Who on earth could be—? Haruyuki whirled his head around to both sides before finally turning and looking directly behind him.
For a while, nothing made sense.
A child was looking at Haruyuki. So far, so good. It was a girl. Well within the realm of possibility. But he had definitely never seen her face before. Not only was she clearly not a student at Umesato, she didn’t even seem to be in junior high; both the top and bottom of her outfit were genuine snow-white gym clothes. Arriving at this stage of understanding, Haruyuki couldn’t help but wonder if his eyes or maybe his brain had malfunctioned. He blinked rapidly and shook his head in sharp, tiny bounces, but the girl before him didn’t disappear, so he had no choice but to raise the hand holding the brush and touch the ad hoc connection icon with an outstretched finger.
Instantly, the radio-wave mark and text disappeared, to be replaced by a large-ish window and a blinking cursor—a text-based chat window to converse, instead of speech.
The moment the connection with Haruyuki’s Neurolinker was established, the girl—clearly younger than Niko, maybe ten, maybe not—raised both hands. Ten small, too-slender fingers stopped, loosely spread out in midair. The home position for a holokeyboard, Haruyuki realized. The following instant, those fingers flashed, blurred with speed, and a row of characters glowing cherry pink flowed across the chat window in his field of view.
UI> HELLO, NICE TO MEET YOU. YOU’RE A MEMBER OF UMESATO JUNIOR HIGH’S ANIMAL CARE CLUB, RIGHT? MY NAME IS UTAI SHINOMIYA. I’M IN FOURTH GRADE AT MATSUNOGI ACADEMY. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ACCEPTING OUR SUDDEN REQUEST. I DO SINCERELY APOLOGIZE FOR ANY BOTHER OR TROUBLE. I’M SOMEWHAT LATE, BUT I’LL ALSO ASSIST IN THE CLEANING.
“……?!” Haruyuki stood rooted to the spot, enormously shocked, but not by the details of her message.
She’s fast!!
Her typing skills were absurd. It hadn’t taken her even a full four seconds to input all those characters. If he hadn’t actually seen her type it out, he would no doubt have thought that she had copied and pasted a message prepared in advance.
Haruyuki was secretly proud that his typing speed was number one, or maybe number two, in the school, just barely losing out to Kuroyukihime. At the very least, he had been at the top of his class by a wide margin when he took the mock typing exam in his information processing class. And although he got no particular respect for this skill, he still held it as a natural virtue. However, the fingers of the small girl before him were obviously twice as fast—or even faster—as Haruyuki’s own. He gaped at her, wondering exactly what kind of practice you had to do for technique like that.
No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t believe that the girl who had called herself Shinomiya wasn’t a master of Linker skills. She was on the small side for fourth grade. The limbs stretching out from the short sleeves of her gym shirt and the shorts that stopped above the knee were almost worryingly thin. Her face was stereotypically Japanese with a crisp structure, as though a master carver had in one quick session chiseled out the single-lidded eyes, the nose, the mouth. A jet-black fringe hung neatly slightly below her eyebrows, and her hair was pulled up in a high position. On her back, a chic brown leather backpack; in her right hand, a fairly large sports bag.
Haruyuki stared vacantly for a while at this figure with an air of refreshment about her—he could almost forget the humid heat of the rainy season just looking at her—before he finally noticed the questioning look she was giving him. He remembered that he hadn’t actually responded to her yet.
He opened his mouth to say hello at any rate, but then thought he should maybe answer her in the chat window, too.
He hurriedly called up his holokeyboard and went to type out a reply, but he was still holding the brush and the hose. He quickly placed them on the ground and had lifted his arms back up when characters began flowing across the window once more.
UI> IT’S PERFECTLY FINE FOR YOU TO SPEAK TO ME.
“Oh…r-right.” His idiotic first words slipped out of him, arms still slightly raised.
The whole situation was full of things he didn’t understand. Why was the girl speaking in chat? What was this “sudden request” she mentioned? And why would a kid from another school—an elementary school to boot—show up there to begin with? About the only thing he could surmise was that the text tagging the beginning of her messages in the chat window was probably a nickname, a shortening of Utai to Ui.
Scratching his head with his right hand, which had nowhere to go now, Haruyuki set his confused thoughts free as vocal output. “Oh, umm. N-nice to meet you. I’m Haruyuki Arita…I’m in grade eight at Umesato. I guess I’m the president of the Animal Care Club…although I just started today…”
Immediately, the sentence UI> YES. I KNOW THAT THE ANIMAL CARE CLUB HERE WAS ESTABLISHED TODAY scrolled out at high speed.
