The morning of the Tech-Fest dawned bright and painfully clear, a perfect day for the public unraveling of my life. The campus was already a living, breathing creature, teeming with thousands of students and visitors, the air buzzing with excitement and the smell of takoyaki from the food stalls.
"Ready to change the world, one quantum bit at a time?" Nami asked, her eyes sparkling with an energy that I simply could not match. She was wearing a faculty-issued polo shirt and a relentlessly cheerful smile.
"I'm ready for this day to be over," I grumbled, setting up the interactive display that was the centerpiece of our booth.
For the first few hours, things were surprisingly peaceful. We fell into a rhythm. A group of students would approach, looking confused and intrigued. Nami would greet them with her disarming charm, and I would handle the technical explanation, breaking down the impossibly complex ideas of quantum entanglement and superposition into digestible metaphors involving cats in boxes and coins spinning in the air.
"You're really good at this," Nami said during a lull, after I had successfully explained quantum tunneling to a group of literature majors. "You don't sound like a textbook. You make it make sense."
"If you can explain something to my sisters, you can explain it to anyone," I said without thinking. It was true. I'd had years of practice simplifying complex topics for them.
"See? All that family chaos is good for something," she teased.
I almost allowed myself to relax. In this little bubble, surrounded by circuit boards and academic posters, I felt a sense of normalcy. I was just Takeshi Kitamaki, an engineering student. Not an idol's brother. Not an object of sisterly obsession.
But, of course, the peace could not last.
I felt their presence before I saw them, like a change in the atmospheric pressure. The buzz of the crowd around our booth shifted, growing louder, more focused. Then, a path parted in the sea of people, and my three sisters walked through it, their celebrity aura slicing through the mundane campus atmosphere like a hot knife through butter.
They were in their "disguise" attire, which consisted of designer sunglasses, fashionable hats, and clothes so stylish they might as well have been wearing signs that said "We Are Famous."
"Onii-chan! We found you!" Ayumi sang out, waving. She immediately broke formation and rushed to the booth, throwing her arms around my neck from the side. "We came to support you! Now, explain everything to me! What's a quantum?"
The effect was instantaneous. Dozens of phones were suddenly raised, snapping pictures of the bizarre scene. Ayumi Kitamaki of Mikuyi, hugging a random student volunteer at a science booth.
Hina and Izuwa followed at a more measured pace. Hina gave Nami a smile that was a masterpiece of polite warmth, but her eyes were calculating.
"Nami-chan, it's so good to see you again," Hina said. "This all looks so impressive. You and Takeshi-kun must have worked very hard."
"Hina-san! Thank you for coming!" Nami replied, completely unfazed by the sudden celebrity onslaught. "We were just explaining the basics of quantum superposition."
"Fascinating," Hina said, though her attention was clearly not on the display. She positioned herself next to Nami, effectively creating a barrier between her and me. "You must be a very dedicated student to take on a project like this." Her questions were light, but the subtext was heavy, a subtle interrogation into Nami's character, her ambitions, her relationship with me.
Meanwhile, I was trapped in Ayumi's quantum physics lesson. "So," she said, pointing a dainty finger at a diagram of an electron orbital. "If I don't look at it, it's everywhere at once? Like, when I close my eyes, are you in my room and also in the kitchen?"
"That's… not quite how it works," I sighed, trying to gently pry her arm off me.
Izuwa, ever the observer, leaned against the side of the booth, scrolling through her phone. She didn't say a word, but I could feel her watching everything. She watched Hina's polite grilling of Nami. She watched Ayumi's suffocating display of affection. And she watched the growing crowd of onlookers, a small, knowing smirk on her face. She was enjoying the chaos she had no doubt anticipated.
The situation was drawing more and more attention. My classmates from other booths were staring, their mouths agape. They knew me as the quiet, serious guy who sat in the back. Now, that guy was the center of attention for the nation's biggest idol group. My carefully crafted anonymity was being torn to shreds and set on fire before my very eyes.
A guy I recognized from my programming class, Kenta, edged closer to the booth. "Dude," he whispered to me, his eyes wide. "How do you know Mikuyi?"
Before I could answer, Ayumi leaned in, her cheek pressing against mine. "He's my wonderful, amazing, super-genius big brother!" she announced to Kenta, and by extension, to everyone else within earshot.
A collective gasp went through the nearby crowd. The secret was out. Kenta's jaw dropped. Nami, who was still expertly handling Hina's questioning, shot me a look that was a mixture of pity and sheer amusement.
My bubble of normalcy had not just burst; it had been nuked from orbit. I was no longer Takeshi Kitamaki, engineering student. I was now 'Mikuyi's Big Brother'. I looked at my sisters- Ayumi, beaming with pride; Hina, maintaining a serene but watchful calm; Izuwa, smirking at the beautiful destruction she was witnessing. They hadn't just come to "support" me. They had come to reclaim me, to publicly brand me as part of their world, whether I wanted it or not. And as the flashes from dozens of phone cameras reflected in Ayumi's sunglasses, I knew my life would never be the same.