Hinako's Diary

***Perspective***************************”The Door,” Hinako Takayama (Prime)******

Hinako swung her bedroom door open. She wasted little to no time in taking off her uniform jacket, and throwing it and her school bag into the corner. Next was loosening the bow at her collar, like the ex-salary worker that she was, and plopped face first onto her bed.

“Oh bed, how I’ve missed you,” she mumbled, burying her face into the pillow to alleviate her splitting headache. It felt like every student at Hiwara was hounding her for tutoring since they didn’t want to bother Hajime Naoko anymore. But, oddly enough, she didn’t seem to mind.

Thankfully I'm a high school graduate, She thought. It would be easy to brush them off, but with this little job within my job, I have a decent cover. I just need to keep refreshing myself on the material as the year goes on. Her brain pulsed at the mention of time, but settled as she shut her eyes tighter.

Aside from the tutoring she’d found herself stuck with, Hinako was also busy with the multitude of other tasks that come with being a de facto employee of the Final Council. Time space anomaly surveillance, multiversal tear stitching, cosmic animal control, mission control meal prep, transdimensional supercomputer repair, and of course, house cleaning.

“I remembered to do everybody’s laundry, right?” She glanced over at the back corner of her room, where five laundry baskets sat stacked and empty. “I sure did.” Hinako felt the most satisfaction when each and every one of her tasks had been completed. A big smile grew on her face as her headache finally lessened a little. She looked up to her analog alarm clock. A round and simple windup with two bells and a hammer in the middle. She picked it up to make sure that it was still set for 5:15AM, and twisted the key in the back twice. But when she set it back down, her eyes fell on a small leather bound book at the edge of her nightstand.

“Right,” She groaned. “My diary.” Sitting up, she grabbed the diary with one hand as it fell open to the last entry written.

“December 21st, 2042? Oh no…” She pressed a hand to her right eye and rubbed it, trying to remember when that was in relation to this universe. When she couldn’t come up with any answer except: “A long time ago?” She cut her losses and stood up to find someone who would know.

Striding for the doorway Hinako flinched out of habit, for fear of being put back to work by the Ethels. Hinako convinced herself that she needed to know what today’s date was, and that she’d translate that back into Prime Time later. Peering down the upstairs hallway, Hinako walked over to the bathroom where she could hear voices and knocked.

“Excuse me, who’s in there right now?” She asked.

“Ethel,” said six distinct but identical voices, which was followed by a loud echo of giggles.

If I didn’t have a headache, that would’ve been cuter, Hinako lamented. Turning the knob she saw four towel wrapped Ethels, each taking turns using the blow drying, combing hair and brushing their teeth in a line, while a fifth was waiting her turn on the toilet.

“Is Final in here?” She asked.

“Here!” Final said from behind the shower curtain, scrubbing away at what Hinako could only assume was Etel’s matted and messy hair. “Keep still!” Final shouted as Etel shook her head violently.

“Soap stings Etel’s skull and spear tails!” Etel growled.

“Scalp and antennae,” Final corrected, beginning to rinse Etel’s hair before sticking her head out of the curtains. “How can I help you, Takayama-san?”

“What’s today’s date?” Hinako asked.

“April 27th, 2018. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” Hinako said, closing the door before any more questions could be asked. Her face felt a little red as she returned to her bedroom quickly. She stopped in front of her bed, and contemplated writing there. Her body tilted towards it before she righted herself back to her heels.

I’m going to pass out if I sit there. She thought and looked around her room finding her desk to be more than cluttered, as she had no real time to clean it since they came here.

“To the kitchen,” she said, tuking the diary under her arm and grabbing a pen from the desk. She started for the stairs with a long line of Ethels trailing behind her, now all in pajamas. They turned left for the living room across the way, and in full view of the kitchen the Ethels had reassembled the large monitoring screen into a home theater system, with chairs surrounding it from every angle.

“Alright,” Alpha spoke up over the rest. “Who’s ready for the sci-fi movie marathon!?” Alpha asked, which was met with a cacophony of cheers from the others. Seeing that they weren’t going to be calming down, Hinako took that as a sign to find somewhere quieter to write.

Dragging one of the two remaining chairs in the kitchen to the backyard, Hinako was met with a cool breeze that calmed her a little, and made her breath deeply before she finally relaxed. Positioning her chair, she sat down and leaned back on it against the house. Now comfortable, she turned the page over to a blank slate and wrote at the top of the left hand page: Entry: April 27th, 2018, Universe 99999-LC.

