Archive of Our Own

     Futsubi Niseko had a problem.  This was not, in of itself, an unusual circumstance for her, however, the problem itself was rather unusual.  She often found herself with problems, and just as often found the solutions - this was a niche she had carved out for herself in the orbit of the Rentaro Family, though not quite a member thereof per se.  She was a member of the significantly smaller Usami Family (3 members as opposed to 96) which consisted of herself, her gigantic goth girlfriend Usami Shiina[#28], and Usami’s boyfriend, Aijou Rentaro, of Family fame.
     Specifically, the niche she had carved out for herself was as the co-chair of the Rentaro Family Investigation Committee, a body of those Family members with a sleuthy bent, tasked with solving any mysteries other Family members might need solved.  Her position as co-chair served several functions; first, it gave her something to do within the Family, a purpose to serve, which helped her to feel a sense of belonging; as welcoming as Rentaro’s ninety-five paramours had been to her, she was not one of them and never would be.  Her girlfriend was, though, and she enjoyed a kind of unique status as an associate member.
     The second purpose her position as co-chair served is doing the actual work of running the committee, a task for which her fellow co-chair, Hasu Hasuha[#32] lacked the mental fortitude, as she was dumber than a sack of wet bricks.  Hold on, I’ve just been handed a note from Rentaro, lessee here, if you don't take back what you something something tire iron something something acetylene torch blah blah blah will never find your head, Okie-dokie.  Let me rephrase that.  Because among the countless extraordinarily wonderful qualities Hasuha possessed, what some might reductively call “conventional intelligence” was not foremost among them, much of the duties involved in running the committee fell to Niseko.
     This suited her just fine; she'd discovered she had something of a knack for the technical and logistical side of investigations (as opposed to Hasuha, who relied entirely on her preternaturally gifted sense of smell to solve mysteries - which is fine, put away the tire iron, please).  Moreover, she liked helping people; members of the family came to her with problems, and she solved them.
     The highly unusual problem she had to deal with started with a much more usual problem, courtesy of the Rentaro Family's most average member, Hambu Hanako [#50], a student one grade behind the one Niseko and Rentaro shared.  Hanako was a startlingly average person in all regards; if they ever make a “Japanese Schoolgirl” emoji, she would look exactly like it.  
     The problem Hanako had was a fairly average one: she was worried about her brother, Hanataro.  Much like herself, Hanako’s Playmobil-ass little brother was unremarkable in all regards; a little teenage rebellion is well within standard allowances.  But, just as it is not unusual to act out a bit, it is also not unusual to worry about one’s siblings nevertheless.  Niseko could relate; her own sister had fallen for a guy who was ninety-five-timing her.
     Niseko dutifully jotted down the facts in the case; Hasuha dutifully jotted down what everyone present had eaten in the last week and their preferred brand of hygiene products before getting distracted by a moth.  The facts in the case were this: Hanataro was disappearing for long periods of time, and his family didn't know where he was going or why.  It was believed, with a mix of hope and concern, that he’d found himself a girlfriend, but he hadn't said anything about one, and no one had particularly seen him meeting anyone in particular.  All that was known is he apparently dropped off the face of the Earth most afternoons and didn't reappear until late in the evening - he skipped classes often, or was otherwise absent or late far more often than his parents had realized until they'd contacted the school.  At this point, the parents were flabbergasted to discover the school did not have a policy of contacting parents in cases of frequent absence - this was a policy change put in place by the current Chairperson, Hanazono Hahari [#6] to help members of the Rentaro Family avoid having to tell their parents they were spending time with fellow members of what is definitely NOT a sex cult.
     Hence, when the Chairperson referred Hanako to the Investigation Committee, there was a certain degree of urgency to have the matter resolved quickly and quietly. 
     “Have you tried following him?  Seeing where he goes?” Niseko asked.
     “Of course.  I mean, pretty much everyone's tried to follow someone close to spy on them while they're on a date, that's just a normal thing everyone does, but unfortunately on the occasions I’ve tried, I lose him.  He gets in the elevator by the entrance of the Student Organization Annex and I never see if or where he gets out.”
     The Student Organization Annex was built in the past year at the Chairperson’s order; its ostensible purpose was to provide additional rooms for official student clubs, although most of the actual floorspace, in point of fact, went to offices for those such as Niseko, tasked with the logistical work of managing the Family.  The annex was as tall as the regular high school building, though much narrower, and could be accessed from same either via crossing about fifty feet of open ground, or a skyway connecting the top floors of each building to one another (as well as the roofs, thus affording the Family an additional, invisible-from-ground-level route to their gathering place on the roof of the high school).  Thus, Hanataro could theoretically have taken the elevator to the top floor and the skyway back to the main building, and thence to any one of multiple exits.
     “But I don't think that's what happened,” Hanako added.  "The indicator didn't show the elevator going to the top floor; it didn't actually give any indication whatsoever.  And it didn't sound like it was going up; obviously I couldn't beat it to the top floor if that's where it was going but I couldn't hear it open from the stairwell.”
     “Alright, let's get this sorted out.”  Niseko slapped a giant red button labelled “Ignore Ethical Concerns,” one of which the Chairperson had had installed on all the faculty workstations, which brought up all the security footage in the school.  She picked out the feeds from cameras with eyes on the elevator on every floor of the annex and rolled back to the moment Hanataro entered the one on the ground floor, and waited.  Sure enough, the next time the elevator opened on one of the other floors, Hanataro wasn't in it.
     She ran the footage through an algorithm to detect any alterations, and it appeared to be genuine.  She had a genuine mystery on her hands.
     “Alright, we’ll see what we can figure out.  Let's go take a look.”  Niseko got up and gathered her things, Hanako nodded appreciatively, Hasuha spat out the moth, and Usami crawled out from under the desk Niseko had been sitting at.

