Book 9 Chapter 1
Part 1
“Wow.”
The next morning, I was shocked to see the roof of our house.
Some excited elementary school kids ran by behind me. Even kids that age had phones these days. The prismatic effect of the snow falling on a sunny day was too amusing a sight to pass up, so they were snapping all sorts of photos with their phones.
Everyone wore masks whenever they went out like it was normal. They had become as much a necessity as food and water.
“Is that around 10cm?”
“No,” replied Maxwell. “It is 8cm at most.”
I held my phone up much like the kids to give Maxwell a look, but we were interested in the roof. We could see the natural(?) accumulation there, untouched by feet or tires.
“So is that about a centimeter per hour?”
“In this case, the microplastics are proven to be heavier than water, so the roof could still be in danger.”
The snow was not real, so it would not melt in the sun and drip off the roof.
My dad and stepmom had used their full grownup power to shovel the snow until yesterday, but now it would be up to us.
But we had to be careful.
Kukyou City was home to a surprising number of Archenemies like a Mermaid, a Dark Elf, and even a Siren, but they were laying low at the moment.
The police and fire department were not functioning properly and we could not rely on outside aid. Things looked relaxed enough, but the situation was actually pretty serious.
I could only guess, but the Archenemies probably wanted to keep a low profile in this isolated space where the rules no longer applied. The Colosseum that had pit immortal against immortal to reduce their numbers must have taught them just how frightening truly unrestrained humans could be.
For example, an Archenemy with ten or more times the physical strength of a human might be overwhelmed with people asking them to shovel their walk or knock the snow from their roof. Much like someone who just won the lottery. Then they would be left exhausted simply helping out other people. I was worried about our roof, but letting my sisters deal with it to ensure the safety of just our own house could be dangerous in a different way.
“The snow is still a problem once it is knocked from the roof,” said Maxwell.
“Yeah, I know.”
You couldn’t just knock it off and leave it there. It wouldn’t melt on its own, so leaving it in the sun wouldn’t make it drain away in the ditch. Piles had been carelessly shoved over to the edge of the road to clear the way as much as possible, but those piles were already growing taller than me.
“If only we could slap it with a label calling it some kind of valuable resource. Then people would fight over who got to take it away for us.”
“No. The multiple components carried by the cargo ship have been mixed together.”
“And the dust, dirt, and nitrogen oxide in the air has probably contaminated it too.”
“Sure. So you do understand. Going to the effort of separating out the components to recycle it would likely cost more than those components are worth.”
I guess wishing someone would do it despite the cost was a childish way of thinking. I still felt like it would be effective if some wealthy person paid for that service as a form of charitable donation.
Tokyo had recovered pretty quickly from being flooded in that bomb cyclone, so I really wanted to believe the tech was there.
Just then, the neighbor’s front door opened in a hurried fashion.
“Hyah! What are you doing there, Satori-kun? Am I really running that late today!?”
“That’s a lot of energy for so early in the morning, Class Rep. Did you oversleep?”
She had long black hair swept back and she had a decent figure, even if it was not quite on my sister Erika’s level. The always beautiful Class Rep was of course wearing a mask, but those good looks were cheating. When she wore a mask, it seemed to give her a charming mystique. With me, it only made me look like I was up to something.
“You saw the news last night, didn’t you? They’ve shut down the roads. I doubt we’ll be able to use the convenience stores or the cafeteria for lunch, so I had to make myself a lunch real quick. Argh, and I thought it would be so easy since I was using mostly frozen things!”
That was exactly what I would expect from her since she loved to plan everything out. Plus, this made her a source of handmade lunches made by the childhood friend next door. How was it possible for a simple lunch to sound more valuable than a bar of gold!? Was she trying to kill me with cuteness!?
“What are you going to do for lunch, Satori-kun? I imagine someone as online as you heard the news before I did.”
Worry not.
I came prepared.
“I brought some CalorieGates. Four is enough for a meal.”
“I can’t believe you! That’s just another name for hardtack! Why would you choose to suffer like that!?”
That was the kind of opinion you arrived at when you only followed the outdated information on TV. To be honest, I had to be better off than the people who trusted the talk shows and thought they would be healthy if they ate nothing but lean meat. Before all these snow-related problems, I had bought an industrial-sized box full of them to help me through my all-nighters and that had come in handy now.
