Zorome X Miku: The Forgotten Plantation

2: A Weird Book

Once Miku went inside after having had her fun with Zorome, she found herself beginning to grow increasingly hungry and tired. She wondered if any of the others would be up to making dinner soon, as tonight they were all planning on making it as a group. Her stomach was growling at her like an angry dog. 

Sighing, Miku went upstairs to the girl's wing to see if anyone would be there now that she'd been out for a while. Her stomach was practically begging her to start making supper for them... even if nobody else wanted to yet. That would also mean that they all owed her one, which was a thought that made her grin. 

"Hello?" She asked as she peered into the room where the girls all slept now. Nobody was in there, though she noticed that some of the things had been moved. The laundry basket she'd left in the hall was also gone now, she realized. 

She walked inside the room and saw that Kokoro's book was lying in plain sight on top of her bedsheets. The book she had found on that day months ago when the squad had gone to the beach, a time that felt like more than a few mere months sometimes. Kokoro had been keen to keep it hidden from the other parasites, which somewhat saddened Miku since she would've been glad to support her friend and talk to her about the stuff she was learning from it. However, she couldn't blame her either. For all they knew, Papa and the others may have never allowed her to have a child.  

Now, however, Kokoro didn't care as much if anyone saw what she'd been reading. She had told the squad about her desire to have a baby once she and Mitsuru had discussed it in due time after being abandoned by Papa and the adults and she had no reservations about it. There was no need for her to hide the information from them anymore. 

Miku walked over to it curiously and inspected it. The cover was a drawing of a woman and a child, she guessed a mother and her daughter. Curiously, she flipped open the cover and began to look at the pages. She'd never looked at the book before. Maybe she'd been scared of what it was in it. Especially since, apparently, it involved boys and girls having to get way too close to each other for her comfort in order to make a baby. She shuddered at the thought. She and Zorome referred to the act as "sticking bodies together", something both of them found absurd and taboo. So taboo, in fact, that they rarely talked about it together. Both of them didn't even want to think about it!

But now she thought she was ready to see what secrets the book held within its pages. She looked at it, confused as she saw various diagrams of what was apparently the female reproductive system. She brushed her finger over one of them. Huh? This is inside us? It looks...complex. She furrowed her brow in confusion as she continued to look through the book. 

After that diagram, Miku was stunned at what she saw on the next diagram! It was a picture of the inside of the male's reproductive system. They're that different?! Well, I shouldn't be surprised. Boys do seem like they're from another universe sometimes!

After that chapter, the book got into details on what it was like to be pregnant. Details that made Miku shudder. She remembered how Kokoro had constantly been throwing up and too nauseous to eat. That had been a sign of morning sickness, something that happened when a woman was pregnant. It showed pictures of the fetus inside the belly, which Miku thought was a mixture of cute and grotesque. She gawked at some of the images as she continued to flip through the pages. 

"Hey, what are you doing?" A voice asked from the doorway, causing Miku to snap the book shut and jump so hard that she hit her head on the top bunk, her bunk, above Kokoro's with a yelp. Ikuno was standing in the doorway with a curious expression on her freckled face.

"N-nothing!" Miku stammered rubbing the top of her head. She guessed that there'd be a mark there for the next few days. "Why? Do you need something?" She was flushed at having been caught reading that book. 

"We were just looking for you," Ikuno replied. "We're ready to make dinner now. Everyone's waiting. Where have you been?"

"I've just been in here the whole time," Miku replied truthfully, albeit a bit defensively. "And, yeah, I'm ready! Let's go!" She ran out of the room, making Ikuno have to sidestep to avoid her. She didn't look over her shoulder at her friend though she was aware that she was being watched as she ran down the stairs. 

She wasn't sure why but she found it incredibly awkward to have been caught in the act of reading such a book by herself. The details of the book weirded her out and, at the very least, made her feel odd about things. She wasn't sure if she felt odd about the boys or about herself now. It was still so confusing, the thought that they were capable of making babies just like animals were. Even though she knew Papa wasn't coming back it still felt like forbidden knowledge. 

Miku tried to shake the weirdness off as she ran outside over to the courtyard where the parasites now liked to cook their food with fire and eat outside, so as long as the weather was nice. She decided she would try her hardest not to think about how weird it was that a boy, of all things, was involved in the process of making babies! It was bizarre and hard for her to digest. 

However, try as she might, poor Miku was hardly able to think of anything else as they prepared supper and sat down to eat it.