“Huh? Y-you do? How? And…why would you go out of your way to come to some other school and help?”
UI> BECAUSE THE CLUB HERE WAS LAUNCHED DUE TO A REQUEST FOR COOPERATION FROM MATSUNOGI ACADEMY’S ELEMENTARY DIVISION.
“Huh? I-it was?!”
In contrast with the stunned Haruyuki, the elementary school girl was utterly calm as she explained to him why they were there in a way that was easy to understand, keyboard work increasingly brisk.
Umesato Junior High was a private, and at any rate, academic school in Suginami Ward in Tokyo. However, an education-related business, headquartered in Shinjuku, operated the school instead of an incorporated educational institution. This company also owned a girls’ school that went from grade one all the way through to grade twelve in Suginami: Matsunogi Academy, the school Utai Shinomiya attended.
Although Umesato had an almost thirty-year history, this paled beside Matsunogi Academy, in its ninety-fifth year since its founding. Put briefly, it was a rich girls’ school. Nevertheless, unable to avoid the nationwide wave of declining birth rates, the school had, due to management difficulties, been bought up ten years earlier by the current owner. The drastic countermeasures that had been taken to streamline school operations had been insufficient, so that finally, the company had decided to sell a part of the grounds that summer and build a new combined school building to house the elementary and junior high sections with the profits. Given that it was a school with a long tradition, parents naturally raised their voices in opposition, but the parent management organization was a publicly traded company with a bottom line. The decision was not overturned, and the current elementary school building would be demolished at the end of the first term.
However, the majority of the students welcomed the change because of the cutting-edge educational environment—starting with a high-spec VR local net—that was going to be introduced to the new school building, which the same corporation had cultivated at Umesato Junior High. But this move would reduce the total area of the school, and several facilities would not be transferred to the new building. One of these was the old animal hutch standing quietly in a corner of Matsunogi Academy’s elementary school.
UI> NATURALLY, I PROTESTED TO THE TEACHERS AND THE MANAGEMENT COMPANY. THE ANIMAL CARE CLUB HAS AS ITS MEMBERS NOT ONLY THE STUDENTS, BUT ALSO THE ANIMALS WE CARE FOR. THE STUDENTS MIGHT BE ABLE TO MOVE TO ANOTHER CLUB OR TEAM, BUT THE ANIMALS CANNOT. HOWEVER, THE COMPANY SIMPLY KEPT REPLYING THAT “THE ANIMALS BEING CARED FOR WILL BE HANDLED APPROPRIATELY BASED ON THE LAW.” WHICH IS TO SAY, THAT THEY WOULD BE KILLED.
“They wouldn’t!” Haruyuki called out reflexively, the instant he read that far into the smoothly scrolling text. However much profit-chasing was the mission of a publicly traded corporation, killing the animals because there was no longer a place to keep them was just too much. He couldn’t even imagine how great the shock must have been for the children who had been caring for them for such a long time. If they were going to do that, then—then…
Haruyuki’s righteous indignation slammed up against a thick wall and raced emptily.
He could also picture the si
tuation on the management side: Building a new animal hutch would be difficult when the school site shrank to reduce costs. He felt like the students could maybe take the animals into their homes, but keeping animals was impossible unless you had a passion and the appropriate environment for it. That said, releasing them into the wild outside the city or something was out of the question, and more important, it was also a crime.
The girl with the old-style name of Utai looked at Haruyuki biting his lip, sunk into thought, and seemed just the slightest bit troubled. Her fingers started moving once again, and the text flowed quickly before his eyes.
UI> YOU HAVE NO NEED TO WORRY. NONE OF THE ANIMALS HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN DISPOSED OF YET.
“Huh? Th-they haven’t? Good…” Unconsciously, he let out a sigh of relief.
Utai’s fingers continued to dance out their explanation. UI> A FARM FAMILY WHO KEEP FREE-RANGE BIRDS IN THEIR GARDEN OUT TOWARD SAYAMA WERE KIND ENOUGH TO TAKE IN THE SEVEN BANTAMS WE WERE RAISING. WE ALSO FOUND A RELIABLE PERSON WITHIN THE WARD TO ADOPT OUR TWO RABBITS. BUT THERE’S ONE ANIMAL WE CAN’T SEEK OUT A NEW HOME FOR DUE TO CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES.