The Class Rep, being a Class Rep, put her hands on her hips and glared at me. (She could really pull off the perfect Class Rep pose. It was a thing of beauty.)
“Satori-kun, give me half of that hardtack later on.”
“I know the maple flavor is good, but if you don’t watch what you’re eating, you’ll gain weight.”
“I’m saying I’ll give you half my lunch in exchange! You claim that stuff is healthy, right? Then it shouldn’t be a problem if I eat some of it too!”
!?
It took every ounce of self-control I had to avoid striking a triumphant pose. This is what I was talking about! Only our Class Rep would be so unnecessarily caring in a way that came completely out of the blue like this!!
“Oh, my! What a dreadfully uneven trade. My user is clearly the only one gaining anything from this!”
Maxwell, shut the hell up. I honestly don’t know how this happened either and I have no chance of reproducing it, so don’t you ruin this for me!!
“Y-you know?” The glasses Class Rep was fidgeting a little. “This is embarrassing for me too. Ahh, I can’t believe I’m sharing my lunch with the neighbor boy at my age.”
“Hm, this reaction does not look favorable for you, user. I sense no bittersweetness there. Is this similar to someone letting a filthy abandoned dog eat their dinner because they would feel guilty otherwise?”
“Shut up or I’m dumping your storage container in the sea, Maxwell. And I’m more than willing to play the filthy abandoned dog if it means the Class Rep will feed me her lunch in the middle of the classroom!! I just know she’ll considerately keep her left hand below the chopsticks in case the food falls!!”
“I-I never said I’d do that!!” she protested.
“She suggested it yet now she is blushing about it?” said Maxwell. “This glasses forehead Class Rep appears to possess some highly complicated thought processes. Is this what they call a tsundere?”
You’re wrong there, Maxwell. While she can be irritable and angry, she is throwing the doors of her heart wide open to reveal what she is truly feeling deep down, so it doesn’t qualify as tsun. You only call someone a tsundere when they can’t be honest about what they’re feeling deep down. Heh. You’ve started using a lot of emotional terms for a program – like bittersweet and guilty – but it looks like you still have much to learn. The internet is overflowing with cute girls, so go observe them as a form of training. And don’t stop until you finally understand that a Class Rep only needs to be a Class Rep. No extra additives like “tsun” or “dere” are needed there.
“Wait, this means I’m going to be walking to school with you, doesn’t it?”
“Eh heh heh. We can hold hands if you want, Class Rep.”
“…………………………………………………………………………………”
“Don’t look so disgusted with the idea! You’re supposed to raise your voice and get after me in a Class Reppy way when I make jokes like that!”
“That is what happens when you ask for an unearned reward, you fool,” said Maxwell.
I walked to school with that pure Class Rep.
There were signs everywhere of people having fought with the microplastic snow, but their methods varied. There were no established rules, so where the people preferred to stay at home or were just sloppier, the road tended to be blocked up enough that only one lane was clear. At least I didn’t see any homes collapsed under the weight of the snow. Yet, anyway.
“The city dump truck didn’t come by today.” The Class Rep sounded worried as she observed her surroundings. “The microplastics don’t melt, right? So they’ll block up the roads if no one takes them away. Can they not send out the trucks because they can’t get any gasoline delivered to the city?”
“You might consider reminding her that dump trucks generally use diesel.”
“Maxwell, are you trying to sabotage what I have going here?”
My childhood friend gave me a curious look, but I was not about to let her see my phone’s screen.
“The snow gets in my hair too.” She held a hand to her head. “Maybe I should wear a knit hat tomorrow.”
“No!! Cover up that glorious forehead and all you have left are the glasses, Class Rep!”
“It would seem you are perfectly capable of sabotaging yourself, user.”
It might seem surprising, but despite the state of the city, we saw quite a few boys and girls in the same uniforms as us. Once we arrived at school, a whole bunch of students were entering the school building which was wearing a thin layer of white makeup. The strange look of the city didn’t matter. Unless someone spoke up to stop it, the usual routine continued. That was just how the world worked.
We arrived in our classroom 5 minutes before morning homeroom began. The Class Rep had been worried about the time, but she still managed to arrive with time to spare. Like always. About 80% of our classmates were there. The rest may have hurt their back shoveling snow for the first time in their life.
And one other thing was different from normal.
“Quiet down, everyone. It’s time for morning homeroom.”
“?”
The teacher who walked in with that sharp statement was not our usual homeroom teacher. This young woman was invading our territory and acting like she belonged.
