The Simulacrum

Book 4 Extra 4: Neutron Star

"Ouch! Careful!" a certain resident shounen protagonist hissed through clenched teeth, at which point his childhood friend glanced up from his bare torso with a hint of disapproval.

"Don't be a baby."

"I'm not," he whined, then shuddered as the girl swiped a cotton swab across the scrapes on his abdomen. "Is this really necessary? Can't you just do your thing and heal me?"

"I told you, it's not that simple," she retorted without looking up from her work. "If I use a healing hymn on you right now, there could be sand or other stuff stuck in your wound, and when it closes up, it'll cause an infection. Therefore, cleaning your wounds is necessary."

"Then what about Leo?" This time Angie actually looked up, if only to deliver a questioning glance, so Josh quickly clarified, "When he had an icicle in his stomach."

"Oh, that? It was emergency treatment, so different rules applied."

After saying so, the Celestial girl continued to work on her childhood friend's scrapes, and since he didn't ask anything else, silence settled in the room. Speaking of which, the two of them were currently inside Josh's room, with the guy sitting on the edge of his bed and Angie kneeling next to him for easy access to his sides.

While it wasn't readily apparent during the final match in the afternoon, our champion got pretty roughed up by the tournament. On his shirtless upper body, I could see about half a dozen bruises, a handful of small cuts, and too many minor scrapes to count. I had a feeling that if we didn't have our resident healer living literally next door to him, he would've probably spent the next two weeks covered in bandages.

"I think I've done what I can. Don't move now," Angie said before she stood up and held her hands out over Josh's head.

Over the next couple of seconds, she hummed a calming tune that sounded somewhat familiar. I've probably heard it a couple of times while she was healing me, or the guys during our sparring sessions, but since this time I had nothing else to focus my attention on, I paid closer attention. She called it a hymn, but its tempo reminded me more of a jazz song than anything you'd hear in a church. While listening, my currently disembodied ears tried to pick up any regular or repeating motifs in the song, and while it felt distinctly familiar, it also sounded strangely off, but I couldn't put my finger on what the issue was.

It was a little annoying, and it almost made me want to look into music theory to figure out why I felt that way, but I quickly shook the idea out of my head. I already had waaay too much on my plate, and any efforts dedicated to learning music could be best devoted to experimenting with the Simulacrum, preparing for the coming supernatural-politics storm, flirting with my girlfriends, or making fried cheese sandwiches.

Anyhow, whether her humming felt off or not, Angie's magic still worked fine, as Josh's wounds and bruises receded at a visible rate, and after a few short minutes, he looked fit as a fiddle. The moment she stopped, the guy let out a pent-up breath and circled his shoulders.

"Thanks. I feel much better, but I can never get used to the itching."

"You're welcome," Angie responded with a toothy grin, but then a split second later she leaned forward and sternly wagged her finger at him. "If you don't like it, then don't get injured."

"I know," Josh responded, eyes rolling. She didn't seem to mind, so after a long beat, he looked around and asked, "Where's my shirt?"

"Do you really need it?" Angie asked back with an impish, yet somewhat strained smile.

"Well, duh? I'm feeling a little cold."

"Really? You know, we could do something to warm you up" Angie suggested, her cheeks flushing a bit.

The guy, on the other hand, only blinked at her in incomprehension.

"Like what? Pushups?"

"Oh, come on! Don't be a dolt!" Saying so, she poked the guy on the forehead. "Think a bit, will ya!"

"Errr Okay, let me think then" Josh muttered, eminently perplexed by the conversation, and I was starting to feel the first burning tinges of secondhand embarrassment at his expense. "So it's something that has to do with warming up and me already being undressed Are you telling me to take a bath?"

"No!" Angie retorted, but then the light bulb lit up over her head and she hastily backpedaled. "Wait, actually, that's not a bad idea!"

"Yeah. Now that you mention it, I feel a little sweaty," Josh noted, sounding relieved, as if he just solved some kind of deviously incomprehensible conundrum.