     “So, the way I see it, there's two possibilities.  The simpler one is that Hanataro got off the elevator somehow other than through the main door; assuming he's not a ghost, which to be clear is absolutely in the cards for this franchise, the obvious method would be the hatch on the roof.”  Niseko stood in the elevator, having paused its operation on the first floor, which inconvenienced no one because there never seemed to be anyone else around unless it advanced the plot somehow.  “Hanako, you're about the same height as your brother, right?  You think you could try getting it open?”
     Hanako, a characteristically average athlete, couldn't manage to jump high enough to touch the ceiling, much less pop the hatch open.
     “Well, that's one blow to that theory, but it doesn't rule it out entirely.  Maybe he had some equipment or skill we don't know about.  We'll keep looking.  Honey Bunny?  Do you mind?”
     At that cue, Usami, who had ten inches on Niseko, fourteen on Hanako, and twenty-eight on Hasuha, nodded.  “Of course.”  With a practiced motion, she brought her elbow to the ceiling, popping the hatch out of its moorings, thrust one set of fingers through the gap, gripping the ceiling, hanging from it as her other hand finished getting the hatch fully opened, through a combination of force and dexterity that was clearly routine for her.  She dropped to one knee, offering her laced fingers to Niseko.  “After you.”
     Niseko gave her a thank-you kiss and climbed up, as Usami tried unsuccessfully to avoid showing how much she enjoyed her girlfriend stepping on her.
     Casting her phone's flashlight around the elevator shaft, Niseko didn't see anything out of the ordinary.  “Honey Bunny, do any of the ducts in the Annex big enough to crawl through open into this shaft?”
     “Not a one.”  Usami had hefted herself halfway up through the hole, and seemed content to stay there, either because she enjoyed the sensation of confinement or because she enjoyed looking up Niseko’s skirt.  “Since the Annex was built with anime shenanigans in mind, it has a set of ducts for crawling through that’re completely disconnected from anything dangerous, like the furnace or this shaft.  All the actual ventilation is through regular-sized ducts a person couldn't fit through.”
     “Hrmm.”  Niseko cast her light around the edges of the elevator roof, looking for a spot where an average student could wiggle down between the elevator and the wall and not get turned into deli meat.  She didn't spot one, but shining the light down into the darkness between the elevator and wall, something bugged her.  She took out a coin, opened the stopwatch on her phone, and dropped the coin, hitting stop just shy of four seconds when she heard the soft ding of a coin landing far below.
     Niseko popped back down through the hatch, landing via a process that, mechanically, involved Usami having just the best time imaginable.  Pulling up the Chairperson’s number on her phone, she motioned for the others to listen in on the conversation.
     “Ms. Hanazono, what can you tell me about what goes on in the basement of the Annex?”
     “The basement?  The Annex doesn't have a basement?  The main building doesn't, for the most part, either - there was a partial basement in one corner of the building, just a storage area, but I think it was filled in during the last round of renovations.”  Hahari’s tone conveyed genuine confusion.
     “That's what I thought as well, but apparently it does, and it can only be accessed by secret means.  I’m sending some folks your way to help get to the bottom of this.  Literally.”  Hanging up, she turned to Hanako and Hasuha.  “You two get to the Chairperson's office, have her check the construction records, see if anyone might’ve altered the plans to cover up subterranean excavation.  If there's physical blueprints somewhere, Hasuha can try sniffing them to see who all has handled them.”  She turned to Usami, and gave her a hug. “I'm going to see where this leads; wait for me here so people know where I went, and if I don't come back…”
     “Murder everyone who ever wronged you, alphabetically.  I know, I know.”  Usami kissed her head and let her get to work.  Niseko took a multitool to the elevator panel, fed in a cable from her phone, and brought up an app called “Bullshit TV Hacking,” which, despite the fact that the other end of the cable wasn't even plugged into anything, immediately produced a prompt that read “Take Elevator to Secret Floor? Y/N.”  She typed a response and the doors closed; the elevator descended thirty feet below ground.
     In point of fact, it turned out the Annex did not have a basement, other than the space directly in front of the elevator doors, but the main building apparently did: the elevator opened into a wide, unadorned hallway that led back, parallel to the skyway far above, in the direction of the main building.  At the end of the hallway, red velvet curtains muffled the sounds of activity from the other side.  With trepidation tempered by the knowledge that, due to genre conventions, whatever she encountered was likely to be more funny than scary, she pulled the curtain aside.
     Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw, other than a lifetime of consuming shōjo manga and otome games, so actually she had a pretty good handle on it, but the smell was still shocking - Hasuha would have died.
     Visually, it was exactly halfway between a set from Ouran High Host Club and that rad ninja crime hideout from the first Ninja Turtles movie: Greek columns and antique furniture cohabitating with half-pipes, pool tables, and barbeque smokers, on three levels.  From the mezzanine where Niseko stood, stairs led down to the main floor below, and up to catwalks and what, if this were a club, you'd call VIP rooms.
     Olfactorily, despite the fact that the smell of barbecue was enough to make her drool, to say nothing of various other freshly-prepared foodstuffs making themselves known by scent, the main thing she smelled was the overwhelming smell of dudes.
     Now, when I say that, it sounds like I'm saying it smelled bad, and that's not it.  Guys who have a girlfriend tend to have better personal hygiene (the causality there works both ways), and all the guys present were doing good on that front; nevertheless, any time you have ninety-nine guys inhabiting a single enclosed space for an ongoing period, it is going to take on a certain character, scent-wise.
     Several seconds passed as Niseko took in the smell and the sight, the former literally and the latter figuratively: a shitload of really, peculiarly good-looking dudes, all with distinctive character designs, no backgroundies, were going about having respectful, non-toxic Bro Time.  Skate park, gaming tables, full arcade, lots of crafting nooks, lots of grills, lots of comfortable couches and stacks of books about cool boats.  Lots of cars, which was odd, because there was no apparent way for any of them to get in or out; they apparently served as something one could roll out from underneath, inexplicably unblemished save for a single streak of black grease smeared across one cheek, then get up, throw a towel over one shoulder, and lean on something while looking smolderingly into the middle distance.  Like 40 guys were doing some part of that exact sequence of actions at any given moment.
     In her whole life thus far, Niseko had experienced sexual attraction to a grand total of two men: Aijou Rentaro and Chris Isaak.  What she was seeing was making her seriously consider updating her stats; one guy was chopping logs shirtless, which was odd both because there weren't any trees down here, so someone had to have brought the logs down just so he'd have something to chop, and also he apparently felt the need to get rubbed down with coconut oil immediately beforehand.
     “What the actual fu…” she started to say, before being interrupted by two voices behind her.
     “Looking for something, Little Lady?” 
     “It seems we have an interloper.”
     Whirling around, she saw two students from her grade she didn't recognize.  The first was tall, dark, and handsome, with wild, shōnen protagonist hair and that broad, toothy, shōnen protagonist grin that says “I know we're trying to kill each other right now for very valid reasons, but then we're going to talk about being sad sometimes and then we'll be best friends for life.”  The other was, if anything, taller, darker, and handsomer, with dark, shōnen rival hair and glasses that were inexplicably always reflecting a glare, rendering them opaque.
     “What is this place?  Who are you guys?  What are you doing here?”
     “I believe,” said the one with glasses, pushing them back into place in a posed fashion no actual human ever would, “my associate here asked you a question first.  Also, it is polite to introduce yourself first, before asking someone else for their name.  Regardless, I can tell you this is the school's basement.  My name is Kichikume Ganesha, and this one is Jesús Anno, family name last, Western-style.  As for what we're doing, we're just hanging out.”
     “Yeah, we're all just hanging out, having fun, and there's not any kind of underlying rationale for us being here that's deeply disturbing if you think about it for even a second.”
     “Dude, shut up.  Now then,” Ganesha regained his composure, “why don't you tell us why you're here.”
     “I'm looking for someone.  Do either of you know Hambu Hanataro, and if so where can I find him?”
     “Oh, Han-Han?  Of course we know him,” Jesús said.  “He's over there at the craps table.”  He pointed down between a sundae bar and a nook where overstuffed chairs were packed with lantern-jawed guys cuddled up with hot chocolate, a blanket, and a book full of diagrams of world war-era battleships.  There, happily moving a stack of chips on and off of the pass line, sat a young man with a resting emoji face.
     “He's not in any kind of trouble, is he?  He hasn't racked up a ton of gambling debt he has no way to pay off and he has to sell himself to a sadistic cadre of mysterious financiers who’ll sell his organs or force him to work in a sweaty drug lab or make him compete in a series of lethal challenges and/or mind games?”
     “No,” Ganesha said.  Jesús explained further: “He pretty much always breaks even, actually.”
     “Of course he does.  So he’s just been coming here every day, having fun, nothing else.”  Two nods.  “And is there some reason he wouldn't let his family know what he's up to?  They're worried about him - well, somewhat worried, and also hopeful he found a girlfriend.”  She noticed the two exchanging a significant look and immediately called it out.  “Now, what was that.  What am I missing?  He does have a girlfriend?”
     “He does,” Ganesha said, nailing the delivery of someone who works in public relations and has just been forced to admit a Basic Fact they'd been dancing around, trying to avoid.
     “I mean, we all do, obviously,” Jesús added, which would have been the thing that tipped Niseko off as to what was going on, but then several things happened, not quite all at once, but in a peculiar order:
     The first thing Niseko noticed was the sound of every guy in the room below turning at once, with military precision.  The second thing she noticed, when she glanced back in that direction, away from Jesús’ fiery smile and Ganesha’s icy glare, was that all those guys were looking in her direction.  Then she realized they weren't looking at her, they were looking past her towards the elevator, which she then realized had made a ding sound seconds earlier, but she alone in the room hadn't taken note of it because elevators are always making ding sounds, except, she then realized, it hadn't actually made a ding when she got off it.  Or when those two had, for that matter, which explains why she hadn't noticed them approaching.  The elevator, as it happens, had been made to only go ding when a particular passenger was getting off.
     “Hi guys!” a voice said brightly.  Niseko turned to see a student, another senior like the three of them on the mezzanine, approaching them with a bright, unguarded smile.  As a connoisseur of feminine charm with close access to ninety-five paragons thereof, and intimate access to one particularly large goth exemplar thereof, Koibi Tomo did not initially strike Niseko as the most beautiful woman in the world (if you asked her, it was Usami, though Mimimi [#10], Nano [#4], Meme [#11], and May [#48] were all in the running).  Nor was she the cutest (if you asked her, again she'd say Usami but let's be honest it's Shizuka [#3] and it's not close).  As the other woman approached, however, she started to Get It: Tomo positively radiated cinnamon-roll energy.  By the time she was close enough to reach out a hand and introduce herself, Niseko was telling herself I've only known this person for a couple seconds, but if anything happens to her I'm killing everyone in this room and then myself.  Oh!  Hug.  She's a hugger.  It was a particular kind of enthusiasm, a boundless love for everyone around her, pouring off of every kind smile and encouraging word.  That kind of magnetic positivity is rare; in her whole life, Niseko had only ever seen it in one other person: the guy her girlfriend was dating.
     “Did I say the thing about killing everyone and myself out loud?” 
     “You did,” Tomo smiled sympathetically, “it happens.  Is there anything you need?  Is there anything I can do to help?  Would you like a mix-tape?  I get a lot of these.”
     “No thanks.  Actually, any Kiki?”
     “Who?”
     “Any Chris Isaak?”
     “Here you go.”
     Ganesha once again cuntily pushed his glasses back in place.  “She just came to check on Hambu Hanataro - apparently his family is worried about him.”
     “Of course.  I’ll talk to him later; maybe he can introduce me to his folks, if he feels ready.  I hope - without going into too many details - you can let them know he's doing fine?”  Tomo looked at her with the pained smile of a very nice person knowing they're in a position of moral compromise; someone who's very honest but also aware that if the full truth could be avoided it would help a lot of people they care about, so if we could fudge things just a bit, please.
     “I…understand,” said Niseko, approaching the stage where Get It becomes Got It.  “If you don't mind, could I just ask you a few questions, in private?”
     “Absolutely, I have to make some rounds first, but we can talk in just a bit.  Could you two take her to, let's say, Skybox 6?”  They nodded, she gave them each a quick kiss and waded into the throng of dudes assembled below, who immediately bore her off on a golden chair.  “I told you guys you don't have to keep making me thrones!”
      “A lot of us really enjoy carpentry though,” said like forty guys.
      “The gold leaf work is really impressive,” she said, her voice fading out as she complimented the stitching on the velvet.
      “This way.”  Jesús jerked a thumb at a stairway leading up to the catwalks and VIP rooms.  Niseko followed their lead.
      “So…I take it everyone here is her boyfriend?”
      “Yes.  We're all satisfied with the arrangement, but we also know how it must look from the outside.”  Ganesha spoke a little more softly than before.  “We don't want to cause any trouble, we don't want to get in trouble, and we don't want anything unkind said about her, just because she's in this kind of relationship.”
     “I get it.  I'm in a somewhat complicated relationship myself, if you can believe it.”  The three arrived at the door to a room overlooking the whole chamber.  “So let me guess.  You two were the first two, she couldn't decide between you, and it kind of snowballed from there?”
     “Yup.”  Jesús gave her an odd look; he didn't say “how did you know,” but his look implied the question.  Niseko pressed on.
     “And you two have a kind of antagonistic relationship where you're constantly butting heads and snapping at each other but you're also extremely gay for each other?”
     “No!” they both said indignantly, attempting as nonchalantly as possible to extricate their hands from one another's nipples.  They left in a huff, walking in opposite directions.
     Niseko waited in the skybox for a half-hour before Tomo stepped in, looking extremely bedraggled but also glowing with delight.
     “Having fun?”
     “It's…a lot,” Tomo said, attempting to adjust her clothes and hair.  “I wouldn't trade it for anything, though.  They're all…each of them is precious to me.  I know how it must look to an outside observer, but we love each other, and we're happy.” 

