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Another local festival, Saiki thought as he passed through a crowded street lined on either side with scammy carnival games and street food carts. Saiki actually didn’t mind the festivities. They reminded him of the more carefree summers of his childhood, before he became jaded and burdened by his growing powers. He remembered with fondness getting a thousand yen note from his father and feeling like he had all the money in the world. He would use that small allotment he was given to win from every carnival booth that had skill-games. He knew to avoid the “luck” based ones that were totally rigged, being able to read the minds of the shady old men running them. When his arms were filled with trinkets and toys, his mother would hold his carnival treats out to him with a chopstick so he could eat them without letting go of his winnings. Even his annoying older brother couldn’t taint the fun he had back then.
Saiki sighed as he passed by one of those game booths. He recognized the game. All you had to do was fish up a winning plastic fish to get the prize. Saiki could see through them to know which had the winning stickers on the bottom, so he could always get the prize he wanted. He couldn’t play the games in good conscience now, though, but he considered it only for a moment, for old time’s sake.
Ah well. I’ll just get a candied apple, then I’ll go home, Saiki thought as he watched a child miraculously fish up a winning fish and claim his precious plush puppy that he really wanted. He smiled when the attendant handed the child the toy and the child held it close to hug. “I’ll call you Pepper!” the child said. His mother pat his head and steered him toward a food booth. That alone was worth coming out.
Saiki waited in line for his chance at a candied apple as he listened to the deafening drone of the thoughts around him. In a crowd of this size, it was almost impossible to pick out or pinpoint any singular voice. The mass of people was loud enough for any normal person, but for Saiki the cacophony was doubled. He was fairly used to it though. When he made it to the stall, he exchanged a few coins for his treat and made his way back toward his house.
“Ah, shoot!” he heard someone shout above the crowd. It was a kind of robust voice, but still super bubbly and feminine. He recognized it immediately and her thoughts filtered into his mind soon after. I really wanted to win that too!
Saiki rolled his eyes. Of course she would be at the festival, and of course she’d be trying to win some dumb prize. He considered walking away, going home like he had originally planned. He couldn’t find her in this crowd anyway, even if he wanted to. But then he saw a flash of her dirty blonde hair and it didn’t take long for her to notice him.
“Oh, Saiki!” she said, running up to him and shaking his arm. He couldn’t teleport away from her in this crowd.
Hi, Aiura, he thought as he raised the candied apple to his mouth for another bite.
“Chiyopipi is here with me somewhere… But she got bored and walked off. I was, like, trying to win that stupid game over there where you knock the bottles over with a baseball,” she said, pointing behind her to a game booth.
He looked over her shoulder to the game booth and observed the man running it counting up Aiura’s money with a sinister expression. Within a second he understood why she wasn’t able to win. “The guy has the bottles glued to the table,” Saiki said.
Aiura half-screamed. “Seriously!? I wasted so much money trying to get that pink elephant plush!” She folded her arms over her chest angrily. It’s no big deal, I guess. It’s just that I had one just like it when I was a kid. We totally lost it when we moved. I still miss you, Pinky!
Good grief, Saiki thought. What an annoying sob story. Saiki watched with disdain her mental flashback to when she was a kid--back when her skin was paler and her hair darker. She had cuddled that stupid pink elephant every night before bed all through elementary school. When she had a scary precognition, she would tell it to the plush animal and her worries would lighten. She was afraid to tell her parents about her visions back then, but Pinky always listened. And yes, when they moved most recently, the elephant went missing without a trace. Lost in the shuffle of moving boxes. Aiura was, of course, a teenager by then, but still at night she had to fight back the tears of missing her old friend. Dammit. I have to make sure she wins that prize now.
Saiki didn’t say anything, shoving the last bits of his candied apple in his mouth, and beckoned for Aiura to follow him to the carnival booth.
“Really, you’ll help me?” Aiura said.
Saiki nodded and placed his last two hundred yen on the table for her to get two more balls to throw. “Go ahead,” he said, handing her the balls.
“Trying again?” the booth attendant teased, rubbing his greedy little hands together.
“I’ll get it this time!” Aiura told the man confidently. But, it turned out that the bottles being glued to the table wasn’t the only problem. Aiura’s throw was incredibly weak and her aim was terrible, too. The first baseball didn’t even make it halfway to the bottles and it landed about four feet to the left. I thought you were going to help me? Aiura complained mentally.
“Even I can’t do anything with that pathetic throw,” Saiki said to her, his voice only echoing in her mind. “If I did, the booth attendant would be suspicious.”
Then you throw the next one! Aiura said, placing the second and final ball in Saiki’s hand.
“Oh, so your boyfriend’s going to give it a go now?” the man said.
Neither of them bothered to correct him as Saiki stepped up to make his victory throw. He gulped. Throwing balls wasn’t his specialty, but he had practiced plenty. It should be totally fine… And the ball shattered the glass bottles. They were decimated, pulverized, powdered. Well, they were technically knocked over, but…
“Let’s run,” Aiura said as the booth attendant began to register what had happened.
