Episode 8: The Death of Treena Berry

There was something that fascinated Tomo more than pop culture from the past, school, and different cultures combined.

The Internet. Or more specifically, YouTube. What she’d seen of it anyway, which wasn’t that much. She could count on both hands how many videos she’d watched. (I won’t bore you with the details, though.)

To her, the Internet was a forbidden fruit, something she’d only seen and heard of in old VHS recordings. Because her parents were so strict and so obsessed with the past, that was all she knew. Up until seventh grade, she’d been home-schooled. It was a miracle that she even got to attend the middle school she was at now.

Oh, yeah. The Internet. Back to that.

The reason why she had watched so few YouTube videos were because she thought they were neat, but that was about it. Because she had watched VHS recordings for so long, digital Internet videos seemed almost unnatural to her. But ironically enough (to borrow a word that the nineties loved so much), she did in fact have a YouTube channel that she was proud of.

The fact that the YouTube channel she and her friends created was getting so popular astounded her (although to be honest, she knew basically nothing about who was the most subscribed YouTuber and all that. She was even surprised to know the word “subscribed” at all!)

People from across the world had called reviews unique and refreshing, contrasting her to someone called the Nostalgia Critic, who every other reviewer was apparently emulating.

But that was the point that Tomo wanted to make with her channel. She wanted people to see reviewing from a different viewpoint—a viewpoint of a girl who’s reviewing movies that may be nostalgic to the audience but not to her at all. Something that could challenge their thinking.

Reviews that were free from the influence of every other reviewer on the Internet—a reviewing style that was uniquely her own.

That’s how Treena Berry was born.

★

It was two days after New Year’s Day and Tomo was doing what she always did on Sunday nights before bedtime: Listening to music on her Walkman while writing in the journal that Naoko got for her a little while back.

Writing at nighttime while listening to music was Tomo’s favorite part of the day—besides being in the Can Do Anything Club, of course. The calmness of the night sky, along with the pleasant dim light of her nightstand put her in the mood to jot down what silly or mundane things happened that day. Things that brought a smile to her face.

Everything was going as it normally went… until her Nokia phone rang.

Tomo paused her music and took off her headphones, scrambling to her dresser to see who was calling.

“Hello?” she said politely, nestling the chunky phone between her ear and shoulder.

“Tomo? You answered, good.”

Nathan? What does he want? A bit of nervousness formed in her stomach.

“Yeah…?” she said shakily.

“Listen, thank God I still have your video files, otherwise they could have been lost forever.”

Tomo felt chills run up her spine. “W-what do you mean, lost forever?”

Nathan took a deep breath. “Someone hacked into your account earlier this morning.”

Tomo's mouth dropped open. “Oh my God! That sounds bad…” she blinked. “Hacking is bad, right?”

“Yes. Hacking is when someone breaks into your account. The person who hacked yours deleted all your videos and replaced them with, uh…”

“Bad stuff, I presume?”

“—Yeah. That’s one way of putting it. Oh, and don’t worry. I told Erica about it, too.”

Tomo thought for a second as Nathan kept rambling on about the dangers of hacking and stuff. As he was, a plan was forming in her mind. One that involved time travel.

She told Nathan about this.

The boy sighed. “Tomo. I know you’re upset about your channel right now, but I feel like this is the kind of stuff we should learn how to fix with as little magic as possible.” Him saying that implied that she used her superpower all the time or something… which, admittedly, she did.

“Ah. Yeah, I get what you’re puttin’ down.” Tomo felt disappointed, but she understood what he was saying.

“Erica and I’ll try to solve the problem, okay? Just give it a few days.”

Tomo could feel her eyes fill with tears. She began to sniffle.

A moment of silence enveloped the phone call.

“ … I feel like my account died,” she said softly.

“Well, in a way, it kind of did,” Nathan replied. “But hey. My account was hacked once, and although my videos weren’t deleted, I got rid of him… for good, too.”

Knock, knock!

Tomo knew it was time for bed just by the knocking she heard on the door, meaning that her mom was going to tell her to go to bed.

“Goodnight Nathan,” Tomo said quickly. She then hung up and teleported into her bed just as she heard her mom turn the doorknob.