     “It's cool, I get it.  I just wanted to ask a few questions to make sure I grasp the situation fully.  I'm not going to go blabbing about it, don't worry.”
     “I…appreciate that,” Tomo said, clearly relieved but also a little guilty about the need for secrecy.
     “So, you have, what, ninety-five boyfriends?”
     “Ninety-nine, actually.”  
     Niseko paused.  Ninety-nine, she said?  More than Rentaro?  Huh.
     “And everybody is OK with the state of affairs as-is, everyone is…everything is above board, secrecy notwithstanding?  No one's like, …exploited or anything?”
     “I mean.  I can't say everyone was super jazzed the first time they heard about what they were getting into.  Some of them were, in a way that makes a lot more sense now that their sexuality is better understood.  Lotta these guys spend more time making out with each other than me, which is.  Well.  I mean, it lightens my load, so to speak.  Not that I consider any of it a burden!  I just.  It's a lot.  I feel incredibly lucky to have all this love coming my way and I will do my very best to respond in kind, but.  I’m one person and I'm doing my best.”
     “And it's students and faculty, as well?”
     “...yeah.  That's bad, isn't it?  I mean, we love each other, and we're waiting until after graduation to um.  Take things further.  But still!  Really bad!  Like, if anyone found out I was dating vice-principal Jundo?  Can you imagine anything worse?”
     “I actually can, but yes, it's pretty bad.  Not gonna lie.”  Toward the end of the previous term,  allegations of dalliances between students and teachers at Ohananomitsu University Affiliated High School had reached a level of severity too great for the Chairperson, herself a repeat offender, to ignore.  The school very publicly dismissed the odious then-vice-principal An Baba, notorious for routinely sexually assaulting the male student body, a dismissal which was followed by an arrest, both of which really should have happened much earlier.  They then brought on board a fresh faced young educator, Jundo Soji, as the new vice-principal, who very publicly spoke about cleaning up the school and restoring public decency and decorum.
      “...and the second he finished giving that big speech about restoring morality and ethical compliance to the school, our eyes met for the first time and we felt this incredible sensation run through us, like we were somehow destined to be together, and we've been hopelessly in love ever since.  Annnd…that has happened to me ninety-eight other times.  I don't expect you to understand or believe me, but it's the truth.”
     Niseko put an arm around Tomo.  “I don't expect you to understand or believe me, but I do believe you.  Better than you can possibly imagine.  Are you familiar with the Rentaro Family?”
     Tomo furrowed her brow.  “I think there's a guy in our grade named Rentaro, right?  Is it something to do with him?  I'm sorry, I don't really have a lot of spare time for anyone but my guys, I don't really know a lot about the rest of the student body.”
     Niseko nodded.  “I have one last question, and if the answer is no, it's going to sound like a very silly question, and you can just ignore it, and I’ll get out of your hair, you can forget I said anything.  If the answer is yes, you don't have to tell me any specifics, but please let me know.”
    Tomo squared her shoulders to take the question head-on.  Adorable.
    “Is there, to your knowledge, any supernatural cause or justification for what's going on?  Without going into specifics, is there any kind of magic or spiritual reasons or sci-fi nonsense going on that is either the reason all of them have fallen for you, or the reason you absolutely have to pick all of them?”
     “Not that I know of. I mean, it's weird that I can just say ‘...and so, due to the way things panned out, would you mind letting so-and-so be my latest boyfriend?’ and all of them just go yeah, that's fine.  It's weird that this happens!  But is it weirder than the fact that every year here is four thousand days long, two-thirds of which is May?  Couldn't tell you.”
     “Fair enough. I'll get out of your hair.”  Niseko returned the way she came while Tomo judged a chili cook-off (ninety-nine way tie).

     When the elevator opened its doors once again on the first floor of the Annex, Hanako and Hasuha had returned, and their expressions of worry mirrored the one on Usami’s face.
     “Let me guess,” Niseko looked at them unconcerned, “excavations under the main building were authorized last year by the new vice-principal.”
     “How did you know?” said Hanako reasonably, Hasuha mystified, and Usami delighted.  
     “I found out a bunch of stuff down there.  Some secret shenanigans, Hanako, I will leave it to you whether you want to press your brother for details or let him tell you in his own time.  You can tell your family they don't need to worry about him.  He's just kinda hanging out with what I don't think we are in any position to describe as a bad crowd.  He's not in any more danger than we are - which is not the same as being in no danger, I mean, you guys routinely get dosed with experimental drugs without consent.”  The four took a moment to not think hard about that.  
     Hanako left to give her family an update, Hausha left because, once again, moths.  Usami lingered.
     “Are you alright?  Do you want to talk about what happened down there?”
     “I mean, I do, but I don't know if I can.  Some of it…it has to do with things I promised Rentaro I wouldn't talk about.”
     This was the problem Niseko had: she knew how the manga was going to end - clearly, Tomo was supposed to be the one-hundredth girlfriend, Rentaro's perfect foil, someone uniquely sympathetic to his position, yadda yadda parallelism.  She could even see exactly how it would happen: the closing festival.  He’d met his first two girlfriends on opening day, he's meant to meet all of them in high school, meeting the last one on the last day would serve as a bookend.  During the closing festival, there's a massive bonfire, and all the students perform the bon-odori dance, during which the first-year boys dance with the second-year girls, and vice-versa, while the third year boys and girls dance with each other - meaning Rentaro would be brought face-to-face with every girl in the graduating class; if he was ever going to zing with any more of them, this was the first and last opportunity.
     What complicated things was this: Rentaro was running behind Tomo, who had already completed her set, save Rentaro himself.  Rentaro only had ninety-five, and in fact hadn't added any new members to the family since October.  This wouldn't be an issue if it was still the everlasting month of May in which most of the school year took place, but it was already March: the school year was drawing to a close, with the closing festival in less than a week.
     And this, in particular, was the problem Niseko had: was any of that her problem?  Setting aside Tomo, there were, somewhere out there, four other women destined for a lifetime of deliriously happy romance with the hardest working man in ho business, Aijou Rentaro.  But something was getting in the way.  Something happened to them, they went missing, or somehow they inexplicably just happened to always avoid making eye contact, or…?  But whatever.  That wasn't her problem.  Unless it was.  Unless, the only way for them all to get their happy ending was if the co-chair of the Rentaro Family Investigation Committee sleuthed them out.  Which…was she actually obligated, per se, to go out of her way to do the matchmaking equivalent of selling sand to Bedouins?  Did Rentaro need those other four?  Did they need him, if they didn't know he exists?  As long as they didn't meet him, they could go the rest of their lives blissfully unaware of the supernatural bullshit going on.  Except.  They would still be unable to find a loving partner of their own; the fact of having a soulmate in Rentaro still curtailed their chances at romance otherwise.  But was that Niseko's problem?  It kinda seemed like nothing was going to happen unless she did something about it.
     She strongly felt like this decision was bigger than her, but she couldn't tell Usami or any of the others: she'd promised Rentaro to take the secret of the soulmates to her grave, that, due to supernatural bullshit, if any of them didn't end up in loving partnership with him, they'd soon meet an untimely demise.  Beyond having promised him, she ultimately agreed with his assessment that the happiness of everyone in the Family was best secured by none of them knowing that supernatural doom was waiting to strike should they ever try to walk away from it all.  
     Should she tell Rentaro?  Enlist his aid?  The man was busy.  And there's no guarantee he would help - he was quick to offer assistance when needed, but “stop what you're doing and help me help you find four more girlfriends before next Tuesday” might be a hard pitch; though really, Rentaro above all should know there's supposed to be a hundred, he must know he's running out of time, maybe he's deliberately avoiding them because he knows he's already over-extended, maybe maybe maybe
     Her oncoming indecision spiral petered out as Usami grabbed her, pulled her tight, clutching Niseko's head against her chest, an act which may be the single most efficacious mental health treatment in the world; no matter what you're dealing with, problems simply do not seem quite so overwhelming when there's titties in your face.
     “It's OK.  You don't have to say anything.  There's only one reason Rentaro would ask you to keep something secret, and that's if it affects our happiness.  I trust his judgement when it comes to that.”
     “Thanks.  I just…I'm not sure what the right thing to do here is.”
     Usami cocked her head.  “Isn't that why we have an ombudsman?”

