Chapter 3: Andou&!
When I arrived at the club room after school, I found Tomoyo alone inside. Her eyes were glued to her laptop’s screen, so I decided to let her know I was there.
“Hey.”
“Ah, hi...huh?” Tomoyo looked over as she returned my greeting, then immediately furrowed her brow in a skeptical grimace as her gaze drifted over my shoulder.
Mwa ha ha! Looks like she’s noticed already! I barely resisted the urge to break down in a fit of maniacal laughter as I did my best to pretend I hadn’t noticed her stare and nonchalantly sat down in my usual chair. Then I shrugged the crimson coffin—the sarcophagal reliquary within which my very soul slumbered—off my shoulders and onto the table. Yea, that casket the color of fresh-spilled blood...otherwise known as a guitar case.
“Boy, was that ever heavy!” I declared theatrically, making a big show of stretching out my shoulders and surreptitiously watching Tomoyo to see how she reacted. She’d gone right back to her computer, though, and wasn’t looking at me at all.
“Man, oh man, my shoulders are stiff! Really wears you out, carrying something you don’t usually bring to school!”
Glance.
“Think I might’ve stood out juuust a little on the way to class, huh? Man, I wish people’d just mind their own business! Not like we musicians play our songs for attention or anything, y’know?”
Glance.
“Though, when I think about it... What is music, really? Maybe the answer lies in the question? Maybe that eternal conundrum is what draws people to music in the first place, what makes it resonate in their hearts?”
Glance.
“Yeah, I get it now... How foolish I was to even try to explain it in the first place! True musicians are always inarticulate. It’s just the way things are. If an idea can be expressed in words, then why bother expressing it at all?”
“Oh my god, would you please just shut up already?!” shouted Tomoyo, finally driven to the point that she had to react somehow. A second later, though, she realized what she’d done and scowled with regret. “Crap... I knew you’d just get even more annoying if I said anything, so I thought I’d just ignore you, but you were just being so obnoxious I couldn’t let it slide no matter how hard I tried...”
Tomoyo sighed, then looked back up at me. “So, out with it. What’s with the guitar, Andou?”
“Huuuh? Oh, you mean this guitar? Guess people just can’t help but notice, huh? Carrying one of these around’s rough sometimes—you always end up being the center of attention, like it or not! Maaan, I sure wish I could just fade into the background sometimes!” I said with an incredibly self-satisfied smirk.
“Oh, god, spare me... See, this is exactly why I was ignoring you in the first place,” groaned Tomoyo. “What, did you buy that thing?”
“Yup! Sure did.”
“Why?”
“Why indeed? Perhaps it was fate—when I saw it at the shop yesterday, I fell for it at a glance. This guitar was calling for me. I felt its voice; I felt it in my bones! ‘You’re the one,’ it said!” I stroked the case lovingly as I spoke.
Telling the whole and complete story’s probably going to take a while, so buckle up! It all started the day before when I went to a local thrift store. I was looking for used books, but then I found the guitar and bought it right then and there.
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that long of a story after all. Wait, back up a second! This is making me look like some sort of impulse shopper or something!
“Lemme guess,” said Tomoyo. “You were thinking ‘I bet if I carry a guitar to school, everyone’s gonna give me a ton of attention and think I’m hella cool!’ or something along those lines. Right?”
“H-Huh?! Uh, sorry, what? I, like, don’t get what you’re trying to say here!”
Tomoyo glared at me, and I broke eye contact. No way, I wasn’t thinking that at all! I definitely didn’t go out of my way to walk through the third and first years’ floors on my way here either!
“And anyway, can you even play the guitar, Andou?”
“Heh! Do you know what they call questions like that, Tomoyo? Foolish questions!”
“Sure they do. Okay, then, new question: do you have all the chords memorized yet?”
“Chords? What’re those?” I asked reflexively.
“The little dumbass bought a guitar without even knowing what chords are,” mumbled Tomoyo, sighing deeply once again. That was enough to clue me in to the fact that whatever “chords” were, they were apparently something that a guitarist would know about. I had a feeling that the further I dug myself into the music-theory pit, the more my story was going to fall to pieces, so I decided to do what I did best: change the topic!
“Mwa ha ha! You still have a lot to learn about the world, Tomoyo. You look at a guitar case and assume that there has to be a guitar inside... All I can say is that you severely want for imagination.”
“Excuse me? What else would be in there?”
“An assault rifle, for all you know.”
“As if! Maybe if this were a movie or a manga, but not in real life!”
“It’s also totally possible I’m using it to store a holy sword or a blessed lance.”
“No, it isn’t!”
In manga and anime, having a character who operates in the underworld hide their weapon in a guitar case when they have to move around in the light of day is super standard stuff. That way, they can pop open the case and whip out some super cool weapon when a crisis arises—or maybe it turns out the guitar case itself is the weapon! That’s even cooler!
“Admit it, Tomoyo. When you see someone walking around with a guitar case, part of you totally thinks ‘Is that a guitar in there, or is it really...?’ right?”
“I’m not a delusional creeper, so no! You’re literally the only one who thinks like that!”
“Oof, I dunno, sounds like you’re putting yourself at risk to me! You’ll be totally helpless if worse ever does come to worst! That’s why I always make sure to keep my distance and stay on guard whenever I see someone walking around with a guitar case.”
“Your fantasies are running way out of control! Nobody carries anything other than guitars in guitar cases in the real world! That’s what you have in yours, isn’t it?!”
“No way to know for sure unless I open it, right? Listen up, Tomoyo: objective reality can only be determined by way of observation. In other words, so long as something hasn’t been observed, it cannot be conclusively stated to be one thing or another! By logical extension, since there could be a guitar in this case and there could be a weapon, the truth of the matter is that both outcomes exist simultaneously in a superimposed—”
“Of course you’d go there! Wouldn’t be a conversation with a chuuni if they didn’t drop Schrödinger’s cat in somewhere along the way!” said Tomoyo with a mighty roll of her eyes.
I fell silent midsentence. Oh, she didn’t! How dare she ridicule Schrödinger’s cat? Doesn’t she know that Schrödinger was, umm...famous for, err...I dunno exactly what, but I’m pretty sure he was famous for something super awesome!
