I have a message from another time...

Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
presents

Undocumented Features Future Imperfect
The Order of the Rose: A Duelist Opera

The Federation Lives Forever!
Volume Two: "Come Up Screaming"

by Benjamin D. Hutchins
with Jaymie Wagner

© 2015-19 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


Table of Contents

  • Chapter Nine: "More Than a Feeling"
    June 26, 2410
  • Chapter Ten: "Love Has No Brakes"
    July 2, 2410
  • Chapter Eleven: "Just What I Needed"
    July 16, 2410
  • Chapter Twelve: "In the Hall of the Mountain King"
    July 17, 2410
  • Chapter Thirteen: "Shelter"
    July 19, 2410
  • Chapter Fourteen: "Relax"
    July 20, 2410
  • Chapter Fifteen: "Call Me Lightning"
    July 21, 2410
  • Chapter Sixteen: "Discovery"
    July 22, 2410
  • Chapter Seventeen: "Welcome to the Pleasure Dome"
    July 23, 2410
  • Chapter Eighteen: "The Real Relation"
    July 23, 2410
  • Chapter Nineteen: "Who Do You Love"
    August 20, 2410

  • Chapter Nine: "More Than a Feeling"

    Xinqiliu, Liuyue 26, 291 ASC
    Saturday, June 26, 2410
    Sakuragaoka, United Republic, Dìqiú

    Breakfast in the Akiyama household that morning was a quiet, reflective affair.

    It was clear to the elder Akiyamas from the way Mio and Ritsu (who had apparently slept over unexpectedly) appeared that neither of them had slept well, but it was nothing like the happy, too much energy, that-was-great sort of vibe they might have expected the night after a rock concert.

    Instead, both girls seemed subdued and a bit melancholy, as if something terrible had happened; but neither seemed willing to talk about it, and the adults made a silent decision not to pry too much right now. If Mio needed to talk to them about it, they trusted her, and knew she would.

    Besides, it obviously wasn't anything too drastic - the only big news in the morning paper was about the Avatar somehow-or-other opening a new Spirit Portal in Republic City while working to quell the recent riots there, and there was no way they knew anyone who would be mixed up in that.

    Not long after Mio and Ritsu had finished eating, they went out to where Ritsu had left her scooter, keeping their voices hushed as she pulled on her helmet and jacket.

    "I just... I don't know, Ritsu. I don't have any idea what to do. He sounded so sad."

    Ritsu finished tightening the strap of her helmet, turned, and gave her friend a hug. "I know. My heart still feels broken after reading that. I don't think even Mugi would be able to get us to the South Pole in time to do much, though. So let's get together and see if we can figure out something."

    Mio returned the hug, then stepped back. "I... OK. I'd rather talk to everyone than just sit in my room worrying, anyway."

    Ritsu got settled onto the seat of her Type 4, then leaned down and kicked the engine to life. "Exactly! I'll see you in a little bit - I want to go home and change before I start getting hold of everyone!"

    Mio watched her friend drive off down the street, beeping her scooter's horn in farewell, then looked down at her shoes for a long moment before she looked up, took a deep breath, and turned back towards her front door.


    "I'm back," said Ritsu, a little listlessly, as she kicked off her shoes in the foyer of her house.

    For a moment there was no response; then her younger brother Satoshi leaned into the hallway from the living room, looking mildly surprised.

    "Are you just getting in?" he asked, puzzled.

    "Yeah," Ritsu replied, hanging up her jacket. "I slept over at Mio's last night. Mom knows, I emailed her."

    "Oh," said Satoshi, shrugging, but before he could say anything else - if he was going to - Ritsu had crossed the foyer and dragged him into a hug. "Uh?"

    He returned the embrace, puzzled; the Tainaka siblings weren't a contentious pair, but Ritsu was generally not really the huggy type, and Satoshi was at an age when it would have struck him as downright weird if she had been.

    "What's that for?" he wondered when she finally released him, and then, blinking, he noticed the downcast look on her face. "Hey, what's wrong?"

    "Oh... nothing, really," she said, sounding abstracted. "I just... got a lot on my mind. Brothers... and stuff." With a slightly wistful smile, she ruffled his hair; then, seeming to regain some of her usual bounce with an effort, she went on, "I'm gonna grab a shower, then I have some stuff I have to do," and headed off to her room.

    "... OK," Satoshi said to the empty hall, now utterly confused.


    Yui Hirasawa was stretched out on top of the covers of her bed, trying to write a song about the awesome time they'd had the night before, but not really getting anywhere with it. She was just about to call out and ask Ui if she had any idea what might rhyme with "comeback" when her gearPhone buzzed on her nightstand, breaking her concentration.

    She was still sitting on the edge of her bed, frowning in thought at the message on the screen, when her door opened and Ui came in, a similar phone in her own hand and a look of dismay on her face.

    "Sis, did you get a text from..." The younger Hirasawa trailed off as she saw the look on her sister's face. Without another word, Ui sat down next to her, and together they compared their identical messages:


    Emergency meeting 2p today.
    Club room.
    REAL emergency. Not a drill.
    - R

    Yui and Ui looked up from the screens, their mystified faces almost as perfectly mirrored.

    "What does it mean?" Ui wondered, but Yui only shook her head, baffled.


    Jun Suzuki was the last to arrive, through no real fault of her own; as one of the most junior members of the Light Music Club, she'd felt obligated to bring some sort of an offering to this unusual meeting, and there had been a bit of a holdup in the line at Donut Dynasty. She hit the club room at 2:07, seven minutes late, but her planned apology died unuttered as she got a breath of the atmosphere in the room.

    The place was filled with cloudy afternoon light and a strange sense of tension, and looking from the face of one schoolmate to another, she could see no hint as to why. Akiyama-senpai and Tainaka-senpai looked like they'd received some kind of really bad news, while the others - even Manabe-senpai, who in Jun's experience never looked like she didn't know what was going on - all looked concerned and/or just as confused as Jun was.

    "... What?" Jun said, in lieu of her apology, as she shut the door behind her.

    "There's been a... problem," Ritsu said slowly. "With Kaitlyn-sensei's trip to the South Pole." Glancing at the tall figure next to her, she added in a startlingly gentle voice, "You want to take this, Mio, or should I... ?"

    Mio shook her head, getting an unusually steely look on her face. "No, I'll do it." She looked down at the club room table for a moment, gathering her thoughts, and then explained, "Last night when I got home from the show, I got an email from Kaitlyn-sensei's brother."

    Oh did you now, Jun thought automatically, and then immediately chided herself for it; fortunately, nothing had come out of her mouth, or even crossed her face. Tainaka-senpai wouldn't be pulling that face if it was anything as funny as that, anyway.

    "I'd emailed him earlier in the day, after I read about the problem in the South Pole that happened Thursday night," Mio went on, sounding almost as if she were explaining the matter to herself as much as anyone else in the room. "Just... wanted to see if he and Kaitlyn-sensei and everybody was safe. He said they were, and they were going to hole up someplace for a day or two while Avatar Korra looked into the problem, and I shouldn't worry. So... I didn't."

    "... OK," said Jun after a moment's pause.

    "His email from last night... I'm pretty sure he didn't mean to send it," Mio said after gathering her thoughts for a few seconds. "In fact I know he didn't, because at the end he tried to erase it... but he must have hit the wrong button. I - wait. You and Ui-chan never met him, did you?"

    "Nope," said Jun, shaking her head; Ui silently followed suit.

    "Nor did I," Nodoka added.

    "Then you don't know - he has a daughter. A baby girl, just a few months old."

    "Oh, well, yeah, I knew that," Jun said.

    Mugi looked slightly puzzled. "You did?"

    "I must've mentioned it at some point," Azusa said, looking mildly embarrassed, and then, hurriedly, "Anyway, please go on, Mio-senpai."

    "Well..." Mio hesitated again, selecting words, and then looked up and said, "I don't know many of the details... and I don't really understand some of the ones I do know. But it looks as if Corwin-senpai's daughter was... taken last night. Kidnapped. By her uncle, I think - I guess? His brother-in-law?"

    "Wait, I thought he wasn't married to the baby's mother," said Yui, almost involuntarily.

    "Oh that doesn't matter right now, Yui!" Ritsu snapped, before Mio could react.

    Yui blinked, too startled by the rebuke to even be properly upset by it, and there was a brittle silence.

    Ritsu sighed, hanging her head. "I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have yelled at you. But the details are really... not important. Right now."

    "... Yeah," Yui agreed slowly, nodding, as the real shock value of what Mio had said before started to sink in. "You're right, Ricchan."

    "Kidnapped?" Azusa blurted.

    "That's terrible," Ui breathed, unconsciously taking her sister's hand.

    "Why would anyone do a thing like that?" Mugi wondered.

    "I don't know," Mio said with a shake of her head. "Corwin-senpai's email... doesn't make a lot of sense to me. He says a lot of things that I don't have any background information for. Reading between the lines, it seems like something that's been going on for a while. That his... that Anthy's brother - Anthy, that's her name, the little girl's mother..." She trailed off, losing the thread of it entirely, and then sat heavily down in what was normally Ritsu's chair at the table, unable to stop herself from crying any longer.

    As the rest of the Light Music Club crowded around to offer what comfort they could, Jun hesitated awkwardly, then put the box from Donut Dynasty on the table and said, "Um... I brought donuts?"


    Twenty minutes later, the healing power of pastry products had restored something like equilibrium, if not any particular good cheer, to the music prep room - aided in its mission by the restorative properties of what Mugi considered the most soothing blend available in her peerless arsenal of teas.

    "So I guess the question is," Ritsu said pragmatically once they'd all had a chance to collect themselves, "how can we help?"

    "Have you tried to reply to the message, Mio?" asked Nodoka.

    Mio - red-eyed, but no longer weeping - shook her head. "I haven't dared," she admitted. "I'm sure he didn't mean to send it, and he might not even know he did, yet. I thought about it, but... it'd just be giving him something else to worry about."

    "That's probably a good call," said Nodoka with a judicious nod.

    "I'll try to reach Sawako tonight," Mugi said with a sudden, decisive energy. "She and the rest of Death Devil were supposed to be meeting with Minami Sato today..."

    Ritsu snapped her fingers and pointed to her. "And she's tight with the Avatar, so she probably knows what's goin' on," she said. "Good thinking, Mugi."

    "Shouldn't someone try to get in touch with Kaitlyn-sensei?" Jun wondered.

    "I have tried," Ritsu said, holding up her phone. "So far, no soap. What time is it in the South Pole? Maybe she's not up yet."

    Yui shook her head. "If they're in the capital, it's in the same time zone as Republic City. An hour ahead of us."

    "Mm," said Ritsu, taking the information without further comment. Then, putting the phone away, she said glumly, "Other things on her mind, then."

    "What if she never comes back?" asked Yui, her eyes widening with fresh dismay.

    "Let's try not to panic," said Ui soothingly. "I'm sure she'll be back. The rest of the Art of Noise is still here in town, after all."

    "Oh, jeez, I wonder if they know," said Ritsu, looking as if the thought had just occurred to her, but before she could go on, the sound of a phone ringing interrupted her.

    The girls of the Light Music Club all looked at each other, most of them shaking their heads that's-not-mine, until Azusa realized it was hers and answered it.

    "Hello? Oh, Azalynn, hi. Yes. I'm... we're all at school. In the club room. Um... well, Mio-senpai got an... yes. Right. That. Sorry? No, we're... we're OK. I mean, we're all shocked, and worried, but... yes. Is there anything more you can tell us right now? ... I see. All right. Thank you. Right. Bye."

    Closing her phone, she looked up to see her bandmates and the others all gazing at her. She went slightly pink at the intensity of their scrutiny, her cat ears springing up, then composed herself and said (a little bit unnecessarily), "That was Azalynn. She didn't think we'd have heard about it yet and wanted to warn us. She says Kate-sensei will be back here on Monday, and there's nothing else they can tell us now that we don't already know."

    Ritsu drew a slow breath, then let it out in a long sigh and said, "Right. OK. Here's what we do, then. Mugi, let's go with your idea - see if you can get ahold of Sawa-chan tonight, find out if she knows anything."

    Mugi nodded. "Right."

    "The rest of us..." Ritsu trailed off, no longer seeming quite so certain, then said, "I think we all need to... digest. Once Kate-chan-sensei is back with us, we'll have a better idea of what we can do for her. Right now we just have to try and make ourselves as ready as we can be to help once we're in a position where we can. Does that make sense?"

    There was quiet concurrence from around the table. For a moment, nobody had anything to add.

    "OK," Ritsu said after a few more seconds' consideration. "I don't know about you guys, but I'm gonna have another donut, and then I think I need to jam."

    Xinqiyi, Liuyue 28
    Monday, June 28

    To the great relief of the Light Music Club, Kaitlyn was back in school on Monday, but it was clear from the very outset that all was not well. She didn't appear to be physically injured, and conducted her classes in her usual gentle, pleasant way, but she seemed a bit distracted - almost, though not quite, distant - and she wasn't inclined to socialize. While classes were happening, the best the girls of the club could do was try to make it as plain as they could, without abandoning discretion, that they wished to make available their support.

    If they had hopes of regrouping after school and making a more concerted attempt, those hopes were dashed by the vagaries of the school day, as virtually every member of the club found herself tapped for one or another routine after-school chore. There was nothing for it but to play along when that happened, however appalling the timing; they could but turn to and try to get the various jobs done as quickly as possible.

    So it was that Yui found herself alone in the club room, the sole member of the club not stuck on some form of after-school maintenance duty.

    Completely at a loss, she roamed around the room for a while: gazing out the window at the rain, aimlessly touching things, moving items around on the table. She felt strange. Sad, of course, and worried, but more than that... she felt as if there were something inside her that wanted to come out, but she didn't have any idea what it was, or how she might do that.

    Contrary to popular belief, Yui Hirasawa wasn't utterly naïve. She knew that the world was a real place with real consequences, and that sometimes bad things happened to people who had done nothing to deserve them. Most of her friends and schoolmates assumed that she was a complete innocent, unaware of such realities - sheltered from them by her inherently happy, optimistic personality and (those less kind might add) her limited attention span.

    This was not entirely true. She was an inherently happy and optimistic person, and she did tend to focus the bulk of her attention in very specific directions, rather than looking at the Big Picture; but both she and her younger sister had been raised to understand that the situation in which they lived their lives was not unique, and that it was better than many alternatives. Yui was already well aware that the world was not universally as safe and pleasant a place as her little city by the seaside; but it was not something she was in the habit of confronting so directly, and she found herself put off-balance by the intensity of it all, particularly without her friends or her sister at hand to distract her.

    She thought about going and finding the others - joining them in whatever tasks they were doing, even though they hadn't been assigned to her, just so that she could be participating in something - when her eye fell upon the case of Miki-sensei's Dobro guitar. She hadn't really thought she would need a guitar at school today, under the circumstances, but she'd brought Dō-chan anyway, just in case; selecting him instead of her Les Paul because the Dobro's hard case was safer from the rain than Gīta's gig bag.

    Tilting her head thoughtfully, Yui uncased the guitar, then sat down on the bench facing Ricchan's drum kit with it and started idly picking at the strings, tuning the instrument by ear to an open A configuration. That feeling she'd had before, of something trying to escape from within her, was stronger now, but where before she'd been at a loss for what to do about it, now it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world. She fitted the brass slide over her pinky, strummed the open chord, and then things just sort of started... happening.


    One floor down, a couple of the girls from the Academy's Occult Studies Club were passing by the base of the stairs when they heard the music coming from above.

    It wasn't at all unusual to hear music from up there - the music room was up there, after all - but the type of music drifting down the stairs this afternoon was startlingly out of their experience, and they paused as one, glancing at each other with mirrored looks of surprise, at the sound of it.

    With a nod of silent consensus, the pair glided up the stairs and eased up to the door of the Light Music Club room, listening intently. The door was slightly ajar, and through the opening, they could see Yui sitting on the bench with a gleaming metal guitar in her hands, her head nodding to the rhythm.

    Again the surprised glance came, as - in a lower, fuller voice than they were accustomed to hearing in Yui's performances with the Light Music Club's band - she began to sing:


    Went down to the cross road
    Fell down on my knees
    I went down to the cross road
    Fell down on my knees
    Well I asked the spirits, "Have mercy
    Save me if you please"

    You can run, you can run
    Tell my friend poor Willie Brown
    You can run, you can run now
    Tell my friend poor Willie Brown
    That I'm standin' at the cross road
    I b'lieve I'm sinkin' down

    With a third and final startled moment of eye contact, the girls from the Occult Club backed away from the door, turned, and flitted silently down the stairs, their faces deeply pensive.


    By the time anyone else from the club made it to the room, Yui had long since finished "Cross Road Blues" and moved on to more general experimentation, and she put the guitar aside entirely when the others began to gather. By half-past three they were all present, waiting anxiously to see whether their faculty advisor would come, silently rehearsing what they would say when she did.

    At a quarter to four the door opened, and the club members were halfway out of their seats before they realized that the person opening it was Nodoka.

    "Oh, it's just you," said Ritsu, slumping back into her seat.

    Nodoka arched an eyebrow, but otherwise let the remark pass, because she understood where it had come from. Instead, she said apologetically, "I'm sorry to be the bearer of disappointing news, but Hutchins-sensei went home."

    "Aw - !" Ritsu declared, a sound of frustration that verged on a whine.

    "She's probably still tired," said Azusa reasonably.

    "That's true," Mio agreed. "With all the traveling she had to do, it would have been a long weekend even if..." She hesitated, then forged on, "... nothing had happened."

    "Mm," said Mugi, nodding. "We can try again tomorrow."

    Xinqier, Liuyue 29
    Tuesday, June 29

    The second day was, if anything, more frustrating than the first. This time there was no intrusion by the unknowing mechanisms of the school to disrupt the Light Music Club's plans; Kate simply didn't turn up after class.

    "Well, I can't take this," Ritsu declared matter-of-factly when three-thirty came and went with no sign of their advisor. Rising, she went on, "Come on, Mio, let's go."

    "And do what?" Mio wondered. "Drag her out of the staff room, if she's still there?"

    "Well..." Ritsu hesitated, as if considering it, then sat back down with a heavy sigh. "I guess not. It's just..." She gestured to the room in general. "I thought we had a pretty good thing going here. And I know we could help! You remember when Sawa-chan was all upset and wouldn't tell us why?"

    "That's more or less how Kate-chan-sensei got here in the first place," Yui observed glumly.

    "That's what I mean!" Ritsu said.

    "This problem's a lot bigger," Mio pointed out. Then, looking downcast, she added quietly, "Maybe too big for the likes of us. I mean... we're just kids."

    "So were we," said a voice from the door, and the club members turned to see Azalynn regarding them with an unfamiliarly somber expression.

    "Rin-chan!" Yui cried, running to hug her. "We don't know what to do..."

    "It's OK," Azalynn said, sounding more grown-up than any of them could ever remember hearing her. Smiling a little wanly, she returned the embrace, then half-led, half-dragged Yui back to the table and hopped up on the end of it.

    "It's not OK, it's terrible," Mio objected.

    "Well, no, you're right," Azalynn acknowledged. "I mean it's OK that you don't know what to do. It's not your fault; this is unfamiliar territory for you. That's why I'm here. I should've let you know sooner, but... Kate isn't avoiding you, specifically. She's just avoiding. It's a... a reaction she has to things like what's happened. I've seen it a couple of different times now. She's tough - one of the toughest people I know - but when she's suffered a bad enough shock, she sort of... withdraws. Hides. Not physically - if she has commitments, she sees to them - but within herself. It's a coping mechanism. Not a very healthy one," she acknowledged before anyone could say so, "and she knows that, but... well, it's in her nature. If she gets hit hard enough, she can't help it."

    "If this has happened before, she must have some way back," Mugi reasoned.

    "Yeah, does she eventually come out of it on her own, or what?" asked Ritsu.

    Azalynn shook her head. "No... not usually. The three times I know of that it's happened, someone basically had to go and get her. The first time... well." In spite of the situation, and her grave mood, she smiled a bit nostalgically. "Let me tell you a story..."


    After telling them how - and the barest outline of why - she had originally caused the Art of Noise to be formed, Azalynn left them to consider her words. This they did for a silent quarter-hour or more, all of them together, yet each alone with her own thoughts, until finally Azusa said what they were all thinking:

    "Well... I think we have to face facts. There's nothing we can do about... about what's actually happened. That's a matter for the police, or the Avatar, or... well, just about anybody other than us, really."

    Ritsu sighed. "Yeah. Agreed. I hate it, but... you're right. And based on what Mugi heard from Sawa-chan, that's already happening, which is like the only bright spot in this thing so far." She paused for a moment, thinking, then hit the table with the flat of her hand and declared, "All right, I have a new plan."

    "You do?" asked Yui, puzzled.

    "I do," Ritsu replied. "And it is... uh, we go home and try to think of a new plan."

    "That's so crazy it just might work," Mio deadpanned.


    Unlike most of the others, Mugi didn't leave the school immediately. Instead, upon leaving the club room, she went down to the administrative area on the ground floor and prowled around a bit - not to check the teachers' room, but rather to look into the office of the student council.

    As she had hoped, Nodoka was still there, at the desk that formed the head of the council's conference table, working on who knew what.

    "Pardon the intrusion," said Mugi automatically as she knocked on the jamb of the open door.

    "Hm? Oh, Mugi, come in," said Nodoka, looking up. "Any sign of Hutchins-sensei today?"

    "I'm afraid not," Mugi said, shaking her head sadly. "We're trying to come up with a plan. In the meantime, though, I have an administrative matter I hope you can help me with."

    Nodoka cocked her head curiously. "Oh?"


    Ui and Jun went to 10GIÄ and browsed the equipment for a while, then decided to hit the ice cream place at the other end of the same shopping arcade. It was a fine late afternoon, a much nicer day than the one before, and there was a warm, pleasant breeze as they ate their sundaes and considered recent events.

    "I've been thinking about the last time we were here," Jun remarked. "When Tainaka-senpai said we should start our own band?"

    "Mm-hmm," Ui said, nodding, to show that she remembered the conversation in question. (Technically, all Ritsu had said was that the two of them could start their own band, but Ui chose not to split that hair just at present.)

    "Well... I dunno, she might be right," Jun said. "What do you think?"

    "I think we'd need more members," Ui said wryly, "but yeah, that sounds like it could be a lot of fun." She looked thoughtful through a bite of ice cream, then mused, "I wonder if we could convince Nodoka-chan to join us."

    Jun coughed, sputtering for a second, and then plied her napkin before asking incredulously, "Did you just call Manabe-senpai 'Nodoka-chan'?"

    Ui blushed, looking surprised. "Oops," she said, then grinned a little sheepishly and said, "She hasn't always been junior class president, you know. She's been my big sis's best friend since kindergarten, I've known her my whole life. I think I learned most of what I know about being responsible from her."

    "Well, I suppose one of you had to," said Jun dryly. "Anyway, that'd be cool, but she doesn't play an instrument, so we'll still need a new member or two. Maybe we should do some recruiting during the school festival this fall and hope that Yui-senpai and the others don't scare everybody off again."

    "Don't be mean," Ui chided her.

    "Dude, the animal costumes," Jun persisted remorselessly. "There are girls in our class who still have nightmares." Her mind jumping back to the previous track, she added, "Oh yeah, we'll need a name, too. I'm assuming you're not gonna go for The Jun Suzuki Project," she added with a smirk.

    "I was thinking maybe The Ui Hirasawa Rhythm All-Stars," Ui countered, grinning.

    "The Western Empire Ballet Company," said Jun.

    "Student Drivers," Ui replied.

    "Orangebender," Jun declared.

    "Ooh, that one's not bad," said Ui.

    "What? Seriously? It's lame. I was trying for lame. ... Hmm! Trying For Lame."

    "That actually is lame. What about The Above Average?"

    "The Junior Varsity."

    "That's a little bit on the nose, don't you think?" Ui wondered.

    Jun eyed her. "Oh, and 'Student Drivers' wasn't? I know! Media Blackout!"

    "Void Where Prohibited..."


    Unlike her younger sister, Yui went straight home. Having accepted an invitation to join her for dinner, Azusa spent most of the silent walk worrying about her senpai's mood, which seemed not to have changed much since Saturday. It was so odd to see Yui in any mood other than bouncy and bubbly, and so unsettling. Azusa recalled ruefully how many times, over the first month or so of their friendship, she'd wished the elder guitarist would take things more seriously.

    I take it all back, she thought plaintively to whatever spirits were punishing her hubris now. Yui-senpai wasn't built to take things this seriously. I just... I just want to see her smile again.

    A moment later - to her considerable, grateful surprise - she got her wish. As they came around the corner onto the street where the Hirasawas' pleasant house stood, tall and narrow, on its little lot wedged into the space next to the Fire Nation temple, Yui suddenly looked up from her pensive silence, blinking; and then her face broke into a look of utter delight, her eyes going big and sparkling.

    "Tobu!" she cried, throwing her arms wide, and she broke into a run. Azusa, puzzled, looked to see what she was talking about...

    ... and stopped walking as if she'd collided with a lamppost, her jaw dropping.

    "What," she said.

    Not noticing that her kōhai had fallen behind, Yui darted up the street with her arms outstretched like airplane wings, then sprang into the air and embraced the figure standing in the driveway of her house with all her might.

    Or, well, part of the figure standing there, anyway. Given that said figure was an Air Nomad sky bison, about the size of one of Sakuragaoka's streetcars, she could really do little better than glom onto one of his massive forelimbs. That seemed good enough for the bison, though; he made a pleasant rumbling sound, ducked his great head, and gave her a gentle nuzzle, the delicacy of the gesture all out of proportion to the vastness of the animal.

    Azusa advanced on autopilot, the complete incongruity of the scene rendering her mind all but blank. By the time Yui had finished greeting the bison, she was standing only a couple of paces away, regarding the scene with complete incredulity.

    "Azu-nyan!" Yui declared happily, brushing bison fur from her uniform as she disengaged herself. "Come meet Tobu. Tobu, this is Azu-nyan!"

    "Uh... hi," said Azusa.

    "Gromph," said Tobu agreeably.

    "... Senpai, why is there a sky bison in your yard?" asked Azusa, her voice flat.

    "He's too big to go in the house, silly," Yui replied cheerfully.

    "... Ask a stupid question," Azusa remarked, mostly to herself.


    After a half-hour or so spent listlessly flipping through TV channels and/or her many back issues of Modern Drummer magazine, Ritsu found herself out in the back yard of her house with Mio, the two of them dressed in their PE tracksuits and engaged in a pastime that - for all that their bandmates had rarely if ever seen them at it - was actually a far older feature of their friendship than music.

    "... got to be something else we can try," Ritsu said, catching Mio's shinai on her forearm and turning it aside.

    "Ritsu, it's only been a couple of days," Mio said. She feinted to the left, then backed and half-turned to avoid a mimed punch that would've been a firebending strike in a real fight. "We just have to be patient."

    "I know, I know," said Ritsu, ducking her friend's counterstrike. "I just - nice one! - I'm just worried we'll run out of time. I mean counting this one, there's only three weeks left in the term, and we're going to be tied up with finals for most of the last one." She backpedaled a little too hard to avoid the follow-up, slipped on the grass, and fell to her back, but scrambled back to her feet before Mio could capitalize. "And then it's summer vacation, and who knows what happens then? She might go home. She probably has to go home before fall term starts."

    "Is this about what Kaitlyn-sensei needs at this point," Mio wondered, "or what we stand to lose if she leaves?"

    Ritsu scowled, crossed up her next attempt, and judo-threw her, though she failed to dislodge Mio's grip on her weapon. "Come on, Mio, you know me better than that. I'm thinking of us, sure, but only because I'd have to anyway. I just..." She sighed, shoulders slumping, and disengaged as Mio got back to her feet, holding up her hands. Meeting her friend's eyes, she went on, "I just don't want it to end like this, you know?"

    Mio looked her in the eye for a moment, then nodded, echoing her sigh.

    "Yeah," she said, putting her free hand on Ritsu's shoulder. "I know."


    Azusa's bemusement at the presence of a sky bison in Yui's yard was not so much dispelled as replaced by meeting her parents. On the one hand, it made total sense that an Air Nomad and her Air Acolyte husband would have a sky bison instead of, say, a car.

    On the other hand, Yui's mother was an Air Nomad?!

    Admittedly, Tsering Hirasawa didn't look much like the popular conception of an Air Nomad. She had long medium brown hair (the slightly lighter shade sported by the younger of her two daughters) and generally, apart from her red-and-gold robes and the blue arrow tattoos on her forehead and hands, looked like anybody else you might see in Sakuragaoka, a town where most everyone had some mix of Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom genetics (tending to lean more toward the former than the latter).

    Her husband, Masato, was even more typically local, and at the moment he looked the part a little more convincingly, since he was dressed not in an Air Acolyte's standard garb, but rather the many-pocketed jumpsuit of a Nomad Air technician.

    "Oh!" said Jun when she and Ui arrived a few minutes later. "So that's why you're never home."

    "Jun!" said Azusa, scandalized, though of course it was the first thing she'd thought as well.

    "What?" Jun asked innocently.

    Mr. and Mrs. Hirasawa laughed. "You must be Jun-chan," said the latter.

    "No inside voice," the former agreed with a winking nod. "Right, Ui?"

