Alone On A Friday Night?

God, You're Pathetic.

---

Nyoro Hoge strangled her phone in her fist until the power button had been held down long enough and the device forced itself off. Then she plucked out the battery and slid it into a separate pocket of her bag from the body of that little computer. She snatched a broad orange leaf from the ground and tore tiny pieces off of it again and again as she walked, flinging each fragment haphazardly into the air over her shoulders. When that one was disintegrated, she plucked up another and begin to work on it as well.

'The girls have their plans. He has his obligations. And naturally there's no point in bothering-' At the sudden mental image of her parents she clutched the dry leaf in both hands and tore swift chunks out of it and then ripped the chunks violently apart in uneven stacks of shredded plant matter. In tandem, she flung the mess to the ground and shook the bits off of her shoes.

'Six.' She aligned and relaxed the muscles of her body.
'Twenty-eight.' She controlled her breathing and concentrated on her heart rate with her eyes closed. Her stress-powered quirk, Wasuremono, withdrew from her blurring outline like a tiger vanishing into the brush.
'Four-hundred-ninety-six.' She brushed any leaf bits, dust, or clothing wrinkles off of her uniform — real or imagined.
'Eight-thousand-one-hundred-twenty-eight.' She opened her eyes, let out a sigh through her nose, and began a measured walk forward.
'Thirty-three-million-five-hundred-fifty-thousand-three-hundred-thirty-six.' She watched a cloud drift by. 'Cumulus. Relatively low in the atmosphere, typically around 800 meters. One normal track event, straight up from the ground....'

She stopped in her walk home and adjusted the straps to her bookbag, still looking at the sky. 'This is normal for you. The state of things has been abnormal for a bit, so returning to normal is expected. There's nothing to be concerned about.' Hoge tore her gaze away from the afternoon sun and returned to her walk home.

---

An odd teen girl laid on her tightly-made twin bed in her own dorm-like room with an antique textbook pressed into her face. It was written in Arabic script, and had handwriting in the margins done by three separate hands: the oldest in Egyptian Arabic, another in cursive Western characters, and the most recent in Hoge's own curvy Japanese kanji. She could not read any of it, as she was occupied with blinding herself with the open book.

"This is normal," she insisted to herself with a book-muffled voice, meaning (of course), 'This sucks.' Hours of failed attempts at revisions, reminiscence, and recreation have done nothing to improve her mood. Neat stacks of notebooks and workpaper still irresponsibly sat out on her study desk. There were still Saturday classes in the morning looming over her head, and all she'd accomplished was ruminating. Even the silliest, most lie-filled textbook in her collection couldn't lift her spirits. With a quiet growl in her throat, she plucked it off her face by the spine and slid it back into the gap between its fellows on the shelf.

She immediately flung her legs off the bed and crossed to her doorway where her bag, still unpacked, hung on its hook. She callously dumped the contents onto her bed where they dented the blankets, and she didn't even take the time to fix it. In a flurry of motion, Hoge speedily redressed, refilled the bag — two kunai, the Marumaru helmet, a coil of rope, disinfectant spray, a camera case, a flaky rubber whale, her wallet — and even fished out a barely-used tube of black lip stain from the back of her stationary drawer to wear. She slung the bag over one shoulder, slipped the dummy trap wallet into her pocket, and clipped a dark cloth mask around her neck.

In the hall outside she locked her room door and trusted her keys to the whale. At the end of the hall, the sun was setting through the window, and she paid it no mind. She raced down the stairs in heavy boots like she was escaping a fire, and blew past some sleepy-eyed residents at the building's entrance. An older girl with unbrushed hair scrambled to snatch drifting pages out of the air. But by the time she had everything back in hand and joined her friends in looking around, Hoge was already gone.

---

Psychedelic rock music swam in rhythm and distortion throughout the room. Young people — freaks, burnouts, slackers, punks, rockers, and all the civilians counter-culture to professional Japan and its Hero Society — filled a dimly lit basement venue with all the light pointed kaleidoscopically at the stage. A petite woman with two rows of sharp fangs was performing a bass solo for a dancing, hopping, moshing crowd and Hoge was staring so intently at every movement of the artist's fingers that it's a wonder they didn't catch fire.

It was easy to forget in a classroom of titans and athletes, but currently Hoge was one of the taller and more fit patrons attending the show. And yet, even wearing an immodestly plunging tank top, metallic colored sports bra, and haori with neon geometries, she failed to stand out at all. She stood at the back of the room, guarding the opening of a cup of caffeinated soft drink with the hand a bouncer had marked with a large black X, and disappeared. She was background color. Faceless in a crowd.

A man's hand waved in front of her face and blocked her view of the bassist. Her concentration was broken. The musicians transitioned to a new verse (the lead singer harmonized with himself in two voices) and Hoge gave a belated flinch and glared sideways at the stranger.