"Yes, me too! I think I'll wash up too!"

Josh was just in the middle of standing up, but hearing that, he sat right back down.

"Really? Then you can go first. I can wait."

"Hold on, that's not what I meant!" Angie exclaimed and waved her hands. "Let's do it together!"

"Like when we were kids?" Josh mused, and after some consideration, crossed his arms. "Nah. Our bathtub is too small. It would be really cramped."

"T-That just means we would need to squeeze really close together," she proposed, and the longer this conversation went on, the redder she became. This whole exchange would've been amusing to watch if I didn't feel like I was dying of cringe and second hand embarrassment.

"That would be pretty uncomfortable, I think," Josh mused in return, finally prompting the girl to be a tad blunter.

"Listen, you dunderhead! What do you think a boy and a girl are supposed to do in a bathtub together?"

"Wash up?" the guy blurted out without much thinking.

"I'm not talking about that!"

"Then what? Oh, wait. Do you mean like that time?"

"What time?" Angie asked back by reflex, but Josh completely ignored her confusion and nodded like he just figured something out.

"You know? It was sometime around the first year of middle school. Remember? We played in the rain, and mom made us take a bath to warm up. I think that was the last time we took a bath together, and you were still wearing your underwear because your boobs just started growing," the guy stated without the slightest shred of delicacy, only to pause and wonder, "Hey? Do you even have spare undies here?"

"I don't need any!"

"But wouldn't that mean we'd be taking a bath together naked?"

"That's the point!"

" I don't know. That just sounds awkward and uncomfortable to me. How about I just turn up the heating?"

"No, that's not Argh!" The Celestial girl, finally worn down by his objections, let out a lung-rattling groan and grabbed the guy's shoulders. "Listen, Josh. We are going out, right?"

"Y-Yeah?"

"Okay then, think really hard about this: what is the thing that a couple is supposed to do in a situation like this?"

"Like what?"

"Like this!" She repeated, sounding more exasperated by the second. "An empty house! Nobody to interrupt! Only a boy and a girl! What is the natural course of events in this situation?"

" We watch a crappy horror movie?" Josh timidly proposed, but seeing that it only upped the severity of the frown on Angie's face, she defensively raised his hands and said, "What? That's what we always do! We hang out in my room even when mom and dad aren't around, and we watch movies and play video games! There's nothing unusual about this situation!"

"Yes, there is! We're a couple now!"

"Then do you want to watch a romantic comedy?"

"No!"

"Then I have no idea what you want from me!" Josh finally reached the end of his rope and threw the girl's hands off his shoulders. "Can't you just say it?"

"No, I can't! That's the point!"

"The point of what?"

"Of being titillating!"

" I don't get it."

The two stared daggers at each other for a moment, but then the Celestial girl threw her hands into the air.

"Fine, whatever! Go and take a bath, you noodle!"

"Wait, weren't you supposed to wash up first?"

"I changed my mind! Get out!"

"But this is my room"

Despite his protests, the guy obediently let his childhood friend kick him through the door and slam it on him. Then, after a couple of awkward seconds, it opened again, but only for Angie to throw a towel and a pair of boxer shorts at his head before slamming it shut again.

"Man, girls are weird," Josh muttered while collecting the aforementioned items off the floor, and if I was there in corporeal form, this would've been the point where I smacked the back of his head and chewed him out for being an idiot of monumental proportions.

Sure, Angie was very weird and awkward about it, but it was blindingly obvious what she was angling for, yet the guy remained genuinely oblivious throughout the entire conversation! Bloody hell! I knew he was slow on the uptake when it came to the fairer sex, but I couldn't act half this dense even when I was trying to ward off Judy's early signals of affection way back during our love-triangle days!