     Usami and Niseko approached the tent where the Rentaro Family ombudsman (also the school's ethics teacher) Bonnouji Momoha[#21] dwelled.  Stumbling out of the tent was Medio Mai[#20], who often served as her caretaker, and increasingly often, as her sexual partner.
     While Rentaro himself continued to assert that he wanted to wait until graduation and marriage before pursuing any sexual relations, all bets were off as far as hanky-panky between girlfriends, a precedent set by Usami and Niseko themselves.  Since the fateful day on the rooftop when Usami told Rentaro she wanted him to accept Niseko as her girlfriend, and also that they would be boning down raw on the regular, a number of other official pairings within the family had emerged.  Some, like Hanazono Hakari[#1] and Inda Karane[#2], were those Niseko suspected were themselves one another's soulmates, just as Usami and Niseko were: Usami had experienced her second zing upon meeting Niseko; Hakari and Inda had zing’d with one another at the same time they zing’d with Rentaro.
     On the other hand, there were also cases like Mai and Momoha: not soulmates, just very, very, horny, pretty much all the time, and finding in one other (literally) a convenient outlet.  Hence, while Mai had entered the tent twelve hours ago intent on helping Momoha tidy up and perform basic hygiene, she was emerging just now worse than naked [see "The Chimera Stratagem"] reeking of second-hand alcohol and bodily fluids, exposed skin streaked with fresh scratches.  Already blushing, she grew even redder as she saw the two approaching.  Niseko put up two hands reassuringly.
     “Relax, we're not here to judge.  In fact, I guarantee the two of us have had more and weirder sex than anything that happened in that tent.”
     Mai blushed again, this time with indignation.  “It's not a competition,” she said walking off in a huff and some of her clothes.
     “If it was, we'd be winning,” Niseko said in a sing-song tease.  She picked up one of Mai’s discarded unidentifiable lacy maid-outfit bits.  “You dropped one of your unidentifiable lacy maid-outfit bits.”  Usami laid a hand on her head.
     “Be nice.”
     “Being nice includes smack talk.”
     “It specifically doesn't!”
     Before Niseko could offer another rejoinder, the school's ethics teacher asked the two minors if they wanted to join her in her booze-soaked fuck-tent, and they politely accepted the invitation.
     “To what do I owe the pleasure,” Ms. Bonnouji asked, looking about for a bra that was tangled in her hair as she ineffectually tried to hide her bite-bruised breasts with the corner of a sleeping bag.
     “I have something of an ethical dilemma,” Niseko said, politely kneeling and doing her level best to ignore the intense fuck-stank the tiny dwelling had collected.  Usami, meanwhile, reveled in it, rolling about the floor as if trying to katamari the smells onto herself.
     “Well, you've come to the right place,” Ms. Bonnouji said, finally discovering the bra and giving it, along with her armpits and underboob region, a spritz of air freshener.  “Tell me about it.”
     “Well, that's just it.  There's a big decision I need to make, and I really feel like I can't just make it on my own, since it's going to affect a lot of people's lives, but it touches on some matters I cannot talk about.”
     “Why not?”
     “I promised I wouldn't.”
     “How important is that promise?”
     “Pretty important?  I mean, it's a promise, the whole point is you're supposed to keep them.”
     “Sure, but you can weigh that against other priorities.  You keep promises not because you have to follow a rule, but because that serves the higher good of honesty.  And there are other higher goods.  One of those ancient Greek dudes gives an example where you borrow someone's axe, and promise to return it.  Fulfilling that promise is good…unless you have reason to think he wants the axe back to kill someone with it.  Honesty is important, but most of us would agree in that case, the greater good of preventing harm supersedes the greater good of honesty.  It would be great if there were some easy way to balance competing moral goods to see what has priority, but if it were easy, us ethicists wouldn't be in business.”  She took the day’s first of what would be many long draws at a bottle of peach schnapps.  “What I would suggest is, thinking about the potential harms different courses of action could take, and find the one likely to cause the least harm.”
     Niseko hrmmed in frustration.  In terms of potential harm, several people were at risk of…what, exactly?  In one scenario, they're free to live their lives (assuming they were alive, she reminded herself) albeit they had all possibility of romantic fulfillment curtailed; in the other scenario, they get dragged into a situation that seems like most people would find objectionable, yet everyone involved seems psyched about.  Also, the structure of the manga was at stake, but that's only a harm to the readers.  Non-canon as she was, she felt no obligation to them.
     “I wanna ask one more person,” she decided out loud.  She opened her phone and hit Inda Karane’s number.  As the line opened, Niseko could hear the Chairperson's daughter in the background asking who was calling.  “Hi Karane, is that Hakari I hear with you?”
     “It's not like we're on a date or anything” Karane replied, flustered.  In the background, Niseko could hear Hakari gently whispering:
     “Your meds, Dear.”
     “Right, sorry,” Niseko heard Karane reply, followed by the sound of her dry-swallowing what Niseko knew to be two tablets of a medication Yakuzen Kusuri[#5] had prepared for her, a limited version of the de-tsundere serum with limited, temporary duration and reduced side-effects.  “OK,” Karane said a moment later.  “It is a date, she is my girlfriend, and later we're going to have really toxic, mind-game-heavy aggressive sex, and I'm looking forward to it.  What's up.  Be quick.”
      “I think I need to ask you something, because I have to make a decision that will affect the future of the family and I don't feel like I should be allowed to make it on my own, but I can't tell you what it is without breaking a promise to Rentaro, so…”
     “Don't.”
     “Don't what?”
     “Don't break the promise.  If Rentaro made you promise, it's got to be important.  Whatever decision you need to make, he trusts you to make it, and we all trust you, too.”
     Niseko smiled.
     “Or, like, whatever,” Karane added, the effects already starting to fade.
     “Thank you,” Niseko said.  She closed her phone, and sighed.  OK, I guess I'm doing this.  “Honey Bunny, could you tell me where Rentaro is right now?”  Usami opened her own phone to check the tracking devices she planted on her boyfriend.
      “Third floor, heading north towards the chemistry lab.”
      “Perfect.  Thank you,” Niseko said, putting an arm around her.  They did some of that extra-sloppy high school goth making-out; Ms. Bonnouji, watching, chin in hand, started to say “nice” before passing out again.  “I’ve got something to take care of, so I'll be busy for a couple days,” Niseko added, wincing:  “Also, I have a big favor to ask.”