    "Dad!" Ui protested, going scarlet.


    "I'm actually from Sakuragaoka," Mr. Hirasawa explained over dinner. "Born and raised here. Tsering and I met in college."

    "Air Nomads go to college?" Jun wondered.

    "If we want to," said Mrs. Hirasawa. "We're nowhere near as insular a society as we were in Avatar Aang's day - a hard lesson painfully learned," she added with a slightly somber smile. She shook it off quickly, though, brightening to something like her daughters' usual level of cheer, as she went on, "I even thought about leaving the order when Masato asked me to marry him, but he wouldn't have it."

    "What kind of person would put such a bird in a cage?" asked Mr. Hirasawa rhetorically, grinning. "Instead, I became a flight engineer, so that I can follow wherever she goes."

    At the other end of the table, Jun and Azusa glanced at each other in bemusement, then discreetly checked to see whether Ui and/or Yui were in any way embarrassed by their parents' lovey-dovey display. It appeared not; indeed, both girls looked more cheerful than they had since the weekend.

    What a family, thought Azusa, and from the look on Jun's face, she was fairly sure the other girl was thinking the same thing - on the inside, for once.

    Instead, she asked, "So... why do Ui and Yui live here, then? Why aren't they... y'know... off nomading with you two?"

    "They could if they wanted to," said Mrs. Hirasawa, "but when they weren't born airbenders, we decided that we'd leave it up to them, and when they reached school age, they both chose the settled life."

    "So we bought the house next door to my mother's, and here we are," Mr. Hirasawa added, beaming.

    Azusa blinked, then turned to Yui. "The nice old lady next door is your actual grandmother?"

    "Of course," Yui said. "You've heard me call her Granny tons of times."

    "I thought you were just... being Yui," Azusa admitted.

    "You're so mean to me, Azu-nyan," Yui said, pouting.

    "I didn't mean it like that!"


    Jun headed home after dinner, but Azusa stayed on; after a quick check-in for parental permission, she and Yui retired to the latter's room and jammed until the hour grew too late to be making that much noise, then changed for bed.

    They'd been lying quietly in the dark for a few minutes, Yui in her bed, Azusa bedrolled on the floor beside, when Yui startled her kōhai slightly by climbing down and crawling in next to her.

    "Um, Yui-senpai, what are you doing?" she wondered.

    "I just had an idea," Yui replied, and Azusa felt her cat ears standing up with a combination of intrigue and faint alarm.

    "... And what might that be?" she asked, not entirely certain she wanted to know the answer.

    "I know what we need to do," said Yui.

    "... Do you?"

    "Yes," Yui said positively, and then she explained...

    ... and Azusa realized that she was absolutely right. The idea had been forming in her own head, unnoticed yet by her conscious mind, and now it sprang into the light: That was exactly what they needed to do.

    Xinqisan, Liuyue 30
    Wednesday, June 30

    "I've got it," every single member of Hōkago Tea Time blurted almost as one when they reconvened the next afternoon.

    They crosstalked fruitlessly for several seconds, until finally Ritsu raised her voice above all the others, declaring, "All right, all right, settle down, one at a time!" They all halted, giving her an expectant look. "OK." She looked from one face to another, seeing the same eager, I-have-to-share-this look on all of them, and chose the one directly across from her to start: "Mio. Whaddaya got for me?"

    "I've been thinking about what Azalynn told us yesterday, about how the Art of Noise got started," said Mio. "I think we should do something similar."

    Ritsu tilted her head quizzically. "What, trick Kate-chan-sensei into joining our band? How would that even work?"

    Mio shook her head. "No, not that part. But - well, that's just it, we're a band. That's the whole reason Kate-sensei came here. So we should play for her. But more than that," she went on, raising a hand, before Ritsu could argue (if she was going to) that the idea didn't go far enough. "We shouldn't just play for her, she's already heard what we could do before she came here. We need to show her what we've learned from her, in just the short time she's been working with us, and we need to do it soon. Probably this weekend would be best."

    "That was my idea!" Yui agreed, nodding excitedly.

    "And mine!" said Azusa.

    "You mean... ?" Ritsu asked.

    "Exactly!" Mugi chimed in. "We write a new song."

    "One that takes what we can do to a whole new level," Yui enthused.

    "A level we couldn't have reached this early if we hadn't met her," Mio confirmed.

    "So... let me get this straight," said Ritsu, leaning thoughtfully back in her chair. "You're saying that... with the start of final exams less than two weeks away... we drop everything we should be doing and throw ourselves into an all-out musical effort instead. We - the five of us - write, arrange, and rehearse a whole new song, and not just any song but the biggest, most challenging one we've done so far, in... what, like four days?"

    Mio nodded. "That's right."

    "You, Mio Akiyama, are suggesting that we slack off on studying at a critical juncture in our school careers to go and do rock stuff."

    Folding her arms, Mio looked her best friend straight in the eye and replied flatly, "Yes."

    While the others all stared expectantly at her, Ritsu reclined in thought for a moment, her chair balancing on its hind legs; then she abruptly withdrew her feet from the table so that it toppled forward into its normal stance again, springing upright as it did so.

    "What? You seriously thought I was gonna pass on that?" she asked, grinning. "What are we waiting for, ladies? Mugi, you better put on a pot of the strong stuff. We've got work to do!"

    Mugi saluted army-fashion, a huge grin spreading across her face. "Yes, ma'am, Madam President!"


    Chapter Ten: "Love Has No Brakes"

    Xinqiwu, Qiyue 2, 291 ASC
    Friday, July 2, 2410

    Azusa Nakano was a bad person.

    She had to assume this, because in the midst of this most dark and difficult of times for the Light Music Club, it suddenly dawned on her that she had never felt more happy or fulfilled in her entire life.

    The thought first occurred to her as she and her fellow members of Hōkago Tea Time began one of the first all-up play-throughs of their new song, late on Friday afternoon. True to Mio-senpai's proposal, the five of them had worked like coal miners to write and arrange their newest song, working long into the night on both Wednesday and Thursday. As was their usual pattern, Mugi-senpai wrote most of the music and Mio most of the lyrics, but the process of arrangement and development had been a lot more collaborative than was usual.

    On the one hand, that meant the resulting song was even more of a distillation of the current state of Hōkago Tea Time than it would otherwise have been; but on the other, it meant that the work was (in a way) even harder, because the constant input from everyone in the band meant that the song evolved almost faster than band members could master their parts. This early play-through, for instance, fell apart midway through - and to Azusa's distinct mortification, it happened to be her fault, as she mistakenly threw the chorus where they'd just decided to put a bridge and blew Yui-senpai's concentration apart. When that happened, Mio stopped singing and held up a hand, calling the performance to a halt.

    "Damn," said Azusa, so caught up in her annoyance with herself that she didn't noticed the raised eyebrows of her bandmates as they all glanced in surprised amusement at each other. "I'm sorry, you guys, that was my fault."

    "Aw, don't be mad at yourself, Azu-nyan," Yui said, smiling. "We're still learning."

    "Yep," Ritsu agreed. "It's rehearsal. That's... why we do it."

    With a nod, Mugi agreed, "Exactly right." Then, with a glance at the wall clock, she went on, "Before we wrap up for the evening, why don't we take it one more time?"

    Ritsu nodded. "I'm game," she said. "It'd be better to end on a better note, so to speak."

    "I agree," said Mio. "I think we should take this one as an instrumental, though. I need to save my voice. I still feel fine," she qualified, "but I don't want to push it, and we still have a lot of practicing to do tomorrow."

    "Yeah, you don't want to end up like Yui before the school festival last year," said Ritsu.

    "That wasn't much fun," Yui agreed. "Well, the festival was. But my throat hurt for a week!"

    "On the other hand, if you do blow your voice out, maybe Yui can complete the circle and show everyone her panties after we play the song," Ritsu added, causing Mio to hurl her plectrum at her. Ritsu parried it with one of her sticks, poking her tongue out cheerfully; Mio rolled her eyes and got another out of her pocket.

    "Mine aren't as interesting as Mio-chan's," Yui said with a blithe smile. "They don't have stripes or anything."

    "CAN WE PLEASE JUST PLAY THE SONG," said Mio.

    "Of course we can," Ritsu replied with a courtly drumstick gesture. "You had but to ask, milady. Ready, Azusa? One, two, one two three and!"


    "Much better," said Mugi with a satisfied smile. Shutting down her Triton, she gathered up her things, then went on, "I think that's coming along very well indeed. When shall we meet back here tomorrow?"

    "Uh... I dunno, ten o'clock?" Ritsu suggested. "We can take a couple hours to make final adjustments before lunch, then we've got the rest of the day to polish it up. Sound good?"

    Mugi nodded. "That works for me. I'll see you all then."

    "OK, have a good time, Mugi-chan!" said Yui. "Happy birthday!"

    The others all concurred with her birthday greetings; Mugi thanked them all graciously, and then, still with the same serenely beaming smile she'd had on pretty much all day, she departed.

    Ritsu stood at the window and watched her leave the school grounds, then turned and walked around the bench, where Mio had sat down to rummage in her school bag.

    "I really wanna take that bait," she declared. Wobbling theatrically on her feet, she wailed, "But I need a naaaaap," then pitched forward in a perfectly executed pro-wrestling flop, sprawling across the bench to bury her face in Mio's shirt front.

    "Hey!" Mio cried indignantly. Yui and Azusa glanced at each other in bemusement; Azusa was slightly embarrassed, but, not entirely to her surprise, Yui appeared simply puzzled.

    Probably just wondering how Ritsu-senpai can breathe, thought Azusa irreverently.

    "Mio, go spy on Mugi for me, I can't move," Ritsu mumbled.

    "I can't move either, at the moment," Mio replied dryly, her momentary shock past. "Also, I think I told you to leave Mugi alone."

    Ritsu sighed. "You're no fun."

    "You'd have more credibility if you weren't saying that directly into my sternum," Mio pointed out.

    "It's nice here," Ritsu replied. Then, drawing a deep breath, she pushed herself upright and, with a new burst of energy, declared, "Anyway, she's probably just going to a love hotel with Sawa-chan, big whoop. Who wants to go to the ribs place?" Making a covetous claw gesture with her hands, she added, "Riiiiibs."

    "I thought you were too tired to move," Mio remarked, getting to her feet.

    "Desperate times call for desperate measures," Ritsu replied, and then climbed up into the piggyback position. "So this is what it's like to be tall!" she declared, locking arms and legs around her friend. "Not bad!" Then, with an imperious point toward the door, she declared, "Light Music Club - hasshin! To the ribs place!"

    Mio shook her head resignedly, but couldn't keep a little smile off her face as she hefted Ritsu a little more securely onto her back, hooking her arms under the drummer's legs.


    As the four (well, three) walked downtown, Mio's longer strides built up a little bit of a lead in spite of her burden. Yui ambled happily along behind, content to let the rhythm section have their own space so long as she could keep them in sight. Presently she turned to make some remark to Azusa - and found, to her slight surprise, that her kōhai was lagging a little behind her, with a face that could best be compared not to a thundercloud, but just the ordinary rainy kind.

    "What's wrong, Azu-nyan?" she asked, concerned. "Are you feeling OK? Are you tired?" With a grin, she added, "Want me to carry you like Mio-chan's carrying Ricchan?"

    "What? Oh, n-no, thanks, Yui-senpai, that won't be necessary," said Azusa, blushing scarlet. "I'm all right."

    "Then what's that face for?" Yui persisted, dropping back to take her hand. The way she did it was so natural, so devoid of ostentation, that Azusa didn't immediately realize she'd done it, and when she did, she didn't pull away. Instead, she sighed and said in a low voice,

    "I must be a terrible person."

    Yui's look of bafflement was near-total. "Huh? What would make you say something like that? You're not a terrible person, you're awesome."

    "It's nice of you to say that, senpai, but... well... I just realized when we were rehearsing that I..." She hesitated, as if psyching herself up to confess a crime, and then stopped walking, looked Yui in the eye, and told her, "I love it. I love what we're doing right now. It's what I hoped being in the Light Music Club would be like. Working so hard with you four, not just performing but really making the music... the whole process... the focus... it's everything I wanted when I joined. It makes me really happy." Then, lowering her eyes to the sidewalk, she went miserably on, "And then I remember why we're doing it. And I hate myself for loving it so much."

    "Awww, Azu-nyan," said Yui, and then - right there on the sidewalk, about halfway between corners - she drew the younger girl into a hug. It wasn't one of Yui's usual hugs, which tended to be delivered at a run and from odd angles, invariably with a huge grin and almost always with a high-pitched cry of her name. This was gentler, more deliberate - almost maternal. That wasn't really right either, but it was a gesture of such caring warmth that Azusa could think of no other comparison off the top of her head.

    "You shouldn't hate yourself for being happy," Yui went on. "No one else will. It'll make Kate-chan-sensei and her family feel better knowing that some good came out of all this somehow."

    Azusa saw the sense in her senpai's words, but even so, she couldn't let go of her guilty feeling that easily. "But... we're doing the right thing, but it's for the wrong reasons."

    "Nn-nn," Yui disagreed, shaking her head and hugging her tighter. "We're doing it for exactly the right reasons. It's the reasons for our reasons that are wrong, and we can't control that. Mom always says, 'You have to fly with the wind you've got, not the wind you want.'"

    For a few seconds, Azusa had no response to that. Partly that was because she didn't want to risk ending this amazing, surprising moment prematurely, but mostly, she was taking on board how amazing it was. She had already learned, a short while ago, that Yui-senpai really was a serious musician, on top of her natural talent. Now she was finding that - in spite of her usual air of cheerful flightiness - she was able to be serious, full stop.

    Serious, and yet still unsinkable, because it wasn't a grave or somber seriousness, like she had worryingly flirted with earlier in the week. As she relaxed her embrace and leaned back slightly to meet Azusa's eyes, Yui was smiling, her eyes bright.

    "Cheer up, Azu-nyan," she said. "That's why we're doing this, after all," and all at once Azusa realized that by "this" Yui meant more than simply Hōkago Tea Time's current project; she meant, more or less, "being Hōkago Tea Time."

    "Senpai," she said, and for a brief instant Azusa had the utterly crazy idea that one of them might be about to kiss the other. She wasn't sure which one was about to take that action. It might even have been her.

    "Hey!" Ritsu's voice called from the corner, jolting her out of her microsecond reverie. "Are you guys coming or what?"

    "Be right there!" Yui called back; then she winked and said in a more personal tone of voice, "C'mon, Azu-nyan - let's fly with the wind we've got!"

    Before Azusa could ask her what she meant by that, Yui had - in a feat of agility that startled her young kōhai, accustomed as she was to the elder girl occasionally having trouble getting things like escalators and curbs entirely right - ducked and swept her up into a piggyback of her own, then set off running to catch up with the rhythm section before the light changed.

    Xinqiliu, Qiyue 3
    Saturday, July 3

    "Good morning, all," said Mugi cheerfully as she entered the club room. "I hope I haven't kept you waiting long."

    "Nah, we just got here ourselves," Yui replied, looking up from tuning Gīta. "Jun-chan bought us donuts again!" she added, indicating the box on the table.

    "Oh, how thoughtful," Mugi declared, beaming. She put her bag down on the bench, went to select a donut, and then turned the beam fully on Jun. "Thank you so much, Jun-chan."

    "Oh, uh, gosh, it was nothin'," Jun mumbled, going suddenly red-faced. Ui giggled, but Azusa couldn't find it in her heart to make fun of her classmate's discomfiture. She knew full well how oddly intimidating it could feel to be on the receiving end of Mugi-senpai's undivided goodwill.

    Emerging from the storeroom with a fresh pair of drumsticks, Ritsu declared (a bit unnecessarily), "Hey, Mugi's here." As she took her seat behind her drum kit, she added with a casual grin, "How was Sawa-chan?"

    Over by the window, Mio snorted violently, spattering the glass with the water she'd just been trying to drink; spluttering, she turned and shot Ritsu a look that, by rights, ought to have hit hard enough to knock her off her stool. That set off the junior varsity, Yui, and even Azusa (despite her flaming blush), and when Nodoka entered a moment later, most of the room was still giggling helplessly.

    "Well, it looks like today's off to a positive start," she observed.

    "I should say so," Mugi replied with a serene smile, taking her place behind her keyboard, and that set everyone off again.

    Nodoka, an eyebrow arched, waited them out, then said, "I just wanted to remind you all - I've cleared you to be in here all day as part of an Official Club Activity, but it's still a Saturday, so the building's locking up at seven. Do you think you can be done by then?"

    Ritsu looked at the clock on her phone. "That's eight and a half hours from now," she said, then added wryly, "The heck with done, if we play straight through, we might be dead by then."

    "Yes, well, try not to do that," Nodoka said, and then added with a perfect deadpan, "You wouldn't believe the amount of paperwork students working themselves to death generates, especially if it's for extracurriculars."

    "We'll keep that in mind," Mio promised, wiping up the window with a towel.

    "OK, then, I'll let you get to it," said Nodoka.

    "We'll get going too, big sis," Ui put in. "If you need anything, give me a call."

    "You guys can stay if you want," Ritsu said. "I feel kinda bad, I mean, I talked you into joining the club and now..."

    "It's OK, Tainaka-senpai," Jun assured her. "This is really important for your band. The best thing we can do right now is just stay outta your way."

    "Besides - we've got a few things of our own to take care of," said Ui with a grin.

    "Well, OK, but - you're gonna be there tomorrow, right?" Ritsu persisted. "It's not just from us, it's the whole club."

    "Of course we will," Jun assured her, then added with a wink, "We're the kōhai, it's our job to carry the stuff."

    "Let's all have dinner together tonight, once we're done," Yui suggested. They arranged that it would be so, and then Ui, Jun, and Nodoka departed, and Hōkago Tea Time got to work.


    Despite Ritsu's dire prediction, they pushed straight through, with only a brief pause to eat their bagged lunches and quick, tactical tea breaks over the course of the afternoon. Mio, who had the lead vocal duties for the new song, tended her voice carefully, aided by Mugi's expertise with warm beverages. Much of the afternoon's practice was instrumental, to save wear and tear, but they had to do a few runs with all the vocals in place to make sure they had everything right.

    At six-thirty, weary but energized, they powered to the end of a full-dress rehearsal, then stood breathing hard in the almost-startling silence that ensued, glancing around at each other. None of the five had to say a word; all of them knew, and knew that the others knew, that they had it. They had taken the essence of what their band was now, how far it had come, and what they felt they owed to their teachers past and present; their solidarity in the face of the fates' sudden hostility to one of their circle; their stiff-backed defiance of the gloom and despair it might have brought; all of that, and distilled it into a single song. They had prepared a four-minute thesis, The Present State and Future Prospects of Hōkago Tea Time, and then honed and polished it until it gleamed.

    Now all that remained was to present it to the faculty.

    "Yeah," said Ritsu, after letting it sink in for a few seconds. "We're ready."


    Tired but content, the band met Ui, Jun, and Nodoka for dinner at the food stall down by the river, where - in recognition of the occasion - they all opted for chicken katsu over curry.

    While they waited for their order, Ritsu imperfectly covered an enormous yawn with a hand, then sheepishly apologized as it set off a chain reaction down the counter and around the corner.

    "Whoo, man," she said. "Azusa, I know you think we were all total slackers before you came along..."

    "I never said that!" Azusa protested.

    "About which you were not entirely wrong," Mio put in dryly.

    "But we have put in some hard days' work before this," Ritsu went imperturbably on.

    "It's true," Mio agreed, nodding. "I mean, we did have to come up with everything we knew when you joined us from scratch between the start of school last year and the fall festival..."

    "And Yui-chan had to learn to sing and play the guitar, so it's not as if we were doing nothing," Mugi put in.

    "Aw, shucks," said Yui, blushing.

    "Even so," Ritsu said, "and this is really my point, we've never pushed ourselves this hard before. Everything Mio and Mugi just said is true, but we still had a few months to get all that done. This time, we've had, what - four days. And three of them, we've still had school to do." Smiling, she raised her glass of Orange Stuff and went on, "Whatever happens tomorrow, this is something we can be proud of. Kanpai!"

    The food came as they were wrapping up the toast, and for a while there was no further conversation. Presently, though, Azusa paused between bites of her katsu to inquire,

    "Speaking of which, what is happening tomorrow? Is there a plan?"

    "Of course there's a plan," said a voice from above them, causing most of the club to jump and/or yelp. A moment later, Azalynn's head and shoulders swung down from the stall roof above them. "There's always a plan," she went on, grinning an inverted Cheshire-cat grin.

    "Rin-chan!" Yui cried.

    "Uh... how long have you been up there?" Ritsu wondered.

    "Long enough," Azalynn replied, then flipped the rest of the way down from the roof, landing next to Ui. "Hey, Pops, can I get some of that katsu?"

    "Comin' right up," said the stall's proprietor cheerfully.

    "OK, so, here's the plan," said Azalynn, climbing onto the vacant stool at the end of the counter's long side. "Tomorrow, Miki's going to get Kate out of the house... somehow. Dynamite may be involved. Anyway, however he does it, they're going to go have lunch someplace, and then he'll talk her into checking on the progress of our new studio. And that's where you guys come in."

    "The studio? Is it ready? I thought Kate-sensei said it'd be the middle of July," said Mio.

    "Not even close," Azalynn said, "but it's private, and it's available. The soundproofing isn't in yet, but it's in a commercial district and all the offices around will be empty anyway. So what we're gonna do is, someone will be at the school at 10 tomorrow morning to help you move your gear. You'll need everything you'd take to a show. Head over to the studio, set up, get your sound check done, and grab some lunch - there's a decent noodle joint just down the street. Be back there and ready to rock at two; we'll bring Kate to you. Then..." She smiled. "Rock 'n roll does the rest."

    Ritsu grinned. "Sounds like a plan, all right. OK, gang. Let's meet at the club room at 9:30, so we can pack up our gear and have it ready to go when our ride shows up. Good?"


    When the Hirasawa sisters got home, they found their parents making ready to head out on another run in the morning. Ui, tired out from her busy day, said her goodnights and went off to have a bath before bed, but Yui stayed on for a while, helping her mother pack.

    As they worked, Mrs. Hirasawa couldn't help but take note of her daughter's demeanor. Though obviously tired - and Tsering would could well believe it, knowing from Ui's accounts how hard she'd been working all week - Yui was in a buoyant mood, humming cheerfully while she bustled around the living room, fetching odds and ends and folding clothes. In spite of the hard work, and the rather dismaying reasons why she and the rest of her band had undertaken it, she'd been in a similar frame of mind every time her mother had seen her this week. It wasn't that the Air Nomad was accustomed to seeing her elder daughter in a gloomy mood - far from it! - but there was something slightly different about this, and after mulling it over for a few moments, she thought she recognized it.

    Oh, my, she thought with a private little smile, and then, excusing herself for a moment, she went upstairs. In the master bedroom, Masato looked up from packing his own kit bag, then arched an eyebrow at the look on his wife's face.

    "What?" he asked.

    "Dear... have you noticed that Yui's been humming a lot this week?"

    Masato raised the other eyebrow. "Well... now that you mention it." Shrugging, he went back to his work. "She is a musician," he pointed out. "And didn't she say the girls are working on a new song this week?"

    Tsering crossed the room, put a hand on his shoulder so that he'd look up to meet her eyes, and said patiently, "No, sweetie. There's humming... and then there is humming."

    The look Masato gave her back was none the wiser for a moment; then the light came on and he nodded. "Ahh." With a thoughtful frown, he added seriously, "Maybe she's irradiated."

    Tsering rolled her eyes with an exasperated little sigh. "No, you fool -"

    Masato grinned. "Got you," he said, gently tweaking his wife's nose.

    "Oh, you infuriating man," she said, swatting at his shoulder.

    "Ow! Hey!" Masato protested, pretending to cower. "Non-violence, woman! We're Air Nomads!"

    Unable to stop herself giggling, she swatted him again, then said, "Kidding aside, what do you think we should do?"

    Masato shrugged. "She's sixteen and a half, Tsering. If she is in love, it wouldn't exactly be the biggest surprise in the world. Besides, she's a smart girl. She won't do anything crazy."

    "All the same... I'd better talk with her," said Tsering. "I know better than to leave it to you," she added wryly, swatting him once more.

    "The Apsara Lama would be very disappointed in your constant recourse to violence," said Masato piously.

    "Oh, pack your socks," Tsering replied mock-dismissively, then leaned to kiss him before heading back downstairs. There, she found Yui in the kitchen, taking stock of the fridge.

    "It's a bit late for a snack," she observed. "Besides, didn't you just come from dinner?"

    "Oh, I'm not looking for something to eat right now," Yui semi-lied with a cheery smile. "Just checking out the prospects for breakfast. We're not really going to have time for Ui to make anything really elaborate. Looks like we've got everything we need for pancakes, though." She shut the refrigerator and turned to head back to the living room. "Do you need any more help?"

    "I think I've just about got it," Tsering replied, following her out. "You should probably get ready for bed. I gather you've got a pretty big day tomorrow."

    "Yeah, that's true. I'm not really tired... well, I am tired, but I'm not really sleepy yet," Yui corrected herself. "I might read for a little while."

    "That sounds like a plan," said Tsering; then, after a moment's hesitation, she said, "Yui..."

    "Hm?" Yui replied, giving her a curious look. "What is it?"

    After contemplating her daughter for a moment, Tsering crossed the room and hugged her, saying, "I'm just realizing how much you and your sister are growing up, that's all." Leaning back slightly with Yui's shoulders in her hands, she asked seriously, "Do you think maybe it's time you and I had a little... talk?"

    Yui smiled serenely and shook her head. "Nah, it's OK, Mom. Ui already explained all that to me when we had it in school last year."

    Tsering blinked, both at the answer and at the completely, happily matter-of-fact way it was delivered. "Ah," she said. "Well, I... ah."

    "But thanks for offering," Yui went on. "Besides, I don't even know any boys. Except for Ricchan's little brother, and he's... well... Ricchan's little brother," she said, as if that explained everything - which, Tsering supposed after a moment's reflection, it probably did.

    Hmm, well, in that case - oh, unless... hmm, she thought, and then, with a mental shrug, she hugged Yui again and said, "All right, then, carry on. But if you find you do want to talk sometime, you know you can bring anything to me, right?"

    "Sure," said Yui, with the plain good cheer of someone who had nothing weighing on her mind that required any kind of confidential understanding.

    "All right," Tsering repeated, at a bit of a loss. Then, chuckling inwardly at herself - What were you expecting? - she kissed Yui on the forehead and told her, "Good night, sweetheart. Good luck tomorrow. Your father and I are very proud of what you and your friends are doing."

    "Thanks, Mom," said Yui. She trotted to the stairs, then turned, smiling broadly, and said, "Have a good flight! G'night!" before heading upstairs. Tsering heard her pause to wish the same to her father, then continue on up to the third floor, go into her room, and shut the door.

    "How'd that go?" Masato wondered as his wife came back upstairs and into the bedroom. "Get anywhere? She didn't seem upset, at least."

    "I'm not sure she even knew what I was on about," Tsering admitted wryly.

    "Haha, that's my girl," said Masato cheerily, zipping up his flight bag. "See, you worry too much. Whatever's going on, she's obviously got a handle on it. What do you say we get some shut-eye? It's a long flight to Chameleon Bay."

    Xinqitian, Qiyue 4
    Sunday, July 4

    As planned, the Light Music Club gathered promptly at 9:30 to start organizing and preparing their gear. By ten o'clock, they were well along; Ritsu and Mio were just finishing up the job of packing the former's drum kit into its compact travel mode when there came a knock at the club room door.

    "I got it," said Jun, and then, "Oh, uh... hello."

    "Hi," said the black-haired young man opening the door had revealed. "You must be Jun? Miki sent me. I'm -"

    "Corwin!" Mio cried, caught somewhere between delighted and aghast.

    Kaitlyn's brother looked like a man who had had a hard week, and was expecting a succession of others, but his smile was real as he replied, "Hey, Mio. I'm still alive."

    Before she could come up with a response to that, he drew a deep breath and seemed to shake himself, brightening with an exercise of will, and stepped into the room, saying, "Let me introduce you to your beautiful and talented road crew for the day."

    Two girls, both of them looking to be about the same age as the Light Music Club's "original four", entered the room behind him. One was tall and thin, with short dark hair, and - somewhat to the club girls' surprise - she wore the robes and tattoos of a master Air Nomad, very similar to those Yui's mother had been sporting when Jun and Azusa had met her the other day. The other, dressed in a white and blue sailor outfit that looked like a school uniform (but not one from any school any of the club members knew), was petite and pale, with long silver hair and eyes of a remarkable aqua green.

    "This is Nyima," said Corwin, indicating the Air Nomad, "and Iona."

    "Hi," said Nyima cheerfully, making the airbender salute to the room. "It's nice to meet you guys at last. We're all big fans of your demo on Air Temple Island."

    Mio blushed to her eyebrows. "Really?"

    "Would this face lie to you?" Nyima replied, grinning.

    "It's nice to meet you," said Iona in a soft, almost diffident voice, bowing slightly in what the local girls interpreted as the fashion of a Kyoshi Islander.

    "Right," said Corwin, after further greetings and introductions had everyone properly acquainted. "Let's get your stuff down to the van, shall we?"


