Originally Posted by
DeepL
December 27, 2017.
Aoko was chased by the cold wind on her heels and fled into the door of the Modern Magic Division's school building. The magic ambassador also could not stop the cloudy dukkha day that froze in the London rain, wrapped in a trench coat and stood in the heated hall, full of thoughts or beating up Aeolus (1) to relieve her hatred.
The assistant teacher at the reception desk said that Elmero II was still giving lectures to the first year, she picked a seat in the hall and sat down, muttering in her heart that this man is not even off for Christmas holidays, really for the sake of the students, the silkworm spit out the silk and wax into ashes. Norwich's school building, as its name suggests, is less like a magician's cradle and more like an ordinary university building full of ivy. The magician is nestled in the corner of the hall, fiddling with the IPAD, but also difficult to attract the attention of students in a hurry, just an ordinary female students to steal a half day of leisure.
Aoko focused on manipulating the screen of the bird kill time, the girl came to the front before lazily raised his eyes. The nominal next head of the house of Elmero was holding a gift box full of glitter and was saluting her with a smile on his face like a cat with prey in his mouth.
"Fifth Magus, what brings you to my house?"
She was not good at dealing with octogenarian characters, and was startled by this sweet questioning, and the little bird lost control and whirled downward.
"The princess of ...... El Mello." She simply put down her tablet and tried her best to keep her tone down to austere majesty, "I have important business to discuss with Sovereign-Elmelo II."
Miss Elmero nodded leisurely, "Since I am discussing with my brother, I am not at liberty to interfere. Has Miss Arakaki had her tea?"
"Not yet."
"It will be some time before the elder brother teaches. My inner disciple and I were just about to have tea, so if you would be so kind as to accompany us, I would be delighted."
So it wasn't a waitress, but a disciple. Aoko's eyes glanced at the young girl behind Elmero. The young girl, like the mercury maids around her, had her arms full of gift boxes of various sizes, and half of her face was shrunken in a plain hood that she had to struggle to see.
As the girl uncomfortably parted her tourmaline-like eyes, Aoko blurted out, "The face of an inner disciple, it's special."
The girl cowered and took a step back like a frightened animal, and Miss Ermelo stood between Aoko and the girl, smiling courteously: "My brother's brother Grey's face is indeed very beautiful. I am honored by your praise."
Aoko smiled at Elmero's unmistakable smile and asked no further questions. She had always been tired of dealing with the old and little foxes of the Clock Tower, and she had known from her false probing at social evenings that the closets in the homes of these noblemen, like those of the Arakaki family, hid a skeleton or two that would die at the touch of a button. (2)
"Then I'll bother Miss Elmero." She obediently stood up and followed the strange combination of two people and a ceremonial costume towards the parlor at the end of the corridor.
During the years she was not in the Clock Tower, she had heard a lot of whispers about Elmero. The political skill of the Princess of Ermelo was on par with the wisdom of Ermelo II. Aoko has always been smart and thorough, so she is not afraid of being set up and used; she is just used to staying out of the situation and watching from the sidelines, and is always careful not to get too close to others. Fortunately, the young girl of Elmero is more than 20 years younger than her, but the world is much more sophisticated than her, picking the taste of black tea, London terroir and other topics, the magician should not step on a forbidden area. The interesting face of the inner disciple is silent, but does not spare the strength to serve tea and pour water, only in the side to make black tea and add snacks.
What do you think of the recent London scenery?
It's a bit cold. Other than that, compared with my first visit twenty-seven years ago, not much has changed.
Why did you suddenly visit the Modern Magic Division without first reporting to the Legal Affairs Division?
I have a good Wi-Fi signal here.
Would you like a box of chocolates? My favorite dessert store made it to order, a limited edition for Christmas.
"This ...... is better not," Aoko replied cautiously, "I'm on a diet lately."
The young girl resentfully stopped flipping through the gift box and glanced at her chest with a complicated look. The inner disciple who was pouring hot tea on the other side also looked up and smiled coyly, and the amber tea soup spilled out of the lid of the pot and rushed to her skin. She jerked her fingers away in pain, and the teapot fell straight to the ground.
A magician with a modicum of competence and conscience would not have let this happen. Aoko chanted softly, "Flow! (Float up!)"
This chant of "One Count" failed to prevent the accident from happening. The round-bellied teapot rolled twice in the air, and instead of stopping firmly, it slammed into the door panel.
