"Aaaa… aaaaa… choooo!"
Ranko grimaced, her eyes and the bridge of her nose scrunching in disgust. "Eew! I got it in my… eugh!" She reached up into the drawn hood of her purple Minato University Pixies sweatshirt, unhooking the elastic band that held her paper mask over her face. Careful not to touch its damp inner folds, she separated from her companion on the picturesque sidewalk and deposited the soiled mask in a nearby metal trash can.
"Sorry," Kumiko said, a conciliatory frown on her face. "I hate when that happens. You're feeling pretty rough, huh?"
The redhead nodded, sniffling as she fumbled in the back pocket of her black jeans for a clean mask. "Yeah. The shows in Seoul were… yeah. It was an outside venue - a baseball stadium - and I think Ari said it was something like minus two or three degrees last night? I damn near froze to death out there, girl!"
Kumiko winced, giving her friend a supportive pat on the shoulder as they resumed their stroll through the main quad of Sapporo University. "Man, that's rough! Did they at least get you and the girls some warmer costumes?!"
A droll glare from the masked singer was sufficient to answer Kumiko's question in the negative.
"Yeah, I should'a known better," Kumi lamented. "But this one's inside, at least!"
Ranko nodded, stuffing her hands down into her pockets to keep them warm. "Thank the gods. Next one too, and then we're done with the tour. Now, I just gotta get rid of this cold quick, so I don't sound like I deep-throated a friggin' rubber chicken up there."
"For sure. You see a doctor yet?" Kumi hung a left, leading her visiting friend through a crowd of students that were milling about in the quad. Most of them were waiting to obtain one of the free tee shirts being distributed from a large pink tent set up just off the quad - a marketing promotion for a new brand of soda, Kumiko soon discovered.
Ranko smiled behind her mask, waving happily to a few freshmen girls in fake fur coats as they made eye contact. At least there's one nice thing about being sick. With my face and hair covered like this, I don't get stopped every thirty seconds to sign shit for people, and I can just interact with them like normal, she thought as she sped up her step to catch up to her companion.
"Yeah. This morning. Popped into a clinic for some antibiotics. Just hope they work fast." Ranko sniffled, trailing Kumiko as the brunette led her to a stairwell snaking up the outer wall of one of the girls' dormitories. "You decide not to color your hair again?"
Kumiko nodded, fidgeting with the still-silver ends of her shoulder-length brown hair. "Yeah. Just got to be a pain to keep it up. Besides, I think it looks kinda cool where just the bottom is lighter. It's like the printer ran out of ink or something."
"Oh, totally!" Ranko grinned behind her mask as Kumiko stopped in front of room 308. "Yui keeps saying I should color my hair, but I think the Yokai guys would have a stroke if I fucked with the signature look."
Kumiko groaned as she slipped into her dorm room, popping it open harder behind herself to make sure it stayed open for Ranko. "In fairness, what don't they freak out about?"
Ranko sighed sadly, entering the cluttered little bedroom. "You ain't kidding." She scanned the cramped space. There was a twin-sized bed situated on the two walls to her left and right.
The floor on the right side of the room was littered with crumpled skirts and tee shirts, and the nightstand was half-buried in empty soda cans. An overflowing ashtray accompanied them. The bed itself was unmade, one of the elastic corners of the magenta fitted sheet having dislodged and rolled up to reveal the cheap mattress underneath. Posters of shirtless men all but completely covered the wall over the bed. Just beyond its footboard, in the corner closest to the door, a small study desk was piled high with looseleaf papers and dogeared magazines.
"No roomie?" Ranko asked, gesturing to the pigsty of a space as she made her way to the chair on her left. She pulled the blue plastic office chair out from under Kumiko's tidy desk, turning it to face the bed and slipping into it.
Kumiko's half of the room was far more organized. The bed was sloppily made, but made, covered with a yellow puffy comforter printed all over with sunflowers. The walls on Kumi's side were mostly covered with white sheafs of heavy ivory paper bearing hand-drawn manga figures. Some were colored, others merely sketched.
Two posters dominated the area directly over the headboard. One featured the main cast of characters from the anime Metal Armor Dragonar. The other was far more familiar to Ranko, as it was a photo of the singer herself on stage in a red leather pantsuit. From the fire and brimstone evident on the video screen behind her, Ranko knew it had been taken during the opening number, Demon in Your Radio. The wordmark for the Wildfire Tour dominated the lower left corner of the poster, and the logo for Ranko and the Dapper Dragons filled the space opposite it on the right.