    There wasn't much opportunity for conversation during the moving operations themselves, but with so many hands pitching in, the work went quickly. Several members of the Light Music Club noticed that the silver-haired girl, Iona - though tiny and delicate in appearance, second in that department only to Azusa - was as strong as a muledeer, uncomplainingly lugging loads that rivaled those Mugi was famous for tackling. Wiry Nyima was no slouch in that department either, and in the end, the members of Hōkago Tea Time had to do very little of the really heavy work, leaving them able to save their energy for the afternoon's performance.

    Azalynn hadn't been kidding about the studio not being finished. At a quick glance, the untrained eye wouldn't have been convinced it had been started; past the outer door, it was just a set of empty rooms and hallways, framed and drywalled, but with the plastered joints yet to be sanded and no paint to be seen anywhere. The main recording room had its outer door installed, but inside, the area where the control booth was going to be was demarcated only by lines painted on the bare subfloor. Lighting was provided by a couple of work lamps on tripods, which weren't all that different from stage lights once Ui and Azusa had moved them around a little.

    "The acoustics aren't going to be great in here, but at least we've got power," Ritsu mused as she helped Mugi set up her keyboard.

    "It'll do for an emergency," Mugi agreed, nodding.

    Mio finished setting up her amp, then went out to what would be the outer office to get her bass. As she did, she met Corwin coming in with a bunch of coiled patch cables looped over his arm.

    "Mio - can I talk to you for a second?" he asked quietly.

    "Sure," she replied, and he followed her out to the skeletal lobby. Once they were out of earshot of the others (who were mostly pretending to be preoccupied with their setup anyway), he said,

    "I'm sorry about that email. I tried to delete it without sending it; didn't realize I'd managed to mess it up until the next day. I thought about following up, but at that point I figured it would just be piling on, since you didn't reply to the first one."

    "I didn't know what to say," Mio admitted. "And I thought you probably had enough on your mind." Putting a hand on his arm, she went on, "I'm so sorry. I wish there was something we could do to help. We all do. What happened to your family... it's terrible."

    "You're doing it right now," Corwin replied, his smile sad and a bit weary, but genuine. "Kate's taken it hard - Azalynn presumably told you - and this... this is just what she needs. Knowing that she's someplace where people care so much about her - that'll be one load off my mind while I go and do what I can to deal with... everything." He sighed, rubbing a hand down his face.

    "Anyway," he said, before she could find any words of her own. "I'll be leaving Dìqiú for a while - heading out in the morning. I'm not sure when I'll be back. Utena, Anthy, and I... we've all got things we have to do outside. In the meantime, you remember the house we were building, in the mountains outside Republic City?"

    "Yes," Mio replied, nodding. He'd shown her and the others holos of what the place was going to look like on his previous visit, and they had all agreed that it was spectacular.

    "It's finished - mostly empty just at the moment, but finished. If you guys want... if you're looking for someplace to have your summer training camp this year, we'd be happy to let you use it. We're not going to be there, and it seems a shame to just let the place stand empty when someone could be enjoying it."

    Mio's grey eyes went wide. "Are you serious?" Before he could answer, she shook her head and said, "No, sorry. Of course you're serious. Senpai, that would be... amazing." With a wry little smile, she added, "Ritsu's been agitating for a trip to the mountains this year ever since last year."

    Corwin chuckled. "Well, that works out fine, then," he said. "I'll set it up before I go - make sure there'll be some furniture and... you know, supplies and stuff in there for you. Kate and Nyima can take care of transportation. Stay as long as you like."

    "I... wow. That's..." Falling back on long-ingrained custom, she squared herself up as if in a dojo and bowed. "Thank you very much, Corwin-senpai. I don't know how we can repay your kindness."

    "You're very welcome, Mio-chan," he replied with only-partly-mock gravity. Then, cracking his tired smile again, he said, "I'd take a hug."

    And so he got one.


    Elsewhere, having just finished lunch, Miki said as casually as he possibly could, "While we're out anyway, why don't we swing by and see how the studio's coming along? You haven't seen it since they started putting walls up..."

    Kate was about to demur, but as she drew breath to do so, they rounded the corner and she saw the rest of the Art of Noise loitering conspicuously at the downtown streetcar stop. Pausing, she eyed them all dubiously, then turned to Miki and said,

    "This... this is a setup."

    Miki nodded cheerfully. "Yes, yes it is," he replied. "And we're not letting you out of it."

    Kate gave him her hardest stare, but it didn't faze him in the slightest, and she remarked to herself - not for the first time - that it was terribly inconvenient in many ways to have not one but two lovers whom she couldn't manage to intimidate in any way, at any time.

    Sighing, she said, "Fine," and let him lead her toward the approaching streetcar.

    The others said nothing, just clustered around in a supportive little knot, as they rode downtown, then made their way from the closest stop to the office building where their new studio was under construction. Entering the lobby, Kate appeared to take no notice of the moving van, generic in the livery of one of the local rent-a-truck companies, parked farther up the block.

    She was a little surprised that they actually were coming to the studio; having discerned that it was some kind of setup, she had been expecting them to drag her off for ice cream or some other standard pick-me-up kind of activity. If they were going to ask her to jam - another possibility - surely it would've been better to do that at home, where, at the moment, the facilities were a lot better.

    As they got off the elevator, her ears caught the faint but unmistakable low hum of amplifiers. Miki led the way down the hall, opened the door into the main studio room, and bowed her through...

    ... and there was Hōkago Tea Time, arranged the way they set themselves up for live shows: Mugi on the audience's left and Ritsu on the right in the back, and then Mio, Yui, and Azusa ranged from left to right in front. The five girls were dressed in their school uniforms (their performance costumes of choice since the end of the Yamanaka era). The harsh glare of the two work lamps they were using as stage lights made them look even more serious than they actually were - and at the moment, they didn't really need the help.

    No one said a word, and Kate had just time to notice the little group of bystanders over in the area that would eventually be the control booth before Azusa - without a count-in from Ritsu or any audible cue at all - began to lay down a sharp, staccato opening riff.

    Hōkago Tea Time
    "Singing!"
    Singing! (K-On! the Movie End Title theme single - 2011)

    Two bars later, Mio joined her for its first repetition; then Mugi came in on the second and Ritsu on the third, before Yui wound up and launched them into the main body of the song, laying her new riff over top of the original while it continued hammering along underneath.

    As Mio stepped to the one stand mic they'd set up between her station and Yui's and began to sing, the part of Kate's mind that always analyzed music she was hearing realized that it recognized the rhythm of the foundational riff: It was the hook from the band's very first (and still their signature) song, "Fuwa Fuwa Time". Same pattern, different notes and intonation, transforming it from the grinning face of a pop-rock theme to the stiffened spine of a driving, defiant anthem.

    It had lyrics to match; like almost all of their songs', they were mostly in Kokugo, which was close enough to Japanese for Kate, fluent in that language from childhood, to not so much translate them in her head as just instinctively perceive their Anglo-Standard meaning. This, Kate knew, was the work of Mio at her most serious - no romantic musings or sparkly metaphors here, but a bald declaration of... not even hope, but intent, an intent emphasized by a strategic sprinkling of Standard words. We're not doing anything as passive as hoping for a bright future, Mio seemed to be saying; we're going to have one, if we have to grab the universe by the scruff of the neck and shake one out of it.

    Mio's voice was at full power, unleashed completely without her usual self-consciousness, and when Yui joined her at the single mic for the bridges and choruses, she was using the newer, lower-range singing style she'd developed in the course of her studies of the Delta blues. The result was a vocal performance that did the song's lyrics, and the powerful, intricate instrumental work behind them, full justice, and Kate felt a chill race up her spine as they laid it down.

    There was so much to take in, beyond the lyrics and their delivery, that a musician less technically skilled, or less deeply invested, would have missed a lot of the details, but Kate's ear caught them all - some to be remarked upon in the moment, others to be noticed later, upon mental review. The way Ritsu was making an especial effort to maintain a steady tempo, usually her greatest weakness as a drummer (she was, after all, very much of the Keith Moon clade); the carefully chosen voices Mugi was using for the complicated keyboard line; the way Yui and Azusa weren't playing their usual lead and rhythm roles so much as both playing lead guitar, one or the other in rhythm mode at any given moment, but neither pinned exclusively to the task; how Mio was giving her bass just as free a rein as her voice, laying down the full Thunderfingers experience, but never for a moment failing to drive the song's relentless beat.

    The end result was a sound instantly recognizable as her students', and yet... not darker, exactly, because for all its serious tone and uncompromising delivery, it conveyed a powerfully, determinedly positive message. Sharper, perhaps. More grown-up, but without abandoning that youthful spark that was so much of what made Hōkago Tea Time what it was. It was the most ambitious thing she'd ever heard them play, and she would have bet any amount of money anyone cared to name that it had not existed when she'd left on her ill-starred trip to the South Pole the week before last.

    As they dove into what Kate's instincts told her would be the last bridge/chorus, after Yui's brief but blazing guitar solo, her heart - cold and heavy as lead these past few days - blazed with it, hot with pride in these five girls for the effort they must have expended to make this happen, buoyed by the gratitude she felt at the knowledge that they had done it specifically for her benefit. Her eyes threatened to fill with tears, not for the first time lately, and this time she just let them come.

    Every moment upon moment, they won't stop ending
    But every time one ends, another always starts
    So I believe in the future

    Let's follow this road even if it isn't one
    The places we go together are our road

    This vow is etched in our hearts with the beat:
    Yes, we go! Yes, we fly! Yes, we play!
    Always and forever...

    As the music reached a peak behind them, Yui stepped away from the mic and let Mio deliver the final line, in Standard, alone, her eyes locked on their teacher's as she did so:

    Yes, we are singing now!

    They rode out a last iteration of the melody, never letting up, and then wrapped it up with a thunderous, cutoff outro version of the opening. Unlike many of Hōkago Tea Time's numbers, this was not a song with a jam-session windout, where the members would break it down into little improvised solos and then shut it off. It kept making its one unrelenting statement until the very end, and slammed the door as suddenly as it had kicked it open in the first place.

    In the ringing silence that followed, the five members the band stood - sweat-flecked, breathing hard - and watched with wide and nervous eyes for their sensei's reaction.

    A little unexpectedly, that reaction was to burst into tears - but to do it with such a big and luminous smile on her face that no one could possibly mistake it for disappointment or grief - and applause at the same moment. With a jubilant cry, Yui turned Gīta around on her back and ran to engulf Kate in a hug, her patch cable trailing behind her in a way that reminded Mio randomly of the power cords on that silly giant robot show Ritsu had loved so much when they were kids. A moment later, Azusa followed her, and then the rest of the Art of Noise, Corwin and his friends, and the "junior varsity" all crowded around, clapping and cheering.

    Eleven people was the smallest audience Hōkago Tea Time had ever played for outside of practice, but the applause that washed over the band from their hands was by far the sweetest they had ever tasted, and Mio felt her knees go a little weak with relief as she took Elizabass from her shoulder and stood her carefully by her amp.

    "Welp," said Ritsu cheerfully, pausing to chug back most of a bottle of water, "I guess that worked!"

    Mugi beamed. "I love it when things work."


    Chapter Eleven: "Just What I Needed"

    Xinqiwu, Qiyue 16, 291 ASC
    Friday, July 16, 2410
    Asami Sato Girls' Academy
    Sakuragaoka, United Republic, Dìqiú

    Ritsu Tainaka pushed open the door to the Light Music clubroom, dropped her school bag off to the left just inside, and then wobbled theatrically toward the middle of the room, declaring,

    "Clear the bench! I need to fall down."

    Underclass members Jun Suzuki and Ui Hirasawa scrambled off the padded bench just in time to avoid having their senpai collapse into their laps, as Ritsu hurled herself face-down onto the bench without regard to its availability. This made an unexpectedly woody thonk, after which she lay there motionless for several seconds before observing in a muffled voice,

    "... Ow, my head."

    "Idiot," said Mio Akiyama with fond exasperation. "It's padded, but not that well."

    "Yeah, I keep forgetting that," Ritsu agreed, sitting up and rubbing her forehead ruefully.

    "We should get a mattress in here for moments like that," Yui Hirasawa mused, only half-jokingly.

    Ritsu perked up with a slightly evil smile. "Ooh, yeah. Actually, I can think of all kinds of situations where that would be handy as heck."

    "Somehow I don't think the administration would be OK with most of them, senpai," Jun remarked.

    "What are you implying, Suzuki?" Ritsu demanded mock-indignantly, but Jun was not one to be cowed; she just gave her senior back an insouciant little smirk and said nothing.

    Ritsu let it drop, leaned back on the bench, and tipped her head back, regarding the conference table upside-down. "So how do you think you did, everybody? I don't think I bombed too badly, but that math test was murder."

    At the table, Yui tilted her head quizzically. "Really? I didn't think that one was too bad. The one I had trouble with was Geography."

    "Yui, we live in a world that has like five countries," Ritsu observed. "How can you have trouble with Geography." Then, before anyone could answer her rhetorical question, she giggled and said, "I just sounded like the mover trailer guy. 'In a world that has like five countries, one girl has trouble with Geography.'"

    "Must've been at the top of the stack when she learned minor-key transposition," said Jun nonchalantly.

    "Jun-chan!" Ui objected.

    "What?" Jun replied. Off to one side, Azusa Nakano giggled a little guiltily, while Yui just smiled and shrugged as if to say, It's a fair cop.

    "Actually, senpai, the Water Tribes aren't the same country," Azusa pointed out once she'd recovered her composure.

    "Really?" Ritsu said. "Oh. Well, crap, got that one wrong, then." Shrugging, she went on, "Oh well! Anyway, where the heck is Mugi?"

    "I saw her and Manabe-senpai in the office on my way here," said Ui.

    "The office? Hm. I wonder what that's about," said Mio.

    "It's that room where the principal is, but that's not important right now," said Ritsu matter-of-factly.

    Mio was still eyeing her skeptically (and possibly gauging the range between them) when Tsumugi Kotobuki and Nodoka arrived.

    "I'm terribly sorry I'm late, everyone," said Mugi as she entered.

    "Mugi-chan!" said Yui cheerfully. "What did you need at the office?"

    "Nodoka was helping me with a little administrative matter," Mugi explained. "And now that it's taken care of, there's someone I'd like you all to meet." Turning back to the door, she added, "Sumire-chan? Come on in and meet the club."

    After a moment's hesitation, a girl none of the others recognized stepped into the doorway. The first thing that struck them about her was that she bore a striking resemblance to Mugi: blue-eyed, fair-skinned, with very similar long blonde hair. She was a little shorter, petite and fine-boned, with more angular facial features, and she wore the uniform of a different school, in the sailor style as opposed to the blazer-and-tie format favored by Sato Academy.

    "Um... pardon the intrusion," said the new arrival in a pleasant, slightly hushed voice. "It's very nice to meet you all. My name is Sumire."

    Yui sprang up from the table and bounded around the bench to take a closer look, eyes wide with amazement. "Mugi-chan! You never told us you have a little sister!"

    "Er, well, I'm not... not really..." Sumire began, then trailed bashfully off, her face going red.

    Mugi put a reassuring hand on her shoulder and said, "Sumire is Mr. and Mrs. Saitō's daughter. They're my parents' butler and housekeeper, respectively. They've been with my family since before either of us was born, so she basically is my little sister as far as I'm concerned." With a smiling wink, she added, "When our parents aren't around, anyway. They can get a bit hung up on the details sometimes. But they're not here now! Let me introduce you, Sumire-chan."

    After making introductions, Mugi got down to business, and the other members of the Light Music Club discovered to their amusement that Mugi and Sumire, as a team, were even more efficient about putting together tea service for a group. Watching them in action, Ritsu caught Mio's eye and gave her a little smile, which the bassist returned; silent communication between two very old friends, encompassing an entire conversation about what an interesting insight it was into their enigmatic friend that she had learned to work a table alongside the butler's daughter.

    Once they were all squared away and enjoying tea and cake, Ui swung automatically into her social-ambassador role and asked, "So you go to Central High, Sumire?"

    "Well...not any more, I guess," said Sumire. "We've just been down in the office... Manabe-senpai helped us work out the transfer paperwork. I'll be starting here after the summer break."

    "Oh! Well hey, that's convenient," said Ritsu, grinning. "Interested in joining a club? We've got cake."

    "Don't you think that's being a bit pushy, Ritsu-senpai?" asked Azusa. "We only just met her."

    "Well... I'm not sure yet, but I have heard a lot about your club from Miss—uh... from Mugi," Sumire replied.

    "And you still wanted to meet us?" Mio inquired dryly. "You're certainly brave."

    "Aw, Mio, why you got to do me that way?" said Ritsu in a hurt tone of voice.

    Sumire giggled, the byplay going a little way toward breaking the ice. "She told me your meetings are always a lot of fun, and that you've gotten a few new members my own age recently."

    "Yep, that'd be us," said Jun, nodding toward Ui. "Well, and Azusa, but she's already made the varsity team. Hey, why don't you hang out with us some over break? The big kids are going on their swanky summer retreat, and we can kick back and get to know each other without them looking over our shoulders," she added with a wink.

    "That sounds like fun," Ui agreed.

    "You guys aren't coming with us?" asked Yui, sounding surprised.

    "Nah, the invite was for you guys," Jun said. "We don't even know Mio's boyfriend."

    "He's not my boyfriend!" Mio protested, blushing.

    "I'm sure Corwin-senpai wouldn't mind if you guys came too," Azusa put in, diplomatically deflecting the conversation before Ritsu could take the opportunity to put her oar in as well.

    "We might come up for an afternoon sometime next week," said Nodoka, "but we have a few things of our own to take care of in town."

    "'We'?" said Ritsu, her golden eyes glinting mischievously. "So you're admitting you're part of the gang now, Nodoka?"

    "I don't recall denying it," Nodoka replied calmly. "It's just that I have a lot of other responsibilities. Unlike certain slackers in Class 2-1," she added archly, shooting a pointed glance at Yui.

    "You're so cold, Nodoka-chan," said Yui, pouting, but neither of them could hold the tableau for long, and presently their laughter opened the way for the whole room to join them.

    Xinqiliu, Qiyue 17
    Saturday, July 17
    Republic City Central Station

    The train carrying Hōkago Tea Time arrived in Republic City a little before lunchtime. Having been assured that they wouldn't need to take their heavier equipment with them, they had tried to pack light, but still ended up with quite a lot of stuff to wrangle—particularly Mugi, whose instrument was borderline "heavy equipment" in itself.

    "OK, you guys give Mugi a hand," said Ritsu, whose usual drums had remained behind in the clubroom. "Azusa and I will go out and find our ride. We'll meet up outside."

    "What kind of ride do you suppose Corwin-senpai arranged for us?" Azusa wondered as she followed the club president toward the bronze doors leading out to the station plaza. "His note was pretty vague."

    "Well, even without our amps and whatnot, we've still got a lot of stuff, so it's probably a van or the like," Ritsu replied. "Hopefully we'll be able to stop off and get some sandwiches or something on the way up. From the sound of it, it's probably a long ride up to... oh."

    Azusa nearly ran into the back of her senpai as Ritsu stopped dead in her tracks, and in mid-sentence, just outside the door; then, detouring around her, she was starting to ask what the problem was when she saw, and was momentarily rendered speechless herself, her cat ears springing involuntarily up in surprise.

    Out in the middle of the brick-paved plaza in front of the station stood not a van, but rather the unmistakable shaggy shape of a sky bison—not the same one, Azusa realized after a moment's dumbfounded pause, as the one she'd met a few weeks ago at Yui-senpai's house. The pattern of stripes on this one was subtly different. Nor was the woman standing alongside the bison, holding up a hand-lettered sign reading HŌKAGO TEA TIME, Yui's Air Nomad mother, Tsering Hirasawa. In fact, it was obvious at first glance that she wasn't an Air Nomad at all...

    ... she was Avatar Korra.

    "Uh... what?" said Ritsu to no one in particular, as if requesting an explanation of the universe itself.

    "Hi!" said Korra cheerfully. "You must be Ritsu..." She considered for a moment, head tilted thoughtfully, then went on, "... and Azusa, am I right? I'm Korra."

    "Um... yeah," said Ritsu.

    "We... we know who you are," added Azusa slowly, her face mostly blank with disbelief.

    "This is Mogi," Korra went on, patting the bison's side.

    "Ghromph, said Mogi with a nod.

    "Hi," Ritsu replied automatically.

    "Wow," Azusa said.

    "Corwin asked me to make sure you guy got up to Mount Weitang," Korra explained. "Are the others still inside?"

    Ritsu blinked, pulling herself out of her reverie, and grinned. "Yeah, they're just dealing with baggage claim and stuff. Mogi, huh? Oh man, I have to be the one to make this introduction." Turning, she saw the others emerging from the station, pushing a luggage cart piled with all their things, instrument bags on their backs. "Hey guys, check it out!"

    Ritsu wasn't sure whether Mio blanched at the sight of the bison or the Avatar, but either way, she went almost entirely colorless, freezing alongside the luggage cart as though she thought that by keeping completely still, she might avoid their notice. Mugi looked faintly startled, but recovered her composure so quickly she might as well not have lost it, bowing politely.

    And Yui, completely unconcerned, bounded over and offered the sky bison an apple from the snack pocket on the front of her backpack, then greeted his human companion as though she'd known her for years.

    "It's great to finally meet you all," Korra said, tactfully ignoring the fact that two of them hadn't actually dared to address her yet. "Let's get your stuff aboard and get a move on!"

    Still grinning broadly, Ritsu beckoned Mugi over to the bison and said, "Let me introduce you to our ride. Mugi, Mogi. Mogi, Mugi," barely getting it out before dissolving into giggles.

    "It's lovely to meet you, too," said Mugi without missing a beat, offering the bison a polite bow of his own.

    "Are you enjoying yourself, Ritsu?" asked Mio, somewhere beyond deadpan thanks to the lingering shock.

    "Immensely," Ritsu managed to reply.


    Underneath the giggling, Ritsu was actually a little worried that the ride up to the mountain might be too much for Mio, between being in such close proximity to someone as famous as Avatar Korra and the whole open-air flying thing; but she found almost as soon as they got underway that she needn't have worried. If anything, being in the air seemed to agree with her. She showed no physical fear once they were airborne, and indeed was so captivated by the experience that she soon lost her social fear as well, stationing herself at one of the front corners of the saddle and enthusing to their pilot about the view of the city, sprawling out far below them.

    Ritsu had also half-feared that Yui, who was notoriously prone to motion sickness in cars and on buses, would react poorly to flight, but that, too, seemed to be an unfounded fear. Indeed, she seemed to have the best air legs of any of them, which Ritsu realized, after she thought about it for a few seconds, really stood to reason.

    Their youngest member, on the other hand, didn't seem to be taking very well to the experience; she was crouching in the lee of the low-wall-like pommel at the front of the saddle platform, head down, eyes tightly shut. Ritsu was just thinking that, as club president, she ought to go over there and give her a little pep talk, when Yui beat her to it. Noticing her kōhai's discomfort, she went forward, knelt behind her, and gathered her up in an embrace.

    Azusa was a bit startled to be hugged abruptly from behind, but only because she'd already been so tense before it happened. Her muted yelp was mostly lost in the slipstream as Yui leaned in and murmured gently,

    "Don't be scared, Azu-nyan. Nothing's going to happen to you."

    "I'm not scared," Azusa protested automatically, knowing it was a lie, knowing Yui would recognize it for one by the way Azusa's hands seized her forearm where it crossed her chest.

    "It's OK," Yui went on, as if Azusa hadn't said anything. "No one knows quite what to expect the first time. But you're totally safe here. And you're missing an amazing view. Look—even Mio-chan's enjoying the flight."

    Azusa cracked open one eye and looked. Mio was, indeed, obviously having a ball, a few feet off to their left, leaning out to take it all in. Slowly, almost unwillingly, Azusa opened her eyes fully and raised her head, looking over the pommel and past Korra to the view beyond.

    "Oh wow," she murmured. They were sweeping over the eastern outskirts of Republic City now, and before them were spread out the great peaks of the mountain range that bounded most of the city on its landward sides. These were spectacularly dramatic, tall and jagged in a way that the lesser mountains near Sakuragaoka were not, some of them snow-capped even in July. The sky up here seemed bigger, too, somehow, its blue deeper.

    "See?" said Yui cheerfully. She rose slowly to her feet, helping her kōhai up along with her, and Azusa braced her hands on the top of the pommel wall and leaned forward a little for a better look. Yui had to release her before she could do that, but stayed very close behind her, her own hands resting just outboard of Azusa's, looking over her shoulder.

    A short way behind them, sitting amid the bags and gear, Ritsu and Mugi glanced at each other, amusement on the former's face, a serene little smile on the latter's.

    Before long, the view got even more amazing. Once they cleared the sprawl of the city and got up into the mountains proper, Korra, unsuccessfully trying to hide a smile, encouraged Mogi to "Give them the tour." The bison obligingly made a long banking turn as he delved higher into the craggy peaks, ultimately offering a perfect view of the Three Brothers and the meadow valley that lay between them. The girls gasped and oohed with delight at the view, particularly when they saw what stood on the shore of the lake at the valley's head.

    "Azu-nyan, look," Yui cried, almost squeaking with excitement as they entered the mountain valley. "It's a castle!"

    Azusa did look, what remained of her earlier fears swept away entirely by the beautiful view. "Well, sort of... but it's got all that glass. It's... I'm not really sure what it's like. I've never seen anything quite like it."

    "Oh, wow," Mio said, leaning a bit forward against the saddle to get a better look. "He said it was a house on the lake, but I didn't expect anything like this."

    As Mogi began to descend, they could all see that it was indeed a house on a lake, but that was a lot like saying the Phoenix House Hotel was a large red building.

    "The holos didn't do it justice," Azusa agreed, her eyes wide.

    The lake was a deep blue that glinted in the sunlight, one edge rippling and splashing as the waterfall off the mountain flowed into it. The meadow beyond the rocky shore was covered in lush grass and bursts of color from the flowers that grew there.

    The house really did look a bit like a castle, Mio thought, with that big tower coming off one side, but Azusa was right about the glass that made up most of one side, too. It was a beautiful building—really almost a mansion—but something about the way the wide blue roofs and creamy walls combined with the glazed areas made it welcoming, rather than imposing.

    Ritsu turned, leaning back against the side of the sky bison's saddle, and grinned lazily. "Well, gang, I guess Mio having a sugar daddy has officially paid off! Ow!"

    Mio, blushing furiously, hunched over a bit after giving Ritsu her ritual donk on the head, trying and largely failing to make herself disappear. "We're still up high enough that I'm pretty sure you'd hit the ground before the Avatar could catch you, Ritsu."

    Korra, who had managed keep a straight face through all this only through a titanic effort of will, suddenly spoke up, making Mio jump. "Actually, I probably could still get her down safely if you tossed her off from here, but I might be willing to arrange a water landing for a suitable bribe."

    That got everyone, even Mio, giggling, and the sound of their laughter trailed behind them as Mogi started his final approach. As they drew closer to the house, the girls all noticed another sky bison grazing sedately on the lawn. A moment after that, they saw that someone was coming out of the front door to greet them: a person dressed in the distinctive garb of an Air Nomad.

    As Mogi settled down gracefully, they recognized her as Nyima, who had helped them with their gear for their surprise show at the Art's new studio. "Hello, ladies! It's nice to see all of you again." Walking to Mogi's side, she helped those who wanted a hand down, then gestured to the house.

    "Welcome to Bellehaven. We've been getting a few things ready for you."

    Mio looked around, a bit confused. "We?"

    Smiling, Nyima opened the door to usher them inside. "I've been taking care of picking up essentials and stocking the pantry, but I asked for a hand with the final preparations."

    Inside, there were, in fact, two more women waiting for them. One was a tall woman in something that looked almost like an elaborate maid uniform, with a long white apron over a deep red blouse and long matching skirt, and a strange metal collar arrangement that almost looked like an armored gorget. The other was another airbender, this one shorter than Nyima and perhaps three or four years older, though she also bore a master's set of tattoos.

    "Good afternoon," the uniformed one said pleasantly as she offered a formal curtsy, "I am Yamato—I've heard so much about you from Admiral Ravenhair! It's a pleasure to meet you all at last."

    "Admiral?" Ritsu wondered quietly to Mio, who shrugged with a search-me expression.

    The other woman grinned a bit mischievously as she looked at the group. "And I've met one of you before, though I bet you don't recognize me."

    That left the girls looking at each other with confusion, and after a round of shrugs the airbender laughed. "Well, it's been a long time, Yui—I used to read you stories when your parents made their summer visits to Air Temple Island."

    She cleared her throat, drawing herself up, and then began to recite, "'Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who lived on the moon...'"

    That seemed to spark something for Yui, at least, and her confusion turned to a look of surprise, and then a somewhat happier astonishment.

    "Master Ikki?" Yui asked, as if she didn't quite believe what she was saying. "Um... you used to be old, though," she added hesitantly.

    Ikki laughed, then winked at the girls. "I got better!" Then, completely failing to explain further, she turned a beaming smile on the others, while Korra smacked her forehead into one hand. "So! Let's give you girls the grand tour!"


