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  Chapter 21: That's not an excuse!

  In the wee hours of the next morning, the kitchen was warm. Craft placed a basket of eggs on the countertop. “Here,” he said. Lei-rei nodded. Sunlight and the barking of excited wolf pups poured in through three small windows set near the ceiling. Her knife thumped on the chopping board, yet not a sound made by the action of steel on potato.

  Each cut was merciless, precise — Craft found no waste in her movements whatsoever. She hasn’t got any hesitation — how envious. She picked up an egg, smashed it straight into a hot pan with one hand, and pulled her hand back with the eggshell so fast that the heat hadn’t even had the time to stick to her skin.

  The whites and yolk pooled into a neat circle. “Damn,” Craft said with a chuckle. It was the most uselessly incredible thing he had seen. No hesitation, he thought again. His mind was on visiting Nightshade soon.

  Eggs and chips went onto a plate, which Lei-rei then placed on a tray, bringing it to a door that Craft had dismissed as a closet. She opened a port, sliding the tray inside.

  “You keeping some unknowable being in there?” Craft said.

  Lei-rei paused and narrowed her eyes on him. She couldn’t figure out whether he was joking or serious. Truth was, he was a bit of both, but she wouldn’t know that. “If that is actually your impression, at least act horrified,” she finally said.

  He shrugged — and smirked as he thought of a mild prank. “I’m used to it.”

  At this point, she only knew that he’d fought beings like J-0N. She shook her head before she could explore the implications, getting a chuckle out of Craft. “Right you are. Well, nothing of the sort to find here.” She went back to the kitchen counter. “Our other housemate’s name is Mono. She’s one of the resident NEETs in town.”

  “An unknowable being, then.” He’d heard about them from Nightshade. He had been close to thinking it had been a joke all along as he had never bumped into one until now. Then again, “bumping into a NEET” was a conceptual impossibility.

  Lei-rei went back the counter, but she found only one plate left in the rack. … Like hell they’d share a plate! “There should be an extra set of dishes somewhere.”

  “I’ll look through the cupboards,” Craft said, turning around and opening the first one he saw. “You know, I didn’t think there’d be so much food around here, especially with that ‘Anima’ thing — oh, found it.”

  “People do enjoy it” — she received a plate from him, running it under the sink — “immensely. Wipe this please.”

  She handed him the plate. He took the cloth hanging by a hook beside the sink. “Hey, I was thinking of visiting Nightshade today.”

  “Oh?” She took the plate back from him and added an extra serving of chips, handing it back to him. She had a relaxed, almost imperceptible smile. “Go with me, then. I visit her every morning.”

  “You care about her a lot, huh?” Craft asked. He found it curious how she could smile from the mention of a single name. If he could only look at himself in the mirror, he would have known that he could, too.

  “That, I-I do,” she said. She placed an extra egg on his freshly-wiped plate and quickly turned her body away, picking up her own plate.

  He chuckled. Well, someone’s in a good mood. “Cheers to Nightshade, then.”

  He raised a potato chip, but just when he was about to plop it into his mouth, a headache struck. The pain felt like it was coming from the center of his brain. He had to close his eyes and put the plate down, and he pressed both his hands on the sides of his head hoping it would do something, but it didn’t. He groaned.

  Lei-rei put her own plate down. “Did you sleep well?”

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  “I’m — I’m sure I did.”

  She pulled over a chair. “Sit.” Her expression remained neutral, but she was quick to move.

  He obliged to her hospitality and collapsed onto the chair. The pain was still bad after a while, but it was beginning to recede.

  Lei-rei bent down and took a look at his face. “Show me your eyes.”

  “Alright, doc,” he said with a chuckle. He looked up at her, blinking a few times as he hadn’t opened his eyes in a while, and that’s when Lei-rei came into focus for him. He found it interesting how her eyes flittered about by sub-millimeters as she looked into his.

  “Craft.” She was stern. Craft was taken aback.

  “What is it?”

  “Have you done your Hobby lately?”

  “Huh?” He rewound his memories, but… “Huh. Don’t think so”

  “So, no?”

  He shook his head carefully. “No.”

  Lei-rei sighed and righted herself, crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes. “You’re experiencing mild Anima deficiency.”

  In other words, he had to do his Hobby. He glanced away. “Eh…”

  Lei-rei raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean…‘eh’ ?” She was genuinely puzzled.

  Craft sighed. For a moment, he hesitated to explain himself, but for just a second.