“Hey, you kids!” he shouted angrily as Saiki grabbed her hand and they weaved through the crowd.
On the edge of the festival grounds, Saiki checked to ensure they wouldn’t be noticed before he teleported them back to his bedroom in his house.
“Sorry we didn’t get the elephant,” he said blandly as Aiura barely caught her breath, hunched over with her hands on her knees.
She looked up, flashed him a peace sign and a grin. “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m not some little kid anymore.” Saiki knew she didn’t really mean it. She was upset. Seeing that plush at the festival brought back the happy memories of her childhood friend, but also the sad memories of losing her.
“Show me a picture of it,” Saiki said.
Aiura pulled her phone out and scrolled through about a thousand recent photos until she reached one from before her last move. And there she was, clutching a ragged, tattered stuffed elephant. Her memories of Pinky had been much more flattering. Saiki nodded at the image on her phone and grabbed a blank sheet of paper. He held the sheet between his fingers as a photograph of the pink toy materialized. “Pinky’s at the dump,” Saiki said. “At the bottom of a massive heap.” He held the paper out to Aiura to see.
Aiura gasped as she snatched the photo. “Oh no! Poor Pinky!” She really personified the thing too much. But it was pretty sad.
Saiki sighed. Well, since Pinky was garbage now, she wasn’t really worth much. Saiki pulled a sock with a hole in it out from under his bed. Apport. Not quite enough value, so he grabbed the sock’s mate. Aiura watched him with curiosity as the socks disappeared and a grubby, soggy pink elephant arrived in Saiki’s hands. “Here she is,” Saiki said rather dispassionately, his eyebrows not even budging a millimeter.
“Oh my gosh! Pinky!” Aiura cheered, ready to clamp her arms around her old, stuffed friend. But she hesitated before her hands could touch it. “She kind of stinks, though.”
Good grief, Saiki thought as he carried it to his bathroom sink. Always so ungrateful.
Aiura stood behind him and looked over his shoulder, like a parent watching their child being rolled back to surgery. He ran hot water over the toy and brought some laundry powder up from the laundry room to clean it. The box of detergent landed in Saiki’s hand as it hovered through the doorway. Saiki sprinkled it over the toy and began scrubbing it with a cloth. At this point, he wasn’t touching it, of course. It was gross, so he did this all with telekinesis. It would have been even easier if he could just restore it, but he could only reset it by a day, and this thing would need to be reset by a year. The two watched as the water washed away months worth of grime. Saiki forced the water through the fuzzy outer layer, penetrating to the filling. “The inside is still gross,” he said, observing the elephants fluff with his x-ray vision. It was… not pretty. Even water and soap wouldn’t cut through it. “The stuffing should be replaced.”
“Oh, I can do that, I think?” Aiura said, unsure of herself. She liked crafting, sure, but she wasn’t really a seamstress.
“Let’s just fix it now,” Saiki said, splitting the plush open along the seams with his mind and extracting the old fibers.
“Eek!” she shrieked as her plush friend was disemboweled. This is kind of graphic. The moldy stuffing floated to the garbage bin.
Saiki took the elephant’s fuzzy carcass back into his room where he had more space and he spun it around with his arm until it was totally dried, which for him only took a few seconds. Then, from his mother’s selection of handicraft supplies, he found replacement stuffing. “You can do the honors,” he said as he handed Aiura a clump of white fluff.
Aiura laid Pinky on Saiki’s desk and restuffed her until she was sufficiently fat. “Now, how do you close it up?” she said, looking at Pinky’s stomach where her plushy entrails were still visible.
“Like this,” Saiki said, not bothering with a needle. With a tilt of his head, the threads wove themselves back up the center of the stuffed animal and tied themselves off. Of course, all done with telekinesis.
Aiura finally picked up her plush again and held it to her chest. “She looks better than she has in, like, ten years!” she cheered, twirling with the stuffed animal around his room. And now she smells like Saiki’s laundry detergent, she observed as she held it closer to her face.
Saiki sighed. His mother didn’t even need to wash his clothes, since he just restored them each time he wore them, but she still did it anyway. So yeah, the elephant smelled like him. He hadn’t thought of that before he washed it. Oh well.
Aiura’s eyes softened as she looked from her old plush elephant to Saiki. “Thank you so much,” she said.
Good grief, he thought. It’s not that big of a deal. It was a lie, though; he knew how much it meant to her. He supposed it was worth going to the festival after all, especially since he got to ruin that scammer’s game booth too. The corner of Saiki’s lip ticked upward at the thought. All in all, not the worst way to spend a Saturday night. “No problem. But you can go home now,” he said.
Aiura didn’t protest for once as Saiki led her down the stairs to his front door. I’m so happy this guy is my soulmate, she thought, even as he practically pushed her out onto the street. Then her eyebrows shot up in realization. Ah! Chiyopipi is probably wondering where the hell I went… “Bye, Saiki!” she called over her shoulder, waving frantically.
Saiki gave her his own lazy wave, watching as her form faded into the night, her nose buried in the plush of the stupid pink elephant.