Ranko waved with both hands as the crowd cheered. Behind her, Hitomi and Emi reached down, offering their hands to their dance partners to help them to their feet. A wispy white fog began wafting onto the stage.
The lights covering the back right corner of the stage came back on, again revealing the bedroom scene that had been hidden from view during the performance of Ring, Ring, Ring. The diffuse light behind the changing screen fired up as well, making the image printed on the canvas panels disappear. Instead, the screen now appeared as five translucent ivory panels that glowed in the dim.
"How we doing, Firebirds? Everybody staying warm out there?" Ranko hugged herself, making a show of shuddering in the cold. She didn't need to fake it; she merely dropped the constant focus it had taken her to hide her shivering thus far for a moment. "We've got three more songs for ya, but we can pack it up early if you're too cold."
The feminine firebrand smirked playfully as the audience roared in disagreement. "Oh. So you want us to keep going, then?!"
Another raucous cheer rose from the sea of humanity arrayed around the stage.
"I guess I'm just gonna have to make it a little hotter in here, then!" The vixenish vocalist bit her fingertip suggestively at yet another affirmative cacophony from her legion of followers.
The video screen lit up again, glowing pink and green through the deepening mist. It displayed the still image of a night club festooned in neon. It featured a round stage bathed in pink light at the center, surrounded by a packed dance floor made up of silhouettes. Golden cages some two meters high were positioned on each side of the stage. In each, an animated silhouette of a woman wearing a flouncy dress similar in profile to the one Ranko herself had just changed into began to dance in time with the bright electric voice of Jacob's synthesizer.
"I mean, don't get me wrong. Romance feels amazing." Ranko spoke over the building rhythm, crinkling her nose cutely as her hips began to roll slowly in time with the beat again. "I gotta say, it's the best feeling in the world."
The salacious singer bit her lip, kicking her heel up behind herself as she cast her eyes down in mock embarrassment.
"Well, okay. Maybesecond best."With a playful and almost vapid giggle, the speed and intensity of her swaying began to increase. She rested one hand over the other over her sternum, before letting her hands begin to explore her own curves.
"Every single day, there's a thousand things to stress. Is dinner gonna burn?"
Ranko spread her arms wide as if offering herself for display. The effect was aided by the two 15,000 lumen spotlight beams that met just above her navel and cast a pair of perpendicular shadows on the stage floor behind her.
"Do I look cute in this dress?!" Ranko asked in song. The decade-old baseball stadium shook on its foundation as her question was answered by more than fourteen thousand emphatic screams.
Not waiting for the affirmations to die down, Ranko continued to sing. She gripped her lacy skirt in both of her hands, thrashing it side to side as she flitted toward the back right of the stage.
"Is my paycheck gonna be enough for all these bills? Sometimes, all a girl wants is a second she can chill."
The young vocalist pushed her voice into a higher register, affecting a slight nasal twang into her tone. It, coupled with her flouncy pink outfit, was intended to give her the vibe of an airheaded valley girl straight from the beaches of Malibu. The Ranma of four years earlier would have been sick at the thought of it - not only leaning so entirely into femininity, but seeming to revel in the stereotype. The Ranko that held twenty-four thousand hearts in the palm of her hand on that December night could only revel in the way it kept her fans on the edges of their seats clamoring for more.
"There's too much going on. Life comes at you at speed."
She sat on the bed facing the crowd, crossing her legs at the knee and slowly tracing her hands down her sides again.
Ariel reached for another, thus far unused, piece of control equipment. "Going hot in three. Two." he announced into his headset.
"It's times like this I'm glad you know exactly what I need…" Her voice was less of a belted alto, and more of a sultry purr. Putting on her very best bedroom eyes, she leaned to her right until she was laying on her side atop the purple plush duvet.
The white mist swirling around the stage ignited in colored light. Four beams of red laser light and four of green blasted through the smoke. They pulsed and flickered in time with Shinji's bass guitar as they panned the stage, the smoke allowing the full lengths of the beams to be seen rather than just the points where they struck the stage.
"It starts with just a glance. You undress me with your eyes. It puts me in a trance, and leaves me paralyzed."