“Your usual teacher was caught in traffic and won’t arrive in time. It probably would have been faster to walk. Anyway, I am here as your replacement. My name is Saeki. I have to visit a few other classrooms too, so let’s get started, shall we?”
What a rip off. With our teacher gone, we could have had the day off and it would be the adults’ fault, but this unnecessarily motivated person instead delivered the day’s announcements with a smile.
She must have taught a different year because I didn’t recognize her, which made it a little hard to ask questions.
“There is still a lot we don’t know about the ‘snow’, but that is no reason to give into fear. This is a temporary problem, so it will work itself out in time. Oh, and one other thing.”
Once her businesslike overview of the announcements was complete, she started on something else.
“I know this is a bad time for it, but you have a transfer student joining your class today. That’s a reason for applause, don’t you think?”
Some of my classmates voiced their confusion about why someone would transfer in now, but the cargo ship fire only began three days ago, so it may have been too late for this new kid’s family to change their plans by then.
“By the way, the transfer student is a blonde-haired green-eyed girl. She’s 15, but she came from an experimental school that doesn’t use the standard 6-3-3 system, so her education level is identical to yours and she’s also especially talented. So rejoice, boys! Do you have your phones ready? Remember that it’s first-come-first-serve on lending her your textbook. Now, onto the introduction!”
I heard footsteps as a new element invaded the familiar scene of the classroom.
She had a small build and whitish-blonde hair. Instead of a standard braid, her long hair was only braided together at a few spots down its length. Her hair and skin created a stark contrast with her brand-new blue blazer uniform.
Then there was her identity.
“Hello, everyone. I am Umikaze Speechia.”
No, not her name.
Something else mattered more.
I had seen her before. I had seen her entirely nude on a spaceship of all places.
In other words…
“I am registered as an Archenemy Scylla. It’s a pleasure to meet all of you.”
Maxwell had called the city’s situation an attack as opposed to a disaster. The people who had intentionally flooded Tokyo were almost certainly involved and it was pinpoint targeted at the city I called home.
“Warning.”
In that case, what was this?
“We have too little information, so she should not rush to judgment,” said Maxwell. “That said, we of course should run a simulation based on the worst-case scenario. It is too late to consider that scenario once it has already dug its fangs into you.”
A girl who had been there during the previous incident had all of a sudden appeared before me for no fathomable reason. It would have been weird not to be cautious.
And if I’m being honest, the situation was awkward enough without that. I mean, I’d never actually spoken with the Scylla, but I had seen her naked. Because she had been preserved as a body double for that alien…well, that queen who thought she was an alien.
That would supposedly make her another abductee and thus harmless, but like I said, I had never spoken with her. She had looked an awful lot like a victim last time, but I didn’t actually know who she was on the inside. She may have been thoroughly “educated” after being abducted to turn her into their loyal soldier, or she may have volunteered to play that role. I didn’t know her, so I couldn’t say anything for sure about her.
So which was it?
On a more fundamental level, wasn’t it awfully weird to change schools with all this going on? Was thinking through all this even worth it when I had so little information? And could I just be overthinking all this in the first place?
“You can sit wherever you like, but with so many people absent, you’d have a hard time knowing which seats are open. What day is it today? Well, never mind. I’ll just do it by alphabetical order. Amatsu! Your ‘A’ name earns you the privilege of helping out our new student today. Umikaze, that means your seat will be the one right next to Amatsu Satori there!! A round of applause, everyone!”
I was still growing pale over this new development when our substitute teacher, Saeki, made that crucial decision for me.
That girl was approaching my territory.
She slowly pulled back the chair and sat right next to me. She was close enough to stick a knife in my side if she had one.
And then she scooted her desk over until it touched mine.
“I do have a full set of textbooks,” said the blonde girl with a smile, “but I wasn’t sure what optional reference books like an atlas to get. Can I share yours?”
“Eh? Um.”
I couldn’t seem to find my tongue, but she leaned in toward me and whispered in my ear.
“(You don’t need to be so nervous. Let’s be friends. Okay, Amatsu-kun?)”
Part 2
“Amatsu-kun, Amatsu-kun.”
How many times did Umikaze-san call my name throughout the morning?
As far as I could tell, she was just a girl who was not hesitant to ask questions. She wanted to know how far we were through the textbook, if an app was fine for a dictionary and encyclopedia, and other clarifications about the local rules.
