Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 4 - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Cleaning, with a Side of Memories

If I were asked to describe my first impression of Andou Jurai in a single word, I could do so easily enough—I’d go with “awful.”

We had first met in April, one year prior.

“Kanzaki Tomoyo, Kushikawa Hatoko, and Andou...hmm? How would you read this name?”

School had ended for the day, and I, a newly promoted second-year student, was sitting in my classroom, looking through a set of membership application forms. My club advisor, Miss Satomi, had passed them to me earlier in the day, and each one represented a first-year student who wanted to join the literary club.

“I assume it’s most likely read ‘Toshiki’?” I mused as I glanced through a first-year boy’s application. It was one of only three that I’d received—in other words, the club had only three prospective applicants that year. We were, to say the least, a chronically short-staffed organization. I was the only second-year in the club, and there were no third-years at all. The only two other members had both graduated a month beforehand, which left me as the club’s sole remaining occupant.

It’s a tragic story, really...though personally, I couldn’t bring myself to be especially sad about it. Frankly, I’d never been especially attached to the literary club in the first place. I had gotten along well with my two seniors, to be sure, but with them having graduated, there wasn’t much left for me there.

I assumed that in all likelihood, nobody would join and the club would be disbanded or suspended. It would be a shame to lose my after-school reading sanctuary, but I accepted there was simply nothing that I could do about it...that is, until not one, but three applications arrived on my desk. I hadn’t even gone to the trouble of trying to drum up interest for the club, but somehow, they came to me anyway.

I could only assume that the guiding hand of fate was at work. It seemed I’d need to carry on my duties as the literary club’s president at least a little while longer—of course, I’d only be presiding over the club until October, in any case.

“Now then,” I said to myself, sweeping up the applications and standing up. It was time to head over to the club room. After all, one of the new applicants could very well have decided to show up that day, and it was my duty as both their senior and the club president to arrive on time.

What sort of people will join? I felt a mixture of excitement and apprehension as I strolled through the hallways...only to find a remarkably peculiar individual standing outside of my club room. It was a boy—a student, clearly—and he was leaning up against the club room’s door, his arms crossed in a display of casual arrogance. He and I were roughly the same height, incidentally.

“Mwa ha ha... You’ve certainly kept me waiting,” he said with a sneer.

I was immediately struck by how he had gone out of his way to say the words “mwa ha ha.” It was an almost unbelievably unnatural way to laugh.

“I take it that you’re the master of this domain?” asked the boy, gesturing at the club room with his thumb.

Its “master”? Is he asking me whether or not I’m the club president? That was the most reasonable explanation I could come up with, so I silently nodded, keeping my expression perfectly neutral.

“Good. In that case, know that circumstances beyond even my control have forced me to make this place my stronghold for the time being. And please, don’t ask me why—not if you value your life, anyway.”

I didn’t reply. I’m quite certain that the expression on my face was as skeptical as expressions could possibly be. In fact, I’m confident it was the exact same face I’d make if I ran into some unidentifiable cryptid out in the wilderness.

“Oh, of course! I haven’t introduced myself! My mistake,” said the boy, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t asked. “My name is Andou Jurai.”

Oh? I see now. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I noticed him waiting outside the club room, but now there was no doubt about it: he really was the boy with the unusually written first name whose application I’d glanced over shortly beforehand. So, it’s read “Jurai,” then? Interesting.

“Mwa ha ha! Of course, that’s not my true name! No, it’s merely an alias! After all, my true name is—”

“Move.”

I had no idea why the strange, cryptic mess of a man before me would introduce himself by an alias only to use his real name literally seconds later, and I didn’t particularly care to find out. I cut him off and looked him directly in the eye. I was probably glaring at him, actually, though it wasn’t exactly on purpose.

“Ah, err, I mean... Mw-Mwa ha ha! To think you’d dare to order me around! I can see you’ve very little regard for your life, woma—”

“Move.”

“R-Right. Sorry,” he stammered, practically leaping out of my way.

I stepped past him, took hold of the door’s handle, then paused. “Andou. Andou Jurai,” I said, pulling a sheet of paper out of my bag and holding it out to him. “You can have this back.”

That sheet of paper, of course, was his club application form. He glanced at the form as he accepted it, then looked back up at me with a mixture of confusion and panic written all over his face. His haughty, arrogant sneer had vanished, like it had never been there in the first place.

“H-Huh?”

