A Look Through the Telescope!

For a weird few seconds the two of us just stared at each other in silence.

I didn’t know what was going on in that beautiful Blondy brain of hers, but on my end I just couldn’t think up what to say. A rare, awkward moment from me. On the contrary, it felt more like it was her turn to talk, and I just needed to listen.

“Ah…” Just when I thought the tension had peaked, she uttered a sound and shuffled toward the telescope to give a look into the eye piece. Occasionally she’d look over her shoulder to glare judgingly, like I shouldn’t have been here, while she frustratedly adjusted the many facets of the long device.

If she wasn't going to talk on her own, maybe I needed to poke in a question to get her chatting in her own way.

“So, you have an interest in stars?” I asked. “Turn that telescope my way, how ‘bout it? Then you’ll see one.”

“Ugh…” she grumbled with a roll of her eyes.

“Hey now, I know it’s hard to look at someone shining so bright,” I shrugged, pleased with her attention. “So I’ll cut you some slack there.”

What I wasn’t pleased with was how that didn’t actually get her talking. Now she wasn’t even looking at me…

I stepped in front of her telescope to change that view.

“M-” she jerked up from the eye piece. “Maka-jan!” she barked. “Daee o Jideebau ga?”

“What am I doing?” I repeated her words, leaning on the telescope, but accidentally tugging it down because it wasn’t stable enough to lean on. “Woah!” I uttered and recovered. “I’m just making sure you're looking at the most important thing in the universe.”

She yanked up the telescope with a huff and lugged it over to the other corner of the balcony, close enough to the railing that I wouldn’t have any room to get in front of it…

Or so she thought! I climbed up the sturdy railing and stood in her path once again, giving my signature grin.

“Ugh…” She shrugged and threw her arms out.

“I’ll move if you tell me about your hobby here,” I presented my reasonable request. “Those stars are pretty. Just like you. I wanna’ know more about both. ”

Her brow furrowed and she leaned slightly to her right to glance at the twinkling dots behind my head. Finally with a deep breath she seemed to concede to my demands.

The notebook which had caused me so much distress came out. Was she going to hit me again?

Oh, no. She flipped to a page deep within its binding, then pointed to a detailed, swirling sketch with many dots erased all over it to denote thousands of stars. A second bright point of sketched in light was beside it.

What a good artist…

Then she pointed to a dark spot in the sky, simultaneously switching her finger back and forth from the book to space.

“Is that…” I leaned in close to decipher her handwriting, which was so neat and cursive that I could hardly read the english. “The Andromeda Galaxy?”

“Mm!” She nodded with a smile. “Andromeda.” She pointed to herself.

“You're trying to find your namesake?” I assumed. “But, I don’t see anything up there.”

There wasn’t even a hint of a galaxy where she was pointing. I could make out several stars that were probably part of a constellation, but not the galaxy. Unless of course it was just so small that a telescope was necessary.

“Can I look through the telescope?” I asked, genuinely curious to see if maybe it would help me spot it.

But she shook her head and pointed to an eyeball drawn in on the page of her notebook. I assumed that the eye meant it was visible without it.

She held her flattened palm directly over her right eye and then traced an X with her pointer finger. Then she moved her hand in a circular motion around the peripheral of her eye, following it up by tracing a circle with her finger.

It took me a minute, and a few repeats of her action, and her then literally writing it down in her book in very broken japanese, for me to figure out she was saying you couldn’t look directly at it to see it.

“How can you see it better when not looking directly at it?” I asked with a scoff. “That’s ridiculous, right?”

I almost didn’t want to try, but for her sake I gave it a go. First testing to see if my sight was good enough, but clearly it wasn’t. Then I slid my gaze over to an M shaped constellation…

Suddenly something of a glowing blob appeared in the corner of my view. I immediately looked back at it, but then it was gone.

“What the…” I turned back to Meda-san. “Hey, what was that?”

She giggled and pointed to her drawing of the galaxy.

It wasn’t as definitively defined as I was hoping it would be, since I couldn’t look directly at it, but even just the hint of seeing another galaxy got me very excited.

How many new worlds did I just witness? Were they like this one? Maybe they had hot alien women just waiting to hear my sweet voice…

With my newfound knowledge of peripheral power, I started to see even more tiny stars that were easy to miss. They just appeared brighter the less directly I looked at them.