“Are you ready for bed, sweet pea?” Tomo’s mom said in a soothing tone that she didn’t know she needed it until just then.

Tomo nodded and took in some calming breaths.

Everything’s going to work out perfectly fine, she kept telling herself.

★

“Awww I’m so sorry, Tomo-chan!” Mimori whined hysterically, and then quickly changed her mood into one of hopefulness. “But you can always use my YouTube account, Caesar Orzell!”

Tomo giggled softly. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Mimori frowned. “You’re right. Hmm… right now, we should be talking about a more pressing issue at hand: My birthday which is coming up!”

It was now Monday and only the six original girls (plus Nathan) were in the clubroom today since Asuka, Behami, Suika, and Jopi were doing some after-school choir activity or something.

Tomo, Mimori, Kasumi, and Mari were all doing whatever while Nathan, Erica, and Naoko were all gathered around Erica’s computer, having a little pow-wow.

“Your birthday?” Kasumi snorted. “Isn’t that, like, a week from now?”

“I’d say it’s the perfect time to start thinking about it,” said Mimori in an overly-serious tone. “And you know what I want for my birthday?”

“An Equestria Girls doll?” Mari guessed, smirking.

“Nope! I already have all the new ones. I want—”

“A DVD box set of Charmed season 6?” Kasumi quipped.

Mimori narrowed her eyes and blushed. “No, but that’d be nice.” She drew in a deep breath and let it out.

“I want cold, hard cash in a nice box with a pretty red bow on the top. That is all.”

“Man, if only Jopi was here right now!” Mari cackled. “Then she’d have that whipped up for you in no time!” She spread out her arms and made magician-like movements. “Vóila! There you go, there’s your birthday present! Mimori-chan!”

“Since when did you get the supreme role in being Ms. Sarcasm?” Mimori murmured. “And FYI for anyone who’s curious, Jopi’s real name is Josephine.”

Tomo caught that interesting bit of trivia and glanced behind to see that Kasumi was looking her way. Before she knew it, the blonde, twin-tailed girl brought her chair over and sat right next to her.

“Someone’s quiet today,” she remarked.

“Yeah…” said Tomo quietly. “It’s just… it feels like Treena Berry is dead.”

Kasumi nodded, face strangely sympathetic. “Yeah. I can totally understand. But remember,” she said, putting a hand on the glasses girl’s shoulder. “She still exists somewhere… in your heart.”

Tomo made a small smile as Kasumi’s hand drew back to her cell phone. “Aw… how sweet,” she remarked.

That was when something strange happened.

It was then that Tomo felt like she was slipping through time and space—everything that was once crisp and clear-looking was becoming blurry and distorted.

It was something so strange to her eyes and her senses that she felt like she was going to get sick.

Luckily, right when she began to feel sick, the dizzying atmosphere stopped, and she was back in the real world…

Or was she?

Looking around the room, Tomo saw that everyone was frozen in place. Her friends, who were just chatting and moving a few moments before, were as still as pictures now.

“ … What happened?” Tomo said, voice quivering.

I mean obviously, it has something to do with me, so… did a new power of mine just arrive? (What are these powers, a delivery service?)

Welp, there was only one person to call in times like this.

“HENRY!” she yelled, not minding the volume of her voice since time had basically frozen and no one could hear her anyway.

Not even five seconds later, a beam of light flashed before her eyes and there was Henry, aka Max Takanashi.

“Nice one,” was the first thing he said. “Nice going, Tomo. You get a gold star.” And with that, Henry made a plastic star appear out of thin air with the words you tried written on it in Comic Sans.

Taking the star, Tomo giggled and placed it on her chest, right next to her uniform’s bow. “Thank you. Now I must ask, what kind of new power is this? I thought Mimori had the ability to freeze time!”

Henry leaned up against the bookshelf, trying to look cool or something in the process. “Not exactly,” he said casually. “You see, what you just did was an extension of your superpower, teleportation. You teleported to a different plane of existence just now, Tomo-chan.”

“‘Of existence?’” Tomo’s eyes widened. This is exciting!