“I have no intention of accepting a tactless lout who shows open contempt for his seniors into my club.”

“Ah, wait, I—”

“Goodbye, and good day to you. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors,” I said, giving him my best retail worker smile and slamming the door in his face.

And that’s how the two of us met. The only reason I’d hesitate to call it an awful first impression is that “awful” almost felt like an understatement. It was the sort of first meeting that had made me sincerely pray that he would find happiness in some far-off foreign country and never, ever come back.

I’d eventually ended up speaking with him about that first encounter of ours, and his explanation was about what you’d expect:

“So, I figured that first impressions are everything, right? And I thought that I’d be screwed if I didn’t, like, assert myself right off the bat, so I decided my best option would be to go in guns blazing. I thought that if I showed off the sort of guy I really was, you’d be all ‘you’re the kind of talent that only arises once in a decade! Please, I need you in my club!’ or whatever.”

One almost had to be impressed by the sheer amount of energy the man could throw into the most hopelessly doomed of efforts. But I digress.

At the time, I’d had absolutely no intention of letting him join my club. However, one of the other new applicants, a girl named Kushikawa Hatoko, frantically poured everything she had into arguing on his behalf. That might not have been enough in and of itself, but then Andou showed up the next day, literally prostrated himself before me, and apologized profusely for his behavior. That, finally, convinced me to give him a second chance.

If I’m going to be completely honest, though...I wasn’t really angry with him in the first place. I also didn’t actually have the unilateral authority to deny his admission. Club presidents just didn’t have that sort of power in our school. I’d only been so stubborn because it had felt like I’d be undermining what authority I did have if I reversed my decision too easily, considering how plainly I’d shot him down.

In any case, a second chance would be his, and I decided to go about granting it to him in the form of a mock interview.

☆

“All riiight, everyone, it’s cleaning time! Hip, hip, hooraaay!” shouted Hatoko, leading us in a cheer.

“Hip, hip, hooraaay,” said the rest of us, more or less playing along.

“Come on, I can barely hear you! One more time—hip, hip, hooraaay!”

“Why’re you so worked up about this, anyway?” I sighed.

“Because we’re cleaning, Juu! Cleaning!”

Hatoko was at least twenty percent more hyper than usual, and all I could do was shake my head with exasperation. We had indeed all gotten together that day to give our trusty old club room a thorough cleaning. It had seen us through thick and thin, and the best way to repay it for its loyal service was to get it spic and span! And whenever cleaning entered the picture, my childhood friend Kushikawa Hatoko simply could not be silenced.

Hatoko had always loved that sorta domestic-style stuff. Housework and cooking were right up her alley, and cleaning was crammed in with them among her favorite activities. Doubly so if she got to do a real major, from-the-ground-up sort of cleanup. She got really, really into those, and you could tell just by looking at her.

Hatoko was wearing an apron that she’d brought from home (not the apron that she wore while she was cooking, notably), along with a bandanna tied around her head and draped over her hair to keep it clean. She held her own personal feather duster in one hand, and her apron’s pocket was stuffed with enough miscellaneous cleaning gear that you’d think said pocket was of the 4D variety.

“Mwa ha ha!” I cackled. “Such enthusiasm truly befits the woman who earned herself the title Sanitary Sniper!”

“You’re literally the only person who calls her that,” Tomoyo jabbed with a roll of her eyes.

“Okay, everyone, it’s time! Leeet’s clean!” Hatoko cried out. We all moved out on cue, taking up our respective cleaning stations.

My task: window wiping! I started out by tying a bandanna over my mouth. I wasn’t sensitive to dust or anything, to be clear, and I wasn’t hyped to clean in the same way Hatoko was at all. So why did I use the bandanna as a face mask? Obviously because I thought it’d look cool! Covering your mouth with some sort of mask has the same sort of vaguely villainous appeal that wearing an eyepatch does. Characters who cover their mouths with a scarf or a particularly tall collar are instantly rendered extra stylish and mysterious!

I checked my reflection in the window, and I gotta say, I was looking good. The fact that it was a plain, flat white bandanna was a bit of a shame, but eh, I was still pulling it off for sure. I wasn’t done yet either—no, I reached out once more for yet another bandanna! This one I wrapped around the upper half of my head, tilting it on a slight offset to cover up just my left eye.