“Ugh…” Hinako groaned, skimming her last entry. “I haven’t written anything down since joining up with the Final Council.” She already knew this fact but still insisted on beating herself up about it. “Why didn’t I keep up with it? Stupid, stupid, stupid!” She scratched her hair roughly and palmed her temple three times. Taking a moment to process all the lost time and details over the past half year, Hinako settled on living with the little bit of things that she could remember, and slapped her forehead one more time to remind herself not to skip again.

Taking one final breath, Hinako set her pen and generalized the earliest date.

January, 0004, The Final Council Pocket Dimension.

Her first few pages were spent summarizing her time at the Final Council. The timeline continuity classes, the fitness training needed for fieldwork, and for some reason, paperwork that had been piled up from back home. As she was formally Prime’s secretary, there hadn’t been enough time to find a replacement for the type of work output that she could produce.

“Hardest worker in the multiverse…” Hinako laughed, sarcastically.

But all that hard work paid off as the Final Council had set the date for their annual ‘Joint Multiverse Recovery Meeting’. It was the week before the meeting that Hinako first met Omega 7-A and Alpha 632-E.

Omega was the cool and calculated type. Hinako wrote. Whereas Alpha was more of a hands on kind of gal. I guess you could say that’s what I liked most about her. Coming up with solutions on the fly was most of my life, and if there was any Ethel who understood that, it was Alpha.

The rest of the time leading up to the meeting was spent studying all of the different contingencies that the Ethels have tried to counteract the multiverse’s collapse. Whereas the only solution in the enormously long document labeled: Unproven, was “Operation Ameko.” The actual meaning behind the contingency was eventually explained to her by Alpha and Omega themselves.

“The only thing out of place in every reality is Ame and Naoko,” they told me. “When they get together, everything will fall back into place, simple as that.”

But as Hinako had come to learn, getting the two most important people in the multiverse to like to even each other seemed impossible.

The concept seemed relatively understandable when Prime Ethel later explained it to me. “Ame and Naoko are a big chunk of a puzzle, we call the multiverse,” she told me. “And when that chunk is put back into place, the full picture stays intact.” It sounds crazy actually writing it out, but when you compare it to everything else that Miss Arkwright and the rest of her selves have tried to save the fabric of reality, this is either going to work, or nothing will.

Turning to the next two blank pages, Hinako touched on how the Multiversal Recovery Meeting went as a whole. She wrote down Alpha being late and Hotaru’s involvement to a minimum before it was stated that they would make contact with the Final Ethel before the mission could start. When they finally crossed over into the final universe, she mainly helped Omega transport the equipment. and that since they were given complete freedom of portal travel for the operation, Hinako was not afraid to decline Alpha when she and Hotaru decided to meet up at Final Ethel’s house by train.

The memories were starting to flow now that she was going, but stopped when she heard thunder overhead. A single drop of water fell and hit the side of her diary, prompting her to instantly run inside.

“Sorry, I should have told you that there was going to be rain,” Final said behind her. She was holding a large tray of chips and dip and taking it to the living room. “Would you like to join us?” Final asked. But Hinako merely shook her head.

“I’ve got some work to do,” she said.

“Yeah, me too…” Said Hotaru, who was doing some kind of homework on the kitchen table, trying to keep his focus while the Ethels were having a blast watching sci-fi movies.

“Well, whenever you guys are done, come join us.” Final said before walking off. Hinako and Hotaru shared a bored look.

“Do that where it’s quieter,” Hinako advised.

“I work better with background noise,” Hotaru said, and continued to answer the questions on all the past homework he had missed. Hinako rolled her eyes and walked to the stairs. Once up a floor and in her bedroom, she promptly pushed off all of the clutter on her desk and sat in the hard wooden chair to continue.

April 9th, the first day of school was when the ‘Great Advent’ took place. Hinako wrote. And most of what I had to do was observe from the inside. The Great Advent itself didn’t go entirely as the Council had hoped, Hinako wrote. But for some reason, even though a paradox had occurred, it was as if this universe gave Alpha a pass as Final’s twin sister. When this was explained to Owari Ame and Hajime Naoko, the stability of the universe settled, and the great advent was a success.