“Seriously,” she continued, “would you get it through your head already that the weapons in guitar cases thing is totally fictional?”
“Oh, but you still have a lot to learn about the world, Tomoyo!” I countered. “We live in a reality rife with war and devastation, and just because a guitar case has a guitar inside of it doesn’t mean you can just sit back and rest easy!”
“And why would that be?”
“Because people who carry around guitars...could very well be Martial Maestros!”
Tomoyo took a deep breath. “Martial Maestros?”
Allow me to explain! The Martial Maestro is a character archetype that turns up all the time in supernatural battle stories. Simply put, they’re characters who fight by wielding the power of music! They play the guitar or flute or whatever to mind-control their enemies, or they attack with literal, physical sound waves, or something along those lines.
“That’s right—Martial Maestros! They crop up here and there; you know how this stuff works.” Tomoyo, being the mega-nerd she was, would surely pick up on what I was trying to say with the bare minimum amount of explanation required. I never had to go all out on the exposition when I was talking to her. “To put it simply, they’re the sort of characters who say stuff like ‘Now, perk up your ears as I play the requiem of your demise!’”
“I really hate how much sense that made to me,” Tomoyo grumbled. Then she seemed to realize something and shifted the topic slightly. “Hey, Andou? Do you know a lot of that sorta music terminology? Like requiem, and prelude, and stuff?”
“Do you even have to ask? Prelude, solo, duo, concerto, sinfonia, waltz, sonata, rhapsody, fantasia, serenade, oratorio, capriccio, tondo, nocturne, requiem—”
“Oh, god, stop! I get the point! Why do you know that much music jargon?!”
Well, I mean, it’s super cool! Music vocab just sorta sounds awesome; what more do you want from me? Like, Atobe’s special moves are the friggin’ best! Music jargon: hella cool!
“Not that I have any clue whatsoever what any of them mean, of course,” I admitted.
“It’s actually almost refreshing how openly superficial you are about this sort of thing,” replied Tomoyo with an air of absolute exasperation. “You really do just memorize words you think sound cool. That’s just...so, so chuuni it hurts.”
Just then, a thought struck me. “Hey, Tomoyo, let’s play a game! Y’know that one where you take turns coming up with words that fit into a certain category, and whoever slips up first loses? Let’s do that, but the category’s ‘things that a Martial Maestro in a supernatural battle story would probably say’!”
“Ugh, no way. Not happening.”
“C’mon, it’ll be fine! I know you can pull it off! Believe in yourself! And you gotta admit it sounds sorta fun, right?”
Tomoyo pursed her lips and glanced away awkwardly. “W-Well, okay, but just for a little!”
And with that, it was on.
“Here we go!” I kicked us off. “‘The typical human ear can perceive sounds ranging from twenty to twenty thousand hertz. But my ears are different—I can hear a range of sound utterly imperceptible to you average Joes!’”
“Going with the ‘my ears are as good as a dog’s’ archetype, huh? Okay, uhh—‘My ultra-high frequency sound waves don’t just damage your eardrums! They pierce all the way into your semicircular canals! Heh heh heh...you can feel it already, can’t you? Feel the world begin to distort around you!’”
“Ooh, the semicircular canals! Taking out their sense of balance! That’s a classic for sound-based attacks, for sure. My turn! ‘Every form of matter has a distinctive frequency...and sound is nothing more than the vibration of the air! That means that by emitting the same frequency as an object, I can cause it to destructively resonate with the air around it, disintegrating it on a molecular level from the inside out!’”
“Sound-wave attacks? That’s another staple. ‘Anyone who hears my music falls under my spell, and is instantly turned into a mindless puppet that obeys my every command!’”
“I see what you did there—music-based psychological attacks! Always a nice way to make one of the good guys swap teams and stir up some drama. ‘Seventy percent of the human body is made up of water. Now, tell me...what do you think would happen if I were to use my music to send some ripples through all that water inside of you?’”
“Sound and water. Always a solid combo, for sure. Okay, then ‘Fool! Water is several orders of magnitude denser than air, and that means that sound travels faster and farther through it! I’m sure you think you’ve escaped from my domain, but all you’ve done is charged headfirst into your own demise!’”
“Ooh, the ‘you think you can get away from me’ pattern? ‘Ugh... He’s a Martial Maestro, so I’m sure he’ll understand this message. It’ll take the last ounce of my power...but I’ll send it to him...in Morse code...’”
“A message that only a Martial Maestro would understand, huh...? Hmm? Wait a second—that’s not really something a Martial Maestro would say, is it? That’s something that one of a Martial Maestro’s teammates would say, right?”
I paused.
“Oh.”
Crap! I totally slipped up! I had, like, a billion good lines left in stock too!
“And, that’s game. I win! Wasn’t even trying, really, but cool, I guess,” Tomoyo declared with a triumphant smirk. “Heh heh! Gotta say, it does feel pretty good getting to totally grind someone into the dirt like that.”
“G-Grr,” I growled in incoherent, wordless frustration. Not that there was anything I could’ve said in protest to begin with. I’d made a careless mistake, and there was no debating the point. A crushing sense of shame threatened to smash my heart to pieces. Had I really just lost a game that I, myself, had come up with?
“I suppose I have no choice,” I muttered at last. “ As promised, I shall relinquish to you one of my titles: the Tidings of the Moonlit Evangel!”
“When the hell did you promise that?! And keep it! I don’t want it! It’s awful!”
“Oh, my heart...oh, how it breaks!”
“Then take it back!”
“I refuse! God might forgive such transgressions, but my pride would never suffer them!”
“I’m done, I swear...”
“I’m certain that Tidings of the Moonlit Evangel will serve you well, as long as you take care of it. Shouting it at the top of your lungs once every three days or so should do the trick.”
“Hell no!”
“Incidentally, the ‘Tidings’ part’s meant to evoke both literal tidings and the turning of the tide, which links up thematically with the ‘moonlit’ part. Try to keep that in mind when you shout it.”
“Of course it would be needlessly elaborate!”