Kazuki's eyes shot up with concern at the loud thud that resonated from behind the black curtain in the corner of the narrow backstage area. "You good?!"
On the stage, the ravishing redhead dragged her fingertips ever so gently up the inside of her thigh. She did not need to pretend to whimper in needful desire; rather, she needed only to let the self-discipline it took to avoid doing so every time she experienced a sensual touch lapse for a moment.
"Whatever I was thinkin', baby, now it's gone. 'Cause, babe, you turn me off every time you turn me on!"
Ranko hopped back to her feet, all but skipping to the center of the stage. She began to writhe, ducking and weaving in place. Each time she did, one of the colored laser beams whizzed through the space her body had just vacated as if she were being hunted by a legion of farsighted Imperial soldiers from Star Wars and only her agility was keeping her from being blasted.
"I was freakin' out, but suddenly, I'm not. What had me so worried?!"
Growling, Hitomi clamored to her feet behind the changing curtain. "I'm fine. Just tripped. These pants are really fucking hard to get on in the cold."
Ranko stopped dancing, straightening her posture and resting her index finger on her chin. She let her eyes go completely blank, cocking her head slightly to the side as all four of the red laser beams slammed into her stomach.
"Baby, I forgot!"
Kaz took a step closer to the changing area obscured by the bulging black curtain. "Can't Emi help you get your pants on?"
"I'm domesticated, babe, you got me trained. You kiss me on my neck…"
Ranko let her neck fall completely limp as if she were a doll that had run out of batteries. Her head leaned forward until her chin almost touched her breasts.
"... and it disconnects my brain."
"I could…" Emi said with a smirk, pulling the curtain aside and holding it for her partner to escape. "... but I much prefer helping her out of them." She slowed down as she walked past the stammering stagehand, flashing him a sultry wink. "Don't you need to get downstairs?"
"Right! Shit!" Kaz shook his head in an effort to clear the cobwebs, hustling to the darkened stairway leading to the understage.
The laser beams pivoted up toward the video board, clearing the plane at stage level just as Ranko let her legs buckle inward, dropping to her knees on the stage floor with her legs splayed out behind her.
"Knocks me off my feet, and puts me on my knees. And all that I can do…"
The redhead slowly crawled forward on her hands and knees, an almost kittenish prance to her movements that was matched by the desirous tone dripping from her every word.
"... is ANYTHING you please!"
The building erupted in raucous whistles and cheers as the young songstress pranced toward the edge of the stage on all fours.
"The slightest little touch, and I am hypnotized, just focused on how much I need you between my thighs."
In the dark hollows under the stage, Norio reached overhead and removed a round rubber plug from the stage floor. With his other hand, he jabbed one end of a nearly two-meter chrome rod a few centimeters up into the hole. That done, he aligned the bottom end of the pole with a fluorescent orange rubber gasket screwed into a piece of plywood directly below the hole and inserted it such that the metal rod was perfectly vertical. It sank nearly eight centimeters deep into the wooden platform before coming to rest.
The young stagehand dropped to his knees, jamming a stout metal pin through a hole in the collar of the gasket. He quickly twisted the upright rod with his hands until the hole drilled through it lined up with the pin. He shoved the pin clear through the pole until it emerged through the hole on the opposite side of the rubber gasket, ensuring that the bent clip on the other end of the cotter pin was securely clipped around the pole.
Ranko pushed off of the stage floor with her hands, propelling herself back to a kneeling position and resting her backside on her ankles. She tried to let the carnal sensation of her frilly skirt teasingly caressing her hypersensitive and nearly hypothermic skin drip through in her inflection. Ranko cocked her head to the side again, almost crossing her eyes in an effort to portray an entirely blank mental state. Just pretend you're staring at a math problem, Akane had coached her during one rehearsal.
"Whatever I was thinkin', baby, now it's gone! 'Cause, damn, you turn me off every time you turn me on!"
The main curtain parted between Jacob and Zoe's positions, and Emi charged forward. She wore a sequined silver tube top over a pair of skin-tight vinyl pants in a vibrant, iridescent purple. Silver block heels completed the outfit. Hitomi darted out behind her in an identical costume.