Summarizing bulks of information again, Hinako translated simply how Omega explained that since Ame and Naoko’s relationship with an Ethel entity had been a constant in every universe. And that maybe the introduction of another Ethel with a twin sister wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility. But that alone begged a question from Hinako.

“Does Final have a real twin sister out in the universe?” After writing that on the very next page, Hinako tore it out, an incomplete thought instead of a relevant memory. “I’ll think about that later.”

After that happy little accident, She continued. I doubled back to the park to pick up the gun and binoculars Alpha had forgotten. If those had been discovered by anyone else, I would have definitely been fired. Preventing incidents like that were all part of Hinako’s surveillance duty. She regarded it as a near impossible task, but so far she had kept everything and everyone out of the universe’s way. The next day, on the first official day of school, HInako started the page with a two dates.

February 19th, 2043, Universe Prime / April 10th, 2018, Universe 99999-LC. I had gotten up earlier than usual and popped in on Miss Arkwright. The original uniform that Prime wore in high school was requested by Omega for Alpha to wear, and Prime happily obliged. I was asked to deliver it from Universe Prime, but Miss Arkwright wanted to do so personally since her last visit was a little too short for her.

She then touched briefly on the Trackers they planted on Hajime Naoko.

Possibly my first official blunder on the job, and hopefully it will be my last. The task was simple. Place a tracker on either Owari Ame or Hajime Naoko. What wasn’t simple was Owari-san.

Assigned to the same classroom as Ame, it was technically her responsibility to place a tracker on her. But after seeing Ame in full winter gear, Hinako broke under the pressure and chose the easier target.

At the time I didn’t think it would matter if I placed the tracker on Hajime-san or not. Miyagi had beaten all three of us to him first, and I couldn’t think of any way to get at Ame’s bare skin without getting physical. And since forcing her to take my hand wasn’t an option, I shook Hajime-san’s instead.

The aftermath is what you’d expect from taking the easy way out. Alpha, Miyagi and I all had to pay up for the eight pizzas that were ordered. But Final somehow managed to plant her tracker on Ame. I’ll have to ask her about how she accomplished that later.

Some other things she wrote down in between the important stuff was the names of all the kids at Hiwara that she was tutoring. Their bad study habits, or lack thereof and how they made a point of asking her for help instead of Hajime Naoko.

“Right… Hajime-san.” Saying his name brought back the day that officially started her headache. There were already plenty of things that needed to be done that week, but because of the Emotional Contagion converging on Naoko, and Hotaru’s inability to protect him from it, some things had to get resolved sooner than expected.

Sakura Fujimori-sensei was one of them. The young and attractive nurse of Hiwara High School. According to the records of a few universes, Hajime-san had actually waited until graduation to date and then marry Fujimori-sensei. In some universes he even ran away with her during high school. Subduing her wasn’t so hard as changing my schedule around to do so.

When Hotaru brought Hajime-san to the infirmary that day, I was already in the middle of knocking her out. I had to jump out the window with her and portal out that way in order to avoid being seen, as Prime had told me to.

The destination I took her to was universe 33-R, a universe where she never existed. The Final Council says it's safe to do so since the main focus is to keep the futures of Ame and Naoko as free and uncertain as possible. But did leave her with an explanation and some money.

She then thought that she might want to include all of the people she had disposed of during the attack at the east side park. But when she looked at the long list of crossed out names, she chose not to in order to save some space in her diary.

The Multiversal Emotional Contagion turned out to be a far bigger problem than we had initially anticipated. Almost every resident in the Chiba prefecture had gotten their emotions twisted towards hating Hajime-san. It was ultimately subsided by Owari-san’s own genuine dislike for him. Like fire quenching fire. The people and their emotions regarding Hajime-san disappeared, and so did their memories of wanting to hurt him. The only repercussion was that Owari-san ended up becoming the host for the contagion, and thus growing to hate Hajime-san even more.

With the end result setting the mission back months of work, Hotaru was sent away to universe Zero-2 to train under Empress Ethel. And for a whole week, the mission progressed smoothly thanks to everyone’s combined efforts on Ame Day.

A knock came from her door and when she looked up the sun had gone down.

“Takayama-chan?” Called an Ethel. Hinako stood up and answered the door, her hand clutching the diary with one finger in her spot.

“Yes?”