Hey, don’t call it needless! Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I happen to think it’s a pretty darn solid title. If I had to pick out one aspect I like best about it, it would definitely have to be the use of the word ‘evangel.’ It’s just such a good word! I have no idea what it means, but seriously, it’s just great! Evangels: hella cool.
“I guess it’s not my title anymore, though...Tidings of the Moonlit Evangel,” I murmured wistfully to myself, just to hear how it sounded.
“I said you could have it back, dammit!”
“Tomoyo...” I pleadingly moaned with all the sincerity I could muster, ignoring pretty much everything she was actually saying to me. “If nothing else, please, grant me this one final request: I want to hear your title, the title that used to be mine, Tidings of the Moonlit Evangel. I want to hear you declare it yours, as loud as possible. If you do, then I think...I’ll finally be able to move on.”
“No!” shouted Tomoyo, turning me down as bluntly as possible. To be completely honest, I didn’t really care one way or the other. I just thought it’d be really funny if I could actually convince her to shout out one of my titles at the top of her lungs, so I decided to stick to it a little longer.
All right! Time to initiate Operation Butter Her Up! “You know, Tomoyo...you have a really nice voice.”
“H-Huh?!” Tomoyo sputtered. “Where did that come from...?”
“I’d go so far as to say that if you’d been born in a less peaceful era, you could’ve ended wars with your singing voice alone!”
“Th-That can’t possibly be true...”
“And you know, that’s why you’re worthy of the title Tidings of the Moonlit Evangel. Your voice is akin to that of a goddess’s.”
“Oh, stop... If you really think my voice is that nice, then I guess I could still say no, loser! Did you seriously think you could get away with flattering me that blatantly?!”
Oof. Rejected again, and with a fake-out to boot. Guess my plan was a little too transparent. I was out of ideas, so I figured I’d just have to give up and call it a day...but then Tomoyo sighed.
“Fine, I don’t even care anymore. Turning you down over and over’s more of a pain than just doing it,” she said, then stood up, sighed, and started droning in a listless monotone, “I am she who they call the Tidings of the Moonlit Evangel. There. Are you happy now?”
Now it was my turn to sigh, and let me tell you, my sigh put every sigh she’d sighed up to that point to shame.
“Wh-What...?” asked Tomoyo.
“I dunno, it’s just...something about the way you were so obviously doing it begrudgingly, then got all snappy and self-important when you finished... I guess it was kind of a letdown.”
“A what?” Tomoyo snapped disbelievingly. “You’re the one who kept telling me to say it, weren’t you?”
“I did, yeah, but what kind of person would be satisfied just because they technically got their way? The working world always expects people to go the extra mile when it comes to stuff like this, y’know? I know you can do better than that, and I was all excited for you to put on a real high-quality performance.”
“I think the fact that the performance was me saying a title takes ‘high-quality’ off the table by default.”
“Right, right, I get it! You were right, I was wrong, and I’m sorry. You’re a big, grown-up high schooler, after all! Keeping up appearances is really important for people like you, right? That’s why you always act like you’re oh-so mature and make fun of me for being a chuuni, right? You’re like one of those snobs who doesn’t wanna do anything to improve society themself, but just loves ranting on and on about how their least favorite politicians are ruining the country. I get it.”
Tomoyo let out an indignant little grunt.
“I was an idiot for expecting anything from you, and that’s all there is to it,” I closed, punctuating the end of my spiel with a sigh.
“Oh... Oh, it’s friggin’ on,” shouted Tomoyo. She’d finally well and truly snapped. “Fine! You want me to say it that badly? Then I’ll do it! Oh, will I ever do it! I’m going all out on your ass, so don’t get scared and go crying home to mommy halfway through!”
I just sat there and kept my expression in a deadpan. Man, Tomoyo’s really easy to provoke, huh? I pondered as, driven by pure, unbridled fury, she actually climbed up onto her chair. Tomoyo glared down at me from on high, then grinned, her mouth twisting into the merciless sneer of an evil overlord.
“O blades, let resound your cacophonous melody! O beasts, let ring your moon-rending howls! Let war upon war form the chains that bind this world; let the victors sob with delight and the defeated wail in lamentation!”
Tomoyo raised her right hand aloft, and then her left, gesticulating like a trained actress as her soliloquy rose to a crescendo. Then, suddenly, she whipped her hands through the air, crossing her arms in her trademark pose.
Still atop the chair, by the way.
“The din and screams that wash over this world all fall under my domain! I am she who they call the Tidings of the Moonlit Evangel! Now, in these fleeting moments before your miserable demise, I shall let sound your final requiem!”
Her astonishingly long speech finished, Tomoyo paused, a look of relieved satisfaction crossing her face. It soon morphed into a smug, triumphant grin as she turned her gaze back down to me, though. And, yeah, it was perfect. A real 120/100 performance. I could practically see the words ‘Tidings of the Moonlit Evangel’ materialize in big block letters around her. The quality level that time was through the roof. There was, however, one tiny little detail that I figured she probably hadn’t noticed.
That being the fact that two of our tardy clubmates were standing in the doorway, gobsmacked expressions of incomprehension on their faces.
“T-Tomoyo...?” called Hatoko, more than a little nervously.
Tomoyo jerked backwards so violently that she almost fell right off her chair, but then she just barely managed to regain her balance and step down, very slowly, on her own. “H-Hatoko,” she quietly stammered, face white as a sheet. “And Sayumi too... H-How long have you been standing there?”
“Umm,” said Hatoko, “since the part where you said ‘O blades,’ or so...”
“N-No, no no no! It’s not, n-n-no, this isn’t, no!”
“Tomoyo...”
“Look away!” shouted Sayumi as she clamped her hands over Hatoko’s eyes. “Hatoko? Listen to me. We saw nothing. We did not witness Tomoyo standing atop a chair, posing and reciting some sort of bizarre, intensely cringe-inducing monologue.”
“B-But...”
“Hatoko. Please. We’ll be doing her a kindness.”
“Oh... Yeah, okay, I understand.” Hatoko gave Sayumi a big nod, then smiled stiffly as she turned back to Tomoyo. “I didn’t see anything at all, Tomoyo! And, uhh...I-I’ll still be your friend, no matter what!”
