeth.

“I brought your omurice.”

I glanced at her before I could think it through, then turned back to the wall. She was so close.

“I’ll leave it on the night table.”

It’d probably be spoiled by tomorrow and I was hungry, so I sat up, legs dangling off the bunk. Still, she didn’t budge. Whoever hadn’t left was snoring and I didn’t want to wake them up by hopping off the bed. “Thanks,” I said. “Is… is there anything you want or…”

“Do you hate me?”

…oh dear. I shook my head, then remembered she couldn’t see me. “No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes?”

“What about Yusuke?”

I was so, so glad this room was pitch-black without the lamp. “Why?”

“Because of what he did?”

I should’ve specified that I meant ‘why the question’, but by this point I really just wanted to eat, or sleep, or stop talking. All of the above, really. “Could you move?” I asked.

“Because just so you know, I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t even know that he was doing that stuff, so if that’s why you’re being hostile, then you can stop now. As the leader, it’s my duty to…”

Whatever. I lay back down.

Anyone else would’ve gotten the hint, but Hisui just poked my back again. And again. And again. “...ensure peace and order. You should leave the bad things behind. That’s what I’m doing.”

Then, at last, she returned to her bed.

What a naive way of thinking.

If I wasn’t abnormal, I would’ve told her: to run away from your problems is pointless if the problem is you.