“We forgot to get ice cream,” the Ethel said, and noting the pink and white pajamas, Hinako knew it was Final. “Do you think you could run and get everybody some?” Final held out a sizable wad of cash, to which Hinako relaxed as it didn’t feel so bad being ordered around by Final.

“No problem,” she said.

“Great!” Final exclaimed. “And don’t forget to get yourself something.” Hinako nodded as Final ran back downstairs, the echo of the others could be heard as Final told the rest.

Bookmarking her place with the pen, Hinako tossed the diary onto her bed before turning off the lights and locking her room behind her. Locking the door itself was pretty self explanatory. But turning the lights off theoretically meant no one could portal into the room either. As even with the right coordinates, you can’t portal into a place you haven’t seen.

It’s not that I don’t trust them, Hinako rationalized. There are just some things no one needs to know. She pushed all thoughts out of her mind as she focused on getting the ice cream. It was as if her mind went blank when it came to things she was told to do. She barely heard the Ethels from the living room tell her to stay safe as she threw on her jacket and shoes. Portaling with her right eye was far more seamless than Arkwright Portal tech, but that was a given when your timerift opening eyeball was the basis for it.

Hopping out behind the local grocery store, Hinako unconsciously walked around to the front, and ignored all the greetings from the employees. She pulled nine gallons of the usual strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate ice cream, paid for them, and circled back to the rear of the store where she portaled back into the entryway.

“Got the ice cream,” she announced in passing. The Ethels cheered but remained in their seats as their movie continued.

“Wait, but you just left. How did you-”

“Portal hopping, Miyagi,” Hinako reminded him, storing the ice cream away as fast as she brought it. She left him confused and silent as she jogged back up the stairs to her bedroom. Where the room was left exactly as she left it.

“Back to it,” she mumbled, snatching up her diary and sitting back at her desk. “Ame day,” she wrote out, making sure to cite the date before continuing.

April 22nd, 2018, Universe 99999-LC. The day before Ame Day was when we planned to ask Owari-san out, but Omega being Omega, made certain to take full account of all the possible ways things could go wrong. Etel was called in to deter any stray dogs. Alpha was on “Naoko Duty,” meaning that if Hajime-san showed up by accident, she would interfere to keep Owari-san’s emotions in check. My workload was a little bit more than the rest as usual. I was set to steal Owari-san’s water bottle and empty it, (Which I did.) And place it back in her bag so that she would have a reason to refill it and run into Final. I was also in charge of keeping an eye out for Etel, and anything else that might show up and ruin the mission.

Hinako added in a side note: It is my own personal theory that setting up these happenings around her water hobby is what makes her so obsessed with the stuff in the first palce.

Final was able to set up the weekend with Ame, inviting me and Alpha along as a girls day out. Part of me can say it worked out in the end. But it was interrupted by another giraffe.

Alpha played aloof when I brought up the giraffe in the middle of Ame Day. It was rampaging and forcing the police to back off. Alpha opted to ignore the animal altogether and just continue on having fun. But the day itself was almost ruined by Alpha and Final themselves, who apparently forgot to leave their emotions back at home when Hajime-san showed up.

The unintentional party pooper just so happened to be at the aquarium on the exact same day we were going to visit it with Owari-san. And Final being Final wanted him to join the group. Alpha and Owari-san were of course against that idea. I was completely indifferent to both side because I was more concerned with how he ended up with tickets on such short notice, but as of yet, it would seem that the red string of fate really is guiding Ame and Naoko together. Even if it is bringing them closer at the most dangerous of times.

Hinako went on to explain how the giraffe pursued them to the aquarium. And how thankfully the others had enough of a conscience to put ruined plans aside for the sake of addressing the elephant in the room, or in their case, the giraffe.

Final’s plan to use the shimmer watch to scare not only the giraffe, but also the pedestrians in the aquarium made dealing with the animal that much easier. With no civilians to get caught up in the chaos, Alpha and I were free to banish the mad animal to another universe. Thankfully, Alpha was cooperative with me, and the beast was dealt with quickly and humanely.

She saw my eye, she wrote. “She saw my eye…”

Hinako stopped, remembering what the price was for Alpha following her instructions, and like Prime, became wise to how she portaled. Hinako felt defeated. Still mulling over the thought of breaking the news to Prime that she failed to keep it a secret, made her stomach cramp and knot up in the most horrible way. Now sweating a little, Hinako scratched out the line about her portal eye and shut the blinds to her window, double checked that she locked the door, and went scrummaging for her whiteout on the floor. Finding it in record time, she completely covered the scratched out words with a noticeable amount of whiteout before her stomach started to settle again.

