Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ Bitter And Murky ❯ Antagonists Thrive ( Chapter 4 )

“So call me when you get to the front gate and I’ll come out and escort you in,” I reminded Komachi before I dropped her off at her school gate.

“Okay, niisan. See you later,” she bid me farewell, running through the gate. Then ran back weeping to grab her school bag, which included her lunch. Then ran away again. She’s a sweet girl, I promise. As much as any girl can be.

The rest of the ride to school included no serious accidents of anyone I knew. There was some kind of incident with a box truck, but the person on the pavement wasn’t from my class so I wasn’t very interested. Probably a minion from that minion school. Don’t really care. People like to claim that optimism is a good thing, but I think it is a type of social disease. An itchy one with uncomfortable swelling and redness and people who have it kind of want to give it to someone else, just passing it along. The name social disease is more apt than it really should be, I think.

Class did contain the orange haired Yuigahama, who looked angry and was pouting. She sort of glared at me, for some reason, and glared at the chalkboard, and I stopped paying attention to her after that. Female anger and resentment are natural qualities of half our species. They are pretty much always angry, jealous, blaming others, and unable to learn from their bad choices. Overall, this suggests females are less intelligent than males, though I must remind myself of the accident rates for motorcycles by males. Both genders have weaknesses.

At this point I’m pretty interested in considering bigger ideas like living small. Rather than super-achievement in socially promoted areas which are not actually either interesting or happy, I am wondering if the guys who dump civilization and start subsistence farming might be right about life? Is doing just enough to get by the actual route to happiness? Is the secret to happiness having your own spare time to do what you like?

Lunch was nice, PE was tennis practice, but since Yoshi was in a different class and his PE was in the morning, I was alone and found myself practicing volleys on a concrete wall. It was good for form and swing. Then school was over and I showered before heading to the gate to wait for my sister.

Komachi eventually appeared and greeted me. I hugged her and led her onto the school grounds to the office, getting a visitor pass and then going to the teacher’s lounge. The senseis called to Hiratsuka who looks me up and down, then at my sister with her identical ahoge but huge smile, bright eyes and bouncy energy. She double checked that we were standing together so are probably siblings and her eyebrow rose expertly, like Spock.

“Huh. What’s your name?” she asked.

“Hikigaya Komachi, sensei,” Komachi answered.

“So this is the reason you didn’t want to join the club, Hachiman? Okay, I can see it,” sensei admitted. “Here’s your pass for club, Komachi-chan. Keep this visible when on school grounds, so you don’t get kicked out or chased off.”

“Kay, sensei,” agreed Komachi with a big grin. Adorable. I’m glad she’s my sister. She’ll be a holy terror to her series of future boyfriends. A grin like that and they’ll do anything she wants, including get married and be really surprised when she divorces them for the alimony. No-fault divorce has literally killed Japan, one marriage at a time. My adorable little sister is going to be part of that problem.

We settled down, with Komachi chatting with our club members. She offered lots of sympathy for Yuigahama, finally. Yukino did not look particularly put-out, observing my sister instead with few words to say. When Komachi joined Yui on a trip to powder their noses, Yukino finally spoke.

“I think I understand how you and I are somewhat alike. My elder sister is similar to yours,” she admitted. “She’s very friendly and outgoing and everybody likes her.”

“Oh? Is that so?” I asked.

“Well, when you meet her you’ll understand,” Yukino offered with a shrug. She looked uncomfortable. Family drama, no doubt.

The girls returned and got back to their seats, continuing to talk about girly things. I studied the Introduction To Soil Science textbook I’d ordered second-hand from one of the university supply bookstores. It was a couple years out of date so was only 90 yen. It cost more to ship than the book itself. It had color pictures and graphics explaining about soil chemistry, soil horizons, types of soils, types of rock and the soils they make, soil amendments and how soils evolve over time. There was a lot to see and learn, and I had to admit that Farmers know a lot, since this was common knowledge for them.

“What are you reading?” Yukino asked. I turned to regard her. She’d put down her Samurai poetry for the moment.

“Soil science textbook,” I answered.

“Why?” she asked.

“Did you know that a third of the industry in this prefecture is from agriculture? All those pear orchards and fields of peas we’re so famous for,” I pointed out.

“We’re famous for the shipyards, the steel mill, CIT’s robotics, and Tokyo Funland,” she responded.

“How many tax breaks is Tokyo Funland getting? Is the prefecture really benefitting from that park?” I asked her seriously. I happen to know that the monorail ended at the entrance gates for Tokyo Funland, a convenient and fast way for tourists to get from the main train station to Funland without spending any money in Chiba.

“Hardly any,” she admitted. “They needed a lot of tax breaks to build here. Daddy did his best to negotiate, but we had a lot of competition with Kobe and Fukuoka.”

“Not Tokyo?” I confirmed. I’d read a bit about the scandal.

“They didn’t care about Funland, and offered no breaks on permits, taxes, real estate taxes, inspections, or any other discounts at all,” Yukinoshita explained.  

“Considering how things turned out I’m not surprised,” I said.  

“I actually like Funland. I have an annual pass,” she defended weakly. “I try to visit every month.”