“Basically, yeah.” Henry started to pace around in the clubroom. “One you created yourself. One where you and I are the only ones currently living, so to speak.”

Tomo’s knees suddenly felt weak. She knew she had to sit down for this one. “You mean, my friends are all dead?!”

Henry chuckled lightly. “Well, not really. Don’t worry about it too much. You’ll figure out what this place is soon enough.” Henry smiled smugly. “Now, if you excuse me, I’m going to take advantage of this.”

And with that, he orbed out of the room, going to God Knows Where.

Tomo blinked and drummed her fingers on the table, looking around at all of her friends, who were like creepy, ultra-realistic statues at the moment.

But why did I teleport myself here?

Absolute silence rang in Tomo’s ears, and the situation became abundantly—not to mention obviously—clear.

She was scared that her YouTube channel got hacked. She even muttered the words “Treena Berry is dead” the night before.

Tomo was Treena Berry.

Everyone in this plane of existence was not breathing. They were, for all intents and purposes, dead.

This was a world that was the opposite of hers, meaning…

In this world, Treena Berry wasn’t dead.

“BINGO!” she yelled, getting up out of her chair and doing a fist pump.

And how to get back, well, that’s easy!

It was just like teleporting back to a place in her original plane.

I wish to go back to my clubroom to solve this dumb issue.

And so, with another gut-twisting feeling in her, well, gut, she arrived back at the Can Do Anything Club Headquarters—er—clubroom.

★

“Where the heck have you been?” shouted Mari. “You’ve been gone for two whole minutes!”

Tomo knew that Mari was the master of the clock and that one could simply not mess with her when it came to telling time.

The girl felt sweat drip down her cheek. “Wow, I was gone for that long? It felt much shorter than that. Were you guys wondering where I was?”

“Well, uh, duh!” Kasumi said, sticking her tongue out. “I was just talking to you and then you vanished for a few minutes, and then you came back. Like, I’m used to it at this point but it still weirds me out when it happens.”

Tomo’s mouth formed a straight line. “Oh, uh, sorry about that! I just kinda discovered that I have a new extension of my superpower!”

“AHHHHHH!!!” Mimori screamed unnecessarily. “WHAT IS IT, WHAT IS IT?!”

“I am now able to teleport to different places of existence—and also make my own, I guess.”

“Holy shit that’s kind of OP!” Mari responded, eyes wide like saucers. Glancing at Erica, Tomo noticed the girl taking out the piece of paper with their superpowers listed on it (it was now hiding in the girls’ math binder, don’t worry about it) and scribbling something down on it.

Nice one, Erica-chan. Tomo gave her friend a strong thumbs up.

“So did you find out the culprit?” she asked, changing the subject rather abruptly.

“Oh, we found him,” Nathan said, grinning. “We’re fixing the problem right now. No need to do it magically, you see? The only ‘magic’ part is getting YouTube to restore your channel for you and everything will be as good as new.”

Tomo heaved a heavy sigh of relief. Well, this day sure had its ups and downs.

Then, something completely random came to her.

“Everyone,” she announced aloud, getting up out of her chair once more, putting her hands on her hips. “I have a totally radical, totally tubular idea! Let’s celebrate this big victory by making a music video!”

Her close friends’ faces said it all.

“Umm… okay?” chortled Kasumi. “We better make it a good one then.”

It was a yes… Now all she had to do was OK it with the choir girls.

★

As Tomo was walking home, she became more and more stoked by the idea of making her very own music video. Because of this excitement, she hunkered down and worked on her homework so she could spend the rest of the night coming up with what song she was going to use.

“Okay,” she muttered to herself. “Ideas for the music video. I want it to be something that I like a lot, something that I know almost by heart...”

Scouring her mind over the multitude of music videos and episodes of TRL she’d watched over her life, she finally came to a conclusion.

“I’ve got it! Excellent!” Tomo played a little air guitar like a certain pair of radical dudes and got to write everything down that they needed for the video in one of her notebooks.

★

“Okay, everyone!” Tomo said, extremely determined-sounding as she slammed the notebook onto the table, and flipped open to the page she was writing on the night before.

“We’re doing ‘ … Baby One More Time’ by Britney Spears!”

