Anyone else would have noticed that pattern by now and adapted behaviour accordingly. Ataru Moroboshi, well, he was the unluckiest person in the world for a reason. A number of reasons really, too many to list in this case, but one of the major problems was that he so rarely truly learned from his past mistakes.
“Hrm? Were you always such a fast writer?” Lum asked, floating just over his shoulder. Ataru shut the book far too late, and wheeled away from the irritating alien. “Hmph! I didn’t realise you knew so much about that girl. You even had her three sizes in there, and I bet you don’t even know mine.”
“But I didn’t -” Ataru began, before a new thought struck him. Shinobu’s three sizes? He didn’t know that at all. Had the book really entered that much detail by itself?
“Let me see that,” Lum demanded. “I want to see what else you wrote about her!”
“Fat chance!” Ataru yelled, fleeing down the street in a rather futile gesture if you really thought about it. After all, the two of them had met during a game of tag wherein Lum trounced him quite regularly due to the simple fact that she could fly and he could not. However, there was one key difference between then and now which gave him an edge, at least in terms of escaping her wrath for a little while. A simple smoke grenade later, and all he had to do was duck out of sight and wait for her to head off in the wrong direction while she drifted up to look for him.
It would only work the one time. Next time he tried something like that, she’d fly straight up to see which way he went out of the cloud. The element of surprise was with him, and now he was sitting inside of a cafe to catch his breath and really think about things without being interrupted.
Usually when something like this happened, Ataru would have its use explained to him in full. That would make it incredibly obvious how he could go about using it for a little bit of fun. No instructions here. He counted thirty pages. Each blank page had the same things on it, line by line: Name, address, phone number, physical description, location, clothing, mood. Each phrase followed by a blank line that went right across the page.
So, that was a little more detail than he would expect from a little black book. Quite honestly he’d be happy knowing just the first three, but the rest were pretty sweet as well. He turned to Shinobu’s page and found each detail filled in, and it was only because the contrast was so obvious that he even noticed it at all.
He had written her name in pen. Everything else on the page was, now that he was looking, written in pencil. More to the point, the “location” detail was shifting before his very eyes. Now Ataru isn’t the brightest bulb in the shed. One might even argue if he was a bulb in the context of the metaphor to begin with, but he was at least observant enough to spot the oddity and deduce what it might mean.
“It’s updating,” he said aloud. “She was on the high street a moment ago, but now she’s entered the corner shop.” What was more, she was wearing that nice red shirt he’d gotten her last year underneath a thick jumper to keep her warm. Well, that made sense. The weather was a little bit colder this time of year, so she couldn’t exactly wear anything as cute as she might like. Or him, for that matter. But that was a mere digression. Why not put things to the test a little bit more…?
He wrote Lum’s name on the next page and watched as it filled in with all the relevant details. Including her location, which he could easily use to avoid her while he had a little bit of fun with his new Christmas toy. And he’d start by….
<hr>
Floating through the town, glancing around left and right and all around, Lum was in a rather bad mood at the moment, and why shouldn’t she be? Darling had run off again. A smoke grenade of all things! Where did he even get - No, that wasn’t the important matter; what really mattered was that she find him. The little snake was going to get such a thunderbolt and -
<u><i>Mood: Calm</i></u>
- And who cared in the end? It was a little silly to get so upset about something like that. No need to be jealous. The two of them had known each other for years before she came along, it was only natural that they’d know so much about each other. A little bit weird that he’d write it all out in his book like that, but what did she know about Earthling culture? She’d only been here a little while. It was all still quite strange, new and exciting to her.
“Maybe I should just ask Shinobu?” Lum said aloud. She grinned a little, realising that the girl herself was just stepping out of a shop, carrying a bag. She should just swoop down, say hello and then -
<u><i>Location: Ataru’s closet.</i></u>
- Suddenly materialise in the closet. How did she get -
<u><i>Mood: Sleepy</i></u>
A great big yawn burst free of her mouth. The kind of yawn that is like some great untamed beast, a full-bodied yawn that makes you flex your toes to make sure you got it all out. Lum felt her eyes turn bleary, and even though it was the middle of the day she simply couldn’t help herself. Her head hit the pillow, and she was out like a light.
<hr>
Imagine there was a woman in a sports store. You just imagined one of two kinds of woman, most likely. The first is the sort that looks as though she belongs there: Projects a sporty and athletic aura about herself, knows what she’s looking at, knows what she’s looking for. The second is the sort that does not look as though she belongs there. Probably went in with a long movement-restricting skirt, looking at all the equipment as though they wouldn’t even know what to do with it if they did buy it.
Now, keep in mind a few simple facts about Sakura. Until recently she was ill. Not just suffering from an illness, but perpetually rotating between one illness and another, sickness upon sickness, frailty upon frailty. She was quite literally drawing disease spirits unto herself without noticing, and in the process turning her health into a tangled mess that leaves it a miracle beyond comprehension that she could even walk never mind perform exorcisms.