“This is important. If I don’t get the basics down quick, I’ll fall behind.”
“Hm, if you say so.”
I had never transferred schools, so I had never had to switch to a different publisher’s textbook in the middle of the year.
“Also.”
The blonde girl had a small dolphin attached to the knock of her mechanical pencil and she pressed that against her lips while winking at me. But…wait. There was something more going on here. Was she grabbing the hem of her skirt below her desk!?
“You really stand out if your skirt is too long or too short, so I want to know what the standard length is here.”
“Bff!?”
“Not that I expect you to have the answer to that, Amatsu-kun. But just out of curiosity, it might be amusing to hear your preference.”
“Amatsu! Stop staring at the transfer student’s face and pass the printout back!!”
I quickly obeyed the male teacher’s instructions. Since he said I was staring at her face, he must not have noticed what I was really staring at. Umikaze-san herself was facing forward again like nothing had happened. She was toying with printout with the same fingers that had grabbed her skirt a moment before.
How could I even describe the day I was having?
I guess I could say I was used to having someone tug on my sleeve now.
But anyway.
“Sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into another mess, Senpai.”
It was lunchtime.
I didn’t see the problem myself, but the forehead glasses Class Rep didn’t like the idea of exchanging lunches in the classroom and we had finally found a nice private spot in the corner of the library when someone else arrived.
The short girl with short, fluffy blonde hair was everyone’s lovable underclassman, Itou Helen.
Also, her arrival had left the Class Rep frozen solid. The Class Rep’s mind had gone blank just like when someone happened to see her in the shower. Why do I know how she looks when that happens? Ask that Class Rep next door who has a bad habit of keeping the window wide open during the summer.
“No, um, it’s not what it looks like! It’s um, how should I put it!?”
“Are you saying it’s not two people eating lunch? Because that’s what it looks like to me. By the way, I brought sandwiches for lunch. If you want to trade some of your small rice balls for some, now’s your chance, Miss Glasses.”
“Miss Helen is being awfully outgoing today,” said Maxwell.
“(I want to believe she’s actually flustered. I mean, if that super introverted small animal of a girl is forcing her way into an established social circle, we should really assume it’s an emergency.)”
“Did you say something, Senpai?”
“Just that a sandwich sounds really good right now.”
We ended up engaging in a three-way trade. I only had four CalorieGates, so what I traded for was a major decision. Each trade was a full quarter of my lunch.
“By the way, Itou-san, how much have you heard?”
“That the new transfer student is a Scylla and that she’s been all over you for no reason. And it doesn’t look like she just feels lost and wants to rely on her guide. When you moved classrooms, she left on her own without issue. Senpai, keep in mind that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
“I know what you mean.”
It didn’t quite feel like I was being used, but maybe that was a testament to how skillfully Umikaze-san was doing it.
A mystery transfer student had arrived at the same time as the unnatural snow from the cargo ship fire.
Was assuming a connection from that alone no better than the superstition that hanging a Teru Teru Bouzu from your eaves had caused the sunny weather the following day?
And.
“I can’t believe her. I just can’t. You already have me, an all-encompassing Circe Witch, so why would you even need a Scylla? I can do the exact same things she can with my witch’s potions, so the individual creature is entirely unnecessary. And she’s the same age as me, so it’s not fair she gets to be your classmate and sit right next to you. Hmph.”
Itou-san began muttering to herself with a dark look on her face. Was this why she was being so outgoing? And come to think of it, how exactly was she monitoring what happened in our classroom? I wanted to believe the school’s windows were not crawling with geckos and frogs.
At any rate, the Class Rep finally joined the conversation with Helen-chan who wanted to relieve her anxieties. A true forehead glasses girl could judge the appropriate social distance from someone with a sort of radar that bounced off of ordinary conversational topics.
“Itou-san was it? From the look of this tuna salad and eggs, I take it you don’t use a food processor?”
“Th-those things will shred your chicken and vegetables and whatnot regardless of the grain. I know it’s faster, but, um, I can’t really trust them.”
Oh.
The more ordinary topic snapped Itou-san out of her weirdly high-energy state. She even scooted toward me as if trying to keep as much space between herself and the Class Rep as possible.
Meanwhile, the forehead glasses girl must have picked up on that distancing move. Instead of pressing further into Itou Helen’s business, she changed the focus of the conversation with a smile.
