Prologue Two - Minji

“The doctor said she’ll make it; it’ll just take some time to get her completely healthy again.”

“I’m so happy!” The purple haired girl leaned close to the blonde girl and held her in her arms gently. “I don’t know what I would have done without you. You can’t ever try to leave me again, senpai!”

“Do it,” I whispered, curling my legs underneath me and adjusting my glasses on the bridge of my nose in the darkened room. “Kiss her! Make that senpai yours! Go, girl!” The blonde girl smiled tiredly and held her kohai in her embrace. I felt a tear spring from the corner of my eye. So beautiful. So touching and amazing. “Now,” I whispered, stifling a sob, “claim your wife!”

“We’ll always be friends!” The purple haired girl sobbed. I paused, the tissue in my hand halfway up to my eyes.

“More than friends!” The blonde laughed, holding back her own tears. “We’ll be sisters!”

“Are you kidding me right now?” I gaped at the tv as the two girls giggled as if to mock me. “Nooo! Bait! Of course, it’s bait!” I snarled, throwing the tissue at the tv in anger and frustration. It fluttered haplessly for a meter or so before falling to the floor like an ungainly, wounded swallow.

“Goddamn yuri bait!” I raged as the younger brother of the senpai came into the room, he and the kohai sharing a chuckle of relief and a look of mutual interest. “Annnd, there’s the het! Of course, there’s het! Way to sink my ship with your het crap torpedo, you asses! You die redhead boy. You catch yourself on fire, get syphilis, and die like the filth you are!” I uncoiled from the couch awkwardly and staggered toward the kitchen, legs still somewhat numb from sitting on them for the past three hours as I binge-watched yuri bait. I was throwing a bag of popcorn into the microwave when my phone rang.

“Did you see it all, Minji?” The voice on the other end exclaimed. “I can’t believe she got out of that spaceship using only her braids and a toothpick!”

“Yeah,” I muttered, pushing the buttons of the microwave angrily. “I saw the bait.”

“Aww,” the voice on the other end consoled me. “Don’t be sad, kitten. You know every single show ends in bait. There’s like 9 lesbians including you that watch anime. Not much of a market there, sweety. Dudes don’t want to see two girls hook up. They want the possibility of a hot threesome, but the girl has to end up with the guy at the end. It’s just the way things work. It’s all about buying power! It’s all marketing! Hell, I teach marketing! I know it well!”

“Don’t patronize me, Eun-ha.” I snarled. She was my only friend at the academy I taught at. Sehwa Academy was a rather prestigious school, and I had no idea how I’d gotten accepted to teach history there, but the problem with fancy schools were the fancy people. Uptight, classy teachers taught upscale rich girls how to land the perfect husband. I taught these same rich girls how to look at history in a way that wouldn’t be too boring at the cocktail parties they could look forward to frequenting.

There was no place for otakus in Sehwa Academy, and certainly no place for Yuri fan otakus. If the administration found out I was both I would be back in the home village picking cabbage in the dirt. Not only did Eun-ha not judge me, but she also happened to be a crazed otaku like me. At least I had someone to enthuse with after each new anime, even if she was a Fujoshi and kept trying to get me to read that rapey BL crap.

“Ok! Ok! When are you going to check out that game I gave you before break started?”

“I meant to do it tonight but we both knew what would happen. I’ll pop it in tomorrow and play a bit,” I positioned the phone on my shoulder as I tried to maneuver the lid of the peanut butter open. I was weak as hell, there was no way I could have closed the lid this tight. How was it jars could break the laws of physics without batting an eye, yet humanity couldn’t figure out how to make an anime that wasn’t bait? “I really hate there’s no option to date the other girls. Every dating choice looks stupid, especially that guy with the grey hair. What’s his deal?”

“Prince Daishi? He’s so manly it makes me moist just thinking about him,” Eun-ha sighed. This was the same woman who marched into school each day with a black leather briefcase, impeccably dressed, and her hair so perfectly coiffed she could walk through a typhoon and come out the other side looking pristine talking about some grey-haired guy in a game making her moist. The dichotomy was not lost on me. “Mmm, yeah. He’s hot.”

“Let me hear,” I demanded. I finally gave up on brute forcing the lid and began banging the top of the jar on the counter instead.

“What?” Eun-ha’s frown was nearly visible over the phone line.