Then, in the course of one afternoon, everything changed completely. For the first time ever, she discovered the incredible sensation of not having some kind of debilitating condition weighing her down. Even after these past months this store continued to feel somewhat alien to her every time she entered it, seeking to explore a little more of the healthy world she had just now rejoined. It had always looked like fun to play tennis, and now that she was healthy after a lifetime…
Buy the balls. Buy the balls to the left. Buy them. Buy them now. Buy them now now now!
Sakura slapped a charm against her forehead in a moment: “Exorcise! Purify!” she called, and the voice in her head stopped, if only for a few moments. Introspection. It was something of a weakness of her family’s, the inability to perceive their own wicked aspects. She had no doubt there was still a blind spot of some sort but at the very least she was not going to be so arrogant to assume that she was immune to supernatural influence. That had led to a lifetime of illness. Not again. Never again.
Well, until the other day when she’d pulled Parm’s name from that Santa hat. She had sensed the evil immediately and journeyed to the classroom to destroy it, only to find herself returning to the infirmary with a slip of paper in hand. It had slipped through her defenses like they were absolutely nothing, and stranger still…
<i>“I think that Santa hat is cursed. We should resist the urge to purchase gifts for one another, at least for the purposes of this game.”
“Merry Christmas to you as well, Miss Sakura!”
“No, that’s not what I -”
“You’re right, you would make a really cute Mrs Claus!”</i>
The hat was protecting itself from discovery. She couldn’t even find it anymore, and nobody seemed to know where it had gone. Tormenting others as they were now being tormented? Her right hand suddenly grabbed out to seize her left wrist, which had been lifting the box of tennis balls from their place on the shelf.
“You won’t beat me that easily,” she hissed. This compulsion was the most powerful spiritual force she had ever encountered. Overwhelming beyond belief! “What do you want? What are you really -”
“Six hundred yen, please.”
“Thank you!” Sakura said, and to her amazement was walking out of the store with a box of tennis balls tucked under her arm. No. No! How had she - Her immediate response was to look around her for a nearby garbage bin, but none were anywhere in sight. It was statistically unlikely, if not outright impossible, but she was able to walk all the way home without seeing one.
Which meant she was now sitting at a kotatsu, heating herself up with a box of tennis balls sitting in front of her. It was a pack of five. Five ordinary tennis balls randomly purchased from a store against her will. Five ordinary tennis balls that she was going to be forced to gift against her own will; in point of fact her mother had just so happened to leave gift paper over in the corner of the room. Just barely enough for the box. And sellotape. And scissors.
On top of that her fingers really, really wanted to wrap up that box. They kept on flexing and making gestures as though they were folding paper. But she wasn’t going to give in at this step, no, not this time. Not until she knew for a certainty.
“Now there’s a face marked with misfortune!”
“This is hardly the time, Uncle!” she yelled, almost a reflexive response to him interrupting her thought process. He noisily slurped down some ramen he appropriated from gods only know where, and Sakura sort of blinked in surprise. “On the other hand… Perhaps it is the perfect time. An outsider’s perspective… Forgive me, Uncle, but is there anything unusual about these tennis balls?”
He stared at them for a long period of time. Stock still aside from the ramen disappearing down his gullet, eyes unblinking. Staring as though into the very abyss itself and daring it to try staring back. “Yes,” he finally said after an ice age or two had passed in complete stony silence. Though knowing her uncle as well as she did, she fully expected that he would say yes no matter what, and fully expected that yes to be followed with some sort of comment about the make or colour or material or even the very fact that she was asking if there was anything weird about them. “It appears that each of these five balls has a spell cast upon them.”
“A… spell?” Sakura whispered. She stared at the box again and felt a pit open wide in her stomach. How could she - How did she miss <i>that</i>? No… It wasn’t that she’d missed it, exactly, more like it was being hidden from her and she’d unconsciously noticed. That was why she’d asked her Uncle in the first place!
“It shouldn’t be too difficult to dispel,” Cherry said. “These balls are far too dangerous and must be purified immediately.”
The two of them sat in silence once again, staring intently at one another. Neither making the slightest move or breathing the slightest syllable until -
“Well?!” Sakura yelled.
“Well what?”
“Are you going to purify these balls or aren’t you?!”
“Oh no, this is well within your ability to do. Excuse me, I believe I can smell a pie being extracted from the Moroboshi oven.”
All of which is the story of why, if anyone would think to ask, Sakura’s eye was twitching quite violently for the rest of the day.
- Sakura attempts to exorcise her new balls
- Sakura’s plans are interrupted by the arrival of a gift.
- Ataru is studying his new little black book.
- Meanwhile someone else is getting a gift
- Forward to the next day and Lum’s gift date with Megane.
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