“N-No, Hatoko, this is all a misunderstanding! H-Hey, Andou, back me up here!” Tomoyo desperately cried.
I hesitated for just a moment, then recoiled, feigning astonishment. “Tomoyo...? What’re you talking about? You just started shouting all that random stuff out of nowhere—what’s wrong with you...?”
“Andou?!” shrieked Tomoyo, looking for all the world like I’d just stabbed her in the back. Which, to be fair, I sort of had. And yeah, I felt a little guilty about it, but I was having way too much fun teasing her to let that stop me.
“Seriously, that scared me half to death,” I continued. “One second she was just sitting there, typing away at her laptop, and the next she was standing on her chair, ranting about who even knows what.”
“W-Wait! You told me to do that, didn’t you?! You insisted I call myself Tidings of the Moonlit Evangel!”
“Th-The Moonlit...Evan...huh? Uhh, sorry, the what? This is all Greek to me. Is that, like, some special move you came up with?”
“O-Oh, you little! Th-This is all your fault, and you know it!”
“My fault...? Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right. I was with you this whole time, but I never noticed how far your mental health had deteriorated. I should’ve been there for you, so maybe I am responsible for your stress outburst... I’m so sorry, Tomoyo...”
“Stop twisting this against me! That’s not what you should be apologizing for!”
While Tomoyo and I were verbally sparring, Hatoko and Sayumi’s faces went more and more pallid. The pity and compassion in their gazes grew deeper with each passing second.
“S-Seriously, Hatoko, Sayumi, this isn’t what you think it is! Please, stop looking at me like that,” Tomoyo desperately begged as tears began to well up in her eyes. At that point, her panic finally got the better of her, and she started stammering incoherently, glancing all around the room in search of anything that could help her escape from the situation.
Before long, though, her eyes settled upon the root of all evil, the fiend who had put her in this position in the first place. That is to say, me. In an instant, the panic in her eyes was replaced with a sparkle of pointed, concentrated malice.
Ohh crap. Those are the eyes of a girl who’s seriously snapped this time. That’s a look that tells you a supernatural battle could break out at literally any second. Just when I was starting to reflect on my actions and conclude I’d gone maybe just a little too far, though, Tomoyo vanished...and in that same split second, a veritable storm of books materialized right in front of me.
Actually, no, that’s not quite right. The books weren’t just in front of me—they were in front of me and also flying at me, at high velocity. It could only be Closed Clock at work: Tomoyo had stopped time, walked over to the bookshelf in front of me, and thrown all the books in it at my face, one after the other. The second she released her power, they would all sail toward me at once.
Mwa ha ha! She went to quite the effort to set this attack up, but I’ve seen through her schemes! Which, unfortunately, wasn’t to say I could actually do anything about it. Predicting an attack is one thing, but dodging it is an entirely different can of worms.
“Gahaaaugh!” I screamed as more books than I could count slammed directly into me, knocking me clean off my chair. I rolled around on the floor in relatively minor—but nonetheless distressing—agony until I happened to roll right into somebody’s foot, headfirst. I looked up, only to find Tomoyo looking right back down at me. She was definitely still upset.
“Hmph! Serves you right!” said Tomoyo, crossing her arms and looking away in a huff.
“...”
“What? You got what you deserved, and you know it, so don’t you dare complain about this.”
“...”
“S-Say something, come on...”
“Umm...” I cleared my throat. “I can s-see up your skirt.”
Tomoyo let out a strangled screech. Then she stepped on my head. I might’ve enjoyed having a girl step on me if I were a masochist, but seeing as I’m not, it just plain old hurt.
“So, in short, the source of this whole sordid affair was the guitar case that Andou randomly brought to school today,” summarized Sayumi after we’d finished explaining the entire sequence of events. “Would you mind if I took a look at the guitar in question, Andou?”
“Sure, go ahead,” I answered, opening up the case. The four of us crowded around the table to look inside. Stored within was a truly stunning guitar, colored a vivid mixture of red and black. And oh, was it ever cool. My guitar was hella cool.
“Ooof. Yeah, I can see exactly why those colors caught your eye,” said Tomoyo with a dispiriting cringe. So? Nobody asked you! I like what I like!
“I believe this would be a Mustang,” murmured Sayumi as she inspected the guitar.
I gave her a puzzled stare. “A Mustang? Like Roy? Y’know, from FMA?”
“Not that one. I’m referring to Mustang, the guitar brand. The proper English pronunciation is the same as that character’s name, but Japanese people tend to pronounce the brand’s name with more of an extended ‘mu’ sound. Look, see the logo here? That’s ‘Mustang’ in English. This is one of Fender Japan’s guitars, no question about it.”
“Oh, is it?” I said, honestly impressed by how well she knew her stuff.
“Andou, did you buy this guitar without even knowing the first thing about its brand?” asked Sayumi, her exasperation very apparent in her tone.
“Well, I mean, y’know what they say: a true craftsman can produce a masterpiece no matter what tools they’re using! When you get to my level, you don’t really fuss over stuff like the brand of your guitar. Besides, you don’t play music with an instrument, you play it with your soul!”
“He he he! You are, as always, wholeheartedly obnoxious,” tittered Sayumi, insulting me viciously with a perfectly genuine smile. She’d always been really good at that.
“So, wait—pronunciation-wise, does that make my guitar the fusion of Colonel Muska and Colonel Roy Mustang? Is my guitar the ultimate colonel?!”
“No,” said Sayumi, bluntly refusing to play along with what I thought was a really good joke. Instead, she went back to explaining the particulars of my guitar. “The Mustang brand is known for its short scale and relatively small body plus its punchy, treble-heavy tone. It’s a historically popular model that remains well-loved to this day. That said, it’s also known for easily falling out of tune, and is often described as a guitar not suited to beginners.”
I fell silent, largely on account of the fact that I understood almost nothing she’d just told me. For reference, my guitar expertise was at the level where I knew that a guitar and a bass were different things, but didn’t really understand how or why. Sayumi’s explanation went in one ear and out the other.