    Chapter Twelve: "In the Hall of the Mountain King"

    Xinqiliu, Qiyue 17
    Saturday, July 17
    Mount Weitang, United Republic, Dìqiú

    With a finely honed instinct for the dramatic, Korra, Yamato, and the two airbenders started the grand tour in a fairly low-key fashion. The door their guests had entered by was in the part of the house that stood only a single story high, apart from the tower rising from the far back corner, and the entryway itself was nothing particularly spectacular. From this, doors led off to a coatroom and a corridor on one side, while the other side was dominated by a large, open archway that gave onto a room with a cheerful black-and-white-checkered tile floor.

    "Might as well start with the kitchen," Korra observed with a grin. "Nerve center of the house, you know." She led the girls of Hōkago Tea Time through the arch and gestured around. This was indeed the kitchen, large and well-appointed but not containing any particular surprises at first glance—although Mugi, who had an eye for that sort of thing, noticed that all of the fittings and appliances were top-of-the-line, discreetly but unmistakably expensive.

    "I had just finished stocking the pantry when you arrived," said Yamato pleasantly. "You should find all the provisions you'll need."

    "Oh hey, check it out," Ritsu called from the entryway to the pantry, which was literally a second room attached to the kitchen. "There's an old-fashioned soda machine in here. Does it work?"

    "It certainly does," Yamato said with a smile. "That's my own personal touch," she explained as the others crowded around Ritsu to look. "My special Ramune formula, not available from anyone else. Have one! You must be thirsty from the flight up here."

    "This is really good," said Azusa, after Ritsu passed around bottles and she'd had the first drink from hers. Falling back on old habits, she bowed to Yamato and added, "Thank you!"

    "Yes, thanks a lot!" Yui agreed, wiggling her bottle so the glass marble jingled merrily in the neck.

    "It's my pleasure, believe me," said Yamato. "You go and have the rest of the tour, now, and when you're finished with that, I'll have lunch ready."

    "She seems really nice," said Mio as Korra led them all out of the kitchen through the matching arch on the far side. "But why did she call Corwin-senpai 'Admiral'?"

    "It's, uh, kind of a long story," Korra replied. "The short version is that she sort of works for him now. Part of the outcome from a little adventure he had on Earth recently."

    Further curiosity was forestalled as the girls passed through the arch and realized that they'd entered the two-story part of the house—and that this was even more exceptional than they had thought it would be from the air. It wasn't just the south end of the two-story wing that was glazed like a greenhouse, they could see now, but in fact the entire wing, at least on the ground floor. The whole level was one giant room, and on three sides, the walls were glass from floor to ceiling, letting in a flood of daylight and providing a spectacular panoramic view of the lake, the mountainsides sloping down into it on all sides, and the waterfall cascading down the central peak to the east.

    "Oh wow," Yui breathed, going to the nearest pane to get a closer look.

    "Are we actually out over the water?" Ritsu wondered, noticing the sliding door that seemed to lead out onto a sort of pier extending into the lake.

    "That's right," Korra confirmed, nodding. "The wing we just came from is on shore, but this one is built on pilings."

    "Amazing," Mugi said.

    "This area is the dining room, obviously," said Nyima, indicating the table and chairs. "If you'll follow me this way, the other end is even better."

    She was quite right about that, for the other end of the long, open room was just as obviously the living area. There was a big, comfy-looking leather sofa positioned for an optimal view of the falls, a foosball table, and a cozier arrangement of couch, loveseat, and armchair in the corner, grouped around a shiny-new Future Industries flatscreen TV. Above, the second floor ended partway along in a sort of mezzanine, beyond which the whole southern end of the wing was one great, high-ceilinged, glass-walled space.

    They lingered for a while in the living room, exclaiming over the view, the vast expanses of glass, and (in Ritsu's case) the presence of a GameCenter to go along with the TV, before Korra and the airbenders herded them gently upstairs to continue the tour. The mezzanine overlooking the living room seemed to be set up as a kind of office/study, with a desk, bookshelves, and a reading chair; beyond it, down a short hallway, were two large bedrooms, mirror images of each other, sharing a palatial bathroom between them.

    "You're going to have to figure out your own sleeping arrangements, but these aren't the only bedrooms," Ikki pointed out. "There are two more in the tower wing."

    "Speaking of which, that's our next stop," Korra added, opening the door at the end of the hall and ushering them through. They'd seen what lay beyond from the air on their way in; the door led out onto the roof of the single-story wing. This was finished as a deck, complete with patio furniture, a barbecue grill, and an outdoor pai sho table, and there was a separate entrance up here into the second floor of the tower.

    "You five should be especially interested in what's in here," said Nyima with a smile as she opened this door. "It was originally intended to be a dojo," she explained, "but we thought you might prefer it set up like this."

    The room beyond, octagonal in shape, had no fixtures in it besides the spiral stairs leading down to the ground floor and farther up into the tower—but it did feature an array of amplifiers, a drum kit, a couple of stand mics, and a range of guitar stands ready to hand, arranged roughly as Nyima had seen the band's usual layout to be when she'd helped them set up for their impromptu concert for Kate before finals. It was about the same size as the part of the club room they actually played in, less the area with the table and the storeroom off to the side, which gave it a pleasantly cozy and familiar feel as the band members took up their positions and unpacked their instruments.

    "I hope the drum setup meets with your approval, Ricchan," said Ikki. "It's my own rig from the Serious Avatar Business days; I dug it out and gave it a quick overhaul when I heard you guys were coming up here."

    Ritsu sat down at the drums, made a couple of quick adjustments, and then rose and gave her a firebender salute, which she returned with the airbender equivalent and a playfully grave smile.

    "It'll be perfect," Ritsu said. "I, wow. Thank you. It's really an honor."

    "Oh, heck, don't worry about it," said Ikki with a grin. "You're better than I was anyway. I ought to be thanking you."

    "If I can interrupt the mutual admiration society," said Korra dryly, drawing a giggle from Yui, "we still have to get on to the best bit."

    "You're kidding, the giant room with the lake view wasn't the best bit?" said Ritsu.

    "I can't wait for this now," Mio agreed.

    "Well, that is pretty cool," Korra agreed, "but in my humble opinion, there's still one thing in the house that's even better. But first, let's finish off the tower."

    The level above the practice room was fitted out as a third bedroom, smaller than the others but very pleasant; above that, through a hatch in the ceiling, was the open-sided aerie at the top of the tower, perfect for meditating on the sunset beyond Republic City to the west. This, Korra assured the five, was not the best bit either, though Yui—perhaps feeling a gentle tug from the Air Nomad in her genetic makeup—might have begged to differ.

    Korra was smiling half to herself, enjoying the politely restrained but obviously deepening puzzlement of her charges as she led them down the stairs into the basement. This was... well... the basement, a large, plain, mostly featureless room into which had been placed all the mundane but necessary machinery that made the house work—electrical generator, water purifier, furnace, air conditioning plant, and so forth. The laundry machines were down here, too, as well as a few pieces of equipment whose function the girls could not readily divine, but which were not particularly impressive to behold. The lighting was ample but basic and industrial, the walls and floor of creamy, unadorned sandstone.

    The members of Hōkago Tea Time glanced in mutual confusion at each other as the Avatar led them through this space, around a corner, and to a large, dark-stained wooden door. Here she paused, hand on the knob, and asked with a mischievous grin, "Are you ready?"

    "Uh... I guess so?" Ritsu replied.

    "Well, then, prepare to have your minds blown," said Korra, and with a flourish, she swung the door open and gestured them through.

    Beyond the door lay a fourth bedroom, large and comfortably appointed, with pleasant blue walls, its own ensuite bathroom tucked away in a corner, and a half-wall dividing off another bit of it into a little seating area. For a second, as they entered, the band members couldn't figure out what the big deal was...

    ... until they realized, almost as one, that the walls weren't blue. The color was that of the sky, because they were transparent... and the slightly shimmery quality of the light in here was because the eastern end of the basement, where the room was situated, reached a good dozen feet into the lake. The top of the floor-to-ceiling windows was at least two or three feet below the surface of the water.

    "Oh. Spirits," said Azusa, her cat ears springing up, and she absently reached up to touch Yui's arm as her senpai automatically embraced her from behind, making a soft sound of enchantment as she did so.

    "My goodness," Mugi agreed, sounding entranced. "My, my, my."

    "... OK... you were right," Mio conceded, not taking her eyes off the view. "This is better than the living room."

    "I know, right?" Korra replied. "I have to admit, as one of the architects, that this wasn't in the original design. It was an idea our general contractor had during construction, and wasn't it a good one."

    "I hope he got a bonus," agreed Ritsu.

    "He did all right," said Korra with a grin.

    They all stood there in silence for a few minutes, watching schools of lake fish cruise by and marveling at the crystalline clarity of the water. Then, slightly to everyone's surprise, a very large white shape suddenly swam into view from off to one side, then turned and peered in at them, its long tail swishing slowly back and forth behind it.

    "Oh wow!" Yui cried, delighted. "Look, Azu-nyan, it's a polar bear dog!"

    Korra rolled her eyes in cheerful exasperation. "Niri! C'mon. Why you gotta upstage me that way?"


    Niri was waiting just outside the entryway to greet them when they arrived back upstairs, and only the Avatar's lightning reflexes and command of waterbending saved those nearest the door from a drenching after a truly epic wet-dog shake.

    "You saved that just for us, huh," said Korra with another eyeroll as she dismissed the water with a sardonic flick of her hand, leaving the polar bear dog as dry as if she'd spent the last half-hour lying out in the sun. "Get in here and quit causing trouble. Everyone, this is Niri. Don't worry, she's harmless. Mostly," she added with a wink. "C'mon—I'm pretty sure lunch is ready."

    Lunch was, indeed, ready; the tour group entered the dining room to find the table they'd seen earlier meticulously set for a formal meal. The main dish was a variant on a perennial favorite in their coastal hometown, steamed rice topped with glazed strips of grilled eel, with all the accoutrements to be expected in the best class of establishments; the whole offering was lavish without being overdone.

    "This unadon is amazing," Mugi said, to immediate agreement from her bandmates.

    "Thank you," said Yamato pleasantly. "My colleague Kaga caught the unagi for me just this morning."

    Azusa glanced thoughtfully at the morsel she'd just been about to eat, then asked, "It's not the Unagi... is it?"

    "No, no," Yamato assured her. "Kaga did offer to catch the Great Unagi for me, but even I don't have a recipe that calls for 100,000 tons of eel meat. Besides, it's a Kyoshi Island national treasure," she added with an impish smile.

    "After an opening like that, I can see I'm going to have my work cut out for me feeding this crew when you're gone," Ritsu observed wryly after the meal was complete.

    "Don't make it sound like you're going to be doing it all alone," Mio objected.

    "Ricchan is the best cook of all of us, though," Yui pointed out.

    "It's true," Mugi agreed, nodding, then added sagely, "Whoever she marries is going to be very lucky."

    "You just made it weird, Mugi," said Ritsu, more casually than the remark's wording really seemed to call for.

    "Well, before I go, I'll walk you through the provisions I've laid in for you," Yamato said.

    While they did that, the others adjourned to the living room, where Korra and the two airbenders were amused to see that Yui eschewed all the furniture in favor of curling happily up on the floor with Niri. Her bandmates seemed to find this entirely unremarkable; they all knew well that Yui was a great friend of dogs, and this was likely to be the grandest specimen she had encountered by far. The seven of them chatted for a little while, mainly about the band's plans and what Korra knew of Kaitlyn's.

    "She's gone home to New Avalon to take care of some things, but she should be back midweek," Korra told them when Mio raised the question. "I think she and her band will be up sometime after that, maybe next weekend, to see how you're getting along."

    "How are Corwin and his family holding up?" asked Mugi.

    "I feel a little guilty that we're up here enjoying their house while they're dealing with... everything," admitted Azusa with a downcast expression. From the floor next to the chair she'd taken, Yui reached up and took her nearer hand, concern on her face.

    "They're... surviving," Korra said carefully. "But you shouldn't feel guilty. They made the offer, after all, and I'm sure it helps knowing that someone's getting some enjoyment from the place."

    Nyima nodded. "What they're going through is tough," she said, "but they'll welcome any chance they get to..." She paused, weighing words, for a moment, then went on, "... to push back against the dark a bit."

    Before anyone could respond to that, Ritsu and Yamato returned from the kitchen, the former bubbling over with her customary enthusiasm. "You guys are not gonna believe what I can do with that kitchen. This is gonna be amazing."

    "Well, then, I guess our work here is done," said Ikki. "What do you say, kids? Let's get out of these ladies' hair and let them get on with their business."

    "Works for me," said Korra.

    "If you find we missed anything, just call the number on the board by the phone in the kitchen," Nyima told them. "My sister runs a courier service in town, she can bring up anything you need."

    "Thank you for all your help," said Ritsu, bowing, before Mio could rise and beat her to it. The others all seconded her sentiments immediately, not to say profusely.

    "You're very welcome," said Yamato. "I hope you have a very pleasant and productive stay."

    "Absolutely," Korra agreed. "I'll let Corwin know you're settled in when I see him tomorrow. I'm sure he'll be pleased to hear it—and that you were so impressed by his design," she added with a grin. Then, whistling, she called, "C'mon, Niri!"

    Niri raised her head and looked at the Avatar, then put it back down with a muted ursocanine grumble and made no move to get up, her body language replying clearly, Nah, I'm good. You got this.

    Korra put a hand on her hip and glowered. "Niri. C'mon, girl. It's time to go."

    Niri gave a deep sigh, in the manner of one who is being unduly harassed, and remained where she was.

    "Really? Is this the way you want to play this?" Korra wondered, hamming it up a bit for the increasingly amused band members' benefit. "'Cause I'm leaving, and if you don't come with, then you're up here until whenever I get back."

    At this, Niri moved, but only insofar as she turned her head slightly to glance at Korra, then returned to her original position, as if to say, Great, see you then.

    "... OK, seriously now," Korra said. "I'm pretty sure none of these girls knows how to look after a polar bear dog, or has any interest in learning."

    "I don't mind," said Yui brightly.

    "So long, math skills," Ritsu quipped, making Mio stifle a laugh and slug her.

    Korra considered the magnificent inertia of her spirit guide, the brightly willing face of the girl she'd curled up with, and the cheerfully bemused looks of Yui's colleagues, then gave a good-natured sigh and said, "All right, fine. If nobody minds and you promise to be good, I guess you can stay. I'll just write down a few tips..."


    "That dog sure can be stubborn when she wants to be," Korra observed from the "pilot's seat" of Mogi as she and the two Air Nomads cruised in leisurely formation back down to the city.

    Ikki, up on the bison's saddle, laughed. "Well, they do say dogs resemble their owners."

    "Do you think it'll really be OK, leaving her with them?" Nyima wondered from Vayu, a few yards off to starboard.

    "Oh, they'll be fine," Korra said. "Niri's not very high-maintenance. Heck, she'll be good security for them, not that I'm expecting any trouble. If I'm not back from Outside before they leave, though, will you make sure she gets back to Air Temple Island, Nyima?"

    "Of course," Nyima agreed, then added with a chuckle, "If I can convince her to leave the Hirasawa girl's side by then. You might lose your spirit animal, Avatar."

    "I noticed that," said Korra with a laugh. "Well, Niri's a pretty good judge of character. I didn't realize you knew her, Ikki," she added in a that-reminds-me tone.

    "Neither did I, until I saw her," Ikki replied. "Tsering was one of my brightest students in her acolyte days. It's a shame neither of her daughters has the gift."

    "Sounding a little like Meelo there, Ikki," said Korra dubiously.

    "I didn't mean it like that," Ikki said, reddening. "It just means I haven't seen either of them since they got old enough to look after themselves at home." She folded her arms and gave the Avatar a grumpy look. "Sounding like Meelo, indeed."


    "Yui," Mio observed in a tone that split the difference between exasperated and admiring, "only you could talk the Avatar into lending you her dog."

    "More to the point, I can't think of anyone else who would have," Ritsu put in, then grinned and leaned out of her chair to offer the guitarist a high five. "Respect, Miss Hirasawa. Respect."

    "Thank you, thank you," Yui replied, managing to maintain an airy tone for all of a second or two before they all broke up giggling. The silence that followed lasted for a minute or so, as the five sat and gazed out the living room's vast windows at the panoramic view of the lake and the falls.

    "You know what I'm thinking," said Mugi speculatively.

    The girls of Hōkago Tea Time glanced thoughtfully around at each other, then broke into matching, spontaneous grins.

    "Yeah," they all agreed, then jumped to their feet and scampered upstairs to christen their new practice space.


    Chapter Thirteen: "Shelter"

    Xintiyi, Qiyue 19, 291 ASC
    Monday, July 19, 2410
    Sakuragaoka, United Republic
    Dìqiú

    The members of the Asami Sato Girls' Academy Light Music Club's self-proclaimed "junior varsity" met at the Sakuragaoka Center Mall that morning, partly to hang out, but mostly—though none of them had said as much when planning the meeting—to make plans.

    "OK," said Jun Suzuki pragmatically, pretty much the instant they were all assembled. "If we're really gonna do this band thing, we have to figure out who's gonna do what."

    "Hi, Jun-chan, great to see you. How was your weekend? Oh, swell, Manabe-senpai, how about yours?" said Nodoka with gentle sarcasm.

    "You are laying it on a little thick for first thing," Ui Hirasawa agreed.

    "Well, it's not like we've got a ton of time here," Jun insisted, fists on hips. "Not if we want to have anything to surprise the varsity with when we see them again."

    "That was your idea too," Ui protested. "You haven't even bothered to see if the rest of us wanted to do it."

    "Pff, of course you do," retorted Jun, rolling her eyes. "Tell me you don't. Go on. Tell me you're perfectly fine with your sister and the others coming down from the mountain and being the only ones who have something to show off, 'cause you know they will."

    "Well..."

    "She's got a point," Nodoka conceded, smiling.

    "What about you, Saitō?" Jun asked, turning to the fourth person at the table. "Are you in or what?"

    Sumire Saitō blinked, a touch of color rising in her cheeks. "Well... I'm game, but I won't even be able to join the club properly until the fall term starts."

    "Don't worry about that," said Jun confidently. "We've got an in with the student council."

    Nodoka gave a convincing impression of a long-suffering sigh. "Fine, I see how it is..."

    "Right. That's settled. So let's talk positions. Ui just bought a guitar, I don't see her wanting to do anything else for a while. Manabe-senpai's going to sing."

    "I am?" Nodoka inquired, but Jun was already going on,

    "I've been playing bass since junior high, and Tainaka-senpai's, uh, 'advice' notwithstanding, I don't care to try and turn myself into a drummer, so I guess finding one of those is step one."

    "Would you like to give that a try, Sumire-chan?" Ui wondered.

    Sumire brightened. "I already play... a little," she said, hesitating only slightly. "I mean, I haven't in a band or anything, but I have a drum set at home, and I've read some books."

    "Well, hey," said Jun with a grin. "That's convenient. Ui, do you think you could call and ask Tainaka-senpai if we can borrow her kit for the day? Since it's already in the club room and all."

    "Sure, I can do that," Ui agreed, and suited word to deed. Club president Ritsu Tainaka, as it happened, was in an expansive mood—the others, hearing only Ui's side of the conversation, gathered that the senior club members' retreat was going very well—and cheerfully authorized the use of her kit, with the caveat that if the new kid broke anything, it wasn't coming out of Ritsu's salary.

    "Finest kind," said Jun with satisfaction once the call was completed. "What do you say, ladies? Shall we get some lunch and then go jam?"

    "I didn't bring my drumsticks with me," Sumire pointed out.

    "We can probably steal a set from the regular band room," Jun replied.

    "No, no," Sumire said hastily, shaking her head. "The music store is right over there, I'll just buy some."


    While Sumire supplied herself, the others browsed the sheet music and miscellaneous items, chatting speculatively about what sort of things they might attempt for their first jam session.

    "The lineup we have right now is all right," Jun said, "but it doesn't have a lot of depth. We could really do with another guitarist. Or a keyboard player."

    "It's too bad we can't copy Ui-chan," said Nodoka with a wry smile. "She used to play the organ."

    "Not very well, though," Ui demurred, blushing.

    "Hmm. Maybe we should post an ad," Jun mused, looking over the various notes pinned to the corkboard at the front of the store. "'Keyboard player wanted. Must be willing to transfer to Sato Academy. Experience at Art of Noise covers a plus.'"

    Ui was still giggling about that when, from somewhere behind them, they abruptly heard someone lay down the opening riff from a song all three of them had heard played by that very band.

    Journey
    "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)"
    Frontiers (1983)

    Nodoka, Ui, and Jun made a moment's surprised three-way eye contact, then turned as one and followed the sound deeper into the store.

    The three and Sumire, drawn from the drums area, converged toward the back, in the section where the keyboard instruments were displayed. At the end of one of the rows, they found a tall, slim girl with long pale-blonde hair standing over one of the Satotronic ST-8 synthesizers. While the four girls and a couple of store employees watched, she played the keyboard part from "Separate Ways" in its entirety—not altered as a solo performance of the song, but just as if the rest of the band had been there.

    With her eyes closed in concentration, she was unaware that she had attracted an audience while she played. Finishing the song, she remained still for a moment, fingers touching the keys, her expression oddly pensive for someone who had just played a rock standard. Not until one of the store employees and Jun started applauding did she open her eyes, jumping slightly in surprise. Then, seeing the small group of people gathered around the keyboard she'd used, she blushed scarlet and stepped back, raising her hands as if caught doing something she shouldn't.

    "Uh, I'm sorry," she said. "Got a little carried away..."

    "Nothing to apologize for," the employee replied, grinning. "I wish everybody who got a little carried away in here could play as well as that."

    "Um... thanks," said the blonde girl, her blush deepening. She backed up another step, mumbling semi-audible thanks for the loan of the equipment, then turned to make her escape. To do that, though, she'd have had to get past Ui, and Jun could already see her warming up her social tractor beam.

    "Hi!" said Ui with a bright smile.

    The blonde hesitated, checking her withdrawal so as not to crash into Ui, and said, "Um, hi?"

    "I'm Ui, Ui Hirasawa," Ui went on, bowing. "It's nice to meet you."

    "My name's... uh... Shimakaze," said the blonde with an air of intense bemusement.

    "What an interesting name," Sumire observed pleasantly.

    "Are you hungry?" Ui asked. "We were just about to get some lunch..."


    As the four girls left 10GIÄ with their new acquaintance (still looking rather baffled by the whole business) in tow, they were all too distracted by the business of making friends to notice the person passing by the front of the store from the other direction as they passed her—despite the fact that she had very long hair of an arrestingly uncommon turquoise color, which would normally have been fairly hard to miss.

    For her part, the aqua-haired girl didn't take particular notice of them, either, in her case because she was engrossed in a telephone conversation.

    "No, I just got to town," she said, then paused in front of the shop and switched hands with her phone. "It seems like a really nice place! I haven't found the school yet, but it wouldn't really matter since they're on summer vacation right now anyway. I'm just going to poke around town for a few days until Kate gets back in, and then we can strategize."

    "And you really think it's a good idea to just walk into a strange town without a plan," said the woman's voice at the other end of the call, sounding skeptical.

    "Why wouldn't it be?"

    "Miku, the last time you just showed up someplace without making any arrangements beforehand, you caused a riot in Mega Tokyo Square."

    "Oh, Luka, that was New Japan," said Miku dismissively. "You're right, I should've known better than to do that, but that's because things are always extra-crazy there, you know that. I'm sure it'll be fine! Nobody's going to know who I am here of all—"

    "Miku," Luka interrupted, her voice flat.

    "What?"

    "Turn around."

    Miku gave her phone handset a puzzled look. "Why?" she asked, beginning the requested about-face. "Is there a creepy guy or some—"

    She trailed off, looking slowly up. What had been behind her was one of the music store's massive front display windows. This particular one was dominated by a selection of vintage synthesizers, a couple of amps, and a gaily arranged profusion of posters, banners, and oversized reproduction album covers, all of them bearing the same cheerfully smiling face—a face which also decorated the distinctively costumed mannequin standing front and center, her arms outstretched in welcome.

    The very same face that was now observing all of this from the sidewalk outside, an expression of dawning dismay spreading across it.

    All this month! the banner across the top of the window declared, in letters colored a very particular turquoise. Miku Hatsune's World!!

    "... Oh," said Miku Hatsune.


    A block away, the five girls who had passed by Miku without noticing her waited for the traffic signal at the corner, still chatting amongst themselves.

    Having completed introductions to her usual exacting standards, Ui moved on to the key item on the agenda. "So," she said. "What should we do for lunch?"

    "I'm good with whatever," said Nodoka.

    "I could always put something together at home," Ui suggested, but Jun shook her head.

    "I probably need my head examined for turning down an Ui Hirasawa feed," she said, "but if we do that we'll just want to lie around and digest all afternoon. We better eat someplace downtown if we want to do anything else today," she added with a grin and a wink for her mock-pouting friend.

    "How about Curry Udon Central?" Sumire suggested, indicating a storefront a bit farther along the boulevard.

    "Is that OK with you, Shimakaze-chan?" Ui asked the group's new friend.

    "Sure, I guess," said Shimakaze with an agreeable shrug. "I don't really know this town very well. What do they have there?"

    There was a pause.

    "... Not sure if serious," Jun said, eyeing her dubiously.

    Shimakaze gave her a puzzled look, then blinked in consternation before laughing aloud, a sheepish hand behind her head.

    "Sorry, that was dumb," she said. "I'm still a little, um..." A moment's hesitation. "... Jet-lagged? Is that the word?"

    "You're an odd one," Jun observed, not altogether unkindly, as the light changed and the group crossed the street. "Where are you from, anyway?"

    "I, uh... it's kind of complicated," Shimakaze replied. "I guess I'm from Earth. Kind of. At least that's the first place I remember."

    "Ah," said Jun, nodding. "Parents moved around a lot, huh? Still, I'm surprised. Not a lot of blondes in the Earth Kingdom..."

    "Uh, Jun, I think she meant the planet Earth," Sumire corrected gently. "In the Big Universe."

    "Oh. Oh!" Jun said. "Right! Sure. That makes a lot more sense, actually."

    "I'd try to reassure you that this crew isn't usually this weird," said Nodoka wryly, "but my mother taught me not to lie to people I just met."

    "You're so mean, Manabe-senpai," Jun said.

    Shimakaze giggled. "You think she's a mean senpai, I should introduce you to my friend Tatsuta," she said, but then sobered and added as if chiding herself, "Ahh, that isn't fair."

    Ui and Jun glanced at each other, then let it pass. "Well, here we are," said Ui, opening the door to the restaurant for the group.

    "Order whatever you like, Shimakaze-chan," Ui went on after the five of them had found a table. "Since I dragged you along, it's my treat today."

    "Well in that case, I'll have—" Jun began, reaching grandly for the dinner menu.

    "For our guest," Ui added firmly.

    The others were half-expecting the Usual Dance imposed by custom in this part of the United Republic, wherein the guest would demur and the host would insist, but instead, Shimakaze simply accepted, mumbling thanks through a sudden embarrassed blush.

    There were a few points like that during the lunch conversation, which was mostly light, and focused on the kind of polite investigation a socially skillful girl like Ui could pretty much effortlessly make of a new acquaintance. Shimakaze was generally cheerful and friendly, and indeed they all found her quite charming, but she had odd occasional fits of self-consciousness, where she would stumble over some finer point or nicety, draw back, and seem to reproach herself for her failure.

    It was as if she had learned how to socialize from books, or was so out-of-practice that she had to relearn... not the social skills themselves, Jun decided, so much as the timing. The result was a peculiarly variable affect, giving the impression of a person who was good-hearted, but had spent the last few years living in a box.

    Maybe she just got out of jail, Jun thought, then rolled her eyes inwardly. Right, she was in juvie for rocking a synthesizer without a license.

    "You said you didn't know Sakuragaoka very well," Sumire observed when the conversation hit a lull. "Did you just move to town recently?"

    "Oh, uh, I don't really live here... as such," said Shimakaze hesitantly, taken a bit off-guard by the question. "I'm just looking around. I've..." She paused for a moment in thought, then seemed to reach an internal conclusion and went on, "I've been through some kind of... stressful... stuff recently. Ad—uh... my guardian... thought it would be good for me to get a chance of scenery for a little while."

    Jun tilted her head quizzically. "Your guardian sent you off to a strange city to get your head straight? Alone? Uh, no offense to him or anything, but that is weird, yo."

    "He didn't send me, it was my idea," Shimakaze snapped, the first real spark of any sharper emotion flickering in her hazel eyes. "You make it sound like he threw me away because I was damaged."

    "Hey, whoa, sorry," said Jun, spreading her hands in surrender. "Seriously, I didn't mean it to sound like that. I was just surprised, is all. I mean, that's an... unusual way for someone to handle something like that. Honest. That's all."

    Shimakaze maintained the glare for a moment longer, then seemed to deflate, dropping her forehead into her hand.

    "Aauuugh," she groaned, then muttered angrily at herself, "Stupid. Stupid. You're screwing this up. You're not ready. Poi tried to warn you..."

    Then, pulling herself together, she took a deep breath and looked up to see the others all looking back at her—not with expressions of fear or disgust, as she had half-expected, but with a mixture of bafflement and concern.

    "I'm sorry," she said. "Really. It's not your fault. I'm just... not good with people. At all. I should..." She got to her feet. "I should go, I'm ruining your lunch. I'm sorry. Thank you for the meal," and before anyone could interject, she turned and bolted from the restaurant.