     Rentaro, minding his own damn business, was violently yanked around a corner as he passed it.
     “I need you to come with me and do what I say for an indefinite period,” Niseko said.
     “Normally, I would love to.  But I am a little busy right now, we have the closing ceremony next week, I have four hundred and ninety-six things I have to get done before that, so if you'll excuse me…” he smiled politely and began walking off.  Niseko tried to hold him back, but it was like trying to stop a taxiing 747 with a lasso made of dental floss.
     “Stop.  Listen, or else.”  Niseko reached into her pocket.  Rentaro's eyes widened as he saw, clutched in her hand, an envelope, made from luxurious metallic lavender cardstock and sealed with a heart-shaped sticker.
     “Why the fuck do you have that?” Rentaro said, in a tone that hinted at murderous intent, in a way meant to be intimidating but unfortunately Niseko found it sexy.
    “I asked my girlfriend nicely if I could use it.  As long as I don't have to use it, I can give it back.”
    Within the envelope was a voucher; Rentaro had issued exactly one to each girlfriend as part of the ongoing logistical nightmare of trying to keep ninety-five women happy; while normally, Rentaro's time was carefully allocated by the Chairs of the Logistics Committee (Nano), the Cultural Committee (Shizuka), and the Mwehehe Committee (Hakari), if ever any one of the girlfriends had a compelling need for exclusive access to Rentaro, if only briefly, they could cash in their voucher, which stated “48 Hours - Whatever You Want - No Questions Asked - Transferable.”  These vouchers, which would not be reissued until they'd all been used, were jealously guarded by their possessors; Theoretically they could be traded (much like the “Love Dollars” Rentaro had also issued in a move that definitely did not have sex cult vibes) but in practice no one was willing to give theirs up.  Niseko slid a nail under the flap.
     “OK, OK, stop,” Rentaro raised his hands in surrender.  “I’ll do whatever you want, just promise you’ll give that back to Usami.” 
     Thank God, Niseko thought.  She didn't know if she could've gone through with it had Rentaro called her bluff.  She tucked the envelope away safely.
     “I figured out who your hundredth girlfriend is going to be.  No spoilers, but we both know when that happens, right?”
     “The bon-odori?”
     “Circle gets the square.  The question, then, is where are the four people you're supposed to have met before her?”
     “I don't care.”
     “Excuse me?”
     “My priority is the people already in my life - my family.  The girlfriends I already have.  You as well.  You're important to me, I care about you, I know you.  You’re cool, you're smart, you're funny - and you help make Usami happy.  You help all of us.  That's how it is; I don't love my girlfriends because supernatural bullshit says I have to, I love them because of who they are - who I know them to be.  I'm very happy to have them, and if someone else comes into my life again, the way it's happened thus far, I'll deal with that when it happens - but I'm not going to seek it out, I'm not going to ask for more when I already have so much more than any man could possibly ask.”
     “Y’know what?  Fair.  Fortunately for you, I’ve done the seeking for you.  Come with me and look at this:” she handed him a folder and started walking.  Rentaro followed along, opening up the folder.
     “The full student roster?” he asked.
     “Notice anything interesting?”
     “A lot of the students have puns for names?”
     “How many students are there in our grade?  Count them.”  After a while, Rentaro responded.
     “One hundred and forty-seven?”
     “Are you sure?  What did you count?”
     “All the names.”
     “Try counting the birthdays.”
     “...one hundred and forty eight?  The heck?”  Rentaro studied the list more carefully.  “Ah, I think I see what happened.  Whoever made the list screwed up, the top row is supposed to list what's in the column below, like it says ‘Student Name’ at the top of the first column, but then they forgot to do that for the rest, so all the information in the other columns starts at the top row.”
     “You're very close, but not quite.  If that's what happened, then all the birthdays would be one row off, right?”  Rentaro checked again - all the birthdays he knew, and he knew almost a hundred, were in their proper row.  He frowned, then smiled.  He didn't like getting his love life jerked around, but a good mystery was kinda fun.
     “So what did happen?”
     “Take a closer look at the top row.”
     “What am I supposed to wait, what the fuck.”  Each student's name, written in kanji, had furigana written over it, telling you the pronunciation.  What Rentaro had not noticed the first time, and indeed most of the school had apparently not noticed for three years, was that because the lines around the table were a bit thicker than the lines separating rows and columns, it partially obscured the furigana written over the four kanji Rentaro and others had assumed was read as “Gakusei Namae.”  However, upon close inspection, they read completely different.  Rentaro was incredulous.
     “‘Takaryu Akirazen?’  We have a student in our grade with a wildly-cool sounding name like that, but because it's written as ‘student name,’ nobody noticed?  Has she been coming to school?  If she's been here, how has nobody seen her?  How has she flown completely under the radar all this time?”  He realized they'd stopped walking, in a part of the building he'd never been to before.  “Where are we?”
     “This,” Niseko pointed to a sign, too dusty to be read, over the door in front of which they'd just stopped, “is the office of the student council.  She's the president.”
     “I…didn't realize we had a student council.”
     “Which might go far towards explaining why she won her election to the position, unopposed, three years in a row.  With 100% of the vote each time - 100% of the one vote cast.  Presumably, hers.”  She let Rentaro take this information in for a moment.  “Wait here please,” she said, popping into the room.
     Inside, it looked exactly like that one room from Audition: threadbare, unkept, with only three items of note.  A rotary phone on the bare floor, a burlap sack in one corner (don't worry, it doesn't have what the sack in the movie did, it's just what got used to store documents after someone took the filing cabinet away) and one young woman sitting alone in the middle, a bokuto resting upon her knees.
     You would have called her intimidatingly beautiful, except that at the moment she was intimidating more because she had the look of a cornered, starving predator.  She seemed literally hungry, like she'd been missing meals as well as sleep, and beyond physical hunger, rage simmered in her gaze, a fury long stoked and quietly cultivated.
     “So.  The Rentaro Family has finally come to complete its conquest, has it?  They must be underestimating me, sending their errand girl rather than coming in force.”
     “I…think you may have misunderstood some stuff, Madam President,” Niseko said, plopping down in front of her.  “If you'll forgive me, I didn't know who you were until just before the last scene transition.  I'd like to know more about you, if that's OK?”  Akirazen sighed.
     “I had a dream, when I came here.  I wanted to be part of one of those absurdly powerful, deadly-serious student councils you see in anime.  I wanted to be Satsuki Kiryuin.  You ever see Kill la Kill?”
     “I fuckin’ loved Kill la Kill.  And yeah, I see it: you got the hair, you got the eyebrows.  You got a pair of heels that can make a real intimidating clop when you step?”
     “You fuckin' know it.  Imagine my surprise, imagine my delight, when I win my first election as student council president.  Imagine my disappointment when I discovered it's because no one else bothered voting.  Imagine my disappointment when I discovered student council doesn't really work like it does in anime and it's mostly a bunch of busywork no one cares about.  Well fine, I thought.  I can make it into the absurdly powerful deadly-serious student council of my dreams - with careful planning and manipulation, I can be the chessmaster behind the scenes, skillfully gathering allies and directing resources towards my growing empire.  Imagine my rage, then, at being outmanoeuvred at every turn.  Any time I set my sights on a particularly interesting student, someone who could help me make my dream a reality, I discover they've already been snapped up by one of the school's two biggest gangs, the Tomo-Tomodachi-Tachi or the Rentaro Family.”
     “We're not ‘gangs,’” Niseko interrupted.  “Also, they're called the ‘Tomo-Tomodachi-Tachi?’  That's adorable.”
     “You guys are constantly committing crimes.”
     “Yeah, but like anime crimes, though.”
     “You had a wealthy relative installed as chairperson to help cover up your various crimes.”
     “That situation was a lot more complicated than that,” Niseko said, in a sheepish sort of tone.
     “And for all that, I wouldn't have minded if we could have just…”
      “...talked things out?”
      “No!  Had a big fight!  Haven't you been listening?  I want to run a student council like it's my personal army.  I want to get in fights with you guys and have epic battles and skullduggery.  Instead I just look at smaller and smaller budgets every week, and every once in a while someone comes by to tell me some piece of student council equipment is being reassigned to one of the other clubs.  This week the newspaper club took my last folding chair, a month ago I lost my filing cabinet to something called the Investigation Committee.”  Niseko pulled at her collar.
      “Ooh, that's my bad.  Sorry…Is there a trick to getting the middle drawer open?  It keeps getting stuck.”
      “Yeah, y’know how you push down a bit and then left to unlatch the others?  That one you actually push up, it's weird.  Anyway, now you all must die.”  She got to her feet, taking a stance, and Niseko shuffled back towards the door.
     “Hold on, hold on, wouldn't you rather fight someone who can fight back?  Give you an epic battle?  I could get Torotoro Kishika in here, just say the word.”
     “I studied the blade,” Akirazen said, advancing, “specifically to have an epic rivalry with Torotoro Kishika, only to discover she spends her days suckling the Chairperson's nipples.  How is that supposed to be my rival?”
     “I mean.  A, she doesn't only do that, she has a pretty good work/life/sword/nipple balance, and B, don't knock it ‘til you try it.”
     “Enough.  I have devised a devious stratagem of vengeance, as deadly as it is ingenious - you will all be faced with a series of lethal challenges, uniquely designed to”
     “That sounds tedious, honestly,” Niseko said, and yanked Rentaro through the door.

     ZING

     “...actually, nevermind, I get it now,” Takaryu Akirazen [#97] said, staring.  “Um.  Hi, I'm…”
     “...I know,” said Rentaro, stumbling a bit.  “I was just outside, I heard most of…”
     “Oh!  So you know I…”
     “Yeah, I got it.  Um, do you want to…”
     “Yes, absolutely.  Please.”
     “Cool!  You're, um.  You're in.”
     “Great!  I’ll just be…up on the roof, if that works for people?”
     “Absolutely, I’ll be along in a bit, do you need my number?”
     “I have it, actually.  Student council.”
     “Right!  Right.  Text me and I'll have yours.  In a bit then?”
     “Yes.  Great,” Akirazen smiled; her face was acquiring a healthy warmth.  “Um.”
     “Yes?”
     “Would it be OK if I could, y’know…”
     “?”
     “...could I pose dramatically on the rooftop and talk about how cool I am and all the cool stuff we're going to do?”
     “You can ABSOLUTELY pose dramatically on the rooftop and talk about how cool you are and all the cool stuff we're going to do.”
     “And then we'll make out?”
     “And then we'll make out, yes.”
     “Great!”  Niseko clapped her hands together, then sent Akirazen off with a shove.  “Scamper, Camper, we’ve all got shit to do.  Rentaro, take this drug.”

    “Okie dokie.  What is it?”

     “Squid potion.  We'll be taking it as an eye-drop.  Do you know,” she said, taking her contacts out before dosing herself, “that when you ask an anime mad scientist to make you a drug that gives you squid powers, it is almost impossible to get them to understand that you don't want tentacles?  Took like five tries before Kusuri[#5] groked that I wanted something that just works on the eyes.”

     “I can see that happening.  Why are we taking a squid potion?”

     “It takes a few minutes to take effect, and while that's happening, let me tell you a little bit about eyeballs.  In humans and other vertebrates, eyes evolved in a dumb way, where the nerves that connect the light-sensing cells to the brain are on the front side of the cells.  Because the nerves need to get from the front to the back, they all have to pass through a hole in the light-sensing region of our eyes.  Because we have this hole, there's a blind spot in our vision; a ring-shaped zone where we're not seeing anything, but our brain kinda blends it together so we don't notice.  The eyes of cephalopods, like squids, on the other hand, evolved independently from ours, and they got it right.  Nerves on the back of the cells, no hole, no blind spot.”

      “So your idea is, with cephalopod eyes, we’ll be better able to spot some clue about one of the other, hold on, I think it's working.”  He blinked a few times, tilted his head back forward, and allowed his vision to adjust.

     ZING

     “The fuck?!”  Rentaro, lovestruck for the second time in six minutes, was flabbergasted to discover the other young woman standing next to him.  A truly unruly mess of dark hair came down like a tiered fountain, through which it was a miracle a pair of wide eyes could be seen, looking up at Rentaro with a mix of admiration, affection, awe, contempt, delight, disbelief, expectation, frustration, vexation, worship.

     “Hello, Rentaro,” she signed.

     “Oh!  OK;” Rentaro said aloud, then signed “First off, pleasure to meet you, I’m glad I learned to sign just in case.”

     The hairball in front of him cocked her head slightly, signing “I can actually hear fine, I just can't speak.”

     “Rentaro, this is an old friend of mine, Hananomae Koko[#98].  We met at the hospital when we were recovering.”  She hiked up her skirt to show off the scar on her left leg, and Koko pulled at her collar to reveal part of a scar along her neck.  “While I was eventually up and walking again, she lost the ability to speak.”

     “At first, I figured it wouldn't be that big a deal.  I could still hear, I could still text, I was learning to sign.  Who needs a voice?  But then something weird started happening.  People started ignoring me.  They didn't notice me, they didn't see me.  They started acting like I wasn't there, like they'd forgotten me.  I’d try to remind them when I could, but it was like trying to fill a sieve.”

     “To my discredit, it even happened to me.  In my defense, when she told me she was trying to be seen, I didn't know she meant people literally couldn't see her.  After all, I could see her just fine, at first.  But you know how it is with friends, you get a text, you think, hey I haven't heard from them all week, then you realize it's been three months.  You talk to them, they pour themselves out to you, you listen, you sympathize, you talk it through - but then you go back to your own life, and them to theirs, and maybe it's a little longer next time you see them, maybe they're looking worse, but you've got your own stuff going on.”

     “By the time I entered this school, it was happening to Niseko almost as much as everyone else.  Maybe I could have tried harder to keep her focused, to keep myself in the center of her attention, but on the first day here, I stumbled upon something that took up almost all of my attention.”

     “What?” Rentaro asked, genuinely mystified. 