He was just a random guy with long, greasy hair and a gold chain. He was gesticulating in his conversation with the full table beside Hoge, and even as she watched, he made a broad gesture with his arms and smacked her in the forehead with the back of his hand. To his marginal credit, he did look around to see what had happened. To Hoge's less marginal irritation, he looked right past her and shrugged it off by assuming a passerby didn't look where they were going. He looked to the side and continued animatedly with a gyaru gal he was with. It took only seconds for him to clip Hoge's glasses and cock them askew.

Nyoro Hoge, still in the depths of her bad night, frowned and reacted. She drove her palm into the back of his head. He caught himself in the jerk forward and looked agog at his buddy beside him that had been sitting in his blind spot. Projecting offense and rubbing the back of his head, he reached over and smacked the other guy right where the greasy fellow had been struck. The other guy clicked his tongue and smacked the first guy in the same place, mostly catching him in the fingers still massaging the stinging skin. An argument broke out and accusations flew.

Hoge scowled and downed her whole drink, flipped it over to place it on her table, and stalked to the unisex bathroom to be alone. She wasn't around to watch the sumo-looking bouncer hurry over and start shouting ora, orrrra at the squabbling men.

---

The moon was nearing the top of the sky. Marumaru, helmeted and harnessed with rope, was slipping into an empty construction site. The massive steel skeleton of a future high-rise looked like a black etching carved into the darkness. Though the site had cameras and safety lights, they all faced the ground and concentrated on piles of valuable materials. Hoge was not guised and trespassing so she could pilfer bricks and rivets. She circled within the temporary fencing of the grounds until she reached the half-finished bottom floors of the skyscraper.

She tightened the straps of her bag and tucked them away under her arms. Her haori had been folded up and secreted within, and the night wind cooled her bare shoulders. She used construction ladders to ascend the first few floors and kept to the steel beams so she didn't have to test the floors for her weight. Within the helmet, specialized lenses optimized the available light. She didn't have to lose time sweeping for detritus with her booted feet.

Maru made her way to the very edge, overlooking the construction yard, facing the street. This level completely lacked any semblance of walls. Translucent plastic sheets flapped noisily in the breeze. She made her way around sacks of unmixed plaster and cheap hand tools. Far above the ground, street lights looked like little suns in the orange and yellow sharpness of her augmented view. She turned away and balanced at the edge. All that was below her was a gravel field of hard, sharp things.

She began unwinding the loose end of her rope and then lashed it around the vertical steel beam beside her. In case of misfortune, at least this lifeline would catch her and she'd simply get yanked around the pelvis and smack into the metal struts of a partially constructed building. Compared to tumbling headfirst off it entirely, it was the preferable of the bad outcomes. She checked her knots, looped the rope shorter, then tugged hard on the rope coming off her and rechecked them.

Maru retrieved her digital camera and set it to a low-light, long exposure mode. She made sure it was secured to her, too. Just like with her own body, repairs were preferable to obliteration. Then she grabbed onto the rope with one hand, held up the camera with the other, and braced her feet on the exterior corner of the beam. Her heels dangled off into open space. A fearful thrill tingled up from the soles of her feet. She leaned back, back, further back until the rope creaked and went taut. It was the only thing stopping her from plunging into oblivion.

Slowly, she released her handhold on the rope. Gravity pulled harder on her hands than anywhere else, gently levering her shoulder muscles. She put both hands on the camera and angled it up, catching the moon settled like a ball balancing on the tallest beam. The skeletal structure loomed like a hollowed out cliff face. Maru locked herself in place, trusting entirely to her rope and her knotwork to keep her alive. She couldn't let camera shake ruin her shots. Click, whir. Beep. Click, whir. Beep.

When her muscles started to fatigue, she began reeling herself back onto the horizontal beam of this facing and sat herself down on the edge to secure her camera away again. After she unlooped the rope and left it lashed, she rested in the dark. Maru listened to the sounds of night time Kyoto. Hush of sparse traffic, so similar to an ocean crashing to the beach. Flapping plastic and rustling leaves. The echoes of peoples' voices, shouting or laughing or drunkenly conversing. But mostly, the subtle mess of noise just slightly more than nothing.

Just slightly more than nothing was the foundation of Hoge's world.

She was rested. So she climbed to her feet. Then she climbed out onto the vertical beam with her hands and feet pinning her against either side. The rope trailed out beneath her as she hauled herself up two more stories, free-climbing to the end of her safety line and the end of the construction completed so far. Up here, and fully exposed, the wind whirled around her. She was a rock in the stream of night air and it made eddies that were warped by the furtive action against her skin.

If she didn't calm down, then Wasuremono would ruin the view through her camera. Perched narrowly above the world, Marumaru breathed deep on a fragrant mist she triggered in the mask. It hissed away like a thin cloud on her exhale. The familiarity, and the scents, relaxed her muscles and slowed her heartbeat. Her mood shifted. She adjusted the viewscreen of her camera and held it up at the level of her chest. In the moonlight, the silvering of her underclothes glowed.

'This is nice.' Hoge composed her photographs of the lights of distant windows and the interplay of shadows a long way down.