Archive of Our Own

Apartment 9, Aria House, Venice Beach
October 25, 2016

It had been a pretty quiet night once again. Their unexpected domiciles in another universe were the second storey of an almost beachside apartment building. It was a floor of teenaged girls, but it lacked the freewheeling feel of a college dorm. Of course, they had never been such rowdy teenagers anyway, but were among those of the "go-home club" who really did go home after school.

Another reason is that their quarters didn't have near the density of a college dorm. Yomi estimated they could get ten tatami mats in just the living room, maybe even more. It was not even that much smaller than living in her parents' detached house. In that sense, anyway, living in Venice Beach was very much like the beach resort that Tomo had been promised.

Daytime was noisy enough, with the renovation of the remaining vacant apartments, and the beachgoers and athletes passing through. But at night, the beach was just far enough away for all but the noisiest of weekend parties to be drowned out by the white noise of the foaming sea. Sometimes a junkie would wander through, screaming at the top of their lungs, but that had only happened twice now.

More often, the silence of the night was broken by song from the apartment one level down, the singer on the lower balcony's tones carried up for her to hear. No one minded listening to Siren. Even if Yomi didn't understand the words, Athena's voice carried all the feeling that was necessary. Yomi wished, she really did, that she could sing like that. But she knew in her heart that she even if she had Athena's perfect pitch, she could never match her passion.

Sadly, it was not one of those nights. It was a little too cold for an outdoor concert tonight, and both storeys of windows were sealed. It was still cold. Not crank-up-the-furnace, huddle-under-the-kotatsu cold, just a bit of autumn chill, made more uncomfortable by the fact that, as Tomo had put it, they had been cheated out of a summer. So Yomi put down her book, and walked over to the kitchen. She half-filled the electric kettle, and set it to boil.

Even Tomo, across the room, was quiet tonight. She was lying belly-down on the couch, intently reading something on her laptop. It wasn't rare that Tomo was quiet, either. At school, she alternated between hyper and lazy, but a lot of that was performance. When Tomo came over to "study", she had a quieter, more introspective side that only Yomi, and Tomo's own family, got to see. It didn't mean she wasn't annoying, it's just that she wasn't "on". Tomo stopped being the wildcat she wanted others to see when everyone else was gone.

The water came to a boil, and Yomi poured two mugs. She dunked a teabag a few times in each cup, then dropped a teaspoon of sugar in one mug. Then she shook her head, and decided that would have to be Tomo's cup. Yomi had promised herself to avoid extra sugar now.

She set that mug on the coffee table next to Tomo, and sat down with her own cup. She took in the fragrance of the steamy black tea, then took a sip.

Tomo finally broke the silence, still facing her screen, "Aw man, why did Yomi get a penis when I didn't?"

Yomi did a spit-take, and a bit more of the tea sloshed out of her mug onto the floor. "What the hell are you reading?"

"Oh, you know, just some ero doujinshi about us. Here, take a look!" Tomo rotated her screen to face Yomi, showing her a few panels from a fan-made erotic comic book.

"Ew, no!" Yomi said reflexively. She looked anyway, then wished she hadn't. Because it made her uncomfortable, and yet she kind of wanted to look more. She pushed the lid to the laptop shut anyway.

"Hey, what the heck?"

"Why are you even looking at things like that?" Yomi accused.

"Oh, you know, I'm just curious what people think about us."

"Just curious?"

"Well... it is kind of exciting to see myself doing sexy things. Obviously."

"Obviously," she repeated sarcastically. Yomi held her hand against her brow and frowned a little.

Tomo tried to interpret Yomi's frown. "It's not all this weird. There's some normal ones, too. I'll show you."

"No, no thanks. Do not want."

Tomo tilted her head quizzically, but kept looking at Yomi with those puppy-dog eyes.

Yomi turned around and walked to the kitchen to grab a towel. She didn't quite want to say it face-to-face. "It was hard enough to accept that they made an anime of our lives, but I get it. And other people write stories about us. But erotic things... it's just different." She felt judged, she felt objectified.

"It's just a cartoon, Yomi."

"Is it? With what we've seen?"

Tomo thought a second, and replied, "I think so. Most of the erotic stories don't make too much sense. Not enough sense to be real somewhere. It's just harmless fantasy."

"Why do they have to fantasize about us, though?"

"Why not? Just think about all of those boys, touching themselves while they think of us. And girls, too." She inhaled sharply.

"I don't want everyone to do it!"

"But, like, someone can, right?" Tomo was already starting to pick up the Valley accent.

"Yeah, I suppose it might be okay. Just people I want to do it."

"Haven't you ever fantasized about someone? Someone close?"

"Well, I mean..." Yomi blushed and looked aside. She bent down to clean up the tea she had spilled.

"Did they give you permission?"

"Of course not!" Yomi glared at Tomo, then decided to add, "Shut up!"

"I'm just saying..."

"I'm just saying I don't want people like Kimura-sensei to be thinking about me instead of his Love Wife or whatever."

"Well yeah, of course not. He's a teacher, for crying out loud."

"Exactly."

Since Tomo seemed to have quieted down for now, Yomi picked up her novel once again to try to distract herself from the things Tomo had said. She wondered: Why is Tomo so weird? Did Tomo seriously time it to make her spit out her tea? Yomi peeked at Tomo's computer screen – she appeared to be reading 2channel now. Eventually, the thoughts faded as she found herself immersed in her book once again.

