Marionette

Oceans, Chapter Two - Ridatsu [離脱]

The sunlight filtered down upon the urbanized city, casting a golden glow over the steel and stone as it sunk down towards the horizon.

It was evening, and Amaya was on her way to the train station, her gaze tracing dips and chips in the pavement as she went.

The day went more or less like she'd expected it to, even after Akabane Karma had sweet-talked her into helping him out with another prank.

She skipped two of the morning classes with him as he talked her through what they were going to do, then third period came along, and they implemented the prank. It was a harmless enough prank, which was oddly very considerate of Karma, who tended to prefer the very evil and humiliating pranks over innocent-intended pranks for amusement. In his books, it was preferable if someone got horribly humiliated, bonus Points if the victim got a little injured from it. Which meant that if someone who was allergic to Diet Cola got in the middle of this one, it would tick Karma's preference boxes, and he'd be very, very pleased with himself.

Thankfully, this prank was also very easy to implement, and very simple for someone to clean up, which meant that they probably wouldn't even get detention for this one.

Of course, like normal, Amaya did most of the more preparation work - She closed the taps of the five water-fountains inside the school's main building while Karma kept watch, got inside and closed off the drainage pipe so that liquid would sit contained inside the machine, and then Karma would fill it right up with Diet Cola, and just somehow wedge a mentos in there, so that when someone finally figured out how to turn the water back on, the rummaging and jostling movements would have it fall into the Cola inside.

Anyone who's seen the reaction from mixing a mentos and Diet Cola would know immediately what would happen.

This prank was just something designed to ruin someone's day more than damage anything or harm anyone. Amaya did stop to wonder if Karma was feeling under the weather for coming up with such an innocent prank, but she then considered that maybe even someone like Karma liked the more jovial pranks every now and then?

She never played any pranks on Karma - She always thought his sense of humor was a bit too cruel to do that when Yuta and Reiko could accidentally wander in the middle of one his pranks and set it off instead. While he wouldn't have meant for the twins to get wound up in a prank, she knew for a fact that he wouldn't be able to resist the more evil pranks on her, just because it was her.

The rest of the afternoon became rather boring after setting up those trapped Water Fountains; They'd wandered back out into the woods at the foot of the mountain just behind the school, more or less because it would draw attention if they went and sat in class - People would start suspecting they'd been up to something if they complacently attended classes.

Their time was spent rather normally - A regular and relentless exchange of teasing jabs and taunts back and forth for two hours, before Karma decided he wanted to go wander around in search of more mischief he could get up to.

So he left after insulting her meager cooking skills yet again, and she hadn't seen him since.

She was always torn between two desires whenever he'd do this.

The first was that she'd want to hit him for mocking her so bad and insulting her cooking, despite the fact that he was right, because he always worded it in just the right way to bother her.

The second was when he'd get up to wander off, she really wanted to find some way to keep him around for a while longer, but she could never find a reason that he'd accept, or even a reason for her to follow him around for a little longer.