“Hey, Juu,” said Hatoko, breaking into the pause in the conversation. “Can I try holding it?”
“I dunno... You’re not gonna break it, right?”
“I won’t, I won’t! It’ll be fine!” I reluctantly passed Hatoko the guitar, and she happily slung its strap over her shoulder. “Ta-da! Well? How do I look? Like a real guitarist?”
Hmm. Surprisingly enough, she actually sorta did. I had to admit, it was a good look for her. That proved to me that pretty much anyone could look good with a guitar in their hands, at least to some extent.
“Huh?” said Hatoko as she plucked at the strings. “That’s weird, though. It’s not making any sound...”
“Yeah, ’cause it’s an electric,” Tomoyo chimed in. “You have to plug it into an amp to play it.”
“What’s an amp?” I asked, only for Tomoyo to give me one of the most disbelieving looks I’d seen from her all day. “Wh-What? Why’re you looking at me like I’m some sorta caveman?”
“I can understand why Hatoko wouldn’t know this, but you literally own an electric guitar! How could you possibly not know what an amp is?”
“Huh? Wait, are they really that important?”
“Super important. An amp’s like a speaker, basically. You’ve seen those black boxes that’re always up on stage near guitarists, right? Those are amps, and you literally can’t play an electric guitar without one.”
“What?! Seriously?!” I cried out in shock and horror. “Damnations! That clerk pulled a fast one on me! Can’t believe they’d take me for a ride like this just because I’m a beginner!”
“Just for reference, did you, y’know, tell them you’re a beginner?” asked Tomoyo.
“Huh? You seriously think I’d do something that humiliating?” I replied. “I went in with a look in my eyes that told the clerk I’d learned to hold a pick before I started sucking a pacifier! I had my rock star aura turned up to eleven when I bought this thing!”
“Then it’s your own damn fault!” Tomoyo snapped.
Yeah, okay. When you put it that way, I guess I am totally in the wrong here. Probably should’ve asked that clerk a question or two, huh?
“I get it now, though. Gotta buy an amp if I wanna play the guitar... Ah, but now that I think about it, I actually have heard about amps before!” I exclaimed. An amp-related piece of trivia had finally bubbled up from the depths of my memory. “There’s that bit in Soul Eater where they say that a Meister and their Weapon work like an electric guitar and its amp! Okay, it all makes sense now!”
“Of all the ways for you to contextualize this for yourself, I swear!”
“Anyway, I’ll just have to go back to the store after school and pick up an amp! After that, all I’ll have left to do before I can play my guitar is—”
“So, so much stuff! You’ll have to learn your chords and how to tune the thing, to start. Might be a good idea to buy a music book written for total beginners too.”
“—give it a name!”
“Why?!” shouted everyone in the room in unison, me aside.
“Oh, c’mon, guys! Didn’t they teach you that you have to give all your stuff a name back in elementary school?”
“They taught us to write our own names on all our stuff! That’s totally different!” shouted Tomoyo, but I wasn’t about to back down. I wanted to give my guitar a name—a cool name—no matter what she thought about it! “Andou, please, take my advice for once and don’t do this! Naming your guitar is the single cringiest thing you could possibly do here!”
“Naming a guitar is cringe?! Oh, you didn’t! You’ve just made an enemy of every K-On! fan in the country!”
“It’s cute when girls do it, so they get a pass! Guys don’t! Actually, make that you don’t!”
“Peh! Sexism, much?” To think society’s favoritism of females has reached this far already! First they got women-only train cars, now only women get to name their guitars?! “Think about it, Tomoyo! We need to do away with all this discrimination! Modern Japan needs to sit down and rethink the meaning of gender equality! We need to take clear, concrete steps toward becoming a truly equal society!”
“That sounds nice and all, but it’s got crap all to do with you naming your stupid guitar!”
Rats! Thought I’d managed to get away with changing the subject. If I were having this debate with Hatoko, I would’ve totally been able to sweep the original topic under the rug by making big, sweeping statements like that.
Hmm... Well, whatever. Not like I need Tomoyo’s permission in the first place! It’s my guitar, and I can name it if I want to! I reclaimed my guitar from Hatoko and stared at its overwhelmingly gorgeous, aesthetically impeccable form, waiting for the perfect name to come to me.
“It’s gotta be ‘bloody’ something, right...? Then again, it sorta feels like I’ve been overusing that word lately. Its body’s black, so maybe I could play that up with ‘ebon’ or ‘umbral’ or something? Wait, no, I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s a guitar, so I’ve gotta work music vocab in there somewhere. Like ‘soloist,’ or ‘melody,’ maybe... But actually, I dunno...”
I mumbled to myself as potential names for my new partner flowed through my mind. Heh heh heh! Things are really getting fun now! Nothing works my soul up to a fever-pitch quite like coming up with a new name! Sure, the others are giving me major side-eye, but that doesn’t bother me at all!
“All right, I’ve got it!” I declared at the end of my long deliberation. I knew none of the others would care about my guitar’s christening, but I intended to announce it to them in a grand fashion anyway. “This guitar’s name shall be...Infinity Maria!”
Infinite, as in the infinite tones and tunes manifested by its six strings of steel! Maria, as in, like, I dunno, it just sort of feels like guitarists have a thing about giving their guitars women’s names, for whatever reason. Maria also has all sorts of fancy religious implications and stuff, which makes it even cooler, probably! Of course, saying Infinity Maria every time will probably get a bit old, so I’ll just call her Maria for short.
Dang, that’s cool. My Maria is hella cool. No, that’s not quite right—the word I’m looking for is ravishing! There’s no way my Maria could be this ravishing!
“Ooh? So its name’s Maria? That’s so cute!” said Hatoko, reaching for the guitar with a big old smile on her face. The moment before her fingertips brushed the instrument, though, I snatched it away at top speed!
“Keep your filthy hands away from my Maria!” I shouted as menacingly as I could manage. Ooh, that was great! I was totally acting like a real rock star just now, wasn’t I?
“M-My hands aren’t dirty! I wash them all the time!” said Hatoko, who looked a little hurt.
