Chapter Text
ME!" Tatta screeched, repeatedly smacking his button. "I'M THE BUS DRIVER! I'M THE BUS DRIVER! THE BUS DRIVER HAS MY NAME BECAUSE HE'S ME!"
MalaMari: Cat's Eyes, Chapter 8: Maze (2/2)
♡
Tatta entered the venue of the day with a cup holder containing numerous cups of coffee in his hands. He looked up at the ceiling and the various moving lights and spotlights that were mounted there, along with the two big projectors that were already throwing the band's logo at the dark background of the stage: four different playing cards that were falling from a person’s bloody fingers while being pierced by a deep red laser.
Borderlands were playing in Hamamatsu that night, and Tatta had been filling in for their usual driver since the tour start three days before in Yokohama. It had been on short notice. On very short notice to be precise, as he had only been given a two-day heads up before the tour started due to the original drivers sudden and serious illness, so Tatta hadn’t really been given enough time to prepare for the chaos that seemed to come with touring.
The band was reasonably successful it seemed, selling out most of their venues which weren’t huge but also not small by any means. At least that’s what Tatta had been told by the band’s manager Ann. She was currently standing by the stage with her hands at her hips and talking to Kuina, who, as Tatta had come to understand, was not only the bassist of the band, but also Ann’s wife.
Tatta strolled up to them, not wanting to interrupt them and whatever their preparation before a concert looked like. The last two days hadn’t really given him enough time to work that out, especially since he spent a lot of it catching up on the sleep he missed by driving through the night.
When he got closer, Kuina looked up and her eyes lit up at the sight of the cups he was cradling in his hands. “You, my friend, are a life saver”, she laughed when Tatta handed her a cup.
“It’s black”, he said hastily while he balanced the cup holder in one hand and searched through his pockets with his other. “But I got a few packs of sugar somewhere, if you want some.”
Kuina only shook her head and opened the lid to her cup before taking a deep breath. “Lovely coffee”, she sighed blissfully, “oh, how I love you so.”
Tatta smiled and turned to Ann, who didn’t smile back but seemed to look at him with something akin to appreciation on her face, which Tatta didn’t fully understand. It was just coffee, after all.
“I got you one as well”, he said, and added quickly: “It’s decaf. They told me it’s perfectly safe during a pregnancy.”
Ann took the cup with a single appreciative nod. “Thank you, Tatsuta-san. That was very thoughtful of you, especially since it isn’t your job to do that.”
Tatta just shrugged. “I don’t mind”, he said earnestly. “I like to be helpful. Honestly, you can point me anywhere you need me, I’d be happy to help. And I already told you to call me Tatta”, he reminded her. “Tatsuta-san was my father, and I’d rather not be associated with him in any way.”
“Very well”, Ann said, and Tatta was pretty sure that she was hiding a small smile by blowing on her coffee before hesitantly nipping on it. “If you really want to help, you can go and ask our technicians over there.” She nodded to the back of the room, where two people were setting up some equipment. “They might appreciate somebody helping them with the heavier load. But again, only if that’s alright with you. After all, we’re only paying you to be our driver, and I don’t want to take advantage of your generosity.”
Tatta assured her that he didn’t mind and left the two women to their coffee-fueled conversation.
The two people at the back of the room turned out to be a man in his late twenties or early thirties, if Tatta had to wager a guess, and a young girl who couldn’t be older than eighteen or nineteen. Tatta vaguely remembered having seen them before, but he had never talked to them.
The man, while rather handsome, was heavily tattooed, his dark strands of hair partially pulled up into a bun and with various piercings in his ears, brows, nose and lips. Tatta found the look to be rather intimidating, and the loud swearing that accompanied said look as Tatta got closer only enforced the impression. But then the man looked up and Tatta felt himself mesmerized by what had to be the most beautiful pair of dark eyes he had ever seen.
“Hi”, he waved awkwardly and raised the cups in his hands in greeting. “I brought coffee. And an additional pair of hands should you need them.”
The man leaned with his hips against the desk he had been working on, opening his mouth and clearly about to say something, when the head of the young woman popped up from behind said desk. “Coffee?”, she asked with shining eyes. “Oh my god, yes! Thank you so much, guy who I think I saw earlier. You are my new best friend. Gimme!” She made grabby hands over the table and looked even happier about the coffee than Kuina had been.
The man next to her rolled his eyes, but he was smirking in amusement, something that made his overall appearance much less intimidating, and also much more attractive.