Damn. Aoko closed her eyes, and before she realized the childishness of this action, she was the first to fall into a deep remorse. I really shouldn't have gone back to the association. It was bad luck to do anything in the Magic Association in London.
None of the three of them heard the expected sound of breaking ceramics. The man chanted the same incantation as Aoko in a deep voice, and the teapot hovered in the air two inches in front of the door, the amber liquid surrounding the pot.
"Miss Blue," Elmero II bowed to her across the teapot, his face calm, "you are indeed here."
As people get older, they tend to rehash old memories instead. Aoko's high school best friend, with whom she flipped through fashion magazines that imitated French trends, had learned the French word "Deja-vu" to describe scenes of déjà vu.
This cold and rainy afternoon, as she and Elmero II were going through the files handed over by Zelwicky, she thought of this romantic word for no reason at all, and dug around in her memory for a long time before finding a midsummer slice that was sour and moving.
When Aozaki Aoko was an ordinary elementary school student, she went to her grandfather's house in the mountains with her parents for summer vacation. The grandfather's house was a cool and dark mansion, later tainted with bloody stories, all after the fact. In the eyes of children, it was a mansion that was okay for the summer, lacked entertainment, a closed library. Only Orange would wander through the stacks of papers with great interest, like some kind of early genius' privilege; Aoko brought a soccer ball with her and played it every day in the garden without a playmate, startling the insects and birds in the yard.
One day when she was playing soccer in the backyard, Orange was not interested in playing with her partner, and sat on the porch reading with a large, difficult book in her arms. The soccer ball went out of control and broke the glass window of the warehouse, not for the first time that day, the glass of the warehouse had been replaced six or seven times. The ball flew straight to the other side of the courtyard, but was intercepted by an invisible hand on its way, tossed in the midsummer breeze, and landed in a montage of slow-motion, rolling on the ground with purple sunflower petals and coming to rest at her feet. She turned around and saw her sister on the porch, still buried in her book, withdrawing her raised hand.
A child's memory is unusually stubborn, and in the twenty years or so since then Arigatou and the teacher of the Tower of Time have repeatedly corrected her that it is the base of architectural magic, the most basic levitation spell, but she is ingrained in her mind that it is a kind of magic. Later she cut off time and changed the trajectory of other people's destiny, standing in the inner sea of stars, the edge of the root, and the euphoria that struck her body like lightning was no different from that moment.
Aozaki Aoko sometimes couldn't help but feel that she had lived her whole life for that moment. It was all about living for something that she could never do.
When she left the Modern Magic Division, the lights were already on in London in the winter rain. Aoko couldn't resist Elmero's little girl, and was forced to put a box of chocolates in her hand. She walked to the London Bridge, looked down at the dark river and twisted one, swallowed the cocoa butter and candied petals. The sweet, creamy taste that bloomed on her tongue stirred her eyes to moisten and she said vaguely, "It's so sweet."
Dec. 31, 2017.
It was early in the morning on the big obscure day when the Shinkansen dumped her at the station in Misaki City. Orange bought a hot carafe of coffee from the station's vending machine, and she stretched her fingers along the lines of the carafe; they were long and white, flexible and soft, unmarked by the seal blade of age. She regretted in her heart that she did not show any signs of becoming a Madagascar frog.
Misaki has been modernizing and expanding rapidly in the past few years, and like most modern cities, has built its train station on the outskirts. Ritsugi drove her into town and waited outside the station. In the crisp winter air, she and Ruler hugged, and Orange buried her face in the back of her best friend's neck, sarcastic: "It's not easy to get up in the morning to pick me up."
Ruler patted her on the shoulder and said, "It's not like the old days when you slept for twenty hours at a time, it's no trouble."
She let go of her arms around her best friend and straightened up to look at Ritsugu's face. Like every middle-aged woman in a small Japanese town, Ritsugu Chuse had aged peacefully, her chestnut hair losing its luster, her delicate makeup not able to hide the fine lines around her eyes, and Orange was surprised to see that the moment she and her teenage friend embraced, it looked to passersby like a mother and daughter reunited after a long time.
Ruler didn't say anything, just squinted at her with a smile, her eyes as bright as ever. They hugged again, a little tighter.
On the way into town, Riku and she talked, and Orange focused on the tall buildings rising out of the window, the neon screens flashing, and Riku said that the shopping street had been renovated two or three times, that she had married the son of a fish store and lived in a new apartment, that Arisu had married the boy named Kusajiro, and that Aoko had not come to the wedding.