Kumiko shook her head, kicking off her shoes and taking a seat on her bed with her back to the headboard. "Nope! Her last class was yesterday morning, so she left for Christmas already."
"Aren't you going home for Christmas?" Ranko asked, bending down to begin untying her sneakers.
Kumiko scoffed loudly. "Are you kidding?! Girl, I have front-row Ranko and the Dapper Dragons tickets for tomorrow night! I'll go home after. Give me your flight information when you get a second, and I'll try to get a ticket on the same flight back to Tokyo!"
It was Ranko's turn to huff dismissively. "Please. Like I ever know what plane I'm supposed to be on. Crash practically has to keep me on a leash in the airport, or I'll end up on a one-way red-eye to Timbuktu."
"Oh, come on!" Kumiko giggled, waving away her friend's words with the back of her hand. "Nobody can be that lost!"
Oh, yes they absolutely can, Kumi, Ranko thought with a smirk. For Exhibit A, I give you one Ryoga Hibiki. "Well, Akane called this morning and said we have an extra ticket for the Tokyo Dome show; you wanna come? It's totally cool if you don't; I mean, I know you'll have already seen the show twice by then, and it is Christmas."
"Are you kidding?! I'd watch that show seventy times if I could!" Kumi grinned excitedly, clapping her hands. "I'd love to come!"
Ranko shook her head. "You would not watch it seventy times, because then I'd have to do it seventy times, and I'm freaking whipped from thirty-three. It's been fun, but fuck, I'm ready to be done and just get to be home for a while. As opposed to freezing my tits off in Korea." She leaned her chair back, surveying the contents of Kumiko's desk. Ignoring the framed full-squad photo of the 1991-1992 Yusue Technical High School Pride, she reached for a spiral-bound sketchbook with a pewter-colored cover. "Working on anything cool lately?"
"Ranko! Don't! I…" Kumiko swallowed hard, reaching in vain for the book from across the room, but her protest came too late. Her friend was already giggling.
Ranko gestured down at one of the panels on the first page. In it, a muscular blond man in a black leather jacket pointed forward, urgently barking orders to a group of three characters behind him. One had a green mohawk, and another of the men had rail-straight black hair. The fourth character's head was not visible in the panel. "These dudes look like what my band thinks they look like!"
Kumiko groaned, covering her face with her hand as Ranko's eyes drifted to the next page.
On it, the quartet of leather-clad figures had assembled into a line, unveiling the fourth member of the group for the first time. It was a muscle-bound woman. She, too, wore a black leather jacket, but paired with a black pleated skirt. She had bright pink hair. In a series of smaller panels, the blond man - seemingly the leader - reached over his shoulder, pulling a cherry-red guitar from its strap and taking it in hand. However, he did not hold it like a guitar; rather, he gripped it about the neck, revealing that the bottom edge of the guitar's body had been sharpened into the curved blade of a battle axe. The quartet stood atop a small dune in a vast, empty desert.
"Um, Kumi…" Ranko pointed down at the sketches. Kumiko could not discern if the look in her eyes was amusement, awe, or embarrassment. "These guys… are they s'posed ta be…"
"Gods, kill me now," Kumiko groaned quietly behind her hand as Ranko turned to the next page.
The four figures rushed forward on the sand, clashing with a horde of human-sized insects in a sickly brown. The black-haired man cleaved a claw from a beast not unlike a water beetle with the sharpened edge of his bass guitar. In the next frame, the pink-haired girl's glowing drumsticks slashed across her face, each burning through the hairy limb of a cockroach-like creature like dagger-sized lightsabers from Star Wars.
"Where the hell are the twins?!" asked the fourth member of the band in the next frame. He bashed another beetle over the head with his keytar. He then reached for its keys, pulling three of them out of the device. Each key's back edge was sharpened into a jagged point that had been concealed within the instrument. He flung his arm backward, casting the three ivory darts at once like kunai. Each struck a wasp-like assailant between its large, bulbous eyes.
The band's leader dispatched a centipede, bisecting it with the blade of his guitar-axe. "They're busy!" he shouted in a dialogue bubble over his head.
"The twins?!" Ranko turned the page, giggling loudly behind her mask. "Oh, don't fucking tell me…"
The next frame was filled with a sea of flame. Body parts of various insectoid creatures littered the ground and fell from the sky, still smoldering. "There's too many!" read the dialogue panel, though the speaker was still unseen.