Ooooh, nice! Now that’s cool! The vast majority of my head was concealed, with the sole exception of my right eye, and I looked awesome! Looking like Kakashi: hella cool!

As I stood there, admiring myself in the window’s reflection, Hatoko walked up beside me.

“Ah, Juu, your bandanna’s slipping!” she said as she tied it back properly in place around my head. I glowered at her. “Huh? What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Why... Why... Why are you always like this...?”

“Huuuh? Why am I like what?”

“On second thought? Forget it. Thanks.”

“Oh, okay. No problem!”

The way she beamed at me was just too intense, and I couldn’t bring myself to complain. She really had always been like that. If I let my pants droop down stylishly, she’d be all, “Oh, Juu, your pants are falling down!” and pull them up for me. If I left my school jacket unbuttoned, she’d say, “Oh, you forgot to button up!” and do them up in an instant. She’d even tuck in my undershirt if I left it hanging out... Someday, if she ever had kids, I just knew she’d be the sort of mother who’d patch up the jeans that her offspring had spent ages getting just the right degree of distressed.

“Right, guess I’d better get cleaning,” I muttered. “Gotta be a washcloth around here somewhere...”

“Ah, don’t use a washcloth for that, Juu!” called out Hatoko. “Newspaper’s better for window wiping!”

“Oh, huh, really? Okay, then,” I said, a little impressed by her command of cleaning trivia. I grabbed a wad of newspaper and started wiping away, taking care not to leave marks as I cleaned the windows’ every nook and cranny, sometimes standing on a desk to help me reach the parts that were a little too high up for me.

Meanwhile, Hatoko was right next to me, cleaning out the little gaps between the windows and their frames. “Ta-da!” she exclaimed, pulling out two of her secret weapons of ultimate cleaning potential from her apron’s pocket. “A Hatoko Stick and a worn-out toothbrush!”

The “Hatoko Stick” was just a pair of disposable chopsticks that she’d wrapped some gauze around the tips of, but between it and the toothbrush, she seemed to be getting every last little bit of dust out of those window frames, humming a happy little tune to herself all the while.

“Somebody’s sure enjoying this,” I commented. “Is cleaning really that much fun for you?”

“It sure is!” replied Hatoko. “It’s nice to know you’re living in a clean environment, and looking at the place you worked on and seeing it all nice and pretty feels great! Doesn’t it?”

“I guess,” I said with a noncommittal shrug.

I didn’t want to rain on her parade, but honestly, I wasn’t exactly a fan of the activity. I never bothered cleaning if I didn’t absolutely have to, and I was always on the lookout for shortcuts to make it less of a pain. And on that note, it was time for me to put a certain plan of mine into action!

“Chifuyumooon,” I groaned pathetically, throwing myself at Chifuyu’s mercy. She was in charge of wiping down the tables, by the way. “Pleeease whip something up that’ll get all this cleaning done for us! Like, make a tool that makes all the trash in the room disappear or whatever!”

World Create gave Chifuyu the power to make anything, and “anything” just had to include something that could make all this cleaning a breeze! Like, I dunno, a Dyson or a Roomba or something!

Chifuyu turned to face me. “Sheesh, Andou, you really are hopeless,” she said in a husky voice that told me she was surprisingly into the whole Doraemon bit I’d been going for. Her imitation was almost shockingly bad, to be fair, but it was also really cute, which balanced things out.

Chifuyu rummaged around in an imaginary pocket in front of her, humming a little fanfare for herself as she prepared to produce the perfect tool to clean the room up in a snap!

“A black hooole!”

“Noooooope!” I shouted as loudly as I possibly could, desperately cutting her off and praying that my interjection would make her not use her power after all! “What are you thinking, Chifuyu?! Doing a Doraemon voice doesn’t mean you can get away with creating the ultimate tool of cosmic destruction in the middle of our room!”

“You wanted something that’d make all the trash disappear,” said Chifuyu.

“I wanted something that’d leave the rest of the room intact! A black hole would make everything disappear, us included! Actually, wait...can you even make one of those in the first place?”

“Hmm...” Chifuyu paused to think for a moment. “Probably.”

Being a little casual about this, aren’t you, Chifuyu? What’s with the “I bet I could make one if I tried” attitude, girl?! Holy crap, the power to create anything’s scary as hell! Once again, I was reminded of the terrifying scale of Chifuyu’s power.

