Midsummer's eve, 2040, red herring

Some of the pickled herring was red. Twice the fun since the guests were here for a vacation that wasn't a vacation, in preparation of a job that wasn't a job. And now he was eating herring that was indeed red, and yet it was the real deal.

Swedish schnapps helped inflate what was already a bad pun to begin with out of proportion. A truly bad pun as he hadn't even shared it with anyone.

Ryu looked at his sister. For a while she and the two other girls, because they had been girls back in those days, had circled around Urufu like planets around the sun. And he, Prince Wakayama of the Himekaizen Academy, had seen parts of his powers usurped. But they hadn't been, not really.

Red herrings. There had been a lot of them, all of them real, none of them real, but in the end they had all mattered somehow.