“You can’t…look for a new home? Not you can’t find one?”
Utai nodded sharply. Her hair, tied up with a white ribbon, swung above her shoulders. The ends were so neatly aligned that rather than a ponytail, her hair looked like that of a girl from a samurai family in some period drama. A thoughtfulness flitted across her similarly traditionally Japanese face before the elementary school student ran her fingers over her holokeyboard. Quite a bit of time had passed since this strange conversation had begun, but she hadn’t made a single typo so far, and her word choice was excessively adult.
UI> HIS SITUATION IS A LITTLE COMPLICATED, AND HE NOW WILL NOT EAT HIS FOOD UNLESS IT COMES FROM MY HAND. ONCE, I TRIED TO FAMILIARIZE HIM WITH ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE CLUB AND ENTRUSTED THE FEEDING TO THAT STUDENT, BUT HE ESSENTIALLY WOULDN’T EAT AT ALL AND QUICKLY LOST WEIGHT. I’LL GO OVER THIS IN DETAIL AGAIN TOMORROW WHEN I BRING HIM HERE, BUT BECAUSE OF THIS SITUATION, THE ABSOLUTE NEED AROSE TO FIND A NEW PLACE TO KEEP HIM WITHIN A RANGE I AM ABLE TO COMMUTE DAILY.
“I—I get it,” Haruyuki said, his physical voice three times more faltering than Utai’s typing, as the situation finally sank in. “So then, Umesato, which is part of the same corporation, has this animal hutch they’re not using, so they offered it to you and started an Animal Care Club here, too. But our main job isn’t to care for any animals, but to clean out the hutch, which is why only three people were recruited…Is that it?”
UI> THAT’S EXACTLY RIGHT. I APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE FOR YOU.
“Oh, no, it’s fine…But I’m kinda surprised our school was so ready to help out. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but our admin’s pretty cold. I got the impression they wouldn’t do even a minute of extra work for anything.”
We might be in the same corporate group, but if they can be nice enough to keep some other school’s animals here, maybe they could’ve taken a little better care of me when I was getting beat up last year. The thought he couldn’t actually say aloud went round and round in his head.
Almost as if reading his mind, Utai said—or rather, wrote, UI> I’M SORRY. THERE ARE ACTUALLY CIRCUMSTANCES AROUND THIS. I KNOW SOMEONE ON THE STUDENT COUNCIL HERE, SO SHE WAS ABLE TO MAKE THE ARRANGEMENTS FOR ME.
“Oh, is that what happened?”
That made sense. The majority of students in the elementary division of Matsunogi Academy went directly on to the junior high and high school divisions, without having to deal with entrance examinations, but he had heard that kids from families that really care about those exams sometimes came to Umesato Junior High. In which case, it wasn’t at all strange that Utai would know someone at this school.
Having heard—or rather read—the explanation this far, Haruyuki finally understood why he had suddenly become a member of the Animal Care Club. The basic reason was that the club at Matsunogi Academy in the same corporate group had been eliminated, and the reason for that was the streamlining of operations. And the reason for that was the declining birth rate, which showed no signs of stopping; in short, it was society’s fault. Although, naturally, ending up president of the Animal Care Club and cleaning the hutch by himself was Haruyuki’s own fault.
“Right…You’re pretty amazing, Shinomiya. I mean, you go up against a big company, find adoptive homes, and even come all the way to another school for the sake of these homeless animals. When I was in fourth grade, the only things I ever thought about were video games, manga, anime, and snacks,” Haruyuki murmured, heartfelt.
Utai shook her head quickly, a serious expression on her face. Slipping her backpack off her shoulders, she dexterously tapped away at the keyboard. UI> I PLAY GAMES, TOO. AND NOW THAT I’VE BEEN ABLE TO GO OVER WITH YOU THE CIRCUMSTANCES LEADING UP TO THIS SITUATION, I’D LIKE TO HELP CLEAN THE HUTCH, A RITA-SAN.
“Oh! R-right.” He finally remembered that he had been in the middle of the club work and hurried to pick up the hose and deck brush at his feet.
He couldn’t see the point of it when he had been cleaning by himself, but now all these bits and pieces had been explained to him—and, more important, now that he knew there was actually an animal moving in here—he had to put some real elbow grease into the work. “All right! Let’s do this!” he cried out with new resolve in his heart, and turned his eyes to the hutch.