     “You, idiot!  I got wrapped in your drama and couldn't look away - I'm a Day-One fan.”

     “You saw me bump into Karane and Hakari?”

     “You bumped into the three of us!”  At this, it was Rentaro’s turn to tug at his collar.

     “Sorry about that.  So you've been with us this whole time?”

     “This whole time.”

     “Even the extremely private, extremely raunchy times?”

     “Especially the extremely private, extremely raunchy times.  But also, particularly, the tender ones - I saw what you did for Shizuka, how hard you worked to help her participate, and to participate as she was, no pressure to fix herself, because she didn't need fixing.  And it's been like that with all of them, it's not that you don't see their flaws, you seem them clearly, but you see them as a part of the person you love.  I wanted that.  I wanted to be seen like that.  I tried telling Niseko about you guys, but…”

      “...I tend to zone out when then the talk turns to who-kissed-who and all that.  Never a big gossip person.  I still wasn't taking her seriously.  But last year, after I got involved with you guys, I learned the supernatural is real, (including aliens, ghosts, gods, spirits, super science, also we're all characters in a manga, all of those big reveals that, realistically, should be the only thing we think about for the rest of our lives, but eh) I started to think maybe there was something like that going on, like a curse or something.”

      “As it turns out, no, nothing supernatural, people just kinda suck sometimes.”  Koko punctuated this point, ineffectually puffing a lock of hair from her face.  “People have blind spots.  They don't pay attention to things unless their attention is drawn to them, they lose focus, they forget.” 

     “Supernatural or no, I figured maybe super science had a solution.  I took her by the Mads’ tower, and the MUPATN [“Made-Up Plot-Advancing Technical Nonsense”] scan showed that she always happened to be standing right where people's blind spot fell.  Knowing that bit about squids, I asked Kusuri if she could make some drugs about it - she finally made one that didn't come with tentacles this morning, which is the kind of giant coincidence that can happen in this tone of story and it's fine.  Lo and behold, here we are.”

     “I’m really glad you finally see me.  It's been a long…this whole time, I’ve…y’know what, fuck it.”  Koko creased attempting to form words with her hands and instead used them to communicate, if anything more forcefully, by grabbing Rentaro's lapels and pulling his face against hers, whereupon her lips, incapable of voicing the phrase “I love you, you oblivious moron,” nevertheless communicated them.

     Once again, Niseko clapped her hands together.  “Cool beans, let's get this denouement  denouemented.  Koko, wanna hang out?  Roof?  We already have one lady we gotta onboard in the queue ahead of you, but maybe we can squeeze you in.  Rentaro, how much more time do we have before school closes for the day?”

     Rentaro checked his watch.  “Seven weeks.  So just enough time to give Akirazen and Koko their own getting-to-know you chapters, plus a week for the authors to go on break, but then I gotta get home for dinner.”

     “I’ll hang around,” Koko signed.  “You might not see me, but if there's a moment where the comic timing is right, I’ll pop in and it'll turn out I was there the whole time - that's a solid basis for a running gag.”

     “She’s not wrong,” Usami said from the vents.

     “So, that's two.”  Niseko put a hand on her hip in a posture of negotiation.  “The bad news is, these were the easy ones.  The ones I was able to figure out right away - I put two and two together about Koko as soon as I started thinking about it, and noticed the thing with Akirazen after looking into it a bit.  The other two?  I don't think I’ll be able to find them on my own, not without your help.  And I can't make you want to help me; hopefully, you understand as you see by those two, it's still better if we find them than if we don't.  What do you say?  Can you help me out here?”

     Rentaro sighed.  “Tell you what.  I’ll do what I can to help if you do one thing for me.”  Niseko rolled her eyes but waited, listening.  “Can you tell me any ways I could be a better boyfriend?  Other than, y’know, not…” he sighed deeply “...ninety-seven timing?”  

     Niseko thought a bit.  “You could try being good at sex, whenever you get around to it?”

     Rentaro blushed, but took the advice straightforwardly.  “Anything specific you suggest?”

     “Let's walk and talk.”

     “Ricardo Montalban, huh?” Rentaro jotted down Niseko's last bit of advice in a notepad and set it down on Niseko's desk.  “I’ll definitely remember that.  And that works on everyone?”
     “I mean, it works on Shiina, who's to say?  I haven't tried it on everyone.  I'm willing to do the legwork if you're willing to cover the overtime.”
     “That's quite alright, you’ve given me more than enough to think about for now.  What can I do to help?”
     Niseko gestured to her Pepe Silvia wall.  “There'll be a brief montage of us staring at this bad boy, combing through files, arguing over coffee, eating Chinese takeout directly from the cartons…” she began writing these points down on a nearby whiteboard “...drawing on a whiteboard, and so forth.  Then, one of us will say ‘We’ve been at this all night, it's time to give it up,’ and the other will have a breakthrough.”
     “Understood.  Let's get to it.”

     After a short montage, Rentaro stretched out, yawning, snapped the ledger on his lap shut, crushed an empty coffee cup and tossed it at an overflowing wastebasket next to an ashtray full of dog-ends that had manifested despite neither of them smoking.
     “We've been at this all night.  It's time to give it up, Niseko.”  He walked over to where she was staring at her Pepe Silvia wall, seemingly lost in thought.  She didn't respond.  “Niseko?”
     “What can you tell me about her?”  She turned to him suddenly, pointing at the wall.  His gaze followed her gesture to a picture on the wall, nestled among the maze of red yarn.  It was a copy of the Halloween-themed colorspread that had been included in the second-to-last volume of the manga, all ninety-five girlfriends to date posed in distinctive, thematically-appropriate costumes.  Rentaro looked to see who, specifically, she was indicating; next to her fingertip was a blonde woman in a Phantom of the Opera costume.
     “Itokiri Haribara[#95*]?  You’ve met her, right?”
     “I took this picture, Rentaro.  Yes, I’ve met her.  I'm asking what you know about her.”
     “She's my most recent girlfriend.  Or rather, she was until today.  In the same way that some of my girlfriends seem to invoke the vibe of a specific manga, like Himeka[#26] for Oshi no Ko or Zetsubouda[#29] for Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Haribara is kind of a riff on Franken Fran: her whole deal is surgery, she loves the idea of cutting things up and stitching them back together.  There was a run of loosely-Halloween themed characters, nothing supernatural per se, but we've had mad scientists before, Kusuri, Tetsuko[#79], so a Victor Frankenstein-type wasn't especially noteworthy.”
     “What’s she like, though?”
     “If you're asking what I've noticed about her personally?  It's cute how her tongue sticks out a bit when she's working on something delicate with her hands, and it's cute how she holds things with one or two fingers randomly sticking out, and the scar down the middle of her face is really cool, and it's really sweet the way she helps Chiyu[#35] at the nurse's station and mends things if they need it - we’ve have a number of incidents where clothes have gotten slashed to pieces in ways that improbably leave the wearer unharmed but with their tits out, and any time that happens Haribara zips by with needle and thread, and their clothes get sewn back in place with a couple little bows added in.  Karane's sweater is more bows than sweater at this point.”
     “Look at this.”  Niseko brought up a selfie on her phone - herself with a few of the girlfriends on the night of the Halloween party, when the big group photo was taken.  “Notice anything?”
     “It's a cute photo and I hope you send it to me?”
     “Done.  But compare it to this.”  She went to her laptop, and brought up the official character portrait.  “Notice anything?”  Rentaro squinted.
     “Her beauty marks are really charming?”
     “Correct!”  Niseko had taken on a manic tone.  “Her beauty marks, plural.  One on her right cheek, one on her left collarbone.  Look at the selfie again.”  Rentaro squinted again.  
     “Well, I can't see the one on the right cheek in the photos because she's wearing the Phantom mask on that side of her face, so?”
     “So!  Look at this one again!”  She pointed back at the full-cast picture.  Rentaro squinted yet again.  The woman in the full cast picture was wearing a Phantom mask on the left side of their face, the beauty mark on their exposed cheek pinched by a broad smile.  Rentaro sighed.
     “She was doing a bit.  She switched masks back and forth all evening when no one was looking, and whenever someone asked she pretended not to know what they were talking about, like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein with his hump.  Classic bit.  Where are you going with this?”
     “Look, damnit!"  She grabbed an honest-to-God magnifying glass off the desk, where it had up until this point served only a symbolic function, and waved it over the picture.  "What isn't there?”  Rentaro stared at all three images, quiet for a minute, then turned to Niseko.
     “In the picture with the full cast, you can't see the beauty mark on her collarbone,” he admitted.
     “You should, though, right?  With that plunging decolletage?  Nice, by the way.  There's no way it could hide.  In the official portrait, she has both.  In the full cast, she just has the one on her face.  In this selfie, she definitely has the one on the collarbone, and we don't know if the one on her face is there.”
     “So what?  It doesn't necessarily mean anything.  Maybe the illustrator just made a mistake?”  Niseko slapped him as hard as she could.  “Thank you.  No, you're right, she would never make a mistake like that - hasn't missed a beauty mark yet, isn't going to start this close to the finish line.  So what's your theory then?”
     “C’mon,” she said, taking his hand.  “We're figuring this out right the fuck now.”

     The Mads' Tower was constructed on the opposite corner of the rooftop from the bridge to the Annex, and served as a place those in the family with a taste for the impossible sciences could conduct their ill-advised experiments with minimum risk of the rest of the school building being exposed to the potentially toxic and frequently explosive results of Kusuri’s drug cocktails, Tetsuko’s robots, or Haribara’s well-intentioned crimes against nature.  While the stone tower cantilevered out over the school grounds and climbed, like the limb of a great and haunted tree, higher again than the school itself, Niseko and Rentaro only had to go up a floor or two, as the bottom levels of the tower were Haribara's - the level that opened onto the rooftop contained a surgical suite that adjoined the nurse’s station, allowing the newest, wait, actually third-to-newest member of the family to easily aid Nurse Chiyu in medical emergencies.  A couple floors up, they found Itokiri Haribara at work in their private lab; they hastily threw a sheet over whatever they were working on, leaving a linen-covered lump in the shape of a human body upon the slab.