“Alpha was impressed with me, and took the mission seriously when the situation became too big to ignore.” Saying the words out loud as she wrote them seemed to make the lie appear more real to her. And as she blended it in with the rest of the narrative of making Ame not so mad at Naoko anymore, even Hinako was buying it, and eventually blocked the mistake out of her mind.

She’ll keep my secret, Hinako thought. Hoping that she was safe to trust Alpha.

After Ame Day, things went back to the same old basic chores. I was promoted to friend duty now that Owari-san thinks I am a closet punk. And together with Final, our time in surveilling the better half of the relationship was going smoothly. It was just Alpha’s side of things that seemed to be lacking in manpower, if I have to phrase it that way.

Hinako was of course now writing about Naoko’s worries for Hotaru. Ever since the day with the emotional contagion, Naoko had apparently been so full of free time that hanging out with Hotaru was one of the things he wanted to do most. And given that Alpha wasn’t allowed to be too friendly with him for obvious mission failure scenarios, Naoko had been left alone for the greater part of a week as Hotaru was still in training.

But as we had heard nothing of the man from Alpha’s end, most of Hajime-san’s surveillance duty fell to me. Not that it was that hard to do. Since the emotional contagion, Hajime-san had gone on a bit of soul searching. Most of his time off was spent visiting places he would normally never go to, and trying foods that he ended up not liking anyway. But probably the most interesting thing about him was his innate ability to disappear and show up somewhere else entirely.

Hinako went back into full note taking mode as she theorized Naoko’s disappearing act to be some sort of time space anomaly. But she felt disappointed when she rationalized the possibility that he was somewhat forgettable. And him being as such was more likely than some space hopping ability. The nanomachine in him would have displayed anything abnormal if he had an ability like her own, and as far as she could tell, he was like a hobbit. A small forgettable man who left so little of an impression on others that it would almost make sense to just purposefully and subconsciously lose track of him.

It was around the tenth or so day since Hajime-san’s bodyguarding fell to me that I was pulled from it to do something else. Alpha picked up the Naoko-sitting, and Omega had told me of yet another giraffe sighting, and I thought I was going to lose my mind.

Unhappily and with no embellishment, Hinako recounted the overtime she worked in tracking down this new giraffe. And if it was indeed another completely different one, but as of writing this entry, she knew for a fact that it wasn’t.

It was the sell-same giraffe we’ve banished and chased off multiple times. Back then, I had resolved to just kill it. Maybe then the giraffe would be gone forever. But then the nuisance returned.

Hotaru’s return from his training in universe Zero-2 had come to an end, and since it was a special occasion, Hinako was ordered to attend the party, postponing her giraffe assassination.

Coincidentally, Miyagi’s return was anything but perfect. She wrote. After his home-coming party, I immediately resumed hunting for the giraffe. It would pop up in all manner of places. However, the places it showed up most were at the school, the zoo, and the park where the great advent took place.

Hinako laid out her routes for hunting the giraffe across two full pages. She would check the zoo early in the morning first. Two out of ten times she’d catch it in the giraffe pen, eating leaves and looking directly at her. More often than there she found the giraffe outside the boundaries of the Hiwara, looking at the school with barely any interest, but was always looming. She had only counted three times that she had found the giraffe at the park, walking through the cherry blossom trees one moment and disappearing altogether the next. There was no pattern that she could formulate from her short observations but she was willing to bet that her best chance to kill it was when it frequinted the school.

The unethical giraffe sighting equation she had written down from her head made less sense now that she was reading it, but the only thing that mattered was the conclusion at the bottom of both pages, sribled bold, underlined, and circled two dozen times.

“Kill Giraffe April 24th”

The plan was going so well, she wrote with her eyes closed. The ways in which she wrote in her diary changed based on her mood and topic. Sometimes she could write and space words out perfectly in consistent cursive. But right now, it was in full print now that she was returning to the topic of Hotaru.

I’m a good employee, she wrote. I can smile and wave with the best and fake it till I make it. It’s practically second nature to me. But there is literally nothing that I hate more than getting interrupted in the middle of my job.