The cleaning would be done once he rinsed away the remaining slush and leaves stuck to the floor, but he had been struggling with how to turn the water valve on and off. He was actually grateful someone had shown up to help him at such a perfect time.
“Okay, then, maybe I could get you to turn that valve on and off for me?” Haruyuki pointed to the base of the hose.
Utai cocked her head, confused. UI> IS THAT THE ONLY TASK YOU NEED ME TO DO? I DID COME IN MY GYM CLOTHES, PREPARED TO GET DIRTY.
Reading this, Haruyuki stared at Utai again—white short-sleeved shirt with the school emblem on the chest, similarly white shorts covering skinny legs—and quickly averted his eyes. The gym clothes at Umesato were navy blue, but basically the same style otherwise, and he should have been accustomed to seeing girls wearing this outfit at school every day. But when he thought about the fact that the girl before him was one of Matsunogi’s princesses, he got the feeling he shouldn’t be looking at her. If Chiyuri found out thoughts like this had even crossed his mind, she would totally shoot endless super-firepower beams from both eyes.
“Y-yeah. Just gotta scrub the floor with the brush, and it’s all done! So, uh, when I give the signal, please open the valve about three-quarters!” he told her, voice slightly raised, before trotting back over to the animal hutch. He decided to rinse it out from the far side and readied the hose and brush before shouting, “G-go ahead!”
UI> I’M TURNING IT ON NOW.
He got an instantaneous reply via text, followed by a fairly modest stream of water coming from the end of the hose. Keeping a careful eye on the water gauge in the edge of his vision, he thoroughly rinsed an area about one square meter and then instructed, “Turn it off!” In lieu of a reply, the valve squealed shut.
Putting his strength into scrubbing, he easily peeled away the last of the leaves and dirt stuck to the floor to reveal the ceramic tile beneath. Fortunately, it appeared to have been given a solid weather- and dirt-resistant coating, and there were relatively few depressions or cracks for how many years it had sat there covered in wet leaves. If they just let it dry out for a day, it would likely return to its original appearance.
Haruyuki deftly shifted between watering an area and brushing it out. If he had had to turn the valve on and off himself, his efficiency would have no doubt dropped significantly. But more than that, just thinking that he had someone working seriously alongside him had the strange effect of strengthening his desire to get the job done, despite the fact that he had been incredibly listless working with Hamajima and Izeki, both of whom made their annoyance plain
with their entire bodies.
Twenty minutes later, he was done brushing the entire floor. “All right! Now we just need to put on the finishing touches,” he said, stretching hard. He turned around to call out to Utai Shinomiya crouching down by the stopcock. “Okay, I’m going to rinse the whole floor now, so open it all way!”
Instead of nodding, Utai tapped her fingers in space. Pink text rolled into his field of view, somewhat coldly, perhaps not wanting to intrude. UI> IF I WOULDN’T BE IN THE WAY, WOULD YOU ALLOW ME TO HELP AS WELL? IT WOULD BE MORE EFFECTIVE TO USE THE BRUSH AT THE SAME TIME AS THE WATER COMES OUT, AND I WOULD LIKE TO WORK A LITTLE.
“Oh! No, you’re working plenty already. But if that’s what you want,” Haruyuki mumbled and held the deck brush up. Utai got the smallest expression of delight on her face, and then nodded sharply before resting her right hand on the valve and typing adroitly with her left.
UI> ALL RIGHT. I’M COMING, THEN.
“Great!”
The valve squeaked all the way open, and the hose shook forcefully from the base. Utai started running earnestly as if trying to overtake the water racing along inside the hose.
Springing into the hutch a few seconds after the high-pressure water began to gush out, the girl took the brush from Haruyuki and turned her focus on pushing the water flooding the floor out through the mesh. She matched her breathing with this movement, and Haruyuki showered the hutch from front to back with the stream of water, clutching the hose with both hands because it threatened to fly away. The remaining 20 percent in the water meter approached zero before his eyes, but each time the deck brush moved with a forceful scrape, the ceramic tiles beneath took on their original attractive light brown.
Utai’s brushwork was actually impressive, the way she put her back into it. She was probably used to this sort of large-scale cleaning. Feeling a curious admiration for the princess school, Haruyuki stayed steadfast with the hose and pushed the garbage floating on the floor to the outside. In mere minutes, the floor was sparkling like an entirely different floor, and at the same time, they had almost used up all of the water allotted to them by the system.