“Hey, Juu, look! Look at me!” called out a certain other member of our club who, for the record, had a power just as horrifyingly large-scale as Chifuyu’s. Hatoko had finished cleaning out the window frames and was now wiping down the floorboards with a rag. “Look! I figured out how to use my power for this!”

I felt a chill run down my spine. Over Element gave Hatoko complete and utter control over the fundamental forces of nature. If she wanted to, she could burn down a forest or drown a town without batting an eyelash. Her power had the ultimate combination of high output and wide area of effect, and I could only describe its destructive potential as calamity-level. It was an exceedingly brutal, exceedingly dangerous, and utterly horrific power...

“Look, see? My washcloth never dries out this way!”

...and Hatoko’s method of putting that utterly horrific power to use? Making an ever-wet washcloth. Water was, of course, one of Over Element’s eponymous elements, and by manipulating the ambient moisture in the air, she could keep her washcloth perfectly dampened at all times. Yes, it would remain Soft and Wet forevermore!

“I guess the nature of your power matters less than how you choose to use it, in the end,” I half sighed, half muttered to myself. Huh, is it me, or was that actually pretty deep?

“Oh, wooow! I can keep wiping forever like this!” exclaimed Hatoko as she dashed across the floor on all fours, wiping away as she went. Since her washcloth was being constantly refreshed with new water, she never had to stop to soak it and wring it out...though I had to imagine she’d have to stop and clean the thing eventually. It had to be filthy.

“Looks like you’re having more fun than ever, huh?” I commented.

“Yeah! Having a super power really is amazing, Juu!”

I couldn’t have agreed more, but I also wanted to scream that this was not the representative example of super powers’ amazingness she should’ve been going for. I think this is the most excited I’ve ever seen her look while she’s using her power too... Sheesh.

I heaved a sigh, then got back to my own task. It didn’t take me long at all to finish wiping down the rest of the windows, and with nothing left to do, I decided I might as well help somebody else finish up their work. Let’s see, who’s having the most trouble...? Ah, yup, Tomoyo for sure.

“Hey, need a hand?” I asked, walking over to Tomoyo. She’d been tasked with organizing the bookshelves.

“That’d be great, thanks. This is pretty rough,” Tomoyo grumbled in reply. A small ocean of books was spread out around her, and she sounded like she was pretty fed up with them.

“Ah, yeah,” I replied, “sorting the shelves of the Used Bookstore of the Divine: God Off would be pretty hard for one person on their own.”

“I don’t care how many times you casually drop that stupid name into the conversation—it’s never gonna be a thing,” jabbed Tomoyo.

Ugh, I know, right? I’d been calling the row of massive bookshelves that took up one of our clubroom’s walls “God Off” as a term of respect since literally right after I joined, and it still hadn’t stuck.

Generations’ worth of our predecessors had sloughed off—or rather, donated their books to the club, and over the years, it had grown into a dauntingly enormous collection. We had everything, from pure literature and niche subculture stuff to bus schedules and photo books! Every genre under the sun was represented somehow—a veritable treasure trove of books, indeed. Tomoyo’s task, meanwhile, was to take that confusing, jumbled-up mess of a literary hoard and impose some sense of order upon it.

“I swear I always put stuff back where it came from after I’m done reading, so how’d it end up turning into this much of a mess?” griped Tomoyo.

“I mean, it’s not like it was ever sorted to begin with,” I replied. “The selection was nonsense from the get-go, and it’s full of random single volumes of manga and magazines and stuff.”

Tomoyo and I did our best to restore some semblance of order to the shelves together. We lined up series in the right order, sorted them as best we could by genre—or by size when that failed—and tried to rearrange them to look at least a little decent. Meanwhile, we took the chance to dust the shelves themselves off while they were nice and free of books. It was pretty hard work, but for a book lover like me, planning the shelves’ layout ended up being a surprising amount of fun.

“Seriously though, this variety’s ridiculous,” I observed, grabbing a book off a pile. “Oh, hey, look—it’s one of those books that assesses your personality based on your blood type! Remember how everyone got all obsessed with blood type personality tests for a while, way back whenever? Feels like I saw a billion of those books back then.”

“What do you mean, ‘back then’?” asked Tomoyo. “That’s still a thing, and it’s still basically everywhere. God, it’s so stupid—your blood type? Seriously?”

“Oh, huh, you get annoyed by stuff like that?” I was a little surprised. I thought that girls were supposed to all love that sorta fortune-telling adjacent compatibility test stuff.