Tatta really had to stop waxing poetic in his head.
“That’s our driver, you little shithead, you should remember that.” The man received his own coffee and a pack of sugar with a small smile. “Tatta, was it?”
Tatta felt his cheeks turn red. “Yeah, that’s me”, he said with an awkward laugh and another little wave. “I’m the bus driver.” Then, before he could make an even bigger fool of himself, he added: “Ann told me to ask you if you needed any help carrying your stuff from the bus. I don’t really know anything about what you guys do, but I got two working hands and I’m willing to lug stuff around if that’s what you need me to do.”
“That’s kind of you, but I think we’ve got nearly everything here already. We might take you up on that offer tonight, though. Everyone is a lot happier when stuff gets done fast. I’m Niragi, by the way”, he added. “And that little shit here is Heiya.”
He received a raised middle-finger for it, but only rolled his eyes again.
“So, you guys are… technicians?”, Tatta asked hesitantly while setting down the cup holder onto a nearby table that looked like it wouldn’t be used. “I’m sorry, I don’t have any knowledge about how a show like this usually works. I only know vehicles.” He rubbed his neck a bit sheepishly.
“Yeah”, Heiya answered before Niragi could. She jumped up onto the table and sat down on it, her legs swinging back and forth while she sipped at her coffee contently. Tatta noticed that one of her legs looked a little different than the other and realized that she was wearing what seemed to be a very realistically looking prosthetic.
“Pretty cool, huh?” she asked, and while she seemed nonchalant, there was a daring undertone swinging with her words.
But this was something Tatta was familiar with.
“Oh yeah. They’ve come a long way in the last few years. It looks so much better than the one my mum wears. Hers is still a bit clunky, but it’s miles better than what she had to deal with back when I was a child. You could chop wood with that thing, honestly.”
Heiya giggled, still swinging her legs back and forth. “I used mine to whack my brother over the head with”, she fake-whispered. “But anyhow. Yes, we’re technicians. Light technician and audio technician, to be specific. We make sure the show’s gonna be as cool and as smooth as it can get.”
Tatta looked between her and Niragi. “So, who’s who?”
“We do both”, Niragi took over, his hands cradling his cup against his chest. “Or much rather: I can do both. And I’m teaching the shithead to be able to do both as well. Today, I’ll do the lights and she’s doing the sound, but tomorrow, we might change.”
“Is there an advantage to knowing both?”, Tatta asked curiously. “Can you do both at the same time, if the other gets sick?”
“I could, if I really had to”, Niragi agreed, “but usually the location would provide a stand-in for the evening. But that person would need to be instructed and it’s better if someone is there who knows the ins and outs of both.”
Tatta nodded in understanding. Heaven knows he sometimes wished for an additional driver who could take over in case he himself was feeling a bit under the weather.
“So, if you do the lights … how exactly does that work? Audio, I can understand. Making sure that the microphones are at the right volume, that the amp’s working, that the musicians hear the right things in their ears and all that. But how exactly do you work the lights? Is it always the same every evening, or do you have some leeway? And how do you know what light fits the music? Do you need to know musical theory for that?”
Tatta knew that the questions he asked were probably pretty stupid, and that he shouldn’t keep the two from doing their incredibly important work, but he had been so bored the last two days, spending them holed up in his bus and playing games on his phone.
Niragi squinted at his wristwatch before shrugging. “I could show you if you’re interested. Heiya can set up the rest of it on her own.”
The girl rolled her eyes at him but jumped to her feet, murmuring something that was too quiet for Tatta to make out. It earned her a light shove from Niragi, which made her laugh in return before she disappeared underneath the table again. A few seconds later, they heard her rummaging and groaning from time to time.
“So, Mr. Bus Driver. Quick Lightshow 101”, Niragi said and waved Tatta over to where he was turning on the console in front of him and opening a screen that had been previously closed.
“Most people only think of the sound, and while that’s obviously important, the light show can be just as important to the show. It always depends on what kind of show we’re talking about, of course. You wouldn’t want a crazy lightshow when you watch an orchestra perform, but for most bands, it doesn’t matter how good they sound if they’re playing in the dark. Light adds excitement, energy, and emotion, even though you usually don’t realize it during the performance. It only becomes obvious when it’s not there.”
He gestured to the console in front of him. “This is a DMX, short for Digital Multiplex. With this baby here, we can oversee all the combined lighting instruments on and above stage, as well as the one above the audience. It allows us to control the color, movement, and intensity of every single light. We can even blend colors, fade lights in and out and in most venues, we can also use strobes to the tempo of the music, which is pretty important to bands like Borderlands, who play pretty fast rock and metal music.”