      “Hi you two!”  They set down a technical instrument of unknown purpose, pulled off a mask, and smiled.  “Don't worry about contamination, I'm not doing any sterile business today, c’mon in, what brings you this way?”

      Niseko walked up, took a deep breath, and said:  “I have a question, and if the answer is no, it's going to sound like a very silly question, and you can just ignore it, and I’ll get out of your hair, you can forget I said anything.  If the answer is yes, you don't have to tell me any specifics, but please let me know.”  Haribara tilted their head a bit, confused.  “Haribara, are you two people?”

      They sighed.  While Niseko looked on with a look that said I-fuckin’-knew-it and Rentaro looked on with a look that said Jesus-fuckin’-shit, they unbuttoned their long surgical gown and stepped apart.  A featureless expanse of smooth skin on both halves covered the plane of the division, which each covered with her own half of the gown before each hopped over to a different chair.

     “Why not start with introductions?” Niseko suggested.  They smiled.

     “You can call me Hidaribara[#95],” the left half said.

     “And I'm Baramigi[#96],” the right continued.  “We were born conjoined; and a particularly unusual case.  Two complete spines, two complete alimentary canals, a heart, a lung, a kidney each.  Theoretically, we should have been separable with minimum risk, however…”

     “...while the area of fusion was extensive, since we shared no vital organs in the abdomen or thorax, we both would likely survive, except for the matter of the brain; our skulls were incomplete, with areas of brain tissue overlapping.  What's more, due to the way human brains are wired, the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice-versa.  At the time, no surgeon could have successfully separated our brains without sacrificing one or the other, and, since we were able to survive indefinitely while still fused, our parents refused to make that choice.”

     “As we grew up, we discovered we were able to pass as a single individual, with the seam of our fusion appearing to be merely a scar.  It was easier to pretend - if we told people the truth, they got confused, frightened, or disgusted.  But we didn't want to have to hide - we decided to study medicine, to learn surgery so that one day we could separate ourselves - and we did.”

     “But even then, it was still easier to act as one - easier to get around with two legs, two hands, working together.  It was shortly after we'd completed the operation, but still acting together, we met you, Rentaro.”

      Rentaro, for his part, was deep in thought.  “So…that’s why your part of the Season 17 opening theme is in two-part harmony.”

      Hidaribara and Baramigi blinked.  Or winked, hard to tell.  “Actually, that's just a vocal technique - if we both do it, we can do four-part harmony.  Watch this.”

     If you've ever done karaoke, you’ve heard “Kiss From A Rose,” but lemme tell you, buddy, they nailed it.  Rentaro and Niseko handed them bouquets.  Baramigi wiped a tear from Hidaribara’s eye; Hidaribara looked up at Rentaro. 

      “That day we met, at the abandoned mannequin factory…”

      Niseko interrupted.  “Yeah, yeah, the abandoned mannequin factory, we were all there, it was very romantic.  I have a question.  What's under that sheet?”  The sisters looked abashed.

      “We’d…rather you not see that,” they said, getting to their foot and moving to intercept Niseko as she moved towards the slab.

      “Well that just makes me more curious,” she said.  She yanked the sheet away; underneath was Hidaribara and Baramigi’s naked body.  Well, one of their naked bodies.  Well, it belonged to them and it was naked.  “Body” implies it was once alive, and on closer inspection it was artificial, only a body in the sense that it resembled one.  Further, calling it “a body” implies it was but one object, when it was in fact two: a centimeter of space separated its two halves; the plane of division, where the real sisters had living skin, was instead studded with points of attachment and sensory electrodes.  If you didn't know it was some kind of dollmaker’s product, though, you could mistake it for human flesh, realistic skin, realistic hair, moistened eyes.  If it weren't for being in two halves, the only clue Niseko would have had of its artificiality was the skin being unnaturally un-blemished: not a single scar, not even that of a long-passed pimple.  No irritation, no irregularities, no beauty marks.

     “Sorry,” Niseko said, pulling the sheet back over, leaning slightly back as she did so to take in the view a bit longer.  “Incidentally, nice.  So I take it this was at the Halloween party with us?”

     “We were at the party, using these,” Hidaribara explained.  “When we joined your family, we finally met someone we’d been hoping to get to know when we entered this school: Karakuri Tetsuko, the robotics prodigy.  We still wanted to be able to live and work fully independently, you see.  So we approached her about making a full-body, or half-body rather, prosthesis.  The Halloween party was a trial run, to see if the prostheses could function without being noticed; we’re still making final adjustments.”

     Niseko thought back to the time following her injury, when Isseko had to be on hand to help her get around.  She knew very well you can love someone very much and still want to not have to rely on them all the time.  Rentaro frowned.

     “But why all the secrecy?  Why keep it hidden from everyone?”  The two approached him, flat-sides out.

     “We told you,” Baramigi said.  “People get freaked out when they hear.  We didn't want you to reject us.  We didn't want you to find out while we were still two half-people; if you had to know, we wanted to wait to tell you at least until we had these finished, so we could both be complete for you.”  They each had a hand on his chest as they looked up at him.

      “Idiots,” Niseko said.  They turned to look at her.

      “Excuse us?” They raised an eyebrow, intending it as an expression of interrogation, but when you only have one eyebrow to work with, it comes across as shock.

     “I know you two haven't been here as long as the others, but you should know by now Rentaro wouldn't do that.  He's the ultimate loves-you-for-you guy.  Whatever your whole freaky deal is, he's down for it.  Whatever part of you you think is shameful and disgusting, he loves you for it.”

      The two rested their heads on his shoulders; not knowing if touching the flat skin area was kosher or not, Rentaro placed his hand on their shoulders.  “She's right - I love you both, just the way you are.”

     “How can you?”  Hidaribara looked away, conflicted.  “We've been hiding ourselves from you, you don't even know us.”  

     “Rentaro, name ten things that are different about the two of them.”  Niseko leaned back.

     “Aside from the beauty marks, you mean?  Hidaribara holds a scalpel with just her thumb, middle and ring finger, Baramigi with her thumb, index and ring.  Baramigi has autumn allergies, Hidaribara has spring ones, which is why her nose is slightly stuffed up right now.  Baramigi’s an alto, Hidaribara's a contralto.  Hidaribara speaks up a little more, Baramigi usually chimes in to back her up.  They both shivered slightly when my hand brushed against the area of separation, but Baramigi pulled back a bit and Hidaribara leaned into it.  Baramigi looks back over to her sister a bit more, maybe has a bit more anxiety about separation.  Earlier when they were unbuttoning their gown and just now when we saw what's under the sheet, Hidaribara was blushing a little more intensely - Baramigi blushed but smiled a bit, like she has a bit of an exhibitionist streak.  Baramigi scratches her chin while thinking about something, Hidaribara puts her hand on her hip.  When the two of us, sorry, three of us, kissed before, Hidaribara's hand usually goes to the back of my head, pulling me in closer, Baramigi always gropes my ass.  If I kiss her neck, Hidaribara makes a kind of quiet mewing sound, but Baramigi will…”

     “OK!  That's enough!  We get it.”  The two were blushing intensely; Baramigi smiled.

     “Alright, Rentaro, let's wrap it up.  Do your thing.”  Niseko checked her phone; they had less than 24 hours before the morning of the closing festival.

     “My thing?”

     “Yeah, that bit where you tell them it's fine to want something like this” and she waved at the sheet on the slab “in order to make your life, sorry, lives, easier, but don't think for a second he needs you to change a thing for him to love you, he loves the person, persons, he fell in love with, as you were, as you are.”

     Rentaro jerked a thumb at Niseko.  “What she said.”  Hidaribara grabbed his head, pulling him in for a kiss; Baramigi leaned in for a kiss on his other cheek, and grabbed his ass.  Coming up for air after a few minutes, Rentaro looked over at Niseko.  “How do you think the others will react?  It might be hard explaining this one.”

     “I took care of it already.”  She showed the three of them her phone; in the big group text, she'd just posted “FYI Haribara was actually two people.”  Ninety-three thumbs-up emojis came in response, from everyone else except Yakuzen Yaku[#16], the Family's only nonagenarian, who responded by posting “siri how do I ask geeves for bingle,” followed by repeatedly posting a sequence of digits that was definitely her credit card number.

     “I just want to make one thing clear,” Niseko said to Rentaro.  “Just because you're dating twins, don't assume they'll want to do weird sex stuff together with you.”  Before Rentaro could begin to sputter “I wouldn't think of it,” Hidaribara cut in:

     “Actually, we would be totally fine with that - we don't really experience disgust in the same way most people do, you can't if you want to cut people up all day.”

     “So,” Baramigi added, “any weird sex stuff, we are absolutely down to clown.”  They both gave a thumbs-up, followed by a paired heart, followed by a sequence of gestures that started out clearly sexual but became increasingly esoteric.

     “I think that last one means ‘fertilizer plant explosion,’” Rentaro said.

     “Correct,” Koko signed.

     “Anyway, we gotta get going,” Niseko said.  “We'll let you get back to whatever you were up to.”

     “Thanks.”  Hidaribara smiled.  “We were trying get the texture and consistency of the prostheses’ breasts to match the real thing perfectly, but we need an independent tester to make the comparisons.”