“I’m not talking about physical filth!” I countered. “I’m talking about the filth that’s accrued upon your spirit—in other words, the filth that pollutes your very soul!”
“My soul?! Is my soul really dirty?!”
“It is indeed. Your soul is downright corrupted!”
I was saying whatever crap sprung to my mind on the fly, but truth be told, I could only imagine Hatoko’s soul, or heart, or whatever being as clean and beautiful as could be. If somebody asked me who the most purehearted person I knew was, I’d say it was Hatoko without even having to think about it. I knew very well what a virtuous person she was, but this wasn’t the time for honesty. It was the time for stupid, ill-advised horseplay!
“Ugh, the stench!” I said with a grimace, fanning my hand in front of my nose. “You smell worse than barf!”
“W-W-Waaah! Juu, you jerkface!” wailed Hatoko. She ran over to Tomoyo and clung to her shirt, almost in tears. “Ugh... Tomoyo, do I smell worse than barf...?”
“No. Look, Hatoko, there’s this guy in Part 1 of JoJo called Speedwagon, and Andou was just quoting this famous line where he describes Dio...”
Tomoyo launched into an explanation of the JoJo reference I’d just dropped, and I was left to stare on in horror. Hey, stop it! When you go out of your way to explain it like that, it makes it look like I told a joke that didn’t land and you had to tell her why it was funny! I began to consider the merits of avoiding reference humor entirely when I was bantering with Hatoko from then on. She never got them, which meant that instead of coming across as jokes, they came across as me straight up badmouthing her.
Just then, a patch of empty air in the club room began to visibly distort. You’d think that would be shocking, but none of us so much as batted an eyelash. We knew perfectly well that said distortion was a sign that Chifuyu was using World Create to make a Gate from her school to our room. And, just as expected, a moment later, a little girl stepped out from the rift in space.
“Hey, Chifuyu!” I said. “You’re pretty late today, huh?”
“Mnhh,” Chifuyu grunted in vague agreement.
“Something happen?”
“I had to talk to Cookie a little.”
“Oh, with Kuki?” I said, enunciating all nine demons.
“She said she wants to come over and play soon.”
“Huh, cool.”
“What’s that, Andou?” Chifuyu asked, pointing at Maria, who lay slumbering within my arms.
“Mwa ha ha! An excellent question! This is my newfound partner in crime; my fated companion for a lifetime! Her name? Infinity—”
“A guitar. Wooow. Let me see.”
“—Maria, hey, ouch! Ow, stop! Chifuyu, don’t pull on it like that! I still have the strap around my neck! I’ll take it off, just gimme a second!”
I quickly unslung Maria from my shoulders and held her out to Chifuyu, whose eyes sparkled with wonder as she reached out to take the instrument. I’d definitely grabbed her interest. Man, I didn’t think she’d be this happy just to hold a guitar! Sometimes it feels really nice to lend your stuff out.
“Can you play it, Andou?” asked Chifuyu.
“But of course! I can’t play right now, though. I didn’t bring the amp with me.”
“The amp?”
“An amp’s a piece of equipment you need to make an electric guitar play music!” I explained, proudly passing down the knowledge that I myself had just gained about five minutes beforehand.
Chifuyu’s eyes shined even brighter than ever. “You know so much stuff, Andou!”
“Naaah, I’m not that special or anything! This is stuff that anyone who plays the guitar would know. It’s common sense, really.”
Oh man, does it ever feel nice to bask in the admiring gaze of an elementary schooler! In fact, it felt so good that I didn’t even hear Sayumi and Tomoyo muttering something to the tune of “Do you suppose he even has a sense of shame?” and “I’m so far past being fed up with him that now I just sorta feel bad for him.” Nope. Didn’t notice or care at all!
“Wooow. Guitars are so cool,” said Chifuyu, turning her sparkle-filled gaze up to me. “Andou?”
“Yes?”
“Can I have it?”
“Hell no!” I screeched. It was such an unreasonable request, I couldn’t stop myself.
“Stingy.”
“No, look, I don’t think you understand the scale of the situation! This thing was so expensive! I can’t just give it away!”
“Please...?”
“Gwahaugh!”
She gave me the puppy-dog-eyes treatment, and I recoiled reflexively. How can this kid so easily make just the right expression to pierce your heart like a knife?! That’s the sort of look that could make me hand over a guitar or two without a second thought if I let it catch me in its clutches!
You can’t let her dominate your will, Andou Jurai—nay, Guiltia Sin Jurai! If you give up your guitar now, you’ll teach Chifuyu that she can get anything she wants by begging for it! She might turn into the sort of woman who works her wiles to convince creepy old men to buy her stuff! For the sake of her future, you have to teach her that she won’t always get everything she wants that easily! And, more than anything, you can’t let anyone take Maria away from you!
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t... Look, Chifuyu. Maria’s my partner. You might even say that she’s my other half!” I declared with renewed resolution. I’d done it—I’d successfully resisted an elementary schooler’s fiendishly potent guilt trip!
“Boo,” droned Chifuyu with a pouty frown. A moment later, though, her expression brightened and she clapped her hands. “Okay, then let’s play a game.”
“A game?” I parroted, confused.
“Close your eyes, Andou.”
I did as I was told, wondering if I was the only person who got a little excited when a girl told him to close his eyes, or if that was just a general guy thing. A moment later, Chifuyu said “Okay,” and I opened them back up again. Needless to say, nobody had kissed me during the eyes-closed period because we live in a bleak reality where hopes and dreams go to die.
I looked down to witness something totally inexplicable. Maria was lying on the floor, and beside her, Maria was lying on the floor.
“Th-There’s two Marias?!” Indeed, not one, but two captivatingly designed black and red guitars graced the ground before me. “Maria...since when did you learn the Shadow Clone Jutsu?!”
“Guitars can’t do that! Actually, humans can’t do that either!” jabbed Tomoyo.
“Maria, don’t you know that you’re squandering your memory capacity by making a physical double of yourself?”
“Quit acting like you’re Hisoka!”
“Oh, I get it now. The copy acts as your En too, right?”
“This isn’t Kortopi’s Gallery Fake power at work!”