"Shut up and fight!" shouted a tall blonde woman in a sailor fuku. The shell of its body was white, but its collar, skirt, and the large bow at her sternum were all a matching cyan. The knee-high boots she wore were as well. The blonde lifted her hand until it was at eye level, seeming to contemplate it as a white mist swirled around her wrist.
In the next panel, the blonde thrust her hand forward, and a rain of icicles seemingly summoned out of thin air pelted a group of approaching centipedes.
"BEHIND YOU!" read the next dialogue panel. Another character - this one a short brunette with her hair in a bob with long, shaggy bangs - charged past the ice witch. She wore a similar fuku, but all of the bits that were blue on the first girl's outfit were orange. A jet of fire spewed forth from her palm, burning a hole in the chitinous chest of a purple-and-green beetle.
Ranko rolled her eyes, laughing as she turned the page again. "Oh, please. Like they could hold their own for five seconds without me."
Another whimper escaped between Kumiko's fingers as she watched her friend's eyes widen.
The panel showed the interior of some sort of organic base. Every surface seemed to be grown out of insect-like chitin with an iridescent shimmer, and covered in a sort of greenish slime. It was as if the entire structure had sneezed on itself. "Something's entering the atmosphere!" read a black speech bubble indicating that the words were telepathically communicated rather than spoken. A hulking roach-like beast jabbed with a hairy appendage at a console that glowed a sickly green. Red text, in a runic language Ranko did not understand, was clearly intended to indicate a warning of some sort.
The next panel was an aerial view showing a massive horde of thousands of insectoids, too small to discern the features of any one. Dueling waves of flame and ice on the left side of the massive army confirmed it to be the position of the two female mages. On the bottom right side of the group, a chevron of insect corpses indicated the ingress that had been made by the four musicians-turned-melee warriors.
Another small frame showed a glint in the sky, and in the next, a thick beam of red light rained down into the center of the horde. A massive spherical explosion formed at its point of impact, encompassing nearly half of the thousands of bug-men.
"Took you long enough!" yelled the fire-witch as she dispatched a bug with a fireball thrown like a baseball.
Striding out of the flaming eruption, a third woman in a sailor fuku entered the scene. Her outfit's trim was all bright, candy-apple red, as was her hair. "I was busy!" the newcomer shouted.
"Oh, gods!" Ranko covered her eyes with her hand for a half-second before turning the page. "Kumi, you didn't…"
"Shut up!" Kumiko mewled into the back of a stuffed giraffe. Her face was warm enough to melt steel.
In the subsequent manga panels, the redhead joined the fight in earnest. She, unlike her companions, seemed not to wield magic or weaponry; rather, she fought with her hands and feet alone. But, when she punched the first centipede she encountered, the force of her strike blew its head clean off. She leaped into the air to avoid some sort of caustic pink goo that had been spat at her by one of her enemies, spinning parallel to the ground before landing in a superhero crouch. An uppercut with her left hand nearly split her assailant in twain.
"Batter up!" yelled the fire-witch, and she hurled a fireball toward the point of view of the reader. In the next panel, the keytar player swatted at the ball of flame with his instrument-turned-weapon, redirecting it into a cluster of chittering roach-men. As the manga continued, he leaned forward, and the girl with the laser drumsticks ran up his back, launching herself forward and driving both of her weapons into the shoulders of a towering giant beetle.
The redhead smirked at the blond guitarist, shrugging her shoulders. "You mind if we wrap this up? I got somewhere to be." She reached down to the waistband of her skirt, withdrawing a dynamic microphone with a trailing black cord that seemed not to be connected to anything.
In the next few panels, the redhead took the microphone in her left fist, holding it upside-down. The cord's nearly three-meter length began to glow yellow. The redhead slashed parallel to the ground with her hand, and the magical whip cleft a whole swath of wasp-men in half at the waist.
Back in the gooey organic base, black and red text blared a single word from several places at once - RETREAT.
In beams of sickly green light, huge contingents of insectoids began disappearing from the battle as if being teleported up to a ship in orbit. Four panels later, the musical heroes found themselves standing alone in a desert filled with insectoid corpses.
"Not a bad workout!" snarked the ice-witch as she approached the redhead, her fire-wielding partner in tow.
The redhead shrugged, glancing over her nails. "I guess. Wasn't too challenging."
The blond guitarist clasped her on the shoulder. "Might've been, if you'd showed up at the beginning of the fight."
Rolling her eyes, the redhead turned her head to him. "I told you. I was in the middle of something. Which I need to get back to."
"Yeah, we're about done here anyway," said the black-haired bass player, and he stuck his fingers in his mouth, seeming to whistle.