“So this isn’t yours?”, Tatta asked as he eyed console curiously. Niragi had begun tapping on the screen, his fingers going through the motions like he could be doing it in his sleep. Which he probably could, Tatta thought absentmindedly.
Niragi shook his head. “No, we do have a replacement in case any of the ones provided don’t work, but it’s much less extensive in what it can actually do. The problem with touring is that we have many different venues with many different instruments we have to work with. Some offer a variety of different rigs while other, older venues still use more traditional lighting fixtures, which wouldn’t work well with the newer equipment. That means that we have to familiarize ourselves with what we get, but fortunately, nowadays it’s usually stuff like this, which works similarly enough.”
“How do you remember which lights to use during which song?” Tatta asked. “Or are you just freestyling it every night?”
The man snorted and threw him an amused glance before tapping away on the screen again. “No, no freestyling, I’m afraid. That would just end in chaos.” He tapped against his temple with his pointer finger. “It’s all up in here. I get the setlist a few weeks before the tour starts and create a show around that.”
“That’s so cool”, Tatta said impressed. “I barely manage to keep my phone number straight, and you just have that all in your head?”
Niragi shrugged. “You need to be familiar with the music for it to really work. Smaller bands use the location’s resident light technician for it, but they can’t do as much as we can, because they’ve usually only listened to the songs once or twice, if at all. They really would be freestyling it, and quite often, that makes for an average light show at best. It’s obviously understandable, because smaller bands don’t really have the funds to hire their own, but the more familiar you are with the set, the better the light show becomes.”
He looked over where the rest of the band had joined Kuina on stage, setting up their instruments, laughing and talking. “Kuina is one of my oldest friends and I was there pretty much from the beginning. I’ve been touring with them for years, I know their songs by heart, and I know what works with them. Also, there’s a lot of preset looks you can toggle between and adjust from song to song, so you don’t have to do everything all the time. They’re called scenes, and we use them for songs that kind of have the same vibe. But the key to lighting is anticipation, really. If you know what the music is going to do, if you know how it’s going to change, you can time the change in the lighting in time with the music. More exciting lights with more exciting music, changes in color during the chorus or the bridge, lights that fit to the lyrics and emotions the songs are trying to evoke…”
He trailed off, as if he were only now realizing how much he had talked during the last minutes. “Sorry”, he muttered. “I guess I get kind of carried away when I talk about this stuff.”
“It’s because you’re a nerd”, a voice piped up from behind him. Heiya had apparently finished setting up her own console.
Tatta laughed. “Don’t worry, I think it’s really cool. I like learning about that stuff. Makes this a lot more exciting, to be honest.”
“Did you watch the show yesterday or the day before?”, Niragi asked, his head cocked to the side.
“I tried both nights, but it was pretty packed when I got there. Ann told me I could watch from behind the stage, but I could only really see Usagi at the drums, so I left after some time.”
At that, Heiya stepped closer to them and threw an arm around Niragi. “You could stay here with us”, she offered. “It’s great, because no one is bothering you, no one is pouring beer over your head, no one is being taller than you and you’ll even have a place to sit when your legs get tired. How about that?” She grinned before throwing a questioning look at Niragi, who was staring at her with a raised eyebrow. “We can do that, right? Invite people here, I mean? He brought us coffee!”
“That he did”, Niragi laughed before turning to Tatta. “Yeah, you can totally do that if you’d like. There’s no rule against it, and it’s the least we can do for you. After all, you’re chauffeuring all of us through the whole country every night.”
“It’s kind of my job”, Tatta shrugged, “but if you say it’s not a problem, then I’ll take you up on that. It beats playing Candy Crush on my phone the whole night.”
“Yay!”, Heiya cheered. “Oh, and let me bring you up to date on all the gossip surrounding this crazy band, because Niragi is a boring old grouch and won’t do it. Did you know that Arisu had a crazy fangirl come to his and Usagi’s apartment in Tokyo one time, which is like, super scary if you think about it, but all she wanted was for him to sign her bath towel. Her bath towel! Isn’t that crazy? But that’s nothing compared to what Chishiya has to deal with on a regular basis. It comes with being a frontman of a popular rock band, I suppose, but man, the guy deserves a fucking break …”
With one last look at a grinning Niragi, Tatta let himself be tugged to wherever the girl was taking him.
Just what had he gotten himself into?