Rito staggered home feeling more relaxed than he’d felt probably ever. Certainly since a certain day a certain alien princess landed in his bath. He had fun and was rarely bored these days and he’d made so many new friends, but relaxing… was not particularly common an occurrence.
“Still…” he mused, “I wonder where this came from.”
A heart-shaped bottle lying against his leg in the bath. It was the weirdest thing, but as soon as he noticed it Rito had this odd compulsion to take it with him. So far as he could tell it was filled with some sort of sweet-smelling liquid, but it might well be best to err on the side of caution for now. Take it with him and maybe have Lala take a look at it. Or something. Right now he just wanted to get home, lie in bed and appreciate exactly how relaxed he felt right now.
Upon reaching the front door to his house Rito did something without even noticing he did it. He flipped the bottle open, sniffed the contents and sighed a heavy sigh.
“I’m home!” he called, and was greeted with silence in response. “Huh? Where is everyone all of a sudden?”
He found his sister Mikan first. Asleep in front of the television. Weird. It wasn’t <i>that</i> late, surely. A yawn followed that thought, his body betraying him. Okay. Maybe she was just as relaxed as he was after that bath? Hm. There was a rather adorable little smile on her lips… Maybe they should go there more often, if this was how they felt afterwards.
Letting sleeping sisters lie seemed like a valid enough plan. He turned the television off and went towards his room, stretching out muscles that had never before felt so amazing. Rito felt like he could probably run a marathon once he’d gotten a good night’s sleep. It was like his muscles were building up energy within themselves, preparing for… something. But he didn’t know what.
“Hi, Rito!” Lala chirped as he entered his room. “I’ll be done in a minute! Just need to beat this stupid giant dandelion...”
Honestly, these days his room was more or less open to the public. Lala was playing some game or other on a television in the corner of his room with an adorable expression of unflinching determination. Rito decided to just let her get on with it while he lay on his bed, and -
And he noticed something lying on the floor next to Lala. Something that looked rather familiar. In fact, it was an exact duplicate of the very thing he was holding in his hand. A tiny little heart-shaped bottle lying in Lala’s shadow as she played the game, almost as though it had been left there and forgotten.
“Um… Where did you find this bottle?” Rito asked, picking it up and comparing it to his own. Exactly the same. Down to the last detail. Once again he had to wonder what a girl’s body wash bottle was doing in the boy’s section of the bath house.
“Huh? Oh! The bottle! I keep forgetting!” Lala declared, pausing the game and bouncing to her feet. “Eh? Where’d that second one come from?”
“I found it in the boy’s side of the bath house,” Rito said. “Where’d you get yours?”
“A whole bunch of them were in the girls’ side,” Lala said. She took both bottles and looked first at one and then the other. “We all thought they were pretty suspicious, so I was supposed to analyse them or something.”
“You were supposed to?”
“Well, I got all distracted while looking up stuff about chemical analysis and started reading this book about flowers, then I started building a giggle gun to help people get into a better mood, but halfway through I went back to the boring book about chemical analysis, then I saw this adorable cartoon show on television and then I put Peke through his paces with a few new dress ideas, and - I guess I’m a little scatterbrained today!”
Today? Well, perhaps by Lala’s standards even that dizzying account of procrastination might seem rather scatterbrained.
Rito scratched his head as a thought occured. “Wait… You said there were other bottles? Where are they?”
“Oh, the others all took their bottles home with them,” Lala said.
Their bottles? <color=pink>Yep yep! Those bottles belong to them!</color> Oh, well that made sense, nothing weird to think about there.
“But don’t worry,” Lala said. “We all agreed not to use the stuff until we all know what it does.”
<color=pink>Awww, but they’re totally missing out! The body wash is soooo harmless, and stuff! They should be using it all the time!</color>
“I don’t think it’s really necessary to be that paranoid,” Rito said. “I mean, this stuff is probably pretty harmless. Look!”
He took a bottle back from Lala, flipped the cap open and tipped out a small dollop of it onto his hand. “See? Nothing to it. Just like the bottle says. Just some scented body wash.”
Rito rubbed his hands together, marvelling at how soft it felt. “Just… scented… body… wash,” he repeated. His skin was starting to tingle a little bit, sort of like how he’d felt when he’d first stepped out of the bath. The effect had diminished a little on his way home without him noticing, but - had it always felt this good? He absently rubbed a little of it on his face. “See? Nothing to it,” he said, smiling at Lala. “Completely harmless!”
Lala was a rather extraordinary girl, there was no question of that. Aside from her rather interesting heritage, she possessed many other qualities that easily set her apart from anyone else. She was the very image of an airhead yet was capable of amazing inventions. She was one of the most compassionate people Rito could even think of, and cared for almost everyone she met in some manner.
Even so. There were certain things she didn’t quite understand about Earth society. “But Rito! That’s girl’s body wash! See? Only girls are supposed to use it!”
Rito opened his eyes just in time to see Lala pull out Change-Boy-Girl-Kun. He tried to respond, to tell her that he didn’t want to be turned into Riko right now -
<color=pink>Be a girl! It would be, like, so awesome!</color>
But for some reason his body was feeling a bit sluggish. It wasn’t doing what he wanted it to do. Almost as if some external force was -
<color = pink>*giggle* Let’s have lots of fun as a cute girl!</color>
-Controlling his body and -
Lala pulled the trigger and there was the usual flash of light. The weird hazy feeling Rito had since leaving the bath completely evaporated and the world drew into a much sharper focus. The smell of the body wash was lingering in his nostrils, but didn’t seem quite so pungent or overpowering. He stared at his hands and saw no trace of the body wash, nor the bottle he’d poured it out of. But that didn’t make any -
A gasp drew his attention to Lala, as did the sound of Change-Boy-Girl-Kun clattering to the floor out of her limp hand. Rito followed her gaze and immediately shielded his eyes. Naked girl! There was a naked girl right there!
“R-Riko?” Lala stammered. What. What? What?! Carefully maintaining his gaze at head level only, no looking down, the area below the neck did not exist it did <i>not exist</i>, Rito turned back to look at the mysterious naked girl and felt his world spin a little more out of his control.
She was…... blonde, but the features were otherwise unmistakable. The same hairstyle, the same colour of eyes, the reversed features he saw when looking in a mirror while in girl form.
“Um…... Hi there!” Riko said, flashing an endlessly charming smile at the two of them. “I’m Riko! Nice to meetcha!”
All things being equal and all considerations being met, Rito really didn’t see any other way to contend with this particular situation other than to faint dead away and hope it was all sorted out by the time he woke up.
- Back with Haruna, as she tries out clothes more appropriate to her new outlook.
- Kotegawa accidentally uses the body wash on herself.
- Lala and Riko talk about what just happened.
- Risa thinks about what happened in the bath house.
- Something else
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