"When we're out in public, 'cause you took me on a date…" Ranko sang after rising back to her feet, "... you take the opportunity to demonstrate."
"Take 'em up, guys," Ariel commanded from the control booth. "Spots on the wings."
"You see the waiter coming, and you stroke me on my cheek. By the time he brings the menus, I can't even speak." Ranko whimpered loudly into her microphone, her hand making her way to her own backside as she turned her back to the crowd.
Kazuki, having completed the same installation procedure Norio had on the opposite end of the stage, began rapidly pumping up and down on a long metal lever jutting out from under the wooden platform that served as the rod's base. With each downward thrust on the handle, the scissor jack under the platform extended upward a little more, pushing the pole up through the floor until the plywood platform made contact with the underside of the stage floor.
"It really doesn't matter. I won't have much to say." Ranko took a firm handful of her own butt through her lacy pink skirt with her left hand. She turned slightly to look over her shoulder at the crowd, shrugging with her free right arm.
"You'll be the one deciding what I want, anyway!"
Not three beats after the chrome pole rising out of the stage floor in front of her came to rest, Hitomi gripped it tight in her chalk-coated palm. She launched herself upward off her feet, swinging her body around the pole and angling her legs upward until she could hook the interior of her right knee around it. She tucked her toes back behind the pole, stabilizing herself upside down nearly a half-meter above the stage floor. The brunette closed her eyes as her hands traversed the pole, shielding them from the blinding spotlight beam that bathed her in white light.
"Whisper in my ear. Remind me that I'm yours." Ranko took a loose handful of her windblown hair in each hand, holding it out away from her ears as if she intended to put it up in twin pigtails.
"My thoughts will disappear."
Emi slid down her own pole on the left side of the stage, letting her fingers trace down its length ever so slowly as she orbited it on her sparkling heels.
Again, Ranko let her legs buckle inward, dropping hard onto her knees.
"My knees will hit the floor. Whatever I was thinkin', baby, now it's gone!"
The rapturous redhead crossed her wrists in front of herself, letting the fingers of each hand trace up the opposite thigh agonizingly slowly.
"'Cause, when you wanna turn me off, you just gotta turn me on!"
With the upper body strength of a gymnast, Hitomi gripped the pole tight in her hands. She leapt from the stage floor, whipping herself around the reflective rod as if she were a vine of ivy coiling around the pole.
A flick of a switch on Ariel's console ignited another bank of eight lasers mounted to the trusses above the stage. They cast stationary beams of green light straight down through the artificial fog to the stage floor. The circle of beams surrounded Ranko in a narrow cage of light at center stage.
"You flash me a smile and wrap me in a hug. I'm instantly shut down, just like you pulled the plug." Ranko took a rigid stance with one hand on her hip and the other straight down at her side. She held her body perfectly still, as if she were a mannequin that had been posed and put on display.
"All of me goes limp. I'm putty in your hands. I don't fear a thing when I'm under your command."
The red lasers zipped back and forth, parallel to the stage floor. They backlit Emi and Hitomi, giving the white mist surrounding them a pinkish ambient glow as they thrashed their bodies around their poles. For Ranko's part, she relaxed her posture, letting her shoulders and neck droop downward loosely as if she were a marionette whose strings had just been cut.
"Everything fades out. There's nothing left but bliss. I can't live without your sweet paralysis!"
Ranko jabbed her hands forward repeatedly, stopping them short just before they interrupted the green laser beams that formed the bars of her cage as if she was banging on them.
"Please don't keep me waiting, trapped here in my mind."
Hitomi crouched low, bending her knees until the seat of her pants nearly brushed the stage floor. She then slowly began straightening her legs, thrashing her hips to and fro as she coiled herself around the pole and began slithering up it into a standing position again.
"Life is so frustrating," Ranko bemoaned in song. "Help me leave it behind."
The black curtains under the video board, which still displayed the nearly-still image of the neon-lit night club, parted. Sanyo jogged out onto the stage, having again donned his gray pinstriped suit. He strode to the front of the cage of light surrounding the band's lead vocalist.
With the press of a button in the control booth, Ariel Wright disabled the frontmost two of the eight green laser beams, effectively opening a door at the front of Ranko's cage.