“AHHHHH!!!” Mimori shrieked. “I love that song!! It also reminds me of episode 3 of season 1 of Being Erica when she sings—”

Asuka smirked. Tomo heard that her friends texted the choir girls last night about the music video idea so they were already filled in about it. “Not a bad choice,” she said coolly.

The other girls made various agreeing noises.

“Now I feel like I gotta do some music video sins,” Tomo could hear Naoko murmur, head down.

Tomo looked at Erica, who was looking at her notebook, marking some things with a pen.

Erica looked up at her, eyes serious. “There’s going to be choreography in this, isn’t there?”

“Ah, damn. If there is, is this going to be a ‘Backstreet’s Back 2’ situation? I can’t dance if I wanted to and I will most certainly leave my friends behind!” complained Behami, whilst lightly hitting her head against the table.

Tomo gasped. I get this reference! “‘Cuz if you can’t dance, well then you’re no friend of mine!’” She paraphrased it a bit, of course.

Jopi chortled at what was going on currently. “I probably know more about choreography than any of you do here, so I guess I’ll be the one to come up with dance moves if there aren’t any already.”

How many people here don’t know the music video? Tomo felt concerned for her generation.

The girl’s face darkened, an evil grin spreading across it. “Girls! Your homework for tonight is to watch the ‘ … Baby One More Time’ video and for Jopi to come back tomorrow with a general idea of the dance steps!”

Shocked, Jopi shot up from her seat, almost banging her thighs against the table. “Me! Learning them in one night? But that’s impossible!”

“I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it. They’re not that hard. And Suika?”

Suika looked up from the books she was reading. “Yes?” she said stoically.

“You haven’t really said anything in this conversation. Would you mind manning the camcorder and recording us?”

She blinked. “I supposed.”

“Yay! It’s settled then!” Tomo raised her fist in the air once again.

The project was off its feet.

★

Expectedly, it took them until the week after to start shooting the video, as Tomo realized that Jopi was right that memorizing dance steps in such a short time was impossible.

For the costumes, Mimori used her own money (pretty enthusiastically, actually) to buy the skirt and tops they needed at a local Salvation Army. Jopi helped to duplicate them via her power.

If it wasn’t obvious yet, Tomo was going to be the lead star of the video, with the other girls being the backup dancers. Suika was recording it (as you already know) and Nathan had no part in it because he was amused that the girls were doing something by themselves.

And now, for your entertainment… a description of what happens in the video, which was only available for viewing via Erica’s computer (and a blank tape that Tomo copied it onto.)

The camera pans into a classroom, which, for some reason, only had about nine girls in it. Their teacher, played by Mr. Fujiwara (who agreed to be in the video), was fake-teaching the class about something, probably having to do with language arts.

The camera then zooms up on Tomo, the lead star of the video, who was wearing a gray sweater with a button-up white t-shirt underneath, as well as a dark gray skirt with matching socks and school shoes, complete with braids in her hair with pink puffs… the iconic Britney look.

Impatiently, she started to tap her pencil on a piece of paper and her feet on the ground, anxious for the bell to ring.

Brring!

As it did, the song began, which Tomo supplied herself via the CD she had at her house.

As the song continued, it followed Tomo through the hallways (after school, of course) as she lip-synced up against the lockers and did a dance with her clubmates. There were also shots taken outside where Tomo was wearing her gym uniform and playing hopscotch because they couldn’t afford any breakdancers (and didn’t know of any, unfortunately).

But it all helped contribute to the amateur style of the video, and Tomo loved it so much.

★

That night in Tomo’s room, she was doing what she usually did at night—listening to music. This time, however, she was listening to it on her CD player, which was probably the most recent electronic item her house had. (Alright, so maybe that wasn’t entirely true).

Tired, Tomo took off her headphones and carefully placed them under her bed, along with her music player.

Now laying in bed, the light of the stars in the sky illuminating her windows, she smiled to herself and giggled.

“Everything’s all right now. It can’t get any better than this.”

Even if she still lived in the past (metaphorically speaking). Even if her parents still acted a bit strange, around her and not.

Even still. She was happy.