     “I mean, we can hang around a little while,” Niseko said, before Rentaro pulled her out the door by her tie.  Baramigi hopped over to the door and hollered down the stairwell after them:

     “We both have complete vaginas!”

     “No one brought that up but we were all wondering, thank you for making it clear!” Niseko hollered back.

     “Beyonce?”

     “Met her.  No zing.”

     “Gretta Thunberg?”

     “Met her.  No zing.”

     “Flo from Progressive.”

     “Met her, no zing.”

     In the miserable, bitch-ass predawn hours on the morning of the closing festival, Niseko was racking her brains.  Having exhausted more systematic approaches to finding someone who might be Rentaro's last undiscovered soulmate, she was reduced to guessing celebrities, as Rentaro amicably responded to her questions while doing newspaper puzzles.  Having completed the day's sudoku, he moved on to the Anyagram.

      “Doris Kearns Goodwin?”

      “You said that already.  No zing.”  Niseko sighed.

      “Let's go over character types again.  You got tsunderes.  You got kuuderes.  Do you have any yanderes?”  Rentaro stomped on the floor twice, and Usami giggled from the vents.  “Fair enough.  You got a cat girl.  You got a robot girl.”

     “I don't have a robot girl.”

     “You now have two half-robot girls, mathematically you have a robot girl.  Any magical girls?”

     “They're all magical.”

     “You know what I mean, I'm looking for some tropes we haven't covered yet, what're the gaps in the collection.”

     “They're human beings, Niseko, they're not Pokemon.”

     “They're a little bit Pokemon.  Mimimi once said nothing but her own name for a week and a half.”

     “That,” Rentaro said, “is mean, but funny.”  Niseko rubbed her forehead.

     “Yeah, sorry.  Hold on, I gotta take my contacts out.”

     “Huh.  I didn't notice you put them back in.”

     “Went to the bathroom after the squid potion started wearing off.  You notice it makes your piss smell like coconut?”

     “That's the least-weird side effect one of Kusuri's drugs has given me.”

     Niseko laughed as she reached for her lens case, then paused.

     “Hold on.  We know from Chiyo[#12] that glasses don't block the zing, right?  So presumably contacts don't either.”

     “Right?”  Rentaro looked at her, curious.

     “But we also know sunglasses do block the zing - you didn't get a zing from May until you saw her with her sunglasses off.”

     “Right, the surfing contest.”

     “What about colored contact lenses?  Y’know that telebimbo you mentioned, the one who officiated at the food fight?  You didn't zing with her, but she has colored contacts.”

    “I see where you're going with this, but unfortunately no.  I had a chance to speak with Kakedashi Aidoru later, without her contacts.  Still no zing.  So we know colored contacts don't block it.”

     “Ah,” Niseko said, disappointed.  “Wait, hold on.  That doesn't prove colored contacts don't block it; if you had zinged, that would prove colored contacts do block it, but not zinging doesn't prove they don't - you can't prove a negative.  Like, if you open a box and there’s a toy inside, it proves some boxes have toys, but if you open a box and there's nothing inside, that doesn't prove that no boxes have toys, just that that one didn't.”

     “OK, fair enough.  What then?”

     “Rentaro…I have a colored lens on my left eye.”

     “What.”

     “I was born with heterochromia.  Nothing dramatic, it's not like a boat lights situation, but my left eye is a much lighter brown than my right.  Not a big deal, but…before the accident, it was the easiest way people could tell my sister and I apart, which I didn't like.  It made me feel separated from her.  It made me self-conscious about it, especially after the accident.  When I went back to middle school, since I needed corrective lenses anyway, I asked my folks if I could get one colored to match the other.  To look more like Isseko.”  She took a deep breath, took her lenses out, put her glasses on, and closed her eyes.  “I swear to Christ if they got us on this Goddamn bullshit…”  She opened her eyes and turned to Rentaro.

ZING

     “God-fucking-damn piece-of-bullshit-hack-writer-bullcrap, fuck the Goddamn Hell sideways-ass motherfucking bitchtit garbage-fucking cock knuckle ass monkey clown show, this is garbage, I quit,” a part of Niseko[#99] wanted to say.  However, another part wanted to run at Rentaro full speed, leap into his heart, taste every part of his face and try to slice him in half with her thighs, and as this was the part of her that controlled her motor functions, that's what she did.

     “We…really get jerked around here, don't we?” she asked, forehead pressed against his, as they came up for air.

     “You get used to it.”

     “Really?”

     “No,” Rentaro admitted.

     “Can confirm,” Koko signed.

     “I know you're not interested in my opinion on the topic,” Rentaro said, “but you look really good in glasses.  Also, and I'm sorry, I know you said you're self-conscious about it, but your eyes look cool.  Do with that what you will.”

     “Well,” said Niseko, who had recently started parting her hair a little to the side instead of down the middle, “some asshole once told me a little asymmetry in the face makes it more visually interesting.”  She smirked; as he leaned in again, she put a finger to his lips.  “Remember, what I said before about twins and sex stuff still applies, capice?”

      “Of course.  I respect your boundaries,” he said, bending her over her desk.

     “And so, due to how things turned out, would you all mind if Futsubi Niseko was my newest girlfriend?” Rentaro asked ninety-eight other women on the school rooftop as classes started on the day of the closing festival.  The polite applause he received in response was subdued, not for lack of approval on the rest of the Family's part, but more due to confusion. A significant number of the other girlfriends, particularly those who joined after Rentaro first encountered the Futsubi household, had never fully comprehended Niseko's associate member status, and had assumed she was Rentaro's girlfriend all along.  A lot of them, Niseko noted with frustration, still aren't checking their binders and keeping them up-to-date.  She'd have to work with them on that; her workload on the logistical side of things was going to get heavier.  First, though, she had another pressing matter to attend.  She grabbed Rentaro's hand and walked over to Usami Shiina.

     “Hold on, I’m only going to get to do this once, I wanna make sure I do it properly.”  She grabbed a few beads of nervous sweat from her boyfriend's forehead and applied them to her own; she was too confident to generate her own supply.  Turning to Usami, she said: “And so, due to how things turned out, is it OK if I make Aijou Rentaro my boyfriend?”

     “No!  Absolutely not!”

     Total silence, save for the loud schloorp noise of ninety-nine sphincters slamming shut at once.  Usami laughed her ass off.  “I’m totally fucking with you, of course it's fine, the person I love loves the person I love, I love that!”  She ran and swept them both up in a big hug.  Rentaro, miraculously able to breathe despite Usami’s well-cushioned vice grip, turned to Niseko.

     “Can we talk a bit?  Usual spot?”

     Niseko nodded, and, unable to vocalize for lack of oxygen, signed “Let me check on one thing first.”  When she had the chance, she went to find Akirazen, who stood at the edge of the rooftop, posing with her bokuto.  “Madam President, a word?”  The Student Council President favored her with a glance.  “I just wanted to double-check something.  Those ‘lethal challenges’ you mentioned: they’ve all been dismantled, right?”  Akirazen nodded.

     “The lethal challenges have all been dismantled.”  There was an explosion two floors below, followed by the sound of screaming, various power tools, rushing water, bees, heavy stone scraping against stone, people screaming about bees, something collapsing through a floor then collapsing through the floor below that, something like a xylophone being thrown into a pipe organ, several sickening plopping sounds, steam escaping, metal grinding on metal, the baying of hounds, and something being flung into the distance.  Without changing her expression in the slightest, Akirazen added “The lethal challenges have mostly been dismantled.”

     “Good.  Stay on top of it.”  She walked over to the bar area maintained by Purufu Sakeya[#40] and ordered her non-alcoholic usual, plopping onto the stool next to Rentaro.  She noticed the typically unflappable bartender seemed a bit more wan than usual, though as ambiguous as her affect was, it was hard to tell.  “You wanted to talk?”

     “Can you tell me why you showed me Akirazen before Koko?  She's your friend, after all.”  Niseko frowned.

     “I didn't really think about it much.  Just kind of happened that way?”

     “I have a theory,” Rentaro leaned in close, “that you did it that way because the story had to happen that way.  Do you know what a chiastic structure is?”

     “I could Google it but why don't you just tell me.”

     “It's a thing you see in certain stories, certain great works of literature like The Bible, Watchmen, or Robocop, where the narrative is symmetrical chronologically: the last part echoes the first part, the second to last echoes the second, and so forth.  You making the choices you did makes our story chiastic: assuming I meet my hundredth girlfriend today at the bon-odori, then my third girlfriend and my third-to-last will both be adorable little floofs who have issues with communication.”

     “He's not wrong,” Koko signed.

     “Furthermore, my fourth and fourth-to-last girlfriends are both tall, cool beauties who are technically the elite of the school, but were isolated and friendless before I met them.  My fifth and fifth-to-last girlfriends are mad scientists with multiple versions of their body.  My sixth girlfriend was the first one to be related to another, and my sixth-to-last also happens to be a relative of another one.  See where I'm going here?”

     “Your seventh is always hungry, your seventh-to-last is that one who's obsessed with trying novelty beverages, your eighth has her eyes closed all the time but has perfect spatial awareness, while the eighth-to-last has those wide staring eyes but is constantly bumping into things.  What's your point?”

     “You don't see how this affects you?  If the pattern holds, my ninety-ninth girlfriend, AKA you, and my hundredth will be in some way a reflection of my first two, who are…what was the phrase you used?”

     “‘Extremely gay for each other?’”

     “That's the one.  So?  You met her, apparently, right?  I won't ask you for any specifics, but the chiasmus suggests you two must have really hit it off.”

     “I mean, she's very sweet, obviously.  I think we got along fine, but it's not like we…” she dropped her drink and looked at Rentaro in horror.  “...I had my contacts in.”