“It’s not that it annoys me on principle, exactly... It’s just that type-Bs always get the short end of the stick in that sort of book, so I ended up not liking them on the whole.”

“Oh, right. I forgot that you have type-B blood.” She had a point too. Blood type personality assessments did tend to give type-Bs a lot of crap about being selfish and egocentric and stuff. “But look on the bright side—having type-B blood means that you have the same blood type that gorillas do!”

“Why would I give a crap about that?!”

Okay, yeah, so it’s kind of pointless trivia, but for the record: literally all gorillas are type-B. Chimpanzees and orangutans, meanwhile, are all type-A.

Tomoyo puffed out her cheeks and pouted for a moment, then started grumbling again. “Like you even get to talk, mister got-the-good-blood-type. Everybody always has nothing but nice things to say about type-Os, you know?”

“Hmm... I mean, yeah, I guess you probably have a point,” I agreed noncommittally as I skimmed through the book. I’d just happened to open it up to a page about romantic affinities between blood types. “Oh, huh, you’re totally right! ‘Type-O men are calm and generous, and they can be excellent romantic partners for just about anyone,’ it says. I guess people really do hold type-Os in high regard! Man, I’m awesome!”

“What about Bs? What’s it say about type-B girls?” asked Tomoyo, a girl who had—let it not be forgotten—just been talking about how stupid blood-type stuff like this was less than a minute before. She leaned way in, peering at the book over my shoulder. Yeah, she was definitely interested.

“Umm, let’s see... ‘Type-B women are selfish and egocentric, and they’re a terrible match for type-A partners. Type-B and AB partners are only slightly better for them.’”

“Ugggh, I knew it,” moaned Tomoyo with a scowl when I finished reading.

“Hey, don’t let it get to you! They just make all this crap up, anyway. There’s no basis to it.”

“I’m not letting it get to me. Not even a little bit!”

“C’mon, you obviously are.”

“I am all sorts of not letting it get to me!” snapped Tomoyo.

Yeah, nah, she’s upset all right. I put on a slightly strained smile and kept reading. “‘The optimal partner for a type-B woman is a type-O man. Or, really, the only suitable partner for a type-B woman is a type-O man.’ Ha ha ha!”

The book’s claims were just so hysterically baseless, I couldn’t stop myself from cracking up. Who wrote this book, and how did a type-B woman hurt them? It really was pure stupidity, and I felt an impulse to banter with Tomoyo about it.

“Welp, bad news, Tomoyo! Looks like you’ll have to settle for dating me!”

“Huh?” For a second, Tomoyo’s face went totally deadpan. She stared at me, her mouth hung slightly agape.

“What?”

“H-Huh? Wh-What do you mean, dating you...?”

“Oh, like, I mean...y’know, since I’m a type-O guy, and all...?”

“I-I knew that! Duh!” Tomoyo shrieked, her face bright red. Then she snatched the book away from me. “W-We’re supposed to be cleaning, not reading this crap! If you’re gonna help, then help, and if you’re gonna distract me, then beat it!”

Before I even had time to apologize, Tomoyo had shoved me away from the bookshelves. It seemed I was banned from helping out on that end of things. Guess I must’ve touched a nerve somehow.

With nowhere else to go, I drifted over to the table where Sayumi was sorting through the documents that had piled up in our room over the course of time. There were a lot of them—a veritable mountain, even—and Sayumi was taking them all on alone. I tried calling out to her.

“Hey, Sayumi, anything I can... Uhh, Sayumi?”

I’d been convinced that she’d be blazing through the pile of paperwork at her usual lightning-quick pace, but instead, Sayumi was sitting completely still. She was holding a single sheet of paper, gazing at it with a look of intense nostalgia in her eyes.

“Oh...Andou,” Sayumi said, finally noticing me.

“What’s up? You were really spacing out there.”

“Pardon me. I just happened to come across something rather entertaining,” she explained, presenting the piece of paper to me. “Well? I imagine this must bring back some memories for you.”

She was right. It really did immediately cast my mind back into a fit of sentimental reminiscence.

A student’s mugshot was pasted to the upper right corner of the sheet, and the lines below had been written with exceeding care in ballpoint pen, careful to avoid even the slightest of spelling errors. I knew that because I’d spent almost an entire night writing it myself.

It was the resume that I’d written up in preparation for Sayumi’s club entrance exam.