Orange always responded with short tone words, and when Aoko was mentioned, she moved impatiently in the passenger seat and crossed her long, slender legs: "...... That kind of woman deserves to be locked up in a shrine bell and knocked away on the big bad day. Who married her is unlucky."
The Ruler smiled broadly, and it was clear that the years had left a lot of marks on her body, and she was no longer the quirky one who stirred up the fire when the sisters were quarreling. She said solemnly, "You two sisters also do not get along for thirty years ......"
The suspect still looked out the window, avoiding the eyes of the law frame. "I heard that the Chinese call the qualification or destiny of being able to become an immortal, the immortal bone."
Ritsugu smiled charmingly, not to pursue the sudden turn of words, "Then it seems that neither of us has this bone growing on us."
"...... Yeah." Orange closed his eyes and fished out a half pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
Some words, she does not need to say out the law frame can also understand. Just like she left home at the age of eighteen, Ruler has not expressed a trace of surprise.
Orange Arakaki left home at the age of eighteen to find a missing bone. From the snowy Scandinavian ice fields to the smoky Istanbul, from the abandoned Mayan jungles to the mysterious cities of Western Europe, she counted every intersection of longitude and latitude and walked halfway around the world, but she could not find the bone. For 10,000 nights she lost sleep in the noise of moving trains, filled with disappointment and anger, dyed her hair a blood-curdling scarlet, nervously rubbed the invisible blood of her loved ones on her hands, and opened her eyes wide in the darkness, searching for the immortal bone that was so slow to appear.
For the first and only time in her life, she knelt in the paradise of flowers to admit that she had no talent, that she could not leave the mundane world for the rest of her life, and that she could not reach that unwarranted bone.
It was not that there had not been a brief reconciliation between her and Aoko.
Two years ago, they witnessed the same death at the Clock Tower and then went to a tavern together to get drunk. They did reconcile briefly before their consciousness fell into chaos, and then the forgiveness was overwhelmed by anger.
They resented and blamed each other, her sister pinned her against the wallboard, and they tore at each other like trapped animals, unable to peel each other's skin and bones. She opened her chaotic and mortal body to her enemy, and trembled at every inch of pleasure that he rewarded her with.
Aoko had a knack for stripping her flesh-and-blood relatives of their graceful and unhurried shells with her brutality, making her sob for the pain mixed with the pleasure of eating the marrow. She moaned fractally in the ear of her closest and most hated sister, as if she were a lover's whisper. I hate you. I didn't kill you. Aoko responded with silence. She was teased with physical tears by cunning fingers, her overused demon eyes as a teenager always blurred in focus, muddled with tears of pain and pleasure, gazing at the other wounded beast with soft, almost loving eyes.
Climbing to the pinnacle of desire, Orange wrenches tightly at one of her enemy's shoulder blades, tracing its delicate contours. She gorgeously banished her thoughts, complacent that the piece of immortal bone she had traveled halfway around the world to find turned out to be here.
The first thing Arakaki Orange did when she returned to Misaki City was to voraciously look at all the modern city streets. As she looked at the streets and the stores, she felt the sorrow of seeing her old love gone, and at the same time, she felt a bit of malice in her heart. The old land has changed, the old friends are scattered, the immortals are in the clouds for half a day, and it has been thirty years on earth. There is no need to force, Aoko can only admit that everything is decaying and decaying at a speed beyond the reach of her flesh. No matter how much she hated Orange or scorned her, she had to admit that the only person who could accompany her in this world was Orange Arakaki. They will be the same as the Arakaki family's weatherproof old house, life and death, rotting at the end of time.
Ritsugi announces that they will have sukiyaki on New Year's Eve, and her husband, a good old boy, naturally goes along with his wife's whims without question. Orange, as the only idle person in the house, is rushed to buy ingredients, and after rustily selecting the ingredients in the shopping street, she climbs the Sakamichi road home with two large bottles of sake in her arms.
She saw a young girl walk into the hustle and bustle of the street scene. The uniform of the public high school at the end of Sakado had not changed for more than twenty years, and the girl was carrying a red umbrella in the gloomy winter, no friends by her side, her black hair waving in the cold wind. Her bright red umbrella, her long stance, everything about her looked new and beautiful, even the rain-laden evening sun she would walk into.
Orange Arakaki stopped and looked at the young girl.
She inhaled hard and watched the girl disappear at the end of Sakamichi. Then slowly walked in the direction of home.
Fin.
(1) The wind god from The Odyssey.
(2) A skeleton in the closet, a Western slang term for a family scandal that must not be disclosed.
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