  “I just feel bad about Nightshade.”

  Deep inside, he knew he had inverted priorities, yet he couldn’t find it in himself to disprove that setting the record straight with Nightshade was pretty darn important.

  Lei-rei’s eyes widened for a split second. “What did you do?” she said — not “what happened,” but “what did you do,” and that set Craft on the defensive.

  “Hey,” he said in a hushed voice, “you’re angry.”

  Lei-rei paused. She glanced away, and her shoulders rose and fell as she heaved a silent sigh. “Not my intention.”

  Craft nodded. He continued to explain, “Well, she was nice to me, you see. I just didn’t react the right way, and I told her I needed time.”

  Lei-rei’s shoulders rose and fell. “That would do more than vex her.”

  “It did. I wanted to apologize to her and say what I need to say. That’s all.”

  A moment’s silence passed between them, neither side able to look at each other.

  “You are different from me. That much, I know,” Lei-rei said. “But I suppose I should have expected you to be willing to destroy your body.”

  He shrugged. That wasn’t the first time he’d been described that way. “Nightshade’s just higher up on the priority ladder.”

  Lei-rei covered her mouth, hiding an upset frown. “And if someone feels the same about you, would you like them to disregard themselves for your sake?”

  “That’s” —

  “Your martyrdom puts others in a selfish position, and they will start to think your self-neglect is their fault. Do you want that?” She paused. “I was sure I hadn’t, and yet, that was what had happened.”

  Against her own experience, he couldn’t find a convincing reply. That was the first time he’d been described that way.

  “Now, go do your Hobby,” Lei-rei continued.

  She had a point, yes. He wasn’t motivated…also yes. “Eh.”

  “No Hobby, no breakfast.”

  Not as if he needed to eat to live, though. His silence was his answer, although he knew it was wrong. At the same time that he believed in Lei-rei’s words, he still believed it right that Nightshade was more important than some Hobby.

  Lei-rei, with all her superhuman agility, was in front of him one moment, back by the counter the next, and finally back in front of him, a plate in one hand a potato chip in the other.

  He didn’t even have time to react. Just as an assassin with a knife, she thrust the chip forth with unerring precision, and a violence of flavors bled in Craft’s mouth: the oils, the starch, and a hidden something which could have only been a classified spice. It was like a quantum superposition of hot and cold, spicy and sweet; focusing on one flavor made the others disappear, causing him to recall the disappeared flavors, bringing them back and making the other disappear. This back-and-forth created a palatal complexity as if woven together by an ancient will of the universe.

  The moment the flavors ended, his soul slammed back into his body. Truly, even if it had just been for that moment, that one potato chip had put him out of his misery. Lei-rei’s cooking was…beyond the terrors of the otherworld to explain.

  While he was recovering, she pulled away and put on an apron, putting herself in front of the stove. She took the plate destined for Craft and dumped its contents into a pan, and on the clockwise turn of a knob, blackfire erupted from the stove’s burner, like a black-and-white rendition of what a flame should be.

  “W-what are you doing?” Craft said. He wiped his drool and felt quite stupid.

  “I’m reverse-cooking your breakfast into its original ingredients.”

  It took him a while to piece together her words. At first, he thought she was joking, but when he saw her pouring oil out of the pan and back into a jar — when he saw her pick up eggshells and scoop up the yolk and return a whole, unbroken egg into its tray — the sight blew away the remnants of his headache with a pressure wave equivalent to standing a kilometer from a 0.1kT briefcase nuke. … No, it wasn’t a lot, but he sure felt it.

  “Wait — why!”

  “No Hobby, no breakfast.”

  Having just tasted heaven, he couldn’t tear his thoughts away from the lingering taste in his mouth. No, I can push through it, he thought. He was a veteran of a hundred labyrinths; all had failed to break him. What could some slightly weird potato chip possibly do to him?

  As expected, the lingering flavors receded leaving behind regrets. What did it taste like again, he started to think, and he couldn’t stop it. He wanted it. Lack of desire had been replaced by a fear of lack, and all it had taken was a single chip to curse him.

  He sighed. It wasn’t really the potato chip that did him in. Perhaps he’d just wanted an excuse to do the right thing. “Alright, alright!”

  Lei-rei looked at him triumphantly, turning off the blackfire. “You know, I’ve always been curious about that Hobby of yours.”

  Long time no see! After finishing , I actually focused on building a backlog, so it took me a while to get around to posting again.

  Nyeh, we'll see.