“I can’t manage that myself. Once I know something is easier, I can’t resist the temptation. For example, I don’t think I could survive without a dishwasher anymore. This lunch is the same. Half of it is made from frozen foods you only have to thaw out at room temperature. And the rice balls I made with a kit where you just have to stick the rice inside a mold.”
“That’s not…a bad thing. Um, I just don’t like to learn new ways of doing things.”
“Even though you made sure to cut off all the breadcrust before making these sandwiches? I’m impressed. I tend to skip those small details before long. Because I know it will taste the same either way.”
“N-no, it’s not about that. I’m just afraid what people will think when they see me open my lunchbox. It’s only for me to eat, but I still feel like I need to make excuses to people while I’m making it. I’m so pathetic.”
Itou-san had started off like she was peeking out the cracked door with the chain lock still in place, but now she was leaning out over the table and revealing her innermost thoughts. The Class Rep did not have an immortal body and she could not shoot flames from her hands, but this was a special “power” she had that Maxwell’s calculations could not reproduce.
That power had saved me a lot in the past.
Especially back when my first mom and my dad were fighting on a daily basis.
“Looks like the snow is picking up some,” said the Class Rep while looking out the window.
It would depend on the cargo ship fire, but the amount of snow generally shouldn’t change. Still, the wind could greatly affect how much was hitting one particular window.
“But isn’t all this originally the plastic materials loaded on that one 100 or 200m cargo ship? Isn’t it weird for that to cover the entire city and everything for dozens of kilometers around it?”
“The ship was only carrying the highly-concentrated base materials, so during the melting, cooling, and hardening process, it’s going to take in a lot of air and impurities, preventing a simple calculation from telling you how much there will be.”
I could explain all that like some kind of know-it-all, but that didn’t mean I had the slightest clue what was going to happen next. Nothing was blowing up and our houses were not being blown away, so we had just kind of let things play out. And now that the trains and roads were shut down, it was too late to leave the city.
“I wonder what’s going to happen,” said the Class Rep.
None of us had an answer.
Part 3
“Umikaze-san, are you in a club yet?”
“Um, a club? What kinds do you have here?”
“You really aren’t in one yet!? Um, we are from the cooking research club!”
“Hey, no fair! We want to snag her as our manager!”
“Hold on. Are you only interested in clubs? Because our school also has a committee system with the Student Council at the top.”
Once one of them got started, everyone else stopped just watching and a crowd formed around her. Such are the privileges of good looks, I guess. And since she’s so short, she was looking a lot like a timid small animal with so many people around her.
Our afternoon classes were over, but we still had one major task left: cleaning. No one was opening the windows with that unnatural snow outside, but the small grains still got inside with so many people moving in and out of the building. Think of it like the sand crunching underfoot at a busy seaside restaurant.
“A kid in the next class had their air conditioner break.”
“Really? What are they doing at home then?”
Some of the boys were chatting as they left the classroom, but Umikaze Speechia-san made sure to help push the desks to the back of the classroom and filled a bucket full of water.
“I did what you asked, but are you sure this is safe? The hallway faucet didn’t seem to have a filter attached.”
“These microplastics are around 0.5mm. Since they’re bigger than pollen, you can run it through ordinary gauze or a mask to filter them out.”
“That’s a surprise. Such a working class method.”
“Anyway, are you sure you didn’t want to go check out any of the clubs? We could’ve done the cleaning for you.”
“You want me to shove my work onto someone else on my very first day here? I don’t see that leading to a happy school life here.”
She was an Archenemy Scylla.
The Scylla was from Greek Mythology, right? That monster attacked ships, but I wasn’t familiar with the exact story.
“The Scylla is an Archenemy that looks like a beautiful girl with multiple animal heads added on,” explained Maxwell. “The number of heads differs between accounts, but the standard is 6. In the story in which the Witch Circe creates her, she has three dog heads. In other words, the details are unknown.”
“What’s your source for this?”
“A walkthrough site for that demon hunting action game everyone is playing these days. Let’s go hunting!”
Dog heads? That didn’t seem to have much to do with the ocean, but that’s just how legends are sometimes. A witch’s broom wasn’t originally designed for flight, for example. It’d be pretty cute if Umikaze-san was good with dogs, though.
But…
“(That’s not super helpful. It doesn’t tell me what kind of Archenemy she is. Is she good at swimming? Does she bite? Does she lure you into the sea with her song like a Mermaid?)”