October 26, 2016

Koyomi decided that the previous night had been a little too quiet for her taste, and started looking for a late-night radio show. She had spent the last hour or so alternating between researching local college admissions and fiddling with a cheap desktop radio she had bought.

Los Angeles had as many radio networks as Tokyo did, pretty much filling up the dial. It was mostly unfamiliar territory for Yomi, though she did recognize a few American songs from radio and film she had seen back home. Of course, there really wasn't Japanese music to be found out there, but that was expected. What was unexpected was the networks in other languages: Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and a lot in what she guessed was probably Spanish. Actually, a lot of Korean as well, not like the bits of Korean she could occasionally pick up in the AM band deep in the night, but actual local Korean stations.

Talk radio seemed to Yomi to be mostly people getting upset over things she didn't know anything about, so she focused on the FM band. It seemed that over the last fifteen or so years, electronic music had pretty much permeated other genres. Yomi supposed it made sense since she was now living in "the future", if perhaps a little cliché. Given how similar this world was to her home, music would probably evolve that way too back home.

What she was really looking for, besides a place to earn a college degree, was a call-in radio show, like she used to listen to. Nothing political, just social banter and pop music. Something that would connect to the people here, and feel a little less lonely in her new home. She hadn't quite found what she was looking for, but there were a couple of shows where people could phone-in to request music for a friend or lover. It scratched that romantic itch, but not the social itch, so she kept searching the dial, just in case. Being displaced from 2003, it hadn't even occurred to her that she could find an internet radio show that was essentially what she wanted.

It was another lazy night, at least for Tomo and Yomi. Osaka was making her own Halloween costume, a papier-mâché tree, because she wanted to "branch out this year". Most of the their friends had managed to buy their own costumes, or assemble them from clothes found at the local thrift stores^[1].

Yomi had gone along with Tomo's scheme to trick Tomoyo Daidouji into making their own costumes, because she was always up for a good Tom Sawyer bit as much as the next gal. But then as it became clear that Tomoyo was spending nearly all of her time outside of school making costumes for people in the apartment complex (including, of course, Sakura Kinomoto), Yomi had tried to cancel the order. Tomoyo simply wouldn't hear it. She had said, "Clothes make the woman, they truly do. So how could I possibly stop?"

Tomoyo was sweet and cute, yet she rubbed Yomi the wrong way. There was something seriously wrong with the girl – she let people use her too happily – plus her public declarations of her love for Sakura for all to hear. But Yomi had only known Tomoyo for one week. In the months to follow, Yomi grew to have the much more troubling suspicion that there was something seriously right with the girl.

But this night, Koyomi had been left with not much to do, once again, except fiddle with her radio and read. She was the kind of girl who was happy that school was out, so she could catch up on her reading. Contrary to popular opinion, Tomo was not that different, though she certainly had more common tastes, like manga and magazines. Tonight was the same, as Tomo passed most of her evening reading up on the new world in which they found themselves. But she occasionally commented on the radio – about a song she liked, or she made fun of the silly voices in advertising.

So Yomi was pretty shocked when Tomo threw her laptop halfway across the room, yelling, "Oh come on! This is freaking ridiculous!"

"Calm down! The song is not that bad." A little repetitive, sure, but not enough to be throwing objects.

"No, not the music, the doujinshi!" Anger was easy to read in her face, not that Yomi ever knew Tomo to hide her emotions.

"Oh. You're still on about that?"

"How could they... How could they draw those things about us?"

"Are you the same Tomo as yesterday or did they send a replacement?"

"Oh, I thought it was just harmless fantasy, where they show how attractive and sexy we are, but that's just a facade. A perniciously harmless facade!"

"That doesn't—"

"Do you know how many of them show us getting raped? A lot of them. And it's even worse for the undines downstairs. What sort of sickos want to do that to Chiyo-chan?"

Yomi frowned, too. "Yeah, it sounds pretty terrible."

"If only someone had warned me."

"I did warn you."

"If only I had known all of those creepy otaku were thinking those things about us."

"What did you expect?"

"I don't know, something more respectful of female role models like us?"

"I wish the world worked that way, Tomo. But you have to understand, they didn't even know that we're real."

"So it's suddenly okay to mistreat girls if they're imaginary?" Tomo demanded to know.

"Suddenly? Look, I don't like it either. Does that make it okay to suddenly mistreat laptops?" Yomi bent down to see if the computer was okay.

"Eh, the manager will just buy me another one. It's all free stuff."

"Tomo, you're considered an adult in this country. Start acting like one."

"Oh. Too far?"

Yomi looked at the laptop. The hinge seemed a little wobbly. "Yes. Don't just lash out, direct your actions."

"I don't know, it makes me angry. Is it always going to be this way?"

"Don't ask me, you're the expert on this... stuff. Or isn't there a doujinshi group in New Jersey?"

"Oh right, the Comic Party people," Tomo remembered. "I think I know how to direct my actions."

"Good." As Tomo settled down, Yomi noticed that the song on the radio had been replaced with, of all things, a car insurance commercial. She started turning the dial again until she found something interesting.

By the time she looked up again, Tomo had sat down to write something. Good for her, she thought, organizing her thoughts on paper. Tomo was starting to be a little more mature, but still needed reminders occasionally.

But Yomi didn't see the characters written on the outside of the envelope to be sent to the displacee residence in New Jersey: Letter of Challenge.

Footnotes