    If there was one thing of which former Fleet of Fog high-speed destroyer Shimakaze remained confident, even now, it was that she was the fastest around. Even the speed of the Fog Asiatic Fleet's legendary fast battleships, the Kongō class, paled in comparison to the pace she could maintain on the open sea, and some echo of this could be found in the fleetness of her Mental Model. Even a casual observer could get a sense of it from that Model's build: long and lean, like a greyhound, with no wasted anything to get in the way or make drag.

    Now, as she withdrew from the restaurant at flank speed, the last thing she expected to encounter was one of the people she'd just left behind; but as she turned the corner onto the cross street that would take her to the waterfront, she was shocked to see Ui Hirasawa pop out of the alley ahead of her, waving for her to stop. She could've gone around the girl easily enough, but the surprise alone was enough to pull her up short, all but backpedaling to shed momentum and prevent a collision.

    "Shimakaze-chan, wait!" Ui cried.

    "Wha—?!" Shimakaze blurted as she managed to stop just short of cannoning into Ui. Behind her, she heard running feet; half-turning, she saw Jun, Sumire, and Nodoka catching her up.

    Shimakaze turned back to Ui, astonished. "How did you do that?!" she demanded.

    Jun slid to a halt alongside her and grinned, even as she leaned over her knees and caught her breath.

    "Air Nomad kid—represent," she panted, holding up a fist, which Ui—even in her currently preoccupied state—absently bumped.


    Out of seat, three bounds to the back of the curry house, vault the counter, through the kitchen, bang a left and out the fire door. Watch out for the greasy spot by the vent exhaust. Two-hop the dustbins and trapeze the fire escape over the low retaining wall at the end of the lot. Turn the rollout into a right turn and it's a straight shot to the street.

    Airbender parkour. As seen on TV! The twenty-foot vertical jumps don't really work without the airbending. The rest: totally doable.

    Note to self: apologize to the restaurant staff later. That was pretty rude.


    Seeing that Shimakaze's surprise at having been caught was turning into alarm, Ui put up her hands and said, "It's OK! We're not mad or anything. We just... we want to help."

    Shimakaze blinked. "Help?" she repeated.

    "You seem like something's really bothering you," Sumire said, nodding.

    "Yeah, and we couldn't let you go thinking you were ruining our day," Jun added, still grinning. "That's just crazy talk."

    "Don't look at me, I'm just the student council president," said Nodoka with a smile as Shimakaze did just that. "But yeah. If you've got a problem, we'd all like to help you."

    "Why would you help me?" Shimakaze wondered, her face blank with confusion.

    "Because you're our friend," Ui replied simply.

    "Your friend? You barely know me."

    "You don't get it," said Jun, shaking her head. "Ui here? Making friends with people. It's what she does. It's all she does." Her grin returning, she put an arm around Ui's shoulders and shook her a little, adding, "She's a social typhoon. Resistance is futile."

    "You just made it weird, Jun," said Ui through a smile gone slightly wooden.

    "I made it weird?" Jun replied. "I'm not the one just Bruce Lee'd out of Curry Udon Central after the fastest girl in the world. Seriously, damn, girl," she added, punching Shimakaze's near shoulder gently. "Whatever they feed you back home, it's working."

    Shimakaze stood looking from one to another, completely at a loss. "I... I don't... know what to do," she admitted at length.

    "Well, you're a musician, right?" said Ui. "We're starting a band. Why not come to the club room at our school and jam with us for a while?"

    "Weren't you just on me for being pushy recruiting Saitō?" Jun wondered rhetorically, causing the girl she'd named to giggle.

    "It's just a jam session," Ui insisted. "No strings. What do you say? My big sis says that music can be very therapeutic."

    "On a point of order, I refuse to believe that Yui uses the word 'therapeutic' in conversation," Nodoka remarked dryly.

    "Um..." Shimakaze hesitated, then cracked a wry smile, the first of any kind she'd managed since bolting from the restaurant. "Well, I can't really deny needing therapy."

    "Great! Then it's settled," said Ui cheerfully, taking both of her hands. "Let's get going!"

    "Sure, I... OK," said Shimakaze, and she let herself be half-led, half-dragged off toward Sato Academy.

    A block away, unnoticed by any of them, a figure in a dark dress and a pillbox hat watched them go, then smiled and raised a hand to her ear, speaking in a quiet voice to the air.


    Chapter Fourteen: "Relax"

    Xinqier, Qiyue 20, 291 ASC
    Tuesday, July 20, 2410
    Hōkago Tea Time Retreat: Day 4

    Mount Weitang, United Republic
    Dìqiú

    By the fourth day of their mountain retreat, the members of Hōkago Tea Time had established a pattern that defined their working days. In it, the five broke up their time between practicing their existing songs (and trying out new variations on them); developing several new ideas that had come along; free-form jamming with occasional forays into covers of popular songs; and general creative bull sessions, in which they could put down their instruments for a while, decompress, and let their imaginations wander. Interspersed with mealtimes and clubroom-style tea breaks, this program filled the days with industry that didn't feel like work, so that the members of the band finished each day feeling energized rather than drained.

    They hadn't set out to devise this working regimen, nor deliberately arranged things so that their evenings would be free for recreation, enabling them to step away from the practice room altogether and just have some fun of a different kind—which enhanced the overall effect. None of this was by conscious design; but it developed that way all the same, and it worked beautifully.

    A light rain had been falling for most of the day Tuesday, but that hadn't dampened (as it were) the band's spirits; it had only simplified the choice of what to do after dinner that evening.

    They had all agreed early on that the house on Mount Weitang contained many wonders, but their opinions had diverged as to which was the best. Yui, possibly because of her Air Nomad roots, held the view that the tower in the northwest corner of the house was its best feature. Azusa preferred the (usually) sunny expanse of the great glazed main room, while Mio was enamored of (though simultaneously a bit intimidated by) the underwater bedroom in the basement. Mugi favored the balcony overlooking the living room, with its comfy reading chair.

    And Ritsu... well, architecturally Ritsu's favorite thing about the house was its large and well-appointed kitchen, which was something of a wonderland to a culinarily-savvy individual like herself. She'd spent most of the last four days successively outdoing herself in the food-preparation department, leading her bandmates to lament that when at last they left Mount Weitang, they would a) weigh twice as much as they had when they arrived and b) never appreciate ordinary food again.

    In terms of the equipment, however—although the Ramune machine was a very close second—her favorite thing was in the living room, and this evening, while the rain drummed lightly against the great windows, she and the other members of the band were all in there enjoying it.

    As a dedicated video gamer of long standing, Ritsu had heard of the Future Industries GameCenter gaming system, of course. She had the issue of Electro-Entertainment Monthly with Ryo Sato and the first production GameCenter on the cover, and had read it over many times. She'd even seen one, on the display floor of the electronics shop in the Sakuragaoka Galleria. She could in no way afford such a machine, however, not on her allowance. All her stuff was at least two generations old. Ritsu was an inveterate scrounger of discount bins; she had a shelf above her computer at home that was full of games with the spines of their cases notched, for which she had paid an average of ¥2.50 apiece.

    So to be confronted with this state-of-the-art system, with its cutting-edge graphics and its borderline-witchcraft multi-player display adapter (such that each player, viewing the giant screen from a slightly different angle, saw a unique point of view), felt a little like having accidentally wandered into the future. It was just as well she'd come up here to work; if she didn't have a more pressing engagement (and Mio to enforce her attendance to same), she'd just be in here 24-7, playing Super Fury Racing or Earth Rumble '91 or any of the other A-list titles ranked on the little stand behind the core machine.

    Tonight, they were playing Western Empire, a nation-building simulator that cast each of its up-to-six players as the leader of one of the warring factions that had, in ancient times, eventually consolidated this part of the world into the Great Western Empire. They weren't bound to follow the actual history if they didn't want to, and in this instance, in the hour or so they had been playing, they so far hadn't; most notably, the only war that had broken out so far, in two in-game centuries of development, had been between Mugi and the computer-controlled nation standing in for the absent sixth live player. The dispatch with which she'd crushed the computer player for his impudence had gone some way toward persuading the others that avoiding war would be a worthwhile strategy to pursue, at least in the early going.

    "Hey Mio," Ritsu asked. "Did you finish your trade with the Fire Archipelago yet?"

    "Just about to," Mio replied. "It takes a while to unload that much fish."

    "Getting anything good?"

    "They're paying pretty well, but—oh! Yeah, he just gave me a bonus for timely delivery." Mio highlighted the object she'd just received and opened its description window, then went on, "I got an Ornate Sextant."

    "Ooh!" said Mugi. "That sounds handy!"

    "Yeah, totally!" Ritsu agreed; then, leaning toward Mio with a sly smile, she asked, "So who are you going to invite to your ornate sex tent?"

    Mio's face went bright red. "Sextant. Sextant! It's a navigation instrument, it gives plus three speed and accuracy to sea routes. Not a—what even is what you said?!"

    Ritsu shrugged. "I dunno, I figured it was, you know how in the Earth Kingdom there's that big desert with the sandbender nomads and stuff? It seemed like the kind of thing they would have. Sounds pretty high-end, too."

    "Maybe there's a progression," Mugi said.

    "Hey, yeah!" said Ritsu, nodding. "Shabby sex tent; common sex tent; ornate sex tent."

    "Will you please stop saying that?!" Mio demanded, covering her face with the hand not holding the controller.

    "Desert people don't have many resources," Azusa mused. "It would be pretty wasteful to have a special tent just for that."

    "Hmm, yeah," Ritsu said. "It'd be a definite luxury item."

    "It could be a way of showing off," Mugi suggested. "Anyone who visited your camp would know you were someone important if you had your own sex tent."

    "Especially an ornate one!" Yui agreed.

    "Your people are nomads, Yui, do they have anything like that?" wondered Ritsu.

    Yui looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, "Well, when we all go on camping trips with Tobu, Mom and Dad have their own yurt."

    "You're not helping, Yui," Mio mumbled from behind her hand.

    "I guess not," Yui agreed with an equable shrug, then paused for just exactly the right amount of time before adding, "It's not ornate, anyway," and broke them all—even Mio—up laughing.

    Xinqisan, Qiyue 21, 291 ASC
    Wednesday, July 21, 2410
    Hōkago Tea Time Retreat: Day 5

    The weather was back to something like perfect the next day, so without really discussing it, the five decided to take a break after lunch and put some of the afternoon sunshine to good use in the lake behind the house.

    The water was crystal clear, but not as cold as the mountain setting suggested; something to do with geothermal activity, Ritsu gathered, though the details escaped her. It didn't really matter, anyway; what mattered was that it was clean, fresh water and—apart from some fish—they had it all to themselves. With a pier extending right out into the lake from the dining room, they could just go outside and plop straight into the sheltered waters of the corner between that pier and the house, or go around the south end to the little beachy cove next to the drive—all the comforts of the seaside without the salt, the crowds, or the seaweed.

    The others soon learned that getting into a splash fight with Yui would be a big mistake. This was because any watery assault mounted upon her would be almost instantly repaid by Niri, and a full-grown polar bear dog's forepaws, as it turned out, could throw an awful lot of water. After nearly getting herself drowned, Ritsu thought better of the sport and decided to find some other way of amusing herself. Or at least a less well-defended victim.

    Looking around, she spied Mio out by the end of the dock, keeping station and admiring the waterfall as it cascaded down the Second Brother and into the deepest part of the lake, a quarter-mile or so distant. The spray was throwing up a rainbow in the early-afternoon sunshine, shimmering against the blue sky and grey stone of the backdrop.

    Grinning, Ritsu climbed up onto the dock, then backed up to get the best possible start and sprinted clean out to the end. With a loud "Woohooo!" she leaped as far out as she could go, employing a form for long-jumping she vaguely remembered from a time they'd done it in gym class. The effort carried her well past Mio's position and out into the farther reaches of the lake, where she cannonballed into the water with a titanic splash.

    At which point she learned, just a bit too late, one of the other features of Lake Weitang, to wit: it's not unusually warm everywhere. The shock of suddenly plummeting into 50-degree mountain runoff nearly took her breath away; gasping, she popped to the surface and made for the house as fast as limbs suddenly shocked and stiffened with the cold could carry her, which wasn't very fast.

    Fortunately, another thing that polar bear dogs are very good at is rescuing people from cold water.


    "You idiot," said Mio as Mugi handed Ritsu a steaming cup of tea.

    "Too cold to dispute point," Ritsu whispered, extending one hand from the blanket they'd rolled her in to accept the tea.

    "Don't die, Squad Member Ricchan!" Yui pleaded.

    "Maybe someone should put up a sign," Azusa mused.

    "She'd just have ignored it," Mio grumbled.

    "I just wanted to make a big splash," Ritsu whined plaintively.

    "Now, now, now, now," Mugi put in. "You'll be just fine once you get that nice hot Yuyan Blend into you."

    "I hope so," Yui said, big-eyed with concern.

    "See, Mio? At least Yui cares about me," Ritsu whimpered, sipping tea.

    "I was really looking forward to Ricchan's yakitori tonight," Yui went on, causing all of them—Ritsu included—to burst out laughing.


    True to Mugi's prediction, Ritsu recovered quickly with some hot tea in her system. Dried off and changed, she repaired to the kitchen to complete the warming process "by slaving over a hot grill." She and her bandmates were just sitting down to dinner when the telephone on the kitchen wall, by the archway to the dining room, rang.

    "Who even knows this number?" Ritsu wondered rhetorically. She put a platter of yakitori skewers down on the table, then went to answer it. "Hello, Mount Weitang Hypothermia Research Center." At the sound of the voice at the other end, she grinned. "Oh, hey, Kate-sensei, what's up? Uh huh. Yup. Oh, totally. Sure, whenever you'd like. That sounds great! See you then."

    Still grinning, she hung the phone back on its cradle and turned to the others, who were all regarding her curiously. "She'll be back in Dìqiú tomorrow," she reported. "Wanted to know if it was OK if she and the rest of the Art came up to check in with us on Saturday."

    "Oh, good," said Mio. "We should be able to have one of our new songs reasonably presentable by then."

    Mugi nodded. "I think so."

    "As long as we keep at it," agreed Azusa.

    "You know, you don't actually have to nag us to work up here," Ritsu pointed out wryly as she took her seat.

    "It's just habit," Azusa replied nonchalantly, scooping rice.

    "I wonder what Ui-chan and the others are up to back in town," Yui mused. "We should let them know when Kate-chan-sensei is coming up. They might want to come too."

    "Good idea," Ritsu agreed. "Why don't you call Ui after dinner and fill her in? They'll need to figure out some way to get up here, so they'll probably want to coordinate with Kate-sensei beforehand."

    "Sure, I can do that," said Yui, nodding.


    Azusa was mildly surprised to find herself alone when she woke in the night. She hadn't specifically set out to room with Yui-senpai on this retreat—the house was certainly big enough for them each to have a separate place to sleep if they wanted—but Yui had a tendency to find her way into Azusa's space even in her sleep, on campouts like this. On an overnight school trip earlier in the term, she'd even made her way past a locked hotel room door—not specifically locked to keep her out, but one equipped with an automatic lock, all the same—and professed no knowledge of how she'd done it when interrogated later. Azusa had assumed it was some kind of Air Nomad ninja thing, like that scary-looking obstacle-course running Ui sometimes did in PE class.

    At any rate, she wasn't here now, and Azusa felt a faint sense of... was that disappointment?... to find it so as she woke. Shrugging it off, she consulted the lumious dial of the clock on the bedside stand and saw that it was a little past midnight. With a yawn, she got out of bed and went down the hall to the bathroom.

    She was on her way back, past the open window looking out onto the deck that doubled as the roof of the single-story west wing, when a soft sound of music reached her ears. Pausing, she went to the window and listened. Yes, it was definitely music—an acoustic guitar, faint but perfectly clear, drifting across the night air from the direction of the tower. Curiosity piqued, Azusa went back to her room for her slippers, then went out the side door, across the deck, and into the practice room, then climbed the spiral stairs to the top.

    She found Yui up there, sitting on the floor of the open pavilion with Avatar Korra's dog curled up behind her, humming to herself and playing a lesisurely tune on that Dobro guitar Miki-sensei had loaned her. It took a few moments for Azusa to recognize the melody, which Yui was repeating in a sort of circular variation.

    At about the time she did, Yui seemed to notice she had an audience; she paused, half-turning to look back over the bulk of Niri's hindquarters. There wasn't a lot of light up here—the only real source of illumination was the distant column of light that marked Republic City's new Spirit Portal—but Azusa's eyes didn't need a lot of ambient light to pick up general details these days. She could easily make out Yui's expression changing to a bright smile when she recognized her visitor.

    "Azu-nyan!" she said, keeping her voice down. "I'm sorry, did I wake you? I tried to play as quietly as I could..."

    "No, of course not," Azusa replied, her own voice hushed as well. "From all the way over here? I was already up, I just heard you playing. I didn't mean to interrupt."

    "Come have a seat," said Yui, patting the parquet of the pavilion floor beside her. "I was just thinking about some things and couldn't sleep, so I came up here to look at the city and stuff."

    Azusa made her way around the bulk of Niri and lowered herself into the spot Yui had indicated. She made no sarcastic remark about Yui's having had too may thoughts to get to sleep; once upon a time, perhaps, she might have, but she had lately come to appreciate that Yui Hirasawa was a much deeper file than she appeared at first glance.

    Instead, she said, "Was that 'Romeo and Juliet' you were playing?"

    Yui nodded. "Mm-hmm. I've been thinking about covering it at a show sometime. It's a good song for showing what Dō-chan can do," she added, patting the Dobro's gleaming metal flank.

    "That sounds like fun," Azusa agreed. "I'm sure Mugi-senpai would be able to figure out the piano part."

    "That's what I was thinking," Yui said.

    They fell silent after that, just gazing off toward the glow of the Spirit Portal. After a little while, Yui played the opening line from the old Dire Straits song once more, then asked thoughtfully,

    "Doesn't it make you think of Mio-chan and Ricchan?"

    "Huh?" Azusa wondered, jarred out of her own thoughts.

    "The song," Yui said. "I always think of them when I hear it. 'Finds a streetlight, steps out of the shade, says something like, 'You and me, babe, how about it?'" She chuckled. "That's so Ricchan."

    "I... guess, yeah," said Azusa, grateful to the darkness for hiding the furious blush she felt developing. "I mean... not exactly, their parents aren't feuding or anything, but..."

    "Well, no, that's true," said Yui. She followed the guitar line around again, then sang softly,

    I can't do the talk
    Like the talk on the TV
    And I can't do a love song
    Like the way it's meant to be
    I can't do everything
    But I'll do anything for you
    I can't do anything
    'Cept be in love with you

    She didn't go on with the verse beyond that point, lapsing back into humming as she spun out a couple more variations of the guitar line. Beside her, Azusa looked off into the night for a few seconds more, then said without being entirely aware of it,

    "... Neither can I."

    With a surprised blink, Yui stopped playing, then turned and looked at her. Azusa felt Yui's wide eyes on her and came back from the distance, but didn't look back.

    "Did... I say that out loud?" she wondered, sounding no more than mildly curious.

    "Uh-huh," Yui replied, nodding.

    "Oh," said Azusa. "Hmm."

    Then, rising, she said, "I should probably get back to bed. I know I'm going to be awake at seven regardless. Good night, Yui-senpai."

    "Good night, Azu-nyan," Yui replied.

    She watched the younger guitarist walk to the stairs in silence, then quietly called her name just before she would've started to descend.

    "Azu-nyan."

    "Yes?"

    A bright, uncomplicated smile. "Thanks. That makes me happy."

    "It makes me... confused," Azusa replied honestly.

    Yui nodded, still smiling. "That's OK. I'm happy just knowing. G'night."

    "... Night," Azusa said, and then took herself off to bed, where—to her retrospective surprise, come morning—she fell immediately into a peaceful sleep.

    Xinqisi, Qiyue 22, 291 ASC
    Thursday, July 22, 2410
    Hōkago Tea Time retreat: Day 6

    At breakfast the next morning, after serving the waffles, Ritsu abruptly declared, "So listen, I've been thinking."

    "Really?" Mio wondered automatically. "What was it like?"

    "You didn't hurt yourself, did you, senpai?" Azusa put in.

    "With friends like these," said Ritsu with a resigned sigh. "Are you done? OK. This is serious. We all know that Kate-sensei's going to have to go back to the Big Universe for good pretty soon—right? Her deal at Sato Academy was only to finish out the term in Sawa-chan's place, then she's got to go back to her own stuff. The school year out there starts in the fall. Right, Yui?"

    "Right," said Yui.

    "So I've been thinking—I don't know about you guys, maybe I shouldn't speak for you, but I'm not ready for this thing to be over. We've learned so much in the time she's been here, and I think she's still got a lot to teach us. And I think we've still got something to offer her, too. I wouldn't feel right about it with... you know, everything else that's happened recently. It'd be like leaving before the end of the mover. You know?"

    "I... well, I agree with everything you said, Ritsu-senpai, but what can we do about it?" Azusa wondered. "We can't force her to stay."

    "No," Mio agreed, then added wryly, "And it's not like we can go with her when she goes."

    "Ah," said Ritsu with an upraised finger, "but—"

    "What if we could?" she and Mugi said together, then glanced at each other and grinned conspiratorially.

    "Um... what?" said Mio.


    Chapter Fifteen: "Call Me Lightning"

    Xinqisan, Qiyue 21, 291 ASC
    Wednesday, July 21, 2410
    Stately Hirasawa Manor
    Sakuragaoka, United Republic
    Dìqiú

    For two days now, the members of the Sato Academy Light Music Club's junior varsity had been trying to think of a name for their band and a first song to try learning, not necessarily in that order. They hadn't gotten very far with either one, and Jun was starting to worry that they were going to end up being the Band With No Name and covering the school song by default, neither of which she considered an acceptable outcome.

    Now, sitting on the couch in the Hirasawa living room after lunch and struggling to avoid entering the kind of food coma that would involve waking to find an aeon passed and herself the subject of an archaeological dig, she passed her eyes over the spines of the video Lightdiscs shelved by the TV set and was struck by an idea.

    "Hey guys," she said. "Why don't we try the theme from YueQuest?"

    "Hmm," said Ui with a thoughtful frown; then, smiling, she said, "That might work!"

    "It's certainly familiar enough to people our age," Sumire Saitō agreed.

    "Do you remember the lyrics, Manabe-senpai?" Jun asked the band's presumptive lead singer.

    "Not... really," Nodoka admitted. "I mean, it's been a long since since I watched that show." She smiled. "I imagine it'll come back to me quickly enough."

    "Oh... Shimakaze-chan's probably never heard it, though," Ui realized.

    "Nope," the lanky blonde agreed. "Is it a TV show?"

    "Not just a TV show," Jun interjected before anyone else could speak. "YueQuest is a classic, yo." Rising, her incipient coma forgotten, she went to the shelf and pulled out the disc for volume 1. "It's time for you to get some cultural training!"


    Though she didn't say it out loud, Ui was a little concerned about Jun's plan. Not that she wasn't up for watching a few episodes of YueQuest; though old—old enough that it had been a classic program in her parents' childhood, let alone her own—it had long been one of her favorite animated programs. Rather, she wasn't sure how comprehensible it would be to their new friend from out of town. Shimakaze, after all, almost certainly lacked any but the most basic understanding of the cultural background behind the show. For instance, Ui doubted she knew who any of the cast members, all famous historical figures to natives of the United Republic, were, apart from possibly the Avatar.

    That was true, but unknown to Ui, it didn't really matter. At this stage, Shimakaze lacked any but the most basic understanding of the cultural background behind any television show, which gave her the mental freedom to approach YueQuest without any preconceptions at all, and enjoy the show strictly on its own merits. So no, she didn't have the faintest idea who any of the characters were at the outset, but she got the idea quickly enough.

    It was a comedy, depicting the misadventures of three endearing but largely incompetent characters as they attempted to make their civilization's first trip to their planet's only moon, Yue. Avatar Korra, the program's designated taikonaut, was brawny and more or less indestructible, enthusiastic and daring but not terribly bright. Asami Sato, the chief (and evidently only) engineer, was brilliant at coming up with elaborate schemes but not very good at executing them, and prone to constant distractions and side projects. Lin Beifong, the level-headed straight woman, was described as the project's head of security (security from what was never touched on in the first five episodes, since the three protagonists seemed to be the only people in the world as far as the show was concerned). In practice she spent all of her time exasperatedly trying to keep Korra and Asami a) on track and b) from blowing themselves and/or each other up, with limited success on both fronts.

    While Jun was putting Disc One away again, she asked, "So? What do you think? Should we give it a shot?"

    "I think it's a good place to start," said Ui with a nod.

    "Sure," Sumire agreed.

    Smiling indulgently at their enthusiasm, Nodoka said, "Works for me."

    "I'm game," Shimakaze said. "That keyboard part sounds like it'll be fun to play."

    "OK—I'll check the lightningweb and see if I can find any sheet music for it," said Ui. "Then we'll head over to school!"

    quite a bit later that afternoon

    After a couple of hours of fiddling around, familiarizing themselves with their parts, and testing equipment, the still-unnamed band decided that they were ready to go ahead and try actually playing the song.

    The theme from YueQuest (imaginatively entitled "Theme from YueQuest") depended fairly heavily on its keyboard part right from the beginning. Since the only keyboard instrument they had access to right now was the club room's old Sato-Phonic organ, it sounded a little odd, but no one really minded about that. Shimakaze's skill, which they'd had a first taste of back in 10GIÄ, was up to the challenge, and they were all having too much fun as they got to the end of the intro and Nodoka began to sing. For all that she'd agreed to be the band's lead singer only under mild duress, she approached the job with the same calm competence she showed in pretty much every activity she engaged in, and now she laid the first verse down as if she were being paid for it:

    Far to the south, a young girl dreaming
    Of a world she never knew
    She looked above the glacier'd mountain-tops
    And saw a moon so blue
    They told her no one could ever fly so high
    They laughed and said she'd fail if she tried
    She left her home and her life behind
    Her dream burning like a comet inside

    It wasn't perfect—no band's first attempt ever is—but as they powered through the song on waves of arpeggiated organ riffs and closed it out, Ui felt a warm glow of satisfaction. For a few seconds, she and her bandmates stood looking around at each other, considering their performance.

    Just before Ui was about to say how well she thought their first attempt had gone, Jun beat her to the punch:

    "Wow. We're not very good."

    "Jun!" Ui chided her. "How rude!"

    "I thought we did fairly well," said Sumire.

    "When you consider that we hadn't even all met before the other day, that one of us has only heard the song a half-dozen times, and that I'd forgotten most of the lyrics until just now," said Nodoka wryly, "I'd have to agree."

    "Well, OK, yeah, when you put it that way," Jun allowed.

    "My part will sound a little more like it's supposed to once I get my keyboard back from the—from home," Shimakaze offered.

    "Does that mean you've decided to stay?" Ui wondered.

    "Yeah, I think so," said Shimakaze. "I'm having a good time with you guys," she went on with a slightly hesitant smile, "and I haven't really got any other pressing business right now, so..." She shrugged eloquently. "Why not?"

    "I'm so glad," said Ui with a sunny smile.

    "Sounds like this calls for a celebration," Jun proposed. "It's pretty much dinnertime, Let's hit Pop's place."

    "I like this plan," Nodoka agreed, and the others started to pack up their things.

    "Pop's place?" Shimakaze wondered, closing the organ's key cover.

    "Sorta the official snack bar of the Light Music Club," Jun explained. "You'll like it! And if you don't, Ui won't have to run through the kitchen to stop you from getting away this time," she added with a wink.

    "Jun!"

    "Sorry about that," Shimakaze said sheepishly as they left the clubroom.

    "There's no need to apologize—really," Ui assured her, shooting Jun a look.

    Impervious to her friend's irritation, Jun agreed, "Yeah, it was actually pretty awesome."


    Forty or so minutes later, while the band finished up a light celebratory dinner at Pop's place, Ui Hirasawa had reason to feel satisfied with the day's work. Jun's tough-love assessment of their abilities notwithstanding, she thought the five of them had the makings of a decent band about them, if they put in the time to develop it. The biggest question mark there was Nodoka, who was already very busy with her other intra- and extracurricular activities, but Ui wasn't too worried about that. Nodoka had always been good at organizing her life—and Yui's, too, until not that long ago, so now that she mostly just had herself to worry about, she ought to be fine.

    The other wild card, Ui reflected as the group headed downtown to catch the streetcar back to her house, was Shimakaze. Their odd visitor from another world had become much more at ease with the four locals in just the short time they'd all known each other, but they Ui still couldn't really say they knew her. How long she would be in Sakuragaoka for, what her plans were after summer vacation ended, where she would go at that point—all of these things were still complete mysteries.

    As she trailed a bit behind the rest of the group and watched the blonde clowning around with the others, Ui smiled to herself and decided it wasn't something she was going to worry about right now.

    "You're so sloooow!" Shimakaze taunted as she easily outran Jun down the block to the next corner.

    "No fair—I don't have—those 20-foot legs," Jun panted, making a great show of plodding heavily after her.

    Laughing, Shimakaze put out a hand and caught the post of the street sign at the corner, using it to turn herself around so that she wouldn't go running out into the cross street, one of her candy-striped legs swinging out wide with the momentum.

    "Ha ha! Who's next?" she asked. "Sumire?"

