127 My Heavenly Growth [Arc 19]
[ARC 19: EVERYBODY'S A CRITIC]
After a shopping trip for the new punk, the four returned to Urasaria's gates and a curious Marisa.
"Serena, did you get a new haircut?"
"I did." she laughed. Her hair had been trimmed from shoulder-length black to short & spiked.
"It looks good! You've got that whole punk thing going on now. Everywhere."
Serena nodded and felt another cramp. (These are painless for hosts. Typically.) "T-Thanks. Um, would you be cool remaking my jacket for me? It's kinda gotten stretched out."
"Sure, it doesn't take me long. Want it to look the same?"
"Yeah. Could you make one that's sleeveless, too? Um, so it shows my shoulders."
"Sure thing." Marisa looked to Mia. "Also, Mia-Mia, Matoi wanted to talk to you, since you were out for a few days. She said she had like, something special planned up for you."
Mia grimaced, hugged Serena, and set off with Marisa.
Naomi walked home with Serena & Yuruko and spent the rest of the day by herself. Since her encounter with Kirihara, most people were too afraid to say shit to her; this left Julia as her primary friend outside of the couple, though she did not mind. Lately she had been reading philosophy, mostly what Julia recommended, but would occasionally seek some out on her own and ask Julia what she thought of them. Julia was not really a role-model for her, not in the main: she had mostly ended up how she was rather than chosen it. Yet she found their discussions useful.
Julia had said once that art critics favored older movies mostly because so many could not articulate what worked about a certain work, so they preferred someone who had already done it for them. She was teaching Naomi how to do this herself, of characterization and parallax; how to enter one narrative and exit through another. In these early months of their friendship Naomi confided nearly as much in Julia as she did Serena & Yuruko.
These meetings had acted as pressure valves for her intellectual side in prior weeks; no longer did she subtly disdain the couple's inanity, and in fact she now enjoyed both. She went hunting with the two, sometimes including Mia, who was generally the only lesbian besides Julia she could speak to without feeling she was subtly being mocked. (Serena and Yuruko are bisexual.)
At night she would go back home and rest for a few minutes, then head over to Serena & Yuruko's house.
In their usual habit, the couple was watching anime on the sofa. Yuruko was laying back on Serena's lap and eating through one of those ungodly flavors of Pringles that the couple somehow always had available. Serena was eating popcorn with hot sauce out of a bucket. To Naomi, nothing could be more stranger than this place compared to Julia's home.
"Hey, Naomi." said Serena, scooting over.
"Hey, whatcha got?" Naomi sat down and shriveled as she saw what flavor the chips were.
"Mffhm?" Yuruko offered some to her and she rapidly shook her head. "Mmfky. Do you want popcorn?" She offered the bucket.
"…um. Who made it?"
Yuruko glanced at Serena. This was a particular phobia of Naomi's; she never ate anything created out of Yuruko's hands & feet via For-Medicinal-Use-Only. (Despite that, logically, Yuruko's hands & feet were also always clean.) She created another bucket and let Serena create the popcorn.
"Um, also, Matoi signed us up for a travel group." said Serena to Naomi. "She said that you, me, Kate, and Julia are gonna do... I dunno, like, we're not doing regular contracts or investigations anymore? We're just going wherever she tells us to go and solving small stuff or whatever. Helping other students out."
"Sounds fine." Naomi shrugged. "Wait, why not Yuruko, too? She was with us last month."
"Yeah, but I have exams soon." said Yuruko. "I'm probably not gonna be hunting at all more than once a month for the rest of the year. I'm gonna live the NEET life."
"But you're in education." mumbled Serena, relevantly.
"Silence, wagie."
Serena giggled. Naomi never did have any clue where they learned this slang.
"(Gah… I-I'm going to have to power up for this…)" said the television in Japanese.
"Is this new?" said Naomi.
"Yeah, it's Uchi no Ten Seichō." said Yuruko. "'My Heavenly Growth.'"
"What's weird is it's an all-female show, too." muttered Serena, no longer relevantly.
"(I'm going to have to grow for this.)" winced the woman on-screen, having just been thrown through three skyscrapers. She stood in an evening filled with smoke, bloodied & flamboyant foe fifty feet ahead. "(Ghh... U-Utena… I won't allow your sacrifice to be in vain!)"
"Who's that?" said Naomi, pointing to the two-dimensional woman's foe, red spikes out of her back & two blue monocles.
"Some minor villain." shrugged Yuruko, and in the next instant -
- a set of eye-lasers shot out of the monocles and towards the woman -
"( - reduce!)" shouted the heroine, shrinking down to dodge them, lasers catching only air as she shrunk to a microscopic size; ahead, her foe started rushing towards her, more lasers blasting through the road -
"( - you can't run from me forever, Hanako! By my calculations, you only have a dozen seconds left of Growth Energy - all I need to do is blast the rest of this avenue away!)"
Eyes rumbling, she turned her vision down, and as another set of lasers blasted the road to concrete chunks -
- the keen end of one grown projectile smashed her skull in from the front, Serena & Yuruko & Naomi wincing at the burst of blood; the woman staggered back -
- direct in to a grown wall of asphalt, and as she turned her eyes to the sidewalk right -
- she saw Hanako at the entrance of the skyscraper there, grown to her normal height, decided at 5'0 specifically to appeal to male otakus & sell merchandise.
"(I'm not out of Growth Energy yet!)" shouted Hanako, foe staying completely still ahead for the monologue. "(You forgot one very important thing! Utena sacrificed the rest of her Growth Energy to me, before you mercilessly killed her! It's my duty to ensure that her spirit lives on through me! By my calculations, I have just enough to vanquish you.)"
"(As if!)" laughed her foe, still completely still. "(You and all the rest of the Heavenly Growth Squadron will die by my Artificial Spinning Eye Lasers, and usher in a new era of darkness!)"
Her eyes started to rumble, and in the next instant -
- she didn't see with aghast eyes any lasers form, only a miniscule puff of red -
" - n-nani?!"
"( - remember this - this is why you lost!)" shouted Hanako - "- because we fight with our friends! Not tools!)"
Hanako grew to a giant's size, grunting and tearing ferociously at a nearby skyscraper, red&black claws growing as she dug in to the foundation -
"( - THIS IS FOR THE GOOD OF ALL HUMANITY!)"
- and the skyscraper-turned-hammer turned her foe in to pink&red mist, three laughing as the woman shrunk down again and the credits began to scroll. They watched another six episodes before they went to bed, and though Naomi fell asleep thinking about Julia's film, she dreamt of the skyscraper woman.