“In the legend, 6 members of Odysseus’s crew are easily devoured right there on their ship. That means her victims are not ordinary people; they are the hero’s party.”
“For real? So is she like those enemies that hit the entire party with instakill magic?”
“I can only predict that she can be very fierce indeed when she needs to be…but it is true nothing mentions HOW exactly they are eaten. It says she used the dog heads like she was fishing for them, but the details are unclear. It could even be that the heads stretch out like a Rokurokubi.”
“Do you need something?” asked the blonde girl who was leaning down toward a bucket and wringing out a rag. The way she was leaning over with her hands occupied meant the view of her short skirt from behind was quite risqué.
“Well, um, uh.”
“You’re weird sometimes, Amatsu-kun. C’mon, we need to finish cleaning.”
Yeah.
Maybe it was due to seeing her naked back on that UFO, but I was having a hard time judging my social distance from this girl now that she would smile and wonder about things like normal. It didn’t help that she had no idea I had seen her like that. It was a lot different from when I would open the door and find Ayumi or Erika changing, so it made me nervous.
“Amatsu-kun, do you have any plans after this?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I only just moved here, so I was hoping you could show me around the city a bit too. I want to at least know the best places to go shopping and such.”
“In this snow?”
“Oh? The snow isn’t going to last forever, right?”
She was blonde, polite, and a Scylla.
Looking at it like that, I could see why Itou-san felt a weird rivalry there, but those two were so different in almost every other way.
If Itou-san was like a hard, not-yet-ripe fruit, then Umikaze-san had the sweetness of a fruit overripe to the point of nearly rotting. While she was never rude, I got this sense she liked to feel superior to the people around her.
“Is this good enough?”
“Yes, do it gently so you don’t whip up the wind.”
By the way, the step after sweeping was not to dust the floors with a cloth. The microplastics were small enough that dusting would send them into the air, so it was more efficient to just use a wet rag.
Once all the cleaning was done, we returned the desks to their normal positions and Umikaze-san pulled a new mask from her bag.
“Okay, let’s get going, Amatsu-kun. Show me around the city.”
“Sure, sure.”
People in the hallway were saying goodbye to her by name, so it didn’t look like she would have any trouble getting people to remember her name.
Then my phone vibrated.
“Warning,” said the social media speech bubble on the screen. “Have you realized it yet, user?”
“…?”
“The Archenemy Scylla was seen within Kukyou City during the extreme sisterly fight Miss Erika and Miss Ayumi fought in virtual reality. She was inside the Bright Cross lab hidden below the city. How she arrived there is unknown, but this means this is not her first time in this city. She has been here before.”
And that would mean…
“Whether or not she means any harm, she is almost certainly lying. You should assume she is hiding something.”
That supported the hunch I already had.
She gave off the sweetness of a fruit on the verge of rotting. She was never rude, but she liked to feel superior to the people around her.
Part 4
“If you need to shop, you can find most anything here.”
“The train station area? This is where I arrived in the city with my luggage in tow.”
“If you can’t find something here, online shopping is your best bet. The selection gets worse the further out you get.”
“Oh, you mean like Wild@Hunt? I honestly don’t use them much. There are other movie and music streaming services out there.”
Now, Umikaze-san seemed fairly popular in person, but what about online? My bet was she had made quite a few new social media friends today.
I was walking around town afterschool with the luxurious blonde transfer student. …When did I end up attempting a stage with such a super hard difficulty rating?
Our uniforms made us look like a couple in matching clothes. We were even both wearing masks.
“Isn’t there a harbor here? You have a lot of fancy stuff on land and sea, right?”
“You must mean the harbor sightseeing district. Visitors from outside the city gather there on the weekends and holidays, but we’re still a pretty regional city. There just aren’t that many well-developed areas. You’ll see what I mean if you check on a map app. Leave this area and there really is nothing at all. Not even a field or parking lot, just a bunch of solar panels.”
“Those maps just confuse me when I don’t have something specific to look up on them. They’re too big. I only use them for finding the shortest route to a restaurant or something.”
Maybe that was how some people did it.
There were so many reviews and ratings for restaurants I never had no idea which ones to trust. And if she was fine with just looking at a map on her phone’s small screen, I guess she wouldn’t have asked me to show her around in the first place.
“You can probably look around here for a bit and, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, check an online store. You won’t find much more than here even if you take a train to the next town over.”
“I see. I don’t claim to