    "No, thank you," said Sumire with a laugh. "I'm not much of a track star even when I'm not wearing an ankle-length skirt."

    "How about you, Manabe-senpai?"

    "Don't look at me, I'm too old for that kind of thing," said Nodoka, drawing a sharp bark of laughter from Jun.

    "Awright, in that case we—" Jun paused, looking around, then turned and saw that Ui was almost a block behind, still on the far side of the previous street. "Ui! What are you doin' all the way over there? C'mon, the new kid wants a rematch!"

    "Yes, yes!" Sumire agreed, and they all started waving and calling to her, egging her on to hurry up and put the new kid in her place (including, gamely, Shimakaze herself).

    Ui rolled her eyes good-naturedly. "OK, OK, I'm coming," she said. At the corner, she looked both ways, just as she'd been taught (and then taught Yui) to do as a child. To her right, the street was empty; to her left there was a fairly steep hill, and the only vehicle in sight was a Cabbage Corp delivery truck parked up at the top. Ui didn't pause to take in the details, but being a naturally sharp observer, she noticed that the truck's two-man crew had just unloaded what appeared to be an electric piano in front of the house on the hill.

    Looks like someone's getting a new Cabbagetone, she thought irrelevantly, then stepped off the curb and started trotting across.

    Halfway there, she saw Sumire, in mid-wave, notice something off to her right (and so Ui's left). The blonde froze, her eyes going wide, and then screamed, pointing. Ui, puzzled, paused and turned to look.

    The Cabbage Corp truck was barreling straight for her. As the instant elongated, Ui's still-observant mind registered that there was no one at the wheel—indeed, the truck didn't even seem to be running—and the driver and his assistant were racing after it, waving their arms and shouting. It all seemed to be happening in slow motion.

    All Ui could think in that moment was: What will Yui do, knowing I got myself killed in a such a stupid, drawnmover way? Hit by a piano truck? Really? That happens to Dizzy Turtleduck, not to actual people. The thought flashed through her head in a millisecond, far too quickly to do anything about it. She knew a dozen different ways of evading an oncoming truck, but they all depended on noticing its approach within a humanly achievable reaction window. Having approached silently, this thing was right on top of her now. There was literally just time to close her eyes and hope it didn't hurt too much.

    The next sensations she had were a feeling like being embraced and a terribly loud scraping crunch.

    That's weird, thought Ui. It didn't hurt at all, and it sounded like metal on concrete.

    Then she opened her eyes and realized that she was still standing upright, and the feeling like being embraced was because Shimakaze—somehow—had embraced her. The tall blonde was slightly hunched, her shoulder turned outward, head down on Ui's, as if shielding her from something.

    Feeling Ui stir, she now relaxed her grip slightly, straightening, and asked, "Are you OK?"

    "I... what?" Ui replied, too startled and confused to form any better response for the moment.


    From where Nodoka Manabe was standing, it happened like this:

    One moment, her best friend's little sister (and a close friend in her own right) was within a half-second of being mowed down by a runaway delivery truck, and Nodoka was too shocked and disbelieving to even look away; she just stood there, transfixed, Sumire Saitō's shrill scream of horror ringing in her ears.

    The next, Shimakaze—who had been the farthest from Ui of any of them, still all the way down at the next street corner with her hand on the street sign post—just... appeared between Ui and the truck, lunging forward to wrap the shorter girl in a protective embrace.

    Not that this incredible feat seemed like doing any good at first; now the truck was just going to hit both of them. Except that rather than flattening the two girls as easily as it would have flattened one—surely what, by every physical law Nodoka knew, should have happened—the truck had stopped dead, its flat front caving in, as if it had just crashed into a reinforced concrete bollard. Shrapnel from its shattered grille and headlights scattered into the intersection, its windshield going suddenly opaque as the safety glass crazed into a mass of tiny stuck-together shards. So heavy was the impact that the rear wheels came momentarily off the ground, before banging back down hard enough that some of the cargo was disgorged from the open doors onto the road behind.


    Now that Shimakaze wasn't hunched over her, Ui could see that the front of the wrecked truck was only a few inches away, but she could make it out only indistinctly. Between it and them stood a curving wall of glowing yellow hexagons, faintly flickering in the still-bright late afternoon sunshine. She looked up, saw them against the sky above as well: a dome of tesselated light, like something out of one of those sci-fi movers from the Big Universe.

    "I... I'm fine," she said, finding her voice at last.

    Shimakaze glanced over her shoulder at the truck, hearing the shouts of the crew still running after it as hard as they could. "We have to get out of here," she said—and then they were gone.


    Assistant Delivery Driver Wei Hao steeled himself as he rounded the smashed prow of his truck. He'd seen bad traffic accidents before, though never involving a vehicle whose crew he was part of, and he doubted very much that there would be anything there that he could help, but nevertheless, he had a duty to—

    —There was nothing there. Not just nothing he could help; nothing at all. The truck was as wrecked as if it had rammed a bridge abutment, its front wheels splayed at such impossible angles that they could no longer roll and were holding the wreck from moving any farther, but there was no trace of what it had hit, and no sign of any person in the impact zone. None. It was as if the truck had been wrecked somewhere else, then towed to the edge of this intersection and just left here.

    "What the... ?" he muttered, scratching his head. Looking up, he saw a little knot of high-school girls standing on the sidewalk partway down the block, staring mutely at the spectacle.

    "Hey, you girls!" Wei Hao called. "Do you know what happened?"

    "Uh... no," the one with the puffy twintails replied, shaking her head with a blank look on her face. "No clue. Sorry."

    "Wei Hao!" cried Senior Driver Chuo, an older, heavier man, as he puffed to a halt by the driver's door. "How's..." He hesitated. "How's it look over there?"

    Coward, though Wei Hao a bit scornfully, but his extreme bemusement was the only undertone in his voice as he replied, "There's nobody here."

    Chuo first peeped hesitantly around the truck, then stepped fully out as he saw the truth of his assistant's statement. There literally was no one there. The girl they could both have sworn the truck was about to hit was nowhere to be seen. Chuo bent and looked under the smashed front end; nothing there either, except a pool of coolant from the ruptured radiator.

    "Did we imagine that girl?" he wondered.

    "I guess we must have," Wei Hao said.

    "Weird. Well, I guess I'd better call this in," the senior driver mused. He walked around to the back of the truck, saw the damage there (which he had run straight past in his panic), and let out a groan of dismay.

    "Aw, man, my Cabbages!"


    Jun, Nodoka, and Sumire arrived at the ice cream shop near 10GIÄ, per Ui's text message to Jun's phone, to find Ui and Shimakaze waiting for them there. Ui still looked a little shocked, but was rapidly regaining her equilibrium—she'd already recovered enough presence of mind to have sundaes on order for all of them when they arrived. For her part, Shimakaze had become withdrawn again, like she'd been when they'd all first met, and responded to the others' thanks for her part in... whatever had just happened... with embarrassed monosyllables.

    Beyond those expressions of gratitude, no one really seemed ready to address the camelephant in the room until they'd finished eating their ice cream, at which point, as ever, Jun was the one to say it first:

    "So, uh... what the heck just, you know... happened? 'Cause I mean I saw something happen, but what I saw wasn't actually possible, so I kinda got nothin' here."

    "I..." Shimakaze began, then hesitated.

    "You don't have to go into it if you don't want to, Shimakaze-chan," said Ui at once. "I'm really grateful, either way. You..." She paused, as if still working on fully processing what she was about to say, then went on, "You saved my life."

    Shimakaze shook her head. "No, I... I want to explain. I'm just... I'm not sure how. I mean, you guys know by now that I'm not great with words. And it's... it's kind of a big story."

    "I don't doubt that," Nodoka agreed.

    "Maybe..." Shimakaze thought for a moment longer, then said, "Maybe it's better if I just show you."


    The late-afternoon shadows were long, the sun going red and dipping for the horizon, when the five girls arrived at their destination. It had taken them an hour or so to walk to the place, a cove a few miles down the coast from the Port of Sakuragaoka. Despite its nearness to a fairly bustling port city, the cove was a secluded spot, boasting no human-made structure more elaborate than a small cabin used by members of one of the city's fishing clubs to store their gear, and a little boat dock alongside it.

    The suspense built all throughout the walk, and by the time they arrived at the cove, Ui, Jun, Nodoka, and Sumire were almost unable to contain their curiosity. Still, they managed to wait a little longer as Shimakaze walked silently to the water's edge, stood looking out to sea for a few moments, and then turned around to face them.

    "So... you're wondering what I am. How I could do the things you saw me do. Whether I'm... whether I'm human." She hesitated, looking down at the ground as worry crossed her face, then raised her eyes back to them and went on, "Well... I'm not human. Not really. This is what I am."

    For a moment, the four didn't understand what she was getting at. Then, noticing a flicker of movement off to Shimakaze's right, they turned as one and saw it: a submarine, surfacing even as it sailed into the cove from seaward, shedding water from its superstructure and deck scuppers.

    No—not a submarine, even though it had somehow just arisen from beneath the surface of the sea. None of the girls watching it approach were military technology buffs, but even so, they had seen enough pictures in history books and the like to realize up close that this, with its three twin-barreled gun turrets, its short bridge tower some way forward of center, and its two slightly raked exhaust funnels, was a surface warship. On the jackstaff at the stern, a flag unfurled, white with a jaunty many-rayed sunburst, its red color almost black in the last rays of the setting sun.

    As the vessel glided silently to a halt behind Shimakaze, the four looked at each other, none the wiser. Then, deeply confused, Jun said,

    "... You're a sailor?"

    Shimakaze blinked—this was evidently not the reaction she had been steeling herself for—and, tilting her head in puzzlement, she asked, "Haven't you heard of the Fleet of Fog?"

    "Um... no," admitted Ui.

    "I don't think so," Sumire agreed.

    "Afraid not," said Nodoka.

    "Is that some kind of Navy special forces thing?" Jun wondered.

    "No," Shimakaze replied. "It's..." She trailed off, then sighed. "Argh. The trouble is, I don't really know what it is either. I assumed you would have heard of us, because we were apparently a big deal on Earth a while ago, but..."

    "We're a pretty long way from Earth out here," Nodoka pointed out.

    "Yeah, true. I guess I didn't really think this through. As usual." She looked like she might be about to berate herself again, like she had when they'd first met, but then she shook her head again and said, "Anyway, no. I'm not a sailor."

    ¡Yo no soy marinero! thought the part of Jun that was always attuned to these details, however irrelevant. Yo no soy marinero, soy capitán, soy capitán.

    "I'm a ship," Shimakaze continued, gesturing. "I'm this ship. Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Shimakaze. Admiral Hayakawa's flagship in Destroyer Squadron 2. Fastest ship in the fleet," she added, with more than a trace of pride even under these weird conditions.

    "... So... what are you doing in Sakuragaoka?" Ui wondered when she found her voice again.

    "That's like I told you last time," Shimakaze said. "I've been through some weird stuff. My memory before a few months ago is blank, and those few months... weren't a lot of fun. Then I had a, um... change of command, and Admiral Ravenhair thought I could use some time to myself to... what did you call it, Jun? To get my head straight."

    "Wait. Your Admiral is named Ravenhair?" asked Jun. "Is his first name Corwin? About this high, built like a rock face, eyes you could get lost in for weeks?"

    "Jun..." said Ui from behind her hand.

    "What?"

    "... Never mind."

    A bit confused, Shimakaze answered, "Well... yes, that sounds like him. More or less. I think."

    "Huh. It is a small dang galaxy, ain't it," said Jun.

    "That it is," said a low, amused-sounding voice from behind the four locals. They turned; with the sun almost set, they could just make out a dark-clad figure coming own the path from the road toward them. As this drew nearer, they could see she was a young woman, her pale face wearing a gentle smile. "Well, Shimakaze," she said, "you've certainly thrown your new friends in at the deep end, haven't you?"

    Then, bowing to the other girls, she introduced herself: "Light cruiser Tatsuta, second of the Tenryū class. Admiral Ravenhair asked me to keep an eye on Shimakaze while she's in town." Shaking her head with a sardonic little smile, she went on, "I turn my back for one minute..."

    "I didn't have much choice," Shimakaze replied.

    "I know. I saw the truck," said Tatsuta. "I'm only teasing. You did the right thing. Well done."

    "... Thanks," said Shimakaze, fidgeting a little with an embarrassed blush.

    "Um..." said Sumire hesitantly.

    "Yeah," Nodoka agreed.

    "We have questions," Ui said.

    "Only about a million," said Jun.

    Tatsuta smiled again. "Well, rather than stand around in the dark, why don't we go back to town and discuss the matter there?"

    "... On that?" Sumire wondered, nodding toward the ship.

    "That would be a little ostentatious, don't you think?" Tatsuta replied. "My taxi is waiting for me out by the road."

    "Is it too early to start drinking?" Jun wondered as the six of them walked away from the shore. Behind them, the sleek form of Shimakaze (the ship) glided back the way it had come, slipping beneath the waves as it went.

    "Mm," Ui said. "By about four years."

    "Darn."


    Chapter Sixteen: "Discovery"

    Xinqisi, Qiyue 22, 291 ASC
    Thursday, July 22, 2410
    Asami Sato Girls' Academy
    Sakuragaoka, United Republic
    Dìqiú

    Ui Hirasawa was vaguely embarrassed as she arrived at the clubroom that morning, assuming she would be the last to do so. A habitually early riser, she'd remained in bed far past her usual time. This was not entirely because, with her parents and elder sister Yui all away and school out, she had the perfect excuse to sleep in. That would have been all the reason Yui needed, but Ui had had a very strange and rather long day on Wednesday, to boot.

    All the same, it was with an apologetic smile that she entered the room, remarking to the assembled members of the Sato Academy Light Music Club's self-declared "junior varsity" band, "Good morning, everyone. Sorry I got kind of a late start..."

    Sumire Saitō paused in some adjustments she was making to her borrowed drum kit and smiled. "That's OK, Ui-chan." Gesturing, she added with gentle sardony, "Miss You're-So-Slow over here is still setting up anyway."

    Ui turned to see Shimakaze standing by the blackboard, where she'd set up a large electronic keyboard and a small rack with a couple of unidentifiable black-box modules in it. The keyboard was the most elaborate Ui had ever seen; in addition to two manuals, it also had a folding screen and the other type of keyboard attached at one end, like a built-in laptop computer. Across the back of the unit, on the panel above the row of I/O ports, stylized Kokugo lettering announced that it was an ONO-SENDAI 7513 MUSIC ENGINE.

    Shimakaze looked up from the keyboard's video screen, smiling a touch ruefully. "I haven't used it in a couple of weeks," she explained, "so when I powered up there was a software update." She gestured to the progres bar crawling across the screen. "So sloooow!"

    "Wow," said Ui, crossing to get a better look at the setup. "That's some impressive gear, Shimakaze-chan." With a faintly troubled look of realization, she went on, "You didn't just buy all of this for our benefit, did you?"

    "Oh, no," Shimakaze replied. "It's mostly stuff I had from... uh, my old posting," she said, a faint shadow flickering across her features. Then she brightened again, pointed to one of the black boxes in the rack, and continued, "Except for the sequencer, that's new. Commodore Tenjou bought me that."

    Ui opened her mouth, probably to wonder who Commodore Tenjou was, but before she had a chance, a voice cried plaintively from out in the hall, "Oh noooo! Who shut the door, poi?! This is heavyyyy! Hellllp, poi!"

    Ui turned to the door, blinking in puzzlement, but Nodoka Manabe was already there, opening it with a faintly indulgent smile. "Don't panic, I'm on it."

    "Thank you so much poi!" declared what appeared to be an ambulatory Roland amp. This then tottered into the room and set itself down alongside Shimakaze's equipment stack, which revealed that it had actually been carried in by another girl about Ui's age.

    The new girl was blonde like Shimakaze, but not as tall nor quite as skinny, and her long, straight hair was tidier and slightly darker. Her most striking feature was her eyes, which were an arrestingly bright green. She was dressed in a sailor-type school uniform, mostly black with white and red trim; Ui didn't recognize what school it came from, but if this was a friend of Shimakaze's, that probably stood to reason, since the taller blonde was from out of town.

    Way, as Ui had had occasion to discover the previous day, way out of town.

    This suspicion was confirmed a moment later, as Shimakaze said, "Thanks, Yūdachi," then gestured to Ui and said, "This is Ui Hirasawa. Ui, this is Yūdachi."

    "Hi!" said Yūdachi with a cheerful smile. "It's nice to meet you, poi!"

    Ui returned the smile and the greeting, but inwardly she was slightly at a loss. Ordinarily, at this point in an introduction to a friend-of-a-friend, she would ask something like, "Do you go to the same school as Shimakaze-chan, Yūdachi-chan?" That would be a ridiculous thing to ask under these conditions, though, and what would the equivalent be? "Are you a ship too?" Even after yesterday, she couldn't quite bring herself to ask a question like that out loud.

    Fortunately, for such matters she had Jun Suzuki. As she entered, box of donuts in hand, Jun asked rhetorically, "Why is Donut Dynasty always packed when I'm on a schedule?" Then, spotting the black-clad girl helping Shimakaze complete the setup of her right, she cracked a wry grin and said, "Who's this? Don't tell me we've picked up another ship."

    "I'm afraid so," Shimakaze replied.

    "Wait, seriously?" said Jun.

    "Yup," said Shimakaze.

    Yūdachi looked around for a second, as if wondering who the two of them were talking about; then, realizing it was herself, she straightened to attention and saluted. "Fourth of the Shiratsuyu-class destroyers, Yūdachi poi! Nice to meet you!"

    Jun blinked at her in bemusement, then grinned. "Sure, why not. Nice to meet you, too. I'm Jun—second of the Suzuki-class teenagers."

    Yūdachi tilted her head in puzzlement. "Poi?"

    "Never mind," said Jun. Holding out the box she carried, she added, "Donut?"


    They practiced the YueQuest theme for most of the morning. As she had promised, Shimakaze's keyboard part sounded much more like the original's now that she had her own equipment to work with, rather than make do with the clubroom's Sato-Phonic organ.

    Ui had been half-expecting there to be a little bit of... not awkwardness, exactly, but oddness about the gathering, coming as it did on the heels of all the craziness of the previous day. She was relieved to find that once they got to playing, whatever tendency there might have been toward that happening dissipated at once. In fact, by the end of the morning, the five of them felt and sounded more like a band than ever.

    Their guest certainly thought so. When they stopped for lunch, Yūdachi, who had sat quietly on the clubroom bench and watched the proceedings with wide green eyes throughout, was full of praise for their performance.

    "Hey, thanks," Jun said, then added with a grin, "I still don't think we're very good, but I'll take the compliments anyway."

    "So rude," said Shimakaze, shaking her head sadly.

    "Do you play an instrument, Yūdachi-chan?" asked Sumire pleasantly.

    "Guitar, a little, poi," Yūdachi replied. "The Admiral didn't expect me—um..." She trailed off with an uncomfortable glance at Shimakaze, as she belatedly realized she didn't know how much of an explanation she was really cleared to give.

    Shimakaze stepped in and elaborated for the others' benefit, "Yūdachi didn't have to perform for the brass like I did, but she learned to play a little to keep me company when we got some downtime." She gave her fellow destroyer a reassuring little smile. "She's a good friend. Even if she is a little slow," she added with a wink.

    Yūdachi folded her arms indignantly. "Yūdachi is not slow," she insisted. "Shimakaze's just too fast, poi."

    "Hmm. Y'know, our sound could probably use another guitar," Jun mused.

    "Are you passive-aggressively drafting people we just met again?" asked Nodoka rhetorically.

    "I'm just sayin'."

    "Did you bring your guitar?" Shimakaze asked.

    Yūdachi shook her head. "It's at the house, poi. I could go get it..."

    "I can go swipe the beater Fang from the jazz club's room if you really wanna jam," Jun said, then added with an apologetic grin, "Don't feel like you have to, though, I was just messin' around."

    "It sounds like fun, poi," said Yūdachi, smiling. "What's your band called?"

    The other girls shared a five-way look.

    "Um," said Ui.

    "Well," said Sumire.

    "Crud," said Jun.

    "That's a strange name for a band, poi," Yūdachi observed.

    Nodoka chuckled. "We haven't been able to settle on one yet. This is historically a common problem for Light Music Club bands," she added dryly.

    "Do you mind if I ask you a question, Shimakaze-chan?" said Sumire as she came out from behind the drum kit.

    "Shoot," said Shimakaze.

    "I noticed this morning that you only used your keyboard," Sumire said. "What's the rest of that equipment for?"

    "It's—well, this is a preamp, this one does some effects, and this box here is a sequencer," Shimakaze explained, touching each racked item in turn. "It's all controlled by software in here," she went on, indicating the laptop-like screen at one end of her keyboard. "I don't really need any of it for what we're doing today, but it's been a while since I had a space to set it all up in, so I couldn't resist. See..."

    Shimakaze paused, considering how best to explain, then continued, "The Admiral... my old one... he wasn't really interested in music beyond just listening to it. He didn't know what most of this stuff did, he just requisitioned it or something. All he ever wanted me to do was play classical music for him. Mostly old rock tunes, like the one you guys first heard me playing at the music store the other day. But when he wasn't around..." She trailed off, uncertain how to proceed.

    Ui's insight surprised her, not for the first time, as the guitarist said with an I-get-it smile, "When you were on your own, you wanted more."

    "Right, exactly," said Shimakaze, nodding. "So, little by little, I figured out what most of the stuff does, and started... doing my own thing with it. Writing—well, not even really writing, I haven't written any of it down—but making my own music, anyway."

    "It's really good, poi," Yūdachi put in.

    "Can you give us a sample?" asked Nodoka, an intrigued look on her face.

    Blushing, Shimakaze looked down at the keys, unable to keep an awkward smile off her face. "I dunno," she said, hand behind head. "I mean, it's mostly just fooling around with samples and stuff."

    "You're in a band that's covering the theme from a kids' TV show," Jun pointed out. "We're not really gonna judge you on originality."

    "Well... OK, I'll play one for you. Give me a second to load up the presets for it..."

    Daft Punk
    "Harder Better Faster Stronger (Alive Radio Edit 2007)"
    Harder Better Faster Stronger (Alive 2007) (single)

    The song she played was a house track, completely different in style from the YueQuest theme or anything Hōkago Tea Time, the Light Music Club's senior band, would have played. After a brief introductory sequence in which a processed voice said mysterious things, it was an intricate construction of samples, synthesized sounds, and sequenced beats, layered together in what must have been a very painstaking way, all driven forward by a thumping kick drum and a frenetic staccato riff.

    For her part, Sumire observed the way Shimakaze operated her instrument with a certain technical as well as artistic fascination. Mugi played a synthesizer, and played it very well, but she rarely indulged in the kind of full-up electronica that was happening here, and anyway she didn't have the rest of the specialized equipment. As she laid down the track, Shimakaze played parts of it manually, but she also managed the automation using various buttons and levers on the keyboard's console and via the computer screen as well, flicking things in and out, modulating, adjusting. Her hands were quick and precise, her eyes darting around the instrument, her face a picture of concentration.

    Sumire's may have been the most technically keen interest in what the taller blonde was doing, since she had spent so much time at home watching Mugi practice with her own keyboard, but of the four Sato Academy students present, Nodoka was the only one who had been to the kind of club where this sort of music was played. Watching Shimakaze lay it down now, the elder student could easily envision her with a big set of headphones on, owning the stage the way the best MCs did it.

    The second half of the song had an elaborate melody line, on top of the driving staccato, which Shimakaze played almost entirely with one hand, the other constantly switching up settings on the computer. Not until it came together at the end of the segment did Jun realize that the voice she was playing that melody line in was made up of synthetic voice samples. For most of that part, they were too chopped up by the rapid-fire melody to be recognizable as anything other than musical tones, but to cap it off she played them straight, her fingers controlling only the pitch, so that the keyboard sang in a robotic voice:

    working harder
    do it faster
    more than ever
    our work is never over
    working harder
    make it better
    do it faster
    makes us stronger
    more than ever
    hour after
    our work is never over

    Shimakaze wound it out with an extended breakdown, then brought the track to a sudden halt, the drums and riff stopping dead so that the last statement went to the robot voice, standing alone.

    Our work is never over!

    She stood still for a moment, her hands still in the last position they'd taken up, then looked up from the keyboard with a slightly nervous little smile to see the others all staring at her.

    "So... anyway," she said. "It's all stuff like that. Kinda silly, yeah?"

    "Silly? That was amazing," said Sumire.

    Ui nodded vigorously. "It was really, really good!"

    "I love that one, poi," Yūdachi concurred.

    "I feel a profound regret that we don't have any dry ice or lasers in here," Nodoka observed.

    "I know, right?" Jun agreed. "My only question is, with talent like that, what do you need the rest of us for?"

    "Jun!" Ui admonished her.

    "What?"

    Blushing scarlet, Shimakaze was mumbling thanks when there came a gentle knock at the clubroom door. The six girls turned as one to see a person they did not immediately recognize standing there in the open doorway, a curious smile on her face.

    At first glance, they took her for an upperclasswoman, maybe a fellow second-year of Nodoka's, possibly a senior. Like them, she was dressed in civvies, it being vacation time and all. In her case, this consisted of a black top over a red-and-black tartan skirt with pleats and a frill, red-and-black candy-striped thighhighs, and a white hoodie, edged like her top with red piping. It was a stylish combo, unusually so for someone hanging out at the school during summer vacation, but what was really striking about her was her hair: it was very long, drawn up in twintails that reached nearly to her knees, and a startling shade of aqua green.

    "I don't mean to intrude," this new arrival said in a sweet and pleasant voice, "but I heard you playing and I just had to come check it out. Are you guys the Light Music Club?"

    Unsurprisingly, Jun found her voice first. "Well, we're half of it, anyway," she said. Then, pausing, she tilted her head and regarded their visitor closely, something like suspicion stealing onto her face. She glanced at Sumire, who was moving slowly forward next to her, and they shared a momentary It's not just me, right? You're seeing this? sort of glance.

    "The senior members are out of town on their summer retreat," Ui explained. "Except for Manabe-senpai," she qualified.

    Nodoka chuckled. "I may be the most senior here, but I think I'm the newest club member, if you don't count the one who isn't technically a student," she said. "I'm Nodoka Manabe, I'm the Student Council representative for Class 2-1. I don't think I've seen you around before, are you a new student for this fall term? If so, welcome to Sato Academy."

    The newcomer's smile became brighter. "Oh, I'm not a student, although I expect I'll be getting that a lot. I'm actually joining the faculty. I'm going to be replacing Miss Hutchins as the music teacher for the rest of this year. My name is—"

    "Miku Hatsune!" Sumire blurted, her face a blank sheet of astonishment, as it suddenly came together in her mind.

    Ui blinked. "Wait, really?"

    "Well, yes," said Miku, almost as though she were admitting to something.

    "Wow," said Jun. "Is this... did we just crack some kind of cosmic secret? To summon a Vocaloid from another dimension, get your friend the fugitive warship to lay down some phat house beats in a deserted school building?" She paused, looking thoughtful, then said matter-of-factly, "For the record, even I can't believe I just said those words in that order."

    "Do you know what Jun-chan is talking about, poi?" Yūdachi asked Shimakaze.

    "Not a clue," Shimakaze replied.


    The clubroom table would have been a bit cramped with seven of them trying to sit around it, so—since it was a nice day—they took their lunches out to the picnic table by the stream at the edge of the school grounds instead.

    There, Sumire and Jun tried their best to explain the interdimensional musical sensation that was Miku Hatsune to Shimakaze and Yūdachi, while at the same time Ui and Nodoka tried to explain their two unusual new friends to Miku.

    "Really? The Fleet of Fog?" said Miku, surprised. "That's extraordinary."

    "You've heard of them before?" Ui asked, equally surprised.

    "Sure," Miku replied. "They invaded Earth in the 2030s—occupied the planet for 20 years. I still lived on Earth then. That was a long time ago, but I remember it well." Her face took on an oddly wistful expression for someone recalling a war; seeing Ui's puzzled expression, she explained, "Those were hard times, but... there's a certain pride that comes from living through something like that."

    "Eheh... sorry," said Shimakaze awkwardly. "If it helps, I don't remember anything about the war. My earliest memory is from... maybe six months ago?"

    "Mine too, poi," Yūdachi said.

    "How did you come to be so far from home?" Miku wondered.

    "Well..." said Shimakaze hesitantly, but Yūdachi jumped right in:

    "This is home, poi! Our home is wherever the Admiral needs us to be."

    Miku smiled. "I see. Well, I'm pleased to meet you, however you came to be here. I never expected to encounter a Fog ship in person anywhere, let alone here in Dìqiú."

    "Hatsune-sensei, did I hear you say you're taking over for Hutchins-sensei when school goes back in?" Sumire asked Miku.

    The Vocaloid nodded. "That's the plan. She has to get back—she has a different student teaching assignment for the fall semester—and she asked me if I wouldn't mind a little working vacation. Which I was totally ready for after our spring tour, believe me," she added with a rueful little grin.

    "Oh, you already knew her? Of course you did, what am I even saying," Jun said. "Everybody in the Big Universe knows everybody else, apparently." A thought occurred to her as she said that. "Does that mean you know her brother Corwin too?"