“How moist are you? Let me hear it” I slammed the jar again on the counter. There was suddenly a schlicking sound over the phone, sounding as if something very wet was being manipulated. I almost dropped my phone in surprise.

“Soooo wet,” Eun-ha purred deep in her throat. “Mmm, Prince Daishi’s sooo hoot.”

“We do not tease the lesbian, Eun-ha,” I chastised her with a frown. “You’re going to want to wash your hands once you get done with that cantaloupe, you know.” I shook my head sadly. “Don’t do that to fruit. There are kids with scurvy in Tanzania who could have eaten that.”

“Bahahaha!” Eun-ha laughed. “Had you for a second, though!”

“Eh, maybe for a second,” I admitted with a shrug. Finally, the lid moved enough to break free of its plastic bounds and I unscrewed quickly, letting loose a war cry of victory as I did.

“Trouble with the peanut butter again?”

“What’s up with lids?” I asked, spreading peanut butter over a piece of bread.

“Right?” Eun-ha sympathized.

“Is there some marketing reason behind them?”

“The only thing I can see the market benefitting from is the notion people will give up all hope of opening the jar and just buy a new one, I guess,” Eun-ha replied. “So, when are we doing the anime-a-thon?”

“It’ll have to be Wednesday at the earliest,” I bit into the bread and deliberately chewed into the receiver at her to maximize the annoyance. “My youngest sister’s coming from Goesan tomorrow morning to stay with me until Tuesday.”

“How has she not just snapped and started sniping everything that moves from living in the sticks like that?” Eun-ha sniffed. “And don’t eat at me. It’s disgusting.”

“Goesan is filled with an abundance of nature and serenity,” I mumbled, peered through the door of the microwave as the popcorn bag bulged.

“Goesan is 12 people, a cow and six cats, Minji.”

“That’s not true!” I gasped with a scowl. “There’s two cows.”

“My bad. I’m going to take a shower and then watch the new episode of Lord of Lords,” Eun-ha said.

“Ugh, gross,” I shook my head, the popcorn getting louder as the remaining kernels burst open. Thank you, Orville. Thank you for making popcorn slathered in artificial butter flavored grease for me to consume at my leisure.

“You gonna skip the next episode of Downtown and go straight to petting the peach to your weird hentai?” I could hear Eun-ha stretch as she stood.

“Rude!” I sucked my teeth in displeasure. “I’m going to watch my completely normal hentai while I pet the peach.”

“I apologize for impugning your honor, milady,” Eun-ha muttered. “Play Ebon Princes! How can I fangirl over my love of Daishi with you when you keep referring to him as ‘that grey-haired guy’? There are rules to these things I expect you to follow.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll play it, but I’m totally mousing over each girl’s boobs in the game while I do it, just so you know” I warned her, the microwave beeping at me, letting me know it had once again successfully completed its assigned task and that I could now partake of my artificial butter drowned kernels of joy.

“You’re a pervert,” Eun-ha said. “I admire that. Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Yep, yep, love your tits,” I said, hissing as I dragged the steaming bag out of the neutron cube.

“I know you do,” Eun-ha hung up and I put the phone down, awkwardly maneuvering the bag open while trying to avoid getting burned by enough steam to power a World War 2 Destroyer escaping from the popcorn.

“Goddamn bait,” I muttered again, shaking my head in disgust. “Ow!” I gasped, nearly dropping my popcorn. It felt like someone had stabbed me right through the damn temples. What the hell? That hurt! The pain lessened for a moment and I poured the contents of the popcorn into a large bowl when a new pain seized my body, this one feeling like another dagger stabbing me in the heart.

What the hell? I was 26, certainly not old enough to have an aneurysm or heart attack. Right? I’d never even gotten sick as far as I could remember. I sucked my teeth as the agony behind my eyes returned with a vengeance. Ok, I thought. Ok. This sucks. Something is definitely wrong. I need to sit down. I staggered toward the living room, leaving the popcorn and my phone on the counter.

Although not ideal, cold popcorn was acceptable. What was not acceptable was feeling like my head was about to crack open. I nearly made it to the couch when the world spun and elongated sickeningly and I felt myself falling forward, control over my limbs abandoning me. I never felt myself hit, but as my vision darkened and the world about me faded, I could have sworn I saw a cobblestone street beneath me.