Anyhow, he headed for the bathroom, and I had no intention to watch him bathe, so I returned to the Celestial girl's side, and to my surprise, I found her sprawled out on Josh's bed, hugging his pillow against her face and kicking at the air like she was being strangled. I was just about to get weirded out, but then she thankfully stopped and hugged the same pillow at her chest instead. Staring at the ceiling, she remained completely motionless for a couple of seconds, but then she turned red to the tip of her ears again and let out a high-pitched squeal.

That was peculiar enough, but then she turned over to her stomach and buried her face into the pillow again while making all kinds of distressed sounds, her legs once again flailing around like she was trying to swim.

"That was sooo embarassiiing!" she whined in the half-second her head emerged from the pillow to take a breath, but then a moment later she resumed her display of what-is-this-I-don't-even. "Why did I tell him to take a bath togetheeer?! What's wrong with meee?!"

To be fair, I didn't know what it was either, but I had a feeling it was something like a delayed fit of embarrassment. At last, after several minutes of doing that in various, increasingly more uncomfortable-looking positions, she suddenly sat up and let out a long breath, all the while still hugging the pillow to her stomach.

"Why didn't it work?" she whispered, suddenly sounding dejected. "She said it would work"

"Hey, Angie?" Josh's muffled voice interrupted her thoughts, and she glanced up at the door. However, instead of coming in, the guy asked, "I just checked, as we've got some Pop-Toasties. Want some?"

"Of course I do!" she called out, her mood shifting on a dime. "I'll be down in a minute; I'll have to fix the bed first!"

"You have to what?" the owner of the room called back, but she didn't respond, and instead fixed the sheets in record time.

Once she finished, she put her hands on her hips while she looked over her handwork, then suddenly did a fist-pump and whispered, "The night's still young! I'm gonna get him!"

And with that, she turned on her heels and headed downstairs, no doubt ready to start round two of her clumsy attempts at seducing his freaking supermassive stellar object of a boyfriend. I decided I had seen enough of that, so I returned to my body and softly exhaled. Normally that would've been the end of it, and while I didn't like to meddle too much in my friends' affairs, this one was just painful to watch, so I stood up and left my room.

I didn't go far though, as my steps stopped in front of the next door and I lightly knocked on it.

"Sis?"

"A moment!" I could hear frantic movement on the other side, and a few seconds later, my dear Abyssal sister opened the door and looked up at me. "Yes? Is there a problem?"

"In a manner of speaking," I answered a touch wearily. "For the record, when you had your outing with Angie the other day, did she ask you for advice?"

"Y-Yes?" Snowy answered, suddenly guarded.

"What did you tell her?"

She looked uncomfortable, probably weighing whether or not she should divulge the discussion she had with her friend, but she ultimately told me, "She She asked me about how she could, uuu entice Josh." When I raised a brow at that, she hastily explained, "S-Since I'm a um Seducer, she thought I would know a lot about the topic, and I tried my best to help as much as I could."

"So you told her to?" I prompted her, and she finished my sentence.

" be coy and indirect about it. Boys like that. I-It's like they feel that they have the initiative, and they would be less guarded and awkward than when the girl... um approaches them more strongly. Was Was I wrong?"

She was giving me puppy eyes, but as her only family member (that dick in the Abyss didn't count), it was my brotherly duty to correct her misbehavior, so I raised a hand and delivered a karate-chop onto the crown of her noggin. Well, it was only a light tap, since I knew she was sensitive to these kinds of things, but it still drew a startled 'Nyuu?' out of her.

I waited for a beat, then sternly told her, "Next time you talk with her, apologize, and then tell her to be blunt like an atom bomb."

Still protecting her head with her hands, she directed an upward glance at me.

"A-Are you sure?"

"Yeah, it's Josh we're talking about here," I answered, then after another beat, I brushed her hand aside and rubbed her head a bit. After all, my brotherly duty also included spoiling my sister, so I had to balance things out.

As for this whole Josh situation, I decided to let them try to work it out between themselves a little longer before I'd stage an intervention. Let's just hope it won't come to that, but with how dense this guy was, I might end up forced to nudge their relationship along anyway. We'll see