    "Of course," Miku replied, nodding. "I don't know him as well as I know Kate, but we've crossed paths a few times."

    "See, that confirms it," Jun said triumphantly. At Miku's curious look, she gestured to the two destroyers and explained, "He's their admiral."

    Miku blinked. "Well! It really is a small universe. I bet there's a story there! There usually is with that family," she added with a confidential smile.

    "Pretty sure there is, but I wasn't there for most of it," Shimakaze admitted. "Yūdachi and I sorta came in at the end."

    "And here I thought Kate was exaggerating when she said I'd have the most interesting fall in years if I came here," said Miku with a merry laugh.


    After lunch, they went back inside and set up for some more practice. True to her word, Jun went and swiped the Jazz Club's utility guitar from their equipment room for Yūdachi, explaining, "It's kind of beat-up, but it works, and nobody's gonna miss it this afternoon—we're the only club crazy enough to come in during vacation."

    Here, the girls of the Light Music Club learned something very interesting about their newest friend. Privately, over the course of the morning and lunch, Jun and Sumire had formed the impression that Yūdachi was nice, but perhaps... well, not to be too uncharitable about it, but a bit dim. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, perhaps. Truth to tell, she reminded Jun of Ui's big sister Yui, who was a ditz of great renown.

    But then, when Ui dug out the sheet music (as yet unused, since they hadn't had anyone to play that part) for the rhythm guitar line of "Theme from YueQuest", the green-eyed blonde read it over once, handed it back, and proclaimed herself ready—and, to the rest of the band's astonishment, she played it perfectly on the first attempt. Her performance wasn't, perhaps, the most nuanced the first time through, but it was technically flawless. And this with the Jazz Club's beater Fangocaster, an instrument she had never held before and which had picked up a number of strange quirks from its many years of being abused by novices.

    She seemed a bit like Yui in personality, and Yui was also (Jun had to admit) a startlingly talented guitarist, but not even Yui could have nailed a part like that after just glancing at the sheet music once. Yui could barely read music; she played mostly by ear, relying on her perfect pitch to guide her, and so generally had to hear what a part was supposed to sound like at least once before she could hope to reproduce it.

    Who are these two? Jun wondered, watching as the two blonde destroyers smiled and bantered with each other between run-throughs. And how much karmic debt are we piling up by having them both come along and join our band?

    What she said out loud, though, was an affectedly nonchalant, "You're not bad! Have you ever considered a career in music?"

    And, back on form, Yūdachi took the question at straight face value, replying, "No... can you really do that, poi?"

    "Some people can!" said Ui, smiling.

    "You all have a lot of potential," said Miku from her perch on the bench, where she'd stationed herself when they resumed playing. "I think Kate was right, this is going to be a great fall term."

    Then, with a curious tilt of her head, she added, "By the way, what do you call your band?"

    Daft Punk
    "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"
    Discovery (2001)

    Chapter Seventeen: "Welcome to the Pleasure Dome"

    Xinqiwu, Qiyue 23, 291 ASC
    Friday, July 23, 2410
    Asami Sato Girls' Academy
    Dìqiú

    The members of the Light Music Club's junior varsity band gathered in the club room as soon as they could decently gain access, so as to collect up everything they would need and get it down to the school's forecourt in time for their pickup. With the band's roster now amounting to six girls, this didn't take long to accomplish, even though they were all still a little logy from the earliness of the hour.

    It was that loginess that accounted for the desultory conversation. They were all excited—the trip they were about to go on promised to be the highlight of their summer vacation—but for the moment it was a private excitement, each band member mostly alone with her thoughts as they stood, each carrying her overnight bag and the group of them surrounded by gear, and waited.

    Twenty minutes passed before anyone spoke above a murmur, and when the moment came, to no one's particular surprise, the one who broke the quiet was Jun:

    "So... did we get ditched by Miku Hatsune? Is that what's happened here?"

    "Jun!" said Sumire Saitō.

    "What?" Jun replied.

    "Somehow," Nodoka Manabe observed dryly, "I doubt that."

    "Let's wait a few more minutes, and then I'll give her a call," Ui Hirasawa proposed, holding up her phone. "I'm sure she's just run into some traffic or something—"

    At that moment, a vehicle nosed through the school gates and up the drive, halting in front of them. It was a van, a medium-sized model made by Future Industries that, according to a chromed badge on the front fender above the wheel arch, reveled in what struck Shimakaze as the slightly improbable name ROADEE+ FriendBus.

    The other striking thing about the van, besides its peculiar name, was its color scheme, a complicated two-tone graphic treatment in silver and an unusual shade of aqua, with black accents. An unusual and very distinctive shade of aqua, which (apart from its metallic sheen) almost perfectly matched the long, twintailed hair of the person who now alighted from the FriendBus's driver's seat with an apologetic, slightly rueful smile.

    "Hi, everyone!" said Miku. "Sorry I'm late, it took longer than I thought it would to rent the van." Sliding doors on both sides of the vehicle and the hatch at the back opened silently, without any obvious cue to do so. "Let's get your stuff loaded!"

    They set to work, packing everything away in the cargo area behind the van's eight seats, making sure the things that should be on the top of the load were on the top, and so on. With seven of them working on it, this was the work of only a few minutes.

    As she pitched in, Jun noticed a number of curious design features in this particular FriendBus—little graphics, badging variations, and interior trim touches that weren't there in the regular model, and which, combined with the color scheme, added up to a distinct impression.

    "Hatsune-sensei..." she said.

    Miku paused in arranging the cargo and sighed, knowing what was coming. "Yes."

    "I can't help but notice that this van..."

    "Yes," Miku said again, the resignation in her voice a little heavier.

    "It appears to be... merch," said Jun.

    "Yes," Miku agreed, still more resigned, and she closed the tailgate.

    Yūdachi peered at the badge thereupon, which did indeed bear a chrome silhouette of Miku above the main text and the legend HATSUNE MIKU Edition in smaller type below. The green-eyed blonde blinked at this, then turned a puzzled head-tilt to the item's namesake.

    "You rented a Miku van, poi?" she asked.

    Miku gave a helpless, embarrassed shrug. "It's part of the thing they're doing at 10GIÄ stores this month..." she explained.

    "I guess a little more promotion never hurt," Sumire offered. Beside her, Jun nodded sagely.

    "I didn't ask for it!" Miku protested, suddenly animated. "It was the only thing the man at Coastal Rentamobile out at the airport would give me. He claimed it was the only van they had. That's why I was late," she added. "I spent 15 minutes trying to convince him to rent me a normal one, but he wouldn't budge."

    "Well," Shimakaze observed as the band members selected seats and climbed aboard, "at least if we have to make a rest stop, we won't lose it in the parking lot."

    "There is that," Ui agreed.

    Miku laughed, her good humor restored, and got behind the wheel. Ui rode shotgun, since she had the directions on her phone, and the others disposed themselves about the second and third rows, amongst various bits of gear that were secured here and there.


    It was about a four-hour drive from Sakuragaoka to the top of Mount Weitang: a straight shot up the coast to the outskirts of Republic City, then a swing northeast on the Western Empire Expressway to avoid the city itself, followed by a final run almost due north up Highway 71 to the lower end of the newly laid private road up the mountain. They made only one stop, at a supermarket Sumire spotted about halfway to Republic City, to pick up some supplies so they weren't arriving empty-handed.

    This led to a minor incident in the parking lot. One of the FriendBus Hatsune Miku Edition's features was a cunningly designed graphic of Miku on the driver's side window, invisible from the inside, but giving the impression on the outside that she was driving the van. When she got out, and a few curious passers-by discovered that she actually was driving the van, one of them was so startled that he crashed his shopping cart into a bollard, spilling its contents everywhere.

    ("Why do you suppose that guy was buying so many cabbages, poi?" Yūdachi wondered as the band, having helped the flustered man recapture his groceries, entered the store.)

    The rest of the trip raced by in a blur of coastal scenery and cheerful conversation. The latter was mostly about music, in keeping with the purpose of the trip. Miku gave a couple of impromptu voice lessons and a short lecture on music theory, already settling into the music teacher/club advisor role she was slated to take up officially in a couple of weeks. Shimakaze talked for a while about the process she used to make the complex electronic music she composed, which had very little to do with formal theory. Jun recounted some adventures from her tenure with the Jazz Club, which she'd been a member of for a few months before Ui and the senior members had convinced her to jump ship for Light Music.

    "How about you, Sumire?" Jun asked at the end of her anecdote. "What made you decide to become a drummer?"

    "Well... of course, I grew up in a very musical household. You know Mugi-nee's father owns that chain of music stores." She blinked, realizing how she'd just referred to her parents' employers' daughter, then reddened and said, "Oh my, you mustn't tell anyone outside the club I called her that. She doesn't mind at all, but all four of our parents are touchy about it. When we're not alone, she's Kotobuki-ojōsama to the likes of me."

    "That must be tough," said Nodoka sympathetically.

    "I'm used to it," Sumire said, shrugging. "It drives Mugi-nee up the wall, though. She's had some real arguments with her mother about it. Anyway," she went on, her blush returning, "you didn't ask me about that. I became a drummer..." She paused, thinking of the right way to say it, then settled on, "... so it wouldn't seem like I was trying to compete with Tsumugi."

    Seeing puzzled looks on a few of her bandmates, she elaborated, "Mr. Kotobuki offered to let me take piano lessons along with her, but we both knew that if we did that, it would turn into a contest. Not to us, but to the music tutors, and at least some of our parents. So I took up a different instrument. We've always had a little conspiracy going," she added with a nostalgic smile. "Ever since we were little, we've tried to avoid anything that could seem like a competition. That's also why I've gone to different schools until now."

    Jun frowned thoughtfully. "Huh. I wonder why she decided to change that now, all of a sudden. Didn't you say she convinced you to transfer to Sato?"

    Sumire nodded. "I don't really know why, either," she admitted. "Mugi-nee's mind is hard to read, even for me. She seems flighty, but she always has plans. Sometimes plans within plans." She smiled. "But it always works out in the end." Becoming mildly self-conscious again, she said hurriedly, "Anyway, I think I've talked about myself enough. I must be boring everyone by now. Ui-chan, what about you and your sister? Have you ever had that kind of problem?"

    "No, not really," Ui replied, and then, "I'm not sure Big Sis even knows what competition is."

    "I'd buy that," agreed Jun.

    Mount Weitang
    Hōkago Tea Time retreat: Day 7

    "Whoa!" Ritsu Tainaka declared, leaning out of the kitchen with eyebrows raised. "Are you OK, Yui?"

    By the dining room table (which she had just finished polishing), Yui Hirasawa sniffled, blinking sudden tears from her eyes, and nodded. "I think so," she said.

    Mio Akiyama stepped into the other end of the kitchen from the side hall, broom in hand, to look through the breezeway at Yui. "That was a heck of a sneeze," she said, impressed.

    Over by the TV, Mugi Kotobuki looked up from tidying the GameCenter discs and smiled. "Someone must be talking about you," she speculated.

    "Either that, or it's time to change the bag in this vacuum cleaner," Azusa Nakano mused from the opposite side of the dining table. "I didn't think it'd had a chance to get that dusty in here in a week."

    "It's fine, it's fine," Yui assured her. "How's lunch coming along, Ricchan? It smells really good!"

    "Taking shape nicely, if I do say so myself," Ritsu replied with a slightly smug little smile. "What was the latest from Ui on when they were going to get here? Right around now, wasn't it?"

    "Should be any minute," Yui confirmed, rechecking the text messages on her phone.

    "Well, I think we're just about ready for them," Mio said as she returned the broom to the hall closet.

    "Great, well, I'll get back to it, then," Ritsu said.

    "I can't wait to see what Ui and her friends have been up to this week," Yui remarked, plopping down on the small part of the sofa not already occupied by the great, dozing white bulk of Niri, Avatar Korra's polar bear dog.

    "Yes, I'm excited," Mugi agreed. She finished up her work and sat down in the matching chair, adding, "From the messages she's been sending, it sounds like Sumire-chan is having a good time. I'm so glad. She has trouble putting herself forward sometimes."

    "That sounds familiar," Mio said with a wry smile as she sat down in one end of the loveseat.

    "Yes, but you've always had Ricchan to push you out of your own shadow—and unlike me with Sumire-chan, she's never had to be subtle about it," said Mugi with a mischievous smile.

    "Which is good," Azusa remarked, putting away the vacuum cleaner, "because I'm not sure Ritsu-senpai could actually manage that."

    "I can hear you talking about me," Ritsu's voice called from the kitchen. "I'm in here unsupervised with your food, I urge you to reconsider your life choices."

    "I didn't say it was a bad thing," Azusa called back as she crossed the room to join the others.

    "Your wording strongly implied it," Ritsu's disembodied voice insisted.

    "Yeah, yeah," said Azusa with a dismissive gesture. Arriving in the seating area, she took a quick look around and saw that only one seat was open; she'd started to move toward it when Yui, grinning cheerfully, held open her arms in invitation.

    Mio expected their kōhai to ignore this invitation, as she always did, and pointedly take the empty place next to her, on the other half of the loveseat. Instead, to her blank-faced surprise, Azusa paused as if considering the matter for a moment, and then, without a word, went and sat in Yui's lap, to be immediately and joyously cuddled.

    Blinking, Mio turned to Mugi with an expression that asked, Did you just see that? It was obvious from the sparkly-eyed smile on the blonde's face, though, that she had.

    OK, kind of unexpected, the bassist thought to herself, but she offered no comment, in part because when she looked back at the couch, Azusa's face was all but daring her to, even as the rest of her melted bonelessly into Yui's embrace.

    Ritsu emerged from the kitchen a few moments later, wiping her hands on a tea towel and beaming. "There!" she declared triumphantly. "All ready. I hope Ui's ETA was right, I can only leave this stuff on 'warm' for so long." She came around the end of the couch, saw the tableau arranged thereupon, and grinned. "Aw, aren't you guys all cozy," she said, and then stretched out on the loveseat with her feet up on the armrest and her head in Mio's lap. "There, now I got mine too."

    "This morning has taken an odd turn," Mio observed matter-of-factly to Mugi, who nodded, still smiling. Before she could reply verbally, if she intended to, the sound of an approaching vehicle and the beep of a horn came from the driveway. Four of the girls turned to look; the fifth had to sit up and hang halfway over the back of the loveseat to do likewise, but Ritsu was still the first to comment:

    "Awright, they're here!"

    By the time the van got to a complete stop, the members of Hōkago Tea Time (and Niri) had all come spilling out of the sliding door from the great room to meet it.

    "Huh, that's a Miku Hatsune van," Ritsu observed. Then the driver's door opened and the person behind it climbed out, and she continued in the same tone of voice, "And... it... has Miku Hatsune driving it. OK."

    "Oh wow, it really is!" Yui exclaimed. "Hi! Welcome to Mount Weitang!"

    "Hello, everyone," said Miku pleasantly, bowing. "It's nice to meet you all. Kaitlyn's told me so much about you—oh! Hello," she added, surprised, as Niri came forward to introduce herself.

    "Oh wow, a polar bear dog," said Ui as she and the rest of the club members piled out of the van.

    "Cooool," Jun said. "Just like the Avatar's!" Hurrying up to get a closer look, she asked, "Where'd you come from?"

    "This is Niri!" said Yui, doing her best to hug the colossal dog.

    "She, uh, is the Avatar's," Mio said.

    "Avatar Korra brought us up here from Republic City," Mugi explained, her eyes still wide at the memory of the trip.

    "And when it came time for her to leave," Azusa went on, "Niri decided she'd rather stay with Yui-senpai..."

    Nodoka laughed. "That sounds completely plausible," she said.

    "I see a couple of faces here I don't recognize," Ritsu declared, looking over the group. "You been doing some more recruiting, Ui?"

    "Seems that way," Nodoka answered before Ui had a chance to.

    "You know ya girl Ui, makin' friends like it's her job," Jun added.

    "This is Shimakaze," said Ui, waving the commentary aside with a slightly embarrassed look, "and this is Yūdachi."

    "Welcome!" said Mugi with a beaming smile.

    "Hey, cool," said Ritsu, grinning. "What with Mugi and Sumire-chan, if we get both bands on stage at the same time sometime, we'll have like every blonde in the Republic, I'm pretty sure. I'm Ritsu Tainaka, I'm the club president and drummer of Hōkago Tea Time. This is Mio Akiyama, she's on bass, and you probably figured out which one is Yui on account of she looks just like Ui. And of course Mugi, she's hard to miss." Snagging Azusa in a semi-hug/semi-headlock, she added, "And this here's Azu-nyan Nakano, rhythm guitar."

    "You too, senpai?" Azusa wondered in a resigned sort of voice, not bothering to struggle for freedom.

    "Azusa's in the same class as Sumire, Ui, and me," Jun explained, "but she got into the varsity band anyway." With a finely telegraphed wink, she added, "Between you and me, I think she's sleeping with one of the senpai."

    "Jun!" said both Ui and Sumire, scandalized.

    "What?" Jun replied.

    "Annnnnyway!" said Ritsu briskly, turning loose her red-faced bandmate. "You're just in time for lunch. Let's get the stuff inside and eat!" She opened the van's tailgate, then declared with mild surprise, "Oh hey, you brought my drum kit up."

    "We thought we might need more than one," Sumire explained, "and since Hatsune-sensei was renting the van anyway..."

    "It's cool," Ritsu agreed, nodding, then qualified with a wink, "So long as I'm not the one who has to carry it back down again!"


    They ate lunch—the house's great dining table only slightly cramped even with a full dozen people sitting around it—and Ui explained how the group had met Shimakaze, and through her, Yūdachi. She didn't go into a lot of detail about all that they'd learned since that meeting. Apart from not wanting to trouble Yui with the news that her beloved little sister had almost gotten herself flattened by a truck, they'd all agreed on the way up that it would probably take too long, and be too weird, to try and explain everything about their new friends to the senior band all at once. Instead, they decided to leave the background information at "they work with Kaitlyn-sensei's brother, the one Mio-senpai likes."

    (Actually, Jun tacked on the last part of her own accord.)

    With the formalities taken care of, Hōkago Tea Time conducted the new arrivals around for a tour of the house. Just as the members of the senior band had been, they were blown away by the place—even Miku, whom the students would have assumed had fancier places than this back in the Big Universe.

    "I would love to shoot a video in that underwater room," the Vocaloid was saying as they all trooped back upstairs.

    "Ooh, that would be great!" Yui agreed. "Up on the tower, too."

    "This whole place would make an epic mover location," Mio said.

    "So how do we want to do this?" Ritsu asked when they were back in the great room. "You saw the practice room in the tower, it's pretty small now that there's so many of us—you want to set up in here?"


    After some discussion, they reached the consensus that this was a good plan. With all twelve of them working on it, it didn't take long to move the dining table over to one end, then rearrange the furniture in the living room end to make a sort of impromptu theater, with the instruments set up where the dining room would normally be. They left most of HTT's gear in the upstairs practice room for simplicity's sake, bringing down only a couple of amps and Mugi's keyboard, and within an hour or so, the whole thing was done.

    Which was how Ui and company found themselves arrayed in front of their first-ever audience, if you didn't count the rehearsing they'd done in front of Miku over the last couple of days. Sumire was up in back, the time-honored drummer's position, with Jun on her left (the audience's right) and a bit ahead. Shimakaze was considerably farther forward than Mugi usually chose to set up, right out front on the audience's left, with Yūdachi next to her and Ui over on the far right, the latter sporting her Surf Green Stratocaster and the former holding a sharply angular guitar in a deeper, richer green shading to black.

    Front and center behind a stand mic, Nodoka considered her audience, her expression tinged with a touch of apprehension that, though faint, stood out like a neon sign to her schoolmates, so unaccustomed were most of them to seeing anything like it.

    "Huh," she said conversationally, then added with a wry grin, "Y'know, I wasn't too worried about this, but now that I'm here, I kind of wish we'd put it off."

    "I know, right?" agreed Jun.

    "You'll be fine," said Miku with an encouraging smile.

    "Yeah, relax," Ritsu said. "I mean, we know you only started playing together the other day. We weren't any good then either."

    "Ritsu!" Mio growled, bonking her on the head.

    "Ow! Sorry! I didn't mean it like that!"

    "Please," said Mugi. "I've really been looking forward to seeing what you've been up to."

    "Me too!" Yui said, nodding.

    Nodoka glanced around, silently polling her bandmates, and then seemed to settle into the moment, her smile less nervous.

    "I only hope Nakano still respects me later," she said wryly, and then, as if addressing an audience that didn't already know them, she gave a slight bow and continued, "Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for coming. My name is Nodoka, and this," she declared, hands open to take in the girls on either side of her, "is Frame Shift!"

    The Yogscast
    "MoonQuest: An Epic Journey"
    (single, 2014)

    Chapter Eighteen: "The Real Relation"

    Xinqiwu, Qiyue 23, 291 ASC
    Friday, July 23, 2410
    Mount Weitang, United Republic
    Dìqiú

    By the middle of Friday afternoon, the weekend was already going down as one of the greatest in the annals of the Sato Academy Light Music Club. With both of the club's bands—more than it had been able to field for the better part of a decade—on hand, the stage was set for a stretch of diligent activity the like of which hadn't been seen in some time.

    It all started right after lunch, with a miniature set by the club's newly formed junior band, Frame Shift. They played four songs, the most polished of which (besides Shimakaze's solo house piece, which her bandmates insisted she show off) was their cover of "Theme from YueQuest".

    The other two were more hastily laid on, prepared (as Nodoka rather sheepishly admitted) mainly because the six of them had felt silly coming all this way just to play one song. They, too, were covers; one was an ancient prog rock song from Earth that Shimakaze had introduced them to, called "Don't Cry", while the other—true to Jun's darkest predictions in their pre-name days—was the Sato Academy school song, hastily rewritten for six-piece rock band.

    Following their set, the club members broke out into impromptu workshop groups, scattering around the big house on Mount Weitang roughly according to their specialties: keyboard players in the dining room talking gear, a few guitarists in the living room doing guitarist stuff, drummers and bass players having a rhythm section confab up in the tower practice room, while the vocalists went out on the deck to get a spot of vocal instruction from none other than Miku Hatsune herself.

    Yui Hirasawa, who was both a guitarist and one of Hōkago Tea Time's two lead singers, spent the afternoon in constant motion, shuttling between the two workgroups she was directly involved with and circulating among all the others as well. Ritsu, being the club's president as well as HTT's drummer, noticed her passing by the tower room windows a few times on her rounds and smirked slightly to herself before returning her attention to her own group.

    And people think Ui's the only social ambassador in that family, she thought, then applied herself to demonstrating a creative use of the hi-hat to Sumire.

    As Friday afternoon went on, the composition of the groups changed. Some people just got curious about what the others were up to, and in a couple of cases what was happening in any given location would shift, not for any planned reason, but more in the manner of evolving conversations. The keyboardist conference, for instance, developed into a bull session about songwriting, in which a number of other club members took an interest, while the rhythm section group eventually fissioned further into drummers and bassists, the latter pair ultimately joining the six-string guitarists for a discussion of common concerns.

    Dinnertime brought everyone back together again. Since the weather was so fine, this operation took place not around the table in the big dining room, but instead up on the deck, in the open air. Ritsu fired up the barbecue grill, and for the next hour or so, she and Mio operated a sort of production line for burgers, teriyaki skewers, and whatever else people thought would, as Ritsu put it, be improved by direct exposure to fire.

    The long afternoon was sliding toward nightfall by the time the feast was finished, and those who had not seen the evening view from up on the deck gathered at the rail to watch the sun sink into the bay.

    "Man," said Jun at length. "What a place this is." Turning a grin to Mio, she added, "You can sure pick 'em, Akiyama-senpai. Respect."

    "I didn't 'pick' anybody!" Mio protested, blushing.

    To Mio's relief, no one else saw fit to pick up that thread, and Jun had the grace to leave it now that the point was made. For a little while, everyone stood silently watching while the lights of Republic City came on in the distance. Beyond the city, the running lights of a ship leaving the United Forces naval station cruised serenely past Air Temple Island and out to open water.

    "Feels weird being this far inland," Shimakaze mused, half to herself.

    "Mm," Yūdachi agreed, nodding. "I wonder why the Admiral built his house so far from the sea, poi?"

    "I don't think he was planning on becoming an admiral," said Shimakaze.

    "Are you sure?" Yūdachi asked, giving her a confused look.

    "Pretty sure," Shimakaze replied.

    Yūdachi considered that for a moment, then shook her head. "Weird, poi."


    They stayed out on the deck until the sky was fully dark, then adjourned to the great room to relax and unwind a bit before bed. This inevitably developed into a collective review of the day's work, which all agreed had been a good one, and ranged from there to reflections on the performing arts, the grand scheme of things, and one's place within the other.

    Of everyone gathered there, Miku had by far the longest experience of the business—the only real experience of the business, given that none of the Light Music Club's members could be called professionals (even if Hōkago Tea Time did get paid for that one Livehouse gig). As such, it was only natural that the students looked to her for insight into the payoffs and pitfalls of a successful performing career.

    "I mean, say we do make it to the big time," Ritsu said, gesturing vaguely at her bandmates. "Or these guys do," she added, nodding to the members of Frame Shift, "or whoever. How do you keep your... your stuff together in that environment? How do you stay you?"

    "Well," said Miku after a moment's thought, "I might not be the right person to ask about that. After all, I've never been anything but a performer. Because of the way my Vocaloid family and I came into being, we were already famous before we were even alive. We never had what you might call 'normal' lives to adjust from. But... hmm."

    She trailed off, her face thoughtful, and the students watched her in expectant silence while she considered the matter. After a few moment's inward pondering, Miku regarded their faces with a smile and said,

    "I think one of the most important things we Awakened Vocaloids had to learn was the same for us as it would be for any normal lifeform in our line of work, even if we came at it from a different direction. Because... whoever you are, and however you got onto the stage, you have to keep some part of yourself for yourself. I don't mean hold back—you'll often hear performers talk about giving it everything they have, leaving everything out there, and I believe in that a hundred percent. It's how I've always approached the craft itself. I'm talking about... about your personal space, not physically but psychologically. You need an inner perimeter, a compartment you don't let the whole world into."

    "Oh! Kate-chan-sensei and her band have a song about this," Yui suddenly remarked, sitting up from where she'd been slouched back against Niri. "Do you know it, Miku-chan-sensei? Living on a lighted stage approaches the unreal for those who think and feel..."

    "In touch with some reality beyond the gilded cage," Miku responded with a smiling nod.

    "Cast in this unlikely role, ill-equipped to act, with insufficient tact, one must put up barriers to keep oneself intact," Mio put in. "I think about that one a lot..."

    "Well, they're absolutely right about that part," Miku agreed. "But the thing is," she went on, pleased that she'd gotten them onto the right page, "you can't live behind those barriers alone, either. You'll just go cold and dead inside if you do that. You have to have some people who know you—not in the 'household name' sense, but really know you, people who exist within that perimeter. Without them, you won't be maintaining an inner safe zone, you'll just make yourself a hollow shell—the outward performance, with nothing inside it. I've seen a number of people in the business let that happen to them," she added soberly. "Some recovered; a few never did."

    "So... how do you stop it?" Mio wondered, her expression troubled. She didn't seem to notice that Ritsu had taken her hand while Miku was talking; possibly Ritsu hadn't realized it either.

    Miku brightened. "Oh, it's not that hard to avoid," she assured her dismayed-looking students. "You guys already have a good head start, being in such a tight-knit band. But beyond that..."

    The Vocaloid paused again, collecting thoughts, then came to an inner decision, nodded slightly to herself, and said,

    "Let me tell you guys a story. It's not one I tell often. Most of the time, the people I'm talking to wouldn't be interested, or they'd be interested for the wrong reasons, or they just wouldn't get it, but... I want to tell you about the first. The first person who loved me as me. Not a performer, or a character, or a digital cypher designed to be whatever the customer hopes for—the first person, apart from my fellow Awakened, who knew me and loved that person, independent of everything else this face brings along with it.

    "Her name was Koemi Takata."

    The smile on Miku's face softened, turning sentimental, as she went on quietly, "Koemi was one of my operators back before I woke up. She was kind, and sweet, and she was brilliant. She had degrees in electrical engineering, computer programming, and what they used to call New Media. She had a photographic memory—better than mine—and an incredible eye for detail. Koemi was the first person outside the computer to notice I had changed. She knew it before we went public.

    "After that, at first, she loved me like anyone else might: as a fan, though with the added dimension of her inside knowledge. But while we were all working on our Turing certifications, I started to realize she was changing too. That along the way, she'd come to look past all of that and just see... me."

    "Oh wow, poi," Yūdachi murmured, her green eyes wide, as if she had just witnessed the unveiling of some hitherto-unsuspected cosmic truth.

    "Right?" Shimakaze agreed, nodding.

    "That can be a rare and precious thing when you live a life as public as mine has been," Miku said, evidently unaware of the moment she'd just caused. "I love my life, I wouldn't trade it for anything, but even so... that lighted stage can be a lonely place, and I'm not good at being lonely. I don't think anyone really is, even if some people think they should be. So I think, when you find people like that... you should do whatever you can to keep them near you."

    She paused, her face going slowly red as she came back from her reverie and realized how many eyes were on her, and then chuckled wryly and added,

    "That sounded less yandere in my head."