He caught me in the middle of my preparations three times! And during one of those-

She stopped herself and erased the sentence. So far there was no written evidence that her right eye had been exposed to another one of the field team members, and she wasn’t about to incriminate herself any further by confessing that Hotaru found out too.

I was seen three times by him the next day during my mission. Once when I had left class to pursue the creature through the trees. A second time when I was assembling the rifle to blow its head off. And the third time when I returned home late, portaling in without an Arkwright watch.

Thankfully, he didn’t notice, she lied. Miyagi had been paranoid and a little on the crazy side since he returned from universe Zero-2, so it was only natural that he’d have a mental breakdown of some kind. He was none the wiser when we talked in the entryway, and I hid my power expertly behind some helpful advice.

I asked him: What does a rhinoceros and a rhinoceros beetle have in common? The answer being that they both charge forward, no matter how big or small. But, the advice only seemed to bolden his spirit in the worst way.

It was only after Final Ethel came to us with news that he had left to “Take care of something alone,” that all of Houston ran out to retrieve him. Admittedly, the way Final worded how Hotaru was acting did sound like he was going to commit suicide. Thankfully that wasn’t the case. Turns out, the giraffe, the cosmic giraffe, had been sending Miyagi cryptic messages ever since he returned to our universe. The goal of this time space anomaly, still unknown. But all that mattered was that the giraffe hunt had finally come to an end.

With the combined help of Hinako H-666, she and I were able to capture it. I was surprised to learn that she knew how to bend light with her eye too. It was always something I practiced, and I thought that I was the only Hinako who had figured it out. But clearly this Rouge Hinako has had time like me to learn how to do more than just teleport. Regardless, with the help of that imitation of me, we were able to hold the cosmic giraffe in place long enough for Omega to teleport the giraffe to the Council of Ethels Lock Up. And from what little the Ethels have been able to gleam, the giraffe had some connection to universe 632-E. Alpha and Hotaru’s universe.

“It won’t talk to anyone but Hotaru,” is what the council reported. Hotaru refuses to see the thing, but we'll need info from it if we’re to find some way to get rid of it.

It has been three days since then, and despite having full credit for naturalizing the giraffe herself, it was instead split up between everyone who helped out. Wanting to end the entry there, Hinako’s subconscious made her do a little bit more on the hero of that hour.

Hotaru may be a horny and irresponsible man. But he’s no different than me. We both came on this ridiculous mission to help the one person in the multiverse that matters to us, and we should try our best to see it through. The Ethels are important. They are arguably more important to the fabric of reality than even Ame and Naoko. But to say so to their faces would be like admitting that they are all wrong to pursue this chance to unit their best friends.

I can only hope that we will be seen as their friends after this too,

She stopped just a few lines from the end of the last page. “Another diary filled,” Hinako said, wrapping a rubberband around the diary and tossing it into her closet. Where a suitcase full of filled up diaries sat stacked neat and compact. Hinako sat up and stretched, the weight of all her work for the day completely gone. It made her smile like nothing else.

“Time for some ice cream,” she said, walking out, forgetting to close and lock her door. Running down the stairs, Hinako quietly walked past the Ethels curled up together, enjoying their own ice cream while watching what looked like some suspenseful fight scene. It was between a giant shape shifting, screaming, laser shooting diamond and two giant robot snipers atop mount everest.

“Anime...” Hinako rolled her eyes and went straight for the freezer door, only to find it empty. She closed the door and opened it again, wondering where all the ice cream she had bought had gone, only had to look over at the empty tubs at the feet of the Ethel movie watching club to deduce who the culprits were.

Sighing, Hinako closed the door and found herself making eye contact with Hotaru. He had a tub of cookie-dough ice cream in hand and was reaching for a bowl to put it in. Hesitantly, he grabbed two bowls and tossed one at her with a flick of his fingers.

“Hey!” Hinako shouted quietly as she barely grabbed it bouncing between her hands. She shot him a glare, but he was just holding up the ice cream as if to say: “Do you want some or not?”

Hinako relaxed and sat down at the table. Next to her was a thick stack of homework, finished and ready to return to the school.

He does quick work now, Hinako thought. Hotaru slid the tub over to her along with the scoop and waited for her to get her ice cream before raising his own as if to toast.

“To Ethel,” they both whispered, and clinked their bowls together, turning to watch the movie from the kitchen. Completely self aware that they had no idea what was going on.