“God dammit, who the hell put a copy-sticker on my Maria?! The copy’ll destroy the original for sure if I take it off!”
“It’s not Ermes’s Stand ability either!”
Tomoyo’s ability to identify my references with pinpoint accuracy never failed to impress. In truth, of course, I knew from the start what had actually happened: Maria’s sudden duplication was World Create at work once again. Chifuyu could create anything with her power, and that meant that one of them was almost certainly a copy she’d made.
“Okay, Andou,” said Chifuyu with a goading stare, “which is the real one? Right, or left?”
Oh, I get it now. So that’s the game we’re playing. “In other words, we’re testing whether or not my love for Maria is the real deal, right?”
“Right.”
“If I really value Maria as much as I say I do, there’s no way I’d mix her up with a fake, right?”
“Right. And if you pick the wrong one, I get to have the guitar.” Chifuyu crossed her arms, threw out what little chest she had, and spoke in an ever so slightly more aggressive tone than usual.
From an objective standpoint, her proposal was completely unreasonable. I had absolutely nothing to gain from accepting her challenge, and I had an awful lot to lose. I’m talking massive risk for zero potential profit! I could lose the guitar that I’d just bought the day before! What sort of absolute ignoramus would accept a deal like that?
“Mwa ha ha! Interesting! Very well, then—I accept your terms!”
It’s me! I’m the ignoramus! I’m the sort of man who dives headfirst into completely meaningless challenges without sparing them a second thought!
“I knew you’d say yes, Andou. I can always count on you,” said Chifuyu with a satisfied nod. That meant, surely, that she’d been moved by my downright chivalrous display of confidence. “I had faith that you’d be stupid enough to accept a bet I won’t lose anything from, whether or not you win.”
“Wait, you knew?! You had that all planned out?!” Crap! I think I just got set up!
It would’ve been really hard to back out of the challenge at that point, though. I’d made up my mind, after all! Instead, I turned around and addressed the three high schoolers behind me.
“All right...don’t try to stop me, everyone! This is my fight, and I have to see it through, even if that does mean going up against Chifuyu,” I growled, doing my best to sell a “oh no, our friend’s being manipulated by the enemy and I have to fight her now, woe is me!” sort of atmosphere.
The three high schoolers behind me, meanwhile...
“Oh, that reminds me—I heard that the baseball club won their second match the other day.”
“Ooh, I heard that too! They’re really giving it their all this year, huh?”
“A first-year on the team has been contributing majorly to their success, supposedly.”
...were engaged in a completely unrelated conversation. They couldn’t have cared less, and they weren’t shy about showing it. Isn’t that just a bit much, guys? Couldn’t you pay at least a little attention to the holy war playing out right next to you? Come on, your friends are fighting each other! That’s one of the most exciting plot developments you can get in a supernatural battle story!
I shook off my indifference-induced aggravation and refocused my attention on Chifuyu and her game, getting down onto my hands and knees and giving both guitars an extremely thorough inspection. No matter how I looked at them, though, they were completely identical. The little screw-things on the top bit of the neck were even turned to the same angles! She’d even copied the fingerprints on the body!
“Hey, Chifuyu, can I touch them?” I asked.
“I’ll allow it,” she replied immediately.
Guess that goes to show how confident she really is. She thinks there’s no way I’ll figure it out, even if I do touch them.
I picked up each guitar in sequence, carefully comparing them. I felt how heavy they were, listened to the sounds they made, but...nothing. They were exactly the same, or at the very least, if there were any subtle differences, I was too low-level of a musician to pick them out. Once again, I realized just how incredible of a power World Create really was. I hated to admit it, but she had duplicated my Maria flawlessly.
Left or right? Which could the real one be?
“Oh, I know. Andou,” Chifuyu muttered happily as I agonized over my decision, “you should break the guitar you think is fake.”
“I should what?!”
“If you really know the answer for sure, then why not?”
“Ugh...f-fine, then!” The show of confidence I’d made when I jumped into the challenge had come around to bite me in the ass. There was no way I could refuse after playing it up that much! My sense of pride just wouldn’t allow it!
That lent a whole new degree of danger to the situation. If I messed up and picked the wrong one, I’d end up murdering my beloved partner with my own two hands. Curse you, Chifuyu, you conniving little brat! How dare you put this sort of pressure on me! What sort of elementary schooler’s capable of that level of strategy, anyway?! For crying out loud, why did you have to go and make this battle’s stakes so incredibly heavy?!
“Hmm...?” I muttered. A sudden burst of noise surged through my mind. A ceaseless, disharmonious melody bearing a subtle but unmistakable trace of dissonance. A harsh, grating din resounded in my ears, reverberating mercilessly and endlessly. What could that noise, that tune of cacophonous malaise have been?
“I see now...” I muttered. Not only had I put my thoughts together, I’d done so while dropping an absolute ton of music jargon into my internal monologue. I was back in the game!
“I’ve figured it out, Chifuyu!” I declared.
“Okay,” she replied, pointing at the two guitars. “In that case, pick the one that you think I made, right or left, and break it. If you break the right one, you win.”
“Got it!” I agreed with a confident nod, reaching down toward the guitars. “The babe on the left or the honey on the right? Nah, bro! Not even!”
I reached out with both hands, grabbing both guitars by their necks, and held them up overhead! A look of shock ran across Chifuyu’s face.
“Andou, what are you—”
“Don’t make me ralph! This is totally bogus!” I shouted triumphantly, then made like a rock star and slammed both the guitars into the ground with all my might! Or maybe I should say I made like Jidanbou unleashing his ultimate Jidan Banzai Strike Festival technique? Point is, I smashed those suckers against the floor, and both of their necks snapped in half with a shower of splinters! That horrible, cacophonous crash would be the last noise those copies ever made!
Incidentally, there’s a very good reason why I suddenly got real “eighties guitar guy” at the end there! You see, when my emotions reach a boiling point, I have a bad habit of suddenly getting into character, regardless of whether or not it’s situationally appropriate for me to do so. I had an inkling that my verbiage may have been absolutely atrocious, but I didn’t let that bother me. After all, suddenly being in my element makes me hella cool!