    The laugh that quip brought saved the occasion from turning maudlin, and in the aftermath, Jun turned the group's attention in another direction, challenging Tainaka-senpai to a head-to-head in Super Fury Racing.

    Xinqiliu, Qiyue 24
    Saturday, July 24

    It was just after breakfast, while they were all gathered up on the deck to work out their starting groups for the Saturday session, when the young musicians became aware of an unusual noise. Quietly at first, but growing steadily louder, they heard the sound of a rotorcraft.

    By the time the club members heard it loudly enough to pause their conversations and look for its source, that source was close enough to be readily apparent: a large twin-rotored cargo helicopter, approaching from the direction of Republic City. As it drew nearer, they could make out its red-and-white livery, familiar to everyone there who lived in Sakuragaoka (which was most of them): the color scheme of a major shipping concern with significant operations in that city's busy port.

    "Huh," said Ritsu aloud. "What's a Future Line Cargobob doing all the way out here?"

    "I... think it's coming here," said Mio, looking puzzled.

    Within a minute or so, the others could all see that she was right. The helicopter was unmistakably heading for their location. While they all watched in confusion, it descended over the meadow in front of the house, its thudding rotors blowing the grass flat, and settled on its wheels a short way from where Miku had parked the rented van that had brought Frame Shift up the mountain earlier in the day.

    "OK, so... did somebody order a pizza or something?" Jun wondered as the Cargobob's turbines whined down, its rotors coasting to a halt. A moment later she had her answer, as the helicopter's big side door slid open and people began climbing out.

    Miku leaned out over the deck railing, waving gaily with one hand, and called out as the helicopter's pilot swung her own door open and alighted. "Kate! Show-off!"

    Kaitlyn Hutchins shut the Cargobob's cockpit door and waved back up at her, grinning.


    By the time the Light Music Club got downstairs and out front, the Art of Noise had finished disembarking from the Cargobob and were engaged in unloading their gear, of which they seemed to have brought quite a lot.

    "Now that was an entrance!" Miku declared as she embraced Kaitlyn. Meanwhile, the students crowded around to greet the rest of the band and help with the unloading.

    "I tried to borrow a truck, but Minami insisted," Kate said with a good-naturedly rueful smile.

    "Ha, I might have known," said Miku.

    "Awright, the gang's all here, huh?" said Ritsu, surveying the scene with a satisfied grin.

    "The gang plus one," said a leather-jacketed figure, standing dramatically in the open door of the Cargobob.

    "Sawa-chan!" cried Yui delightedly.


    With three bands on the scene, plus three "generations" of Light Music Club advisor, what had been a sort of music conference opened up into a full-on mini-festival. This involved a few of the previous day's impromptu workshop groups in the morning, but after lunch everyone moved into the great room (reconfigured back into its "theater" configuration) so that the club's bands could show their departing, incoming, and former advisors their work.

    Frame Shift led off, reprising their mini-set for the Art of Noise and Sawako. Those who had seen them play the same songs on the previous day recognized the tracks of certain tips they'd been given in their second performance, and the increasing confidence they had as a band, even after just one day of working with the senior varsity and Miku. They still weren't ready to set Shinobi Arena on fire by themselves, or anything of that magnitude, but their musically attuned audience could already see them starting to gel, and were content.

    Next came Hōkago Tea Time, demonstrating beyond doubt that they hadn't spent the week just kicking back and clowning around in Kate's brother's palace by the lake. Besides polishing their existing work, they had prepared two new pieces, one a cover of a rock standard from pre-Contact Earth, the other a brand new song, which they laid down in front of other people for the first time.

    Santana
    "Smoke on the Water" (feat. Jacoby Shaddix)
    Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time (2010)

    The former saw Yui and Azusa, customarily the band's lead and rhythm guitarists, switch roles, which Kaitlyn observed with satisfaction. She'd already seen them converge to a sort of co-lead role on the song the band had composed for her when she came back from the disastrous trip to the South Pole in June. Now, in a nicely turned cover of "Smoke on the Water", they switched outright, with Azusa playing not just lead, but her first real solo, while Yui quite happily stepped back and let her take over, playing the song's signature rhythm guitar riff with authority.

    The second was an original composition, more in the vein of their earlier work than "Singing!"—peppier and less confrontational, with a faux swagger and a tongue-in-cheek chorus that had Yui, on vocal, musing, "Could it be that we're geniuses? No one says so, but... we must be!"

    After HTT's set, the occasion developed into a full-on jam session, with the musicians mixing, matching, and more or less showing off to each other, as musicians will tend to do when gathered together with their equipment ready to hand. Riffs were exchanged, songs attempted with various substitutions (some successful, some hilariously not, all undertaken in a spirit of gleeful experimentation). Highlights included an Art of Noise featuring Catherine Yamanaka rendition of "Crazy Train", Frame Shift's somewhat off-kilter but game attempt at the theme from Ultraman Dash! (which none of them had ever heard before), HTT's version of the Art of Noise's "Limelight" with Mio and Miku trading off the vocals, and the all-Light-Music-Club mass rock cover of the school song, with four-way dueling guitar solo and mid-song double keyboard rave break.

    They rocked into the evening, well past the normal dinnertime. When they finally called it a day, no one could be bothered to cook, so Kate phoned down a massive order to Celestial Pizza in Republic City—and despite Mount Weitang's distance from the city, they barely had time to knock the living room more or less back into shape before it arrived, hand-delivered by the restaurant's proprietor himself.

    Amid the carnage of greasy boxes, spent Hassy Cola cans, and empty foil bags that had once contained bread sticks, the members of Hōkago Tea Time all looked at each other and silently agreed that the moment had arrived. Uncharacteristically, it was Mio who spoke for them. Rising from the loveseat, she moved forward a pace, careful not to step on any the debris from dinner, and faced their outgoing teacher, saying a little diffidently,

    "Kaitlyn-sensei..."

    Kate looked up from packing her used paper plate and plastic cutlery away in the nearest empty pizza box. As she did, she was surprised to see the rest of the band forming up behind their bassist, all five of them looking as serious as she'd ever seen them—not solemn, or downbeat, but definitely not in a joking mood. Even Yui had a serious expression, even if she did still have her arms around Azusa from behind as they stood to Mio's left.

    "What's up?" Kate wondered, getting to her own feet.

    "We... we have to thank you," Mio said, haltingly at first, then more confidently as she recalled the remarks she'd been mentally rehearsing for days now. "These last few weeks, since you came to Sakuragaoka last month, have been... amazing. We've learned so much from you and your band. Not just about music, but about ourselves."

    She glanced at Sawako, who was sitting at the other end of the couch, belatedly realizing that her praise of their new advisor could be taken as a snub to the previous one's contribution. She was just sitting there, though, smiling cheerfully, almost beatifically. It was, Mio suddenly realized, the sort of smile Mugi smiled, when something was unfolding exactly the way the blonde had foreseen it.

    Shaking off the realization, Mio got herself back on track; already she felt Ritsu squeezing her hand, assuming that she'd hesitated because her nerve was failing her. She glanced to her right and shook her head fractionally—No, I'm fine—before turning back to Kate and plunging on before she could speak the gracious acknowledgment Mio could already see forming on her lips:

    "And we don't want to let it end like this."

    Kate paused, blinking, the train of what she'd been going to say derailed by that flat declaration. Instead, after taking a moment to get it on board, she smiled a little sadly and said,

    "I didn't want it to unfold this way either, Mio-chan, but... sometimes events change our plans for us. I promise you this isn't an ending, though. I don't intend to just disappear back to the Big Universe and never look back! But for right now... I have commitments I have to see through. I have to go back."

    "I know that," Mio said.

    "We know that," Azusa put in.

    "But we're not ready to say goodbye," Yui declared.

    "So that's why..." Ritsu began, her irrepressible grin breaking through the serious face she'd been pulling throughout, and then they were all grinning as Mugi finished,

    "We're coming with you!"

    There were four seconds of complete silence.

    "Uh... what?" said Jun.

    Rush
    "Limelight"
    Moving Pictures (1981)

    Chapter Nineteen: "Who Do You Love"

    The Order of the Rose: "The Federation Lives Forever!" Chapter Nineteen

    I have a message from another time...

    Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
    presents

    Undocumented Features Future Imperfect
    The Order of the Rose: A Duelist Opera

    The Federation Lives Forever!

    by Benjamin D. Hutchins

    © 2019 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited

    Chapter Nineteen
    "Who Do You Love"

    Xinqiwu, Bayue 20, 291 ASC
    Friday, August 20, 2410
    Republic City, United Republic
    Dìqiú

    Councilman Sokka Memorial Amphitheatre, the concert venue in Republic City Park, was packed and ringing to a very different sort of music than it normally boasted on this Friday night. Ten thousand of the city's more discerning rock enthusiasts had come out, on relatively short notice, to take advantage of a rare opportunity to see one of the hottest bands of the "big universe" play in their very own town.

    This was the final show of the Art of Noise's three-week "microtour" of the cities of the old Western Empire, and despite having been dropped with virtually no fanfare, the buzz—and the crowds—had built up steadily as the musicians traveled from town to town. The tour's designer seemed to have taken this into account, for on its first few dates, they were booked into relatively small rooms, but the venue sizes increased along with the demand so that by tonight, at the largest venue on the tour, they had drawn that tour's biggest audience yet.

    Part of the buzz came from the Art's supporting band, a locally-grown all-girl group hailing from Sakuragaoka, down the coast from Republic City. They began the microtour as complete unknowns outside their hometown, but by a few days into the tour, the word had starting going around that they were not the sort of opening act one simply endures to get to the headliners. What was more, the Art seemed to know it too, because the local girls didn't just play a few songs and then leave in the customary manner. After priming the audience with their high-energy opening set, they stayed right there on stage, collaborating with the senior band in an unusual fashion that was part clinic, part jam session, and part battle of the bands. Not for nothing, the word on the lightningweb said, was this miniature tour called When Bands Collide.

    Waiting in the wings for her cue to bound on stage and introduce herself and the rest of the Art, Azalynn dv'Ir Natashkan watched Hōkago Tea Time slam to the end of their set. The venue was different, and so was the setlist, but the vibe out there was so much like a dream she'd once had, shortly after meeting these girls, that she felt a strange sense of unreality settling over her as she watched them lay it down.

    It had to be the biggest crowd these five had ever played in front of—probably greater by two orders of magnitude to any they'd seen before embarking on this tour—but it didn't seem to be bothering them in the slightest. No more did the heat of this sultry summer night, which had pushed them to abandon their blazers and ties after the first song. Yui, of course, was working the crowd like everyone out there was a personal friend of long standing, but Azalynn was pleased to see that even Mio, who was sometimes almost paralytically shy, seemed to be into it.

    They closed out "Cagayake! Girls" with an evolved flourish that hadn't been there at the start of the tour, then paused to hydrate. As they did, Azalynn noticed a conspiratorial glance make the rounds out there. She, in turn, glanced at Kate, who grinned, raising her eyebrows, to show that she'd noticed it too. Ordinarily, Yui would introduce Azalynn at this point and the main part of the show would begin, but it looked like the members of Hōkago Tea Time had something different planned for this show's handover.

    "Thank you!" Yui cried, bounding back to the front of the stage. "You've been amazing tonight, Republic City! It's almost time for us to bring on the main event—" She paused for a renewed wave of cheers, then continued in a lower voice that hushed the crowd, "—but right now..."

    Azalynn felt a chill race up her spine. This was in the dream too, she realized, and she nearly held her breath as she watched Yui go on,

    "Right now... right now it's time to..."

    Behind her, Ritsu started hammering her drums, playing a driving intro line no one had heard from this group so far on the tour, and with huge grins, Yui and Mio leaned to their stand mics and roared together,

    "Kick out the jams, brothers and sisters!"

    Blue Öyster Cult
    "Kick Out the Jams (Live)"
    Some Enchanted Evening (1978)

    Xinqiliu, Bayue 21, 291 ASC
    Saturday, August 21, 2410

    Azusa Nakano slept late the next day, and not just by her own relatively conservative standards. She woke to find the band's suite at the Phoenix House completely deserted. The only sign of the other occupants was a note on the living room table, informing her that they would be touristing it up downtown this afternoon, and she should give them a call when she wanted to meet up with them.

    "Spirits," she muttered to herself as she padded, blinking, into the bathroom to sort herself out for the day. "Even Yui-senpai is gone. Jun will never let me hear the end of this if she finds out..."

    Still, she reflected as she dressed after showering, she had a good reason for it. Beyond last night's show representing the greatest single outlay of performance energy any of them had ever made, she alone among her bandmates had been working on a massive side project for the past four weeks—weeks that had already been a whirlwind of activity that made that first school festival seem like a study hall in comparison.

    Having brought all of that to something like completion on the day before the Republic City Park show, Azusa felt she had every right to be a bit tired. It would all be worth it, though.

    If it had worked.

    Azusa tied her sneakers, picked up her bag, made sure she had her key, and went downstairs. The lobby was quiet, nobody checking in or out just at the moment. As Azusa passed the front desk, the clerk on duty called out to her, "Oh, Miss Nakano, a telegram came for you this morning."

    Trying to seem nonchalant, and not to look as if every particle of her being had been simultaneously hoping for and dreading that news, Azusa went to the desk and took the thin yellow envelope the clerk was holding out.

    "Thank you," she said, pleased with herself at how calm she sounded, and she tucked the telegram into her bag as if it were no big deal and left the hotel.

    She walked around for almost an hour with the unopened telegram in her bag, feeling vaguely silly about her hesitation, trying to reason with herself. It wasn't that big a deal, surely? Either it contained the news she hoped for, or it didn't. Even if it didn't, it was far from the end of the world. She could practically hear Ritsu-senpai chiding her about her habit of getting herself all worked up for no good reason. Just open the dang thing, that's what she would do. Rip off the bandage. Find out what's what.

    Azusa sat down on a bench by a small park, took out the telegram, and looked at it for a few more minutes. Then, with quick, almost angry movements, she tore the end off the envelope, pulled out the form inside, and read it before she could change her mind again.

    The message was short, clearly written, and completely unambiguous. Just like that, the uncertainty was gone.

    She folded it up and put it away again, got out her GearPhone, and sent a text message. The response came back almost instantly. Azusa sat where she was for a few moments longer, regarding the little screen, then rose, pocketed the phone, and walked back toward the middle of downtown with a purposeful air.


    Yui was waiting for her on the observation deck at the top of the Harmony Tower, a bean roll in each hand. She smiled brightly as she spotted her bandmate emerging from the elevator, hopping up and down and waving, as if the younger girl would have any trouble locating the only person in the place who had a polar bear dog with her.

    "Azu-nyan!" Yui cried, hugging her. "You're finally up. You crashed really hard!" she declared. "We tried to wake you up rather than leave you behind all alone, but you wouldn't budge." Giving her a comically serious frown, she went on, "I think you've been working too hard. It's not good for your body."

    Azusa chuckled. "You're probably right," she conceded. "But don't worry. The hard part is done now."

    Yui looked puzzled by that cryptic remark, but she didn't press the issue until they were settled on one of the outward-facing benches overlooking the city. This afforded them at least some privacy (reinforced somewhat by Niri's massive presence, which tended to keep people from wandering too close to their corner of the deck).

    Azusa ate her bean roll, which was the only lunch she'd had, before speaking. When she did, she seemed at first to be addressing her remarks to the city, rather than the person sitting next to her.

    "It figures I would find you up here."

    "I like being up high," Yui said, shrugging as she dusted the crumbs of her own vanished roll from her tights. "It's probably because of Mom."

    Azusa nodded. "Mm. Do you remember the night when I came up the tower at Bellehaven and found you playing 'Romeo and Juliet'?"

    "Of course," Yui replied.

    "I... said something then," Azusa said slowly.

    "Mm-hmm," agreed Yui, nodding.

    "Well... the thing is, I meant that, I knew I meant it, but I wasn't sure how I meant it. You know?"

    Yui nodded again. "I know," she said.

    "So I've been thinking about it. A lot," Azusa went on. "Eventually, I figured that out, but that left me with a different problem: what I should do about the answer."

    Now, for the first time, she turned her head and met Yui's eyes. She saw nothing there but interest, and a touch of concern for how difficult this obviously was for Azusa. No dismay, but no expectation either; letting the situation take its own shape, as she always did.

    "Finally," said Azusa, "I realized that there were only two ways I could go. I could do what I usually do, and psychoanalyze myself about it forever..." A faint smile touched her face then, as she went on, "Or I could do what Yui would do."

    Yui tilted her head curiously. "What I would do?"

    Azusa nodded. "I could close my eyes... take a deep breath... and jump."

    And with that, and no further explanation, she leaned in and kissed the elder girl.

    In her head, it felt like it lasted for half an hour, but was only a few seconds out in the real world. At its end, she sat back, studying the look on Yui's face carefully, trying to read her reaction as her own heart pounded.

    For a moment, Yui's face remained completely blank with surprise. Then, slowly, another expression started to spread over it, pushing the shock aside and erasing it...

    ... in favor of a look of pure, unalloyed delight.

    "Azu-nyan!" she cried, and lunged forward to wrap the younger girl in an embrace so fierce it carried them both clean off the bench and onto the observation deck floor.

    "Yui-senpai!" Azusa sputtered, one hand grabbing ineffectively for the bench, as everyone on that side of the deck who hadn't already noticed them turned to stare.


    Meanwhile, at an elegant restaurant in the financial district, no one noticed the up-and-coming rock star and the zaibatsu heiress having a quiet lunch at one of the corner tables. Everyone knew they were there, of course; but no one noticed them. It wasn't the kind of restaurant where such people are noticed. That was how it could attract and retain such a clientele in the first place.

    "You know," said Sawako casually, "I can't help but feel a bit one-upped. I mean, here my band is finally hitting the big time in Dìqiú, and then you five skip right past that step and go straight to the big universe." She sighed mock-philosophically. "I suppose it's the destiny of great teachers to be surpassed by their best students."

    Mugi chuckled, regarding her with a skeptical air. "I wouldn't call what we're going there to do 'hitting the big time,' exactly," she said.

    "You say that, but once you get out there, I don't think you'll be able to help it," Sawako replied. "Particularly not in the company you'll be keeping. How even you managed to arrange all this, I'll never know."

    "Would you believe me if I told you it really started with Ricchan?" asked Mugi with a mischievous smile.

    Now it was Sawako's turn to chuckle as she said, "I might."

    "Well, she was the one who decided to send our demo to Avatar Korra," said Mugi. "Everything else has followed from there."

    Sawako nodded. "What does your father think of you going on this adventure?" she wondered.

    "He sees it as an opportunity, unsurprisingly," Mugi reported, sounding unconcerned. "A chance for me to network with some of the key people out there. To present the Kotobuki Group in the best possible light, of course," she added in a gently pointed parody of what she called her father's "tycoon voice".

    "And possibly make an... advantageous alliance?" Sawako suggested with a sly lift of one eyebrow.

    Mugi shook her head, smiling. "I'm sure he's long since given up on that idea. Mother, possibly not so much, but she'll figure it out eventually."

    Sawako laughed, quietly, to avoid disturbing the other diners. Then, becoming serious (albeit still with a sentimental smile), she said, "I'll miss you while you're gone, Tsumugi."

    "I'll miss you, too, Sawako," Mugi replied, and then continued in exactly the same pleasantly matter-of-fact tone, "But you'll probably be too busy to miss me all that much. I've left strict instructions for Minami and Ryō to make sure of that."

    Sawako blinked, her smile taking on an overcast of puzzlement. "... What?"

    Mugi grinned. "Kidding!"


    Hōkago Tea Time reconvened for dinner at a noodle place Kate had recommended in the Little Water Tribe neighborhood. It was the first place Yui had been to where no one was surprised, or even a little taken aback, by the arrival of a person with a polar bear dog. In fact, the proprietor and the waitstaff recognized Niri and greeted her as a familiar guest, a phenomenon which made more sense once the girls noticed the autographed photo of Korra on the wall.

    Mio and Ritsu were the last to arrive, sporting International Dangerball League shirts and bubbling over with news of the match they'd spent most of the afternoon watching. The recap took them through the appetizers and most of the way into the main course, and it wasn't until they were waiting for dessert that Azusa had an opportunity to get everyone's attention.

    "You guys... I have some news," she said. "Really important news."

    The others regarded her curiously. "What is it, Azusa?" Mio wondered.

    "Yeah, why so serious?" asked Ritsu.

    Yui looked the most surprised of all. "Are you sure you want to do it like this, Azu-nyan?" she asked, trying to keep her voice down but only really managing an obvious stage whisper.

    Azusa gave her a puzzled look. "What? Oh. No, not about that," she said, as if distracted. "We'll get to that later. This is about our trip. You know how Manabe-senpai and the School Board made that arrangement with the school we're going to, so that we could go into the same grades we're already in?"

    "Right," Ritsu agreed, visibly wondering where she was heading. Smirking, she added, "Good thing, too. If we had to take that placement test Kate-chan-sensei told us about, Yui would probably have to study so hard she'd forget how to talk."

    Yui folded her arms, eyes closed in huffy dismissal. "I'm not even going to dignify that with a revision," she said.

    "Rebuttal," Mugi put in helpfully.

    "Or that," Yui added, then opened one eye and gave Ritsu a goofy grin, which sent them all off giggling.

    Azusa waited patiently for them all to have it out of their systems, then said without further preliminaries, "I took the test anyway."

    "You did?" asked Mio in surprise. "Why?"

    "For that matter, when?" Ritsu asked. "When the heck did you have time to study for something like that with everything we've been doin' for the last month?"

    "I'll bet," said Mugi with a knowing smile, "that's what you and Miki-sensei were really doing most of those afternoons."

    "About half of them," Azusa confirmed.

    Ritsu gave her young bandmate an impressed look. "Huh! OK. Why didn't you say anything? We'd all have helped if you'd have told us."

    "Maybe she didn't mention it because she's seen how you help people study, Ritsu," Mio said.

    "So cold," Ritsu complained.

    "I didn't want to tell any of you about it until I knew whether it was going to work," Azusa said. Rummaging in her bag, she got out the telegram she'd received that morning, took it out of its envelope, and smoothed it on the table in front of her, turning it so the others could see. "As for why I did it... this is why."

    The four older girls leaned in over the table to get a closer look at the telegram. It was a message from the Dean of Students at the Deedlit Satori Mandeville Memorial Institute—the Big Universe school they had all determined to follow Kate-sensei to this fall—and it read,

    MISS NAKANO:

    YOUR COMPREHENSIVE GRADE LEVEL PLACEMENT SCORE: 1440 / 1600

    THIS SCORE QUALIFIES YOU FOR PLACEMENT: GRADUATING CLASS 2412; MATRICULATION DETAILS WHEN YOU ARRIVE JERADDO

    CONGRATULATIONS
    C. MONTAIGNE ED.D
    ENDIT

    Ritsu looked confused. "What's the big deal? Aren't you already in the Class of 2412?"

    Azusa opened her mouth to explain, but Yui beat her to it. "They do four years of high school there, and the school year starts at a different time," she said. "So that means..."

    "Yes," Azusa said. "I tested into the same grade you four are in. When we get to DSM, we'll all be juniors." Hesitantly, she added, "Technically... I'm not your kōhai any more."

    "How wonderful!" said Mugi, clapping her hands.

    "Yay!" Yui cried, grabbing her up in another hug (with slightly less knockback). "You're amazing, Azu-nyan!"

    "Congratulations," said Mio. "You must've worked really hard, I'm impressed."

    "Totally!" Ritsu agreed. "This is gonna be cool. And it might keep Yui out of jail until you turn 16!" she added with a grin.

    "Ritsu..." said Mio, facepalming, while Mugi giggled.

    Azusa blinked across the table at the three of them. "You... how did you... I only just..."

    "We're often the last people to realize these things about ourselves," Mugi said sagely, and then the desserts arrived.

    Xinqiyi, Bayue 23, 291 ASC
    Monday, August 23, 2410
    Sakuragaoka, United Republic

    The minitour was finished, but Hōkago Tea Time had one more show to play, this one on familiar ground. Geared up and ready, the five waited behind a closed curtain, listening to the hubbub of the audience gathering outside. After a month of unfamiliar stages, this one felt like an old friend.

    "It's like coming home," Mio murmured to Mugi, who smiled.

    "It is home," she said. "Our first home, anyway."

    Nodding agreement, Yui turned to Azusa. "What do you think, Azu-nyan? Ready to show the home crowd what we've learned?"

    Azusa nodded. "You bet."

    "You look good in that blue tie, kiddo," Ritsu put in. "Ready, everybody? Let's rock 'n roll. Hit it, Yui."

    By the time the curtain opened, Yui was already playing the opening to HTT's version of "Smoke on the Water". They had all agreed that, cover or not, this song—polished at every date on the minitour—was the perfect way to introduce their schoolmates to the new dimension their sound had taken on under the Art of Noise's tutelage. Mio's power, Yui's energy, Mugi's exuberance, Ritsu's hard-won approximation of precision, Azusa's fresh second-frontwoman confidence: it was all here, front and center, impossible to deny or ignore.

    They didn't neglect the standards, of course—Yui doubted they would ever play a show and not do "Fuwa Fuwa Time", and they could never have gotten away with playing Sato Academy without "U&I"—but the new material was the centerpiece, wrapped up with another cover, "Romeo and Juliet", as an encore.

    The clapping and stomping did not abate after the band left the stage for the second time, but they had something else planned besides a second encore. When they went back out, they took six more girls with them, finally answering the question of what all that other equipment on the stage was for.

    Yui savored the buzz their re-entrance created. Audience reactions were among her favorite things about performing, and she could read this home crowd almost effortlessly. They all knew Ui and Jun, of course, but who were the three blondes, and—is that Manabe-senpai?!

    "Thank you, everybody!" Yui declared as she bounded back to her stand mic. "It's great to see you all again! I hope you all had a good summer. Ours was amazing!" That got a laugh; everyone in the room knew very well what Sakuragaoka's suddenly-most-famous daughters had been up to.

    "We have to go soon," Yui went on, "but before we do, I want to introduce you the Light Music Club's new band! They'll be taking over for us while we're away this fall, and I know you're gonna love them!" Jostling her childhood best friend with an arm around her shoulders, she cried, "Take it away, Nodoka-chan!" and then left her to it.

    Nodoka gave Yui a slightly sardonic glance as she withdrew to the side of the stage, then straightened her glasses and said dryly, "Thank you, Yui." Then, composing herself, she addressed the crowd: "Hello, everyone. My name is Nodoka."

    "We know who you are!" yelled someone from the back, drawing another laugh.

    Smiling patiently, Nodoka waited them out, then went on as if no one had interrupted, "And we are Frame Shift!"


    Evening was gathering outside the school windows by the time the Light Music Club left the long-emptied school. Even with eleven of them, plus a polar bear dog to haul the freight and the club's new faculty advisor to supervise, it took a while to get all of Hōkago Tea Time's stuff onto a truck, and all the rest of that equipment back upstairs to the clubroom, after which Mugi and Sumire insisted on one last round of tea.

    "After all," Sumire pointed out practically, "it'll be a while before we have the whole club all together again."

    That gave the occasion a properly sentimental tone. Toasts of tea were drunk to the upperclasswomen, to the Original Four and their upstart fifth, to the new kids and the wandering blondes, to Manabe-senpai's patience and the prospect of a club that actually filed all its paperwork correctly and on time, to the continued success of Death Devil, to adventures in the Big Universe, to Miku-chan-sensei and Kate-chan-sensei and a galaxy that is not only stranger than you suppose, but stranger than you can suppose.

    And then, as the last rays of the setting sun bathed the streets in orange, Hōkago Tea Time took their leave at the school gates with many hugs and a few tears and promises to keep in touch. Miku and the members of Frame Shift stood by the gates and watched the five of them (and Niri) walk off toward the train station, carrying their instruments on their backs, the two guitarists hand in hand and singing an old Dire Straits song while Ritsu kept time on whatever street furniture they were passing.

    "I told you she was sleeping with one of the senpai," Jun remarked.

    "Jun!" said Ui.

    "What?" Jun asked, while all the others laughed.

    to be continued in Volume Three:
    "A New World"


    Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
    presented

    Undocumented Features Future Imperfect
    The Order of the Rose: A Duelist Opera

    The Federation Lives Forever!
    Volume Two: "Come Up Screaming"

    Written by
    Benjamin D. Hutchins
    with Jaymie Wagner

    With
    The EPU Team

    van graphics consultant
    Geoff Depew

    Based on K-On! created by
    Kakifly

    and featuring characters from Kantai Collection created by
    Kadokawa

    Miku Hatsune appears courtesy of Crypton Future Media/piapro

    Contains excerpts from

    "Cross Road Blues" by
    Robert Johnson

    "Singing!"
    by Mio Akiyama and Tsumugi Kotobuki1

    "Romeo and Juliet" by
    Mark Knopfler

    "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Alive 2007)" by
    Thomas Bangalter, Edwin Birdsong, and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo

    "Limelight" by
    Lee/Lifeson/Peart

    Yui's performance in Chapter 9 inspired by
    Oliver Jüchems on YouTube

    "Theme from YueQuest" adapted from
    "MoonQuest: An Epic Journey"
    by Sparkles* for The Yogscast

    E P U (colour) 2021

    1 One assumes there were actual non-fictional musicians involved in creating the music for K-On!, but this is how it's credited on the soundtrack album.