As the beams dissipated into the thin white mist that hung in the air, Ranko extended a limp hand out to Sanyo. "Whatever I was thinkin', babe, I want it gone. I need you to turn me off, so please, come turn me on?"
The dapper young man and temporary Dapper Dragon spun Ranko down the length of his arm until she collided with his chest. He led her away from the cage of light, which promptly vanished into the wispy fog, and toward the bed in the back right corner of the stage.
"One touch, and there's a tremble starting in my voice." As Ranko sang, Sanyo softly stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers, careful not to disturb the microphone protruding over her cheek from her headset.
It's just the show. Don't react. Despite her self-coaching, Ranko's body stiffened anyway. Feeling a man's touch in that way, in front of all of those people, never ceased to sicken her. The fact that it was all staged was nearly irrelevant to her.
"Then, my mind gets disassembled, 'til I don't have a choice."
Ranko let herself all but collapse onto the mattress, gazing up at Sanyo from her back with entirely vacant eyes.
On the front left corner of the stage, Emi stretched her legs upward from her handstand, wrapping them tightly around her pole. Once she was confident in her grip on it between her thighs, she arched her back, pushing off from the stage floor with her hands. Using only the muscles of her legs and back, she continued rising, reaching up over her head until her fingers caught the pole.
"Things get sorta hazy, like I'm in a dream, 'til I can't hear the crazy way you make me scream!" Ranko's voice was more whimpering than singing. She swung her legs off of the bed, returning to her feet and striding slowly and carefully toward Sanyo, as if she had suddenly forgotten the thousands of hours of practice walking in high heels that she'd amassed over the three-and-change years since she first met Izumi Sando.
"Cannons ready," Masa announced, watching Ariel's hands for his cue to trigger them.
"I can't even walk. I'm falling on the floor." Ranko made a show of stumbling forward into Sanyo's arms. He arrested her forward momentum, and she slid down his arm until her knees hit the stage.
"But as soon as I can talk…"
Ranko reached up from her knees, taking a tight fistful of Sanyo's crisp white dress shirt.
"... I'm gonna beg for more!"
The stocky dancer grabbed Ranko by the wrist, pulling her up onto her feet. She leaned forward on her heels, tracing her fingers down the center of his skinny gray necktie toward his navel.
"I'm ready and willing. Empty out my head."
The redhead turned away from him, toward the crowd. I'm gonna empty out my freaking stomach if I have to do this too many more times, she thought.
"Take your time in filling…"
Ranko gasped audibly into her microphone, covering her gaping mouth with her left hand. Her right was splayed a few centimeters in front of her crotch, as if she were trying to preserve her modesty in the presence of some twenty-four thousand Koreans.
"... something else, instead!"
Taking Ranko's hand in his, Sanyo ran with the singer to center stage. He gave her a quick moment to wink mischievously in the direction of the audience before pulling her toward the back of the stage.
"Whatever I was thinkin', baby, now it's gone…"
Sanyo pulled Ranko to her left, dragging her behind the backlit changing screen. He wrapped his arms around her neck, and she popped her left heel off the floor behind herself. The embracing silhouettes of the "couple" were projected through the translucent canvas panels.
"... I need you to turn me off. C'mere, and turn me on."
The stout man casting the taller shadow on the canvas reached behind himself. A loud click sound played through the stadium's sound system, and the backlight behind the changing screen blinked out. Ranko giggled impishly into her microphone, purring quietly as the music came to an end. With a loud puff, the confetti cannons mounted to the front edge of the stage belched a cloud of shiny strips of silvery mylar into the air. They slowly fluttered and twisted in the breeze as they rained down on the first seven rows of Firebirds at field level.
Hitomi and Emi spun down their poles to their feet, beginning to scurry toward the gap in the curtain.
The video screen faded to black. Four new laser beams, projected from just in front of the stage toward the back, swirled around the backdrop for a moment. Three went out, leaving only a single beam targeting the left side of the screen, about halfway down from its top edge. An animated river of orange-red sparks rained down from the point where the beam touched the screen, following the laser as it swooped slowly downward.