“How does that even work?” I asked.

She looked content with my glee, but that slowly eased into uncertainty. Her eye contact broke for a moment and she gestured to the telescope.

A tinge of excitement bloomed and with her permission I cautiously peeked into the telescope…

Woah… Look at all those asteroids!

They looked like dust scattered across space!

Wait, that was dust. The lens on this thing was very dirty. No wonder she was so frustrated with it a moment ago, she didn’t clean it before it got used.

“Hey, Meda-san…” I leaned back up and looked at her. “When was the last time you cleaned this?”

“Ze-ge…?” she tilted her head.

“Cl-e-an.” I ununciated.

“Ze-ge-dzu…” she furrowed her brow. “Nai.”

“Nai?”

She was fresh to Japanese, so I couldn’t expect her to get all the ins and outs. But from that it sounded like she’d never cleaned this at all.

“You probably should…” I undid the button on my cuff, then used the sleeve to wipe away some of the dust. It wasn’t really the best way to do this, but it got some of the less caked on crap out of the way. Granted, it made my sleeve really gross, but I was going to wash it tonight anyways. “There. Let’s take a peek again…”

It still didn’t look right. There were now some smudges on the lens that made it harder in a lot of ways to see, but it was a start toward a better view.

“You might need to look into getting cleaning supplies,” I said.

“Ah…” she reluctantly nodded.

Based on how she was pretty new to this, it must have been her first time breaking the telescope out of storage.

“You always want to keep your equipment pristine,” I said, thankful that Mimi was always on top of that for me back at the broadcast booth. “Look online and see how people take care of these.”

She nodded along as she jotted down what I was saying. An astute girl, but she struggled to keep up her notes with how fast I was talking, so I slowed down a little to mouth things better. Had to give her credit for writing so much down without even looking at her book.

Suddenly she looked really startled and gripped her book tightly, then scrambled into her purse for her phone, which said it was around 5:30.

She breathed a sigh of relief with how much time she had to get back to school, but then looked worriedly at her telescope before holstering her phone back in place.

“Do you need help carrying that back to school?” I asked.

She was lugging that around when I first spotted her. Why did she come from downtown with it though? Was that where she lived?

Her head shook, but with reluctance as if she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do.

“You can’t keep this here, you know,” I said.

“Eeh…” Her hand brushed across the tube.

There was something else going on here, like she didn’t have anywhere else to take it. Not very well thought out on her part, but so few had the same forethought I did.

“Can’t you take this home?” I asked.

She didn’t look like she wanted to answer that, not completely. So I assumed she couldn’t. I wasn’t going to pry yet. But that did cause a problem here, because it needed to go somewhere for the night.

Did the school have any space? ᴺᵒ ᵖᵘⁿ ᶦⁿᵗᵉⁿᵈᵉᵈ. I could probably convince the cleaning crew to keep it tucked away in one of the janitor closets. Or maybe put it with all the sports stuff? Too bad we didn’t have an astronomy club…

Or could we?

Nevertheless, this needed a home for the night. An idea entered my thoughts.

“Why don’t you let me hold onto it for you?” I suggested.

Her mouth fell far into a shocked stupor, the only motion after being her head twitching to the left and right in disbelief.

‘M-Maka-jan?” she pointed to me. “Egu-shnai?”

“No, I am not useless,” I replied. “I c-can take it home for you.” I was so reluctant to make this offer, as if crossing a boundary best left alone. But it felt right, so I committed. “I can even…bring it back here every night.”

Without my broadcast, there wasn’t much else I could do during the evening. I just had to keep busy with a good deed, if i could. The gods did favor the kind, after all. Maybe then I’d recover sooner with their blessing.

She slowly shifted from her conflict and nodded with approval, but not in a confident way.

“So, you're good with this?” I asked, just to be sure.

“Mmm…” she nodded. “Okay.”

Hearing her say ‘okay’ so clearly caught me off guard. There was a hint of distant practice, as if the ability to speak clearly wasn’t something beyond her. Her Japanese certainly was lacking, but I had a feeling English was more her forte. Still had to give the gal some good credit.

“Alright. I’ll take this antique…” It sure was heavy! “...and I’ll see you here tomorrow.” I winked.

There was regret in her eyes for a moment, like she felt she was making a mistake, but I always kept my word, and I’d keep this safe.