“I’ll admit, Chifuyu, it wasn’t a bad plan!” I said with a boastful grin as I tossed the two trashed guitars over my shoulders. Guitar-guy-time was over, mostly on account of the fact that I wasn’t good enough at talking the talk to keep it up for much longer. “Your only mistake was turning the pressure up one notch too far. I bet you thought that you were dealing the finishing blow, but the truth is, you were digging your own grave! You planned your way right into a corner!”
Chifuyu had told me to break the guitar I thought was fake, but when I finally stopped to think about it, that command was totally inexplicable. After all, the whole point of the contest was for Chifuyu to have an excuse to take Maria from me!
When I thought about it with that fact in mind, her last-second addition to the challenge made literally no sense. Chifuyu’s condition for victory was me picking the wrong guitar...but with the extra rule, that would mean that I’d also break the real guitar! No matter which guitar I picked, Chifuyu’s ultimate victory condition—getting her hands on the real guitar—would be impossible to fulfill!
Not even an elementary schooler would be stupid enough to put a condition on their challenge that entirely eliminated the possibility of their victory, and that meant that, for some reason, Chifuyu believed that no matter which guitar I destroyed, it wouldn’t be a problem for her. Why would she believe that? Simple: both of the guitars that she had presented to me were replicas! Most likely, the second I closed my eyes, Chifuyu had used her power to stash the real guitar in an extradimensional space, then conjured up two copies for the sake of the game.
“It was an excellent plan that used World Create to its fullest potential. You have my praise, Chifuyu! I’m afraid, however, that you’ve got a long way to go before you can hope to defeat me in a battle of wits!”
I reveled in my victory like a gambler who’d just won the jackpot in an illicit back-alley casino! Mwa ha ha! Though, honestly, this was a pretty played-out plot twist. Taking a game of “which is the real one?” and making the twist be “the answer is neither!” is seriously as played-out as it gets! So played-out, in fact, that it’s come all the way around and become a true classic! You underestimated my encyclopedic knowledge of genre clichés, Chifuyu!
“All right, hurry up and give back the real Maria!”
Chifuyu didn’t reply. She was standing stock-still, silently gaping at me. I assumed that she was just petrified with shock at her complete and utter defeat, but eventually, she looked up at me with pure disbelief in her eyes.
“A-Andou,” she stammered, “why did you break both of them?”
“Huh?”
“I told you to pick the real one, didn’t I?”
“...Huh?” Wait, wait, wait. Something’s wrong here. “Ch-Chifuyu? That, umm, that was just a trick, right? Like, the question itself was a trap...?”
“I wouldn’t pull a dirty trick like that. I play fair and square.”
“B-But then, why would you say that I should break the one I think is fake? You realize that meant that if I lost, I’d end up breaking the real guitar, right?”
“...Ooh,” said Chifuyu as the light of understanding dawned in her eyes.
“You only just noticed?!”
“Whoops.”
“This is more than just a whoops!” My genius-level deductions had completely gone to waste! “Wait. Just wait a second...”
I forced myself to calm down and dispassionately analyze the situation. Basically, I’d read too deep into the setup for my own good while Chifuyu had legitimately just wanted to enjoy a silly little game.
Sheesh—turns out I’m the one who planned his way into a corner in the end! I suppose I do make a habit of thinking too hard about this sort of thing. I can’t help but pick up on the tiny little details that an ordinary person would ignore! They just jump right out at me, and I can’t help but overthink them! It’s, like, in my nature or something! Oh, if only I could be like an ordinary person and not read into everything so much. I’m sure that must be a much happier way to live one’s life...
Suddenly, my self-aggrandizing inner monologue was interrupted by an extremely important realization. I slowly, fearfully turned my head, looking back over my shoulder to where I’d casually discarded a certain pair of objects. One of them had vanished—Chifuyu must have canceled her ability. The other guitar, however, had not disappeared and was lying on the floor...in pieces.
“Mariaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
I sprinted to her side, falling to my knees and cradling her shattered neck in my arms. My cries—the lamenting wails of a broken man who’d just slain the one he loved most with his own two hands—would linger in this club room until the end of time, echoing away for all to hear.
I mean, okay, Sayumi was right there and could fix the guitar in the blink of an eye, and in some distant corner of my mind I was aware of that, but I was too swept up in the scene to let that inconvenient little fact disrupt my performance.
Roughly a week after my fateful meeting with Maria...
“Good morning, Juu!”
“Hey.”
I stepped out from my front door to find my childhood friend waiting for me, and the two of us headed off to school. As we walked along, making our usual casual chit-chat, Hatoko suddenly changed the subject.
“Oh, right! What happened to your guitar?”
I quickly averted my gaze. “Sh-She’s, uhh, sealed away in my closet right now.”
“‘Sealed away’?”
“She’s building up power in anticipation of the fated battle that’s soon to come.”
“Huuuh. I see,” said Hatoko with a little nod that said she’d seen all the way through to the truth of the situation.
“I-It’s not like I got bored with her, for the record!” I shouted.
“I know, I know!” She replied with a chuckle, smiling in that mischievous sort of way that makes people come across as cute even when you know it means they’re making fun of you.
I fell silent. I didn’t have a decent retort on hand because, in truth...I’d gotten bored with my guitar. Just a week later, and all that passion had completely faded. In my defense, playing the guitar’s really friggin’ hard! I couldn’t memorize the chords at all, and holding the strings down made my fingers hurt like hell! Plus, I just didn’t have the free time for that sort of thing. I had tons of TV shows to watch, video games to play, and manga to read!
Anyway, to make a long story short, me and guitars were just a poor match. Ugh...what a waste of money that was.
“You’ve always gotten bored with new hobbies just as quickly as you get excited about them, Juu!”
“I’m a man with the capacity for both intense passion and dispassionate logic, after all.”
“Of course you are!” replied Hatoko, brushing me off in a way that actually stung more than it would’ve if she’d just come out and criticized me.
“That guitar’s moment in the spotlight is still a ways off,” I sighed. Like, a long ways off. Potentially an eternity. Maria’s gone from main heroine to written out of the story in a single chapter.
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