 “Hmm,” I made the sound without agreeing or disagreeing or expressing any opinion on this. The RBF came back to her face, unsatisfied with my answer. There is no way to make women happy for long. Every man who has tried has been defeated by female contempt. There are billionaires in this world who will someday have divorces and lose HALF of what they have to ungrateful women. This is not new. It is as old as our species.

“I have heard most Chiba residents resent the park being called Tokyo Funland even though it is here in Chiba,” I mentioned. My sister and Yuigahama and Yoshi all turned to see her response. This was something everybody agreed about, after all.

“I… I have nothing to say,” she answered and lowered her head in shame. Little did we know that someday, Funland Corp would buy up all the best movie franchises and then proceed to destroy them, all at once, over the course of two years, because they put a rapid feminist whose incompetence was only equaled by her ego. And her iron-clad contract kept her from being fired despite losing Funland Inc over two billion dollars in that time. It was a remarkable accomplishment, when you considered it. It wasn’t like they were bailing out a bad debtor by providing them sufficient weapons to guarantee a genocide of the population but making them feel like they were fighting for “freedom” despite all the swastikas on their uniforms, and the fact the war was at least partially over unpaid debts of several billion US dollars to their neighbor. But don’t talk about that because it’s not a “good story”. What did the Sicilian say? Never get into a land war in Asia? That was it.

I wrote an essay on sound economic policy for my history class. The sensei had been impressed by my examination of the degeneracy in Weimar Berlin directly leading to the Nazi backlash, and powered the eventual wars and genocides. It was the bad economy and the degenerates daring the population to do something about them which lead to the upheaval. Funny how modern degenerates still loved to promote that Cabaret musical. When you see everything in context, you understand that the Linden Tree song is actually a valid counterpoint. If only Japan hadn’t been so drug addicted by the recent invention of Methamphetimine, treated as a wonder-drug at the time, that lead to so many bad decisions and war crimes that Japan could NEVER apologize enough for. Not that evil overlord Abe wouldn’t continue to mock the dead of foreign nations with every visit to the national war memorial. The Americans often commented on how disappointed they were with the Japanese for continuing this insult to their victims in WW2. In this, the Americans were right. If only they weren’t arming our neighbors, or paying them lots of money and selling them the plans to do it themselves. To be fair, the Chinese navy is a joke, as much as the Japanese fishing fleet. Demographic collapse was coming to China and Russia, both. It wasn’t just going to be our nation that collapses. Everywhere that women have rights, birthrates collapse and population follows, aging and dying. Generally, the girls at my school, at Soubu, were doomed to become cat ladies. They wanted to go to college and have careers, and most of them would do so. And then they’d realize they were lonely and all the money they made didn’t help with the wrinkles and disinterest by the men they knew, and how their odds of marriage, or worse conception, were exceptionally low. That they’d wasted their prime years for marriage and children in a pointless job shuffling paper and drinking parties and would end up with cats, a small apartment, and dying alone. That’s the future of the Soubu girls. And they didn’t know and wouldn’t care, because they “dohneednoman”.

“Yoshi, have you made progress on redoing the hero’s maiden?” I asked him, changing the subject. I’d been drifting again.

“Ah, yes, Hachiman. I’ve changed the Princess into a duchess, and the hero has turned from my original Dark Flame Master to an involuntary Isekai, trapped in an Otome Game where all the females run everything and own most of the property, a full Matriarchy.”

“Wow, that actually sounds pretty interesting. Did you give your hero cheat items?” I confirmed.

“Well… yes. He’s got an AI robot that mocks him like a jester, a clunky looking construction mecha, and he owns a floating island and a powerful ship the AI is part of.”

“Is the irony layered so he’s hated by all the characters and forced to fight battles where everybody cheers for the other guy?” I asked him.

“Of course. Your suggestions have been very helpful. I’ve even made his spoiled sister the antagonist in most of the story, and neither of them realize this.”

“So what about the duchess?” I asked him.

“She was originally supposed to be an antagonist, but the sister has usurped the role of the original heroine, yet gets everything wrong so is very unlikeable and the hero ends up befriending the original heroine by accident, and also supports the duchess, so it becomes a love triangle.”

“Hmm. In order to protect the hero from getting a big head, make sure to show his bad side, so he’s greedy and loud and selfish, yet remains reminded he’s a minor character so can’t have the girls. Make him the opposite of that Galaxy Police guy.”

“Hmm. That might work. I can change his dialogue, but I’ll have to re-write a bunch of scenes with the girls,” he commented, thinking.

“If you want your story to be original enough to get people to buy it, I think that would work best. What about the title?” I asked him.

“I was thinking It Sucks To Be An NPC In An Otome Game,” he answered.

 “I like it. Kinda long, but will probably get interest for it,” I said. “You need to milk this Isekai genre with a parody before it goes out of style, like cowboy movies in Hollywood.”

“I’m not so sure about the isekai thing going away. There are so many unhappy people in Japan. The idea that you just have to die and find a better world where you actually matter? This could become the next big religion, you know?” Yoshi said philosophically. “It could be a significant part of anime and manga.”