Ranko pointed at the next panel, giggling and kicking her heels. "Oh, you've gotta be fucking kidding me, Kumi! This is great!"
Each of the six warriors - save the redhead - had mounted a battle-armored cybernetic kangaroo, holding the reins running to the harnesses on their chests as if they were tauntaun in Star Wars.
The redhead snapped her fingers, and was again enveloped in red light. The next panel showed her reappearing in a darkened room, lit only by a pair of moons in a starry sky through a tall window.
"Now…" read the dialogue under her.
The last panel showed her walking up behind another woman. The black-haired girl was wearing a thin white negligee, and the redhead wrapped her arms around her waist from behind. "Where were we?"
Ranko closed the book, a wistful smile on her face. "Now, that part, I can get behind." She rested the sketchbook back where she'd found it on Kumiko's desk. "Dare I ask if this manga has a name?"
Despite finally emerging from behind her plush shield, Kumiko was still bright red. "I was thinking of calling it Sailor Ranko and the Sentai Six."
The sniffly songstress shook her head. "You can't, Kumi! I mean, anyone who knows the band will know you modeled the characters on us, but… you can't use my name, and then show her… ya know, with the girl at the end. It's too close. It'll make people ask questions." There was an emptiness in her voice that had not been there a moment ago.
The mangaka nodded sadly. "I know. I'm sorry, Ranko. I wasn't thinking about that. I don't know how you do it. I don't know why you do it. Who cares what those assholes think?! Anybody who spends five minutes with you can see that it's breaking your heart."
Ranko shrugged, slumping back in Kumiko's desk chair. "I don't have a choice. They made me sign that stupid contract. I guess they think if people knew I was… with a girl… they wouldn't buy my music anymore. Maybe they're right. But it doesn't matter either way. They've got me over a barrel now. If it ever gets out, they can end my career in a blink. They keep all my music, and me and the band get jack shit."
"Why the hell did you sign that damned thing?!" Kumiko growled under her breath. "Fucking assholes."
Ranko bit her lip, wiping the corner of her eye just above the top edge of her paper mask. "I ask myself that question every day. I did what I thought I had to do, but… I mean, if I hadn't signed it then, they would have just kept pressuring me, and I probably would have had to eventually. Nabiki was fighting the good fight, but we were running out of options."
Kumiko crawled across her bed until she reached the foot of it, sitting on it and dangling her feet down to the floor. She extended her arm, giving her friend a reassuring pat on the thigh. "I know you can't, but if you could… If they didn't make you hide it anymore, I mean, what would you even do different? I mean, I don't know the names of any other singers' partners, so how much different is it for you, really?"
The redhead shook her head. "It's not just that, Kumi. It's the little things, like not being able to use words like she or girl in the lyrics. Having to have the boys putting their hands on me every time I'm on stage, because it's what the fans expect. Having to pretend to flirt with them. Having everybody in the crowd think I'm banging Crash. Having to be so careful when I talk to the audience between songs, because I make the slightest slip, and everything comes tumbling down. How the hell am I supposed to sing my heart out, when it's all a lie?!"
She hugged her knees to herself, resting her bare feet on the front edge of her seat. "I'm not doing anything wrong, Kumi. I love someone, she loves me, and I'm sick to death of the fact that they make me feel dirty for it. I've spent so much of my life feeling like… everything I am is wrong. And I guess I actually thought that I was gonna get to feel normal, just once. But I can't, and I need to figure out a way to come to terms with that, because it's not gonna change. This is just the way it is for famous people. I can't imagine I'm the only one. Hell, look at that Elton John dude. You can't tell me that guy's not gay as fuck, but he can't just come out and say it."
"Actually…" Kumiko dropped to her feet, kneeling and reaching under her bed. She pulled out a small wicker basket, leafing through a collection of magazines until she found the one she wanted. She flipped open the glossy pages of the Rolling Stone periodical until a picture of Elton John stared her in the face. Kumiko handed the magazine up to Ranko. "He did. Just a couple of months ago."
"No shit?!" Ranko glanced over the text, her eyes seeming to widen a bit more with each answer the Englishman had given to his interviewer. "It doesn't matter anyway, though. They're chiller about that kind of stuff in the West, I guess." She closed the magazine, handing it back down to her friend. "It's nice to dream, though." Ranko sniffled loudly.
"Hey. C'mon, now." Kumiko slid the basket of magazines back under her bedframe, using the bed for support as she stood. She hugged her friend around the shoulders. "Don't cr…"
"AAAAAAAA-CHOOOOOO!"