The Late Bird's Tale: A Tale of the Floating World

Part 1 || 2 | Sakura | Their Next Case I, Two Gunslingers II

Written on 1/17/21. Winter Season, January 2021 edition (1st scene).
Written on 1/28/21. Winter Season, January 2021 edition (2nd scene).
Sakura Yume (picture reference).

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Part 1 || 2 | Sakura

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A Tale of Their Next Case I

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Sakura and Momo's two-day vacation of rage-playing video games began to wane on the afternoon of the second day. At that point, both girls were sweating and huffing and puffing in their shorts and T-shirts, their hands jittery on their controllers, their eyes glued to the TV screen showing Chen Wu's gun-fu victory pose and Chinese catch-phrases. Momo was positively wasted on a long winning streak, smiling like a devil at another of Sakura's losses, while Sakura's face was red and scowling, and her ears were blowing out steam. Sakura gave her sister sidelong glares, gritting her teeth in a grimace.

Out of all of their head-to-head duels in Gun-fu Gunslingers, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, A Chinese Sun-Dance Kid, and For a Few Tokens More, Sakura had won just a third of her gaming sessions against Momo. And Momo kept getting underneath her skin about it during each of her losses, meaning that Sakura wasn't too keen on getting her pride assaulted with three thousand more reasons to resent her elder sister's underhanded strategy of exploiting one of her childhood foibles.

So she wrapped the cord around her controller and handed it to Momo, saying, "I wanna do something else."

"Is that so?" Momo said and took the controller.

"Yes, that's so," Sakura said. And to hammer it home to her sister, she added, "For real. I don't wanna play video games right now."

"Can't take the heat?" Momo said, but Sakura gritted her teeth and stayed firm about her decision, no matter how much Momo prodded her into another gaming session. "Okay, okay, we'll stop for the day."

So Momo got off the couch and rolled the cord around her own controller and placed both controllers next to the gaming console beneath the TV. She then crouched and opened the tray holding the disc of For a Few Tokens More, took it out and popped it back into its CD case. She placed that game next to the others on the shelf beside the TV, changed the TV screen back to its channel-viewing mode, and faced Sakura.

"What else do you wanna do?" Momo said.

"I wanna talk," Sakura said.

Momo paused. "About the training case?"

"Yeah," Sakura said, looking down on the floor, thinking, thinking . . . She hadn't a clue how she felt about the whole ordeal of that debacle of a case, let alone how to ask Momo why she did things that way.

Momo shut off the TV. "Are you sure you can take it?"

"Yeah," Sakura said, keeping her eyes on the floor, even as Momo came over and sat beside her on the couch. Sakura pulled her legs up against her chest, crossed her forearms over her knees, and caught Momo's gaze. "I know you, Momo. There's no way you'd switch up the training program without a damn good reason. So why'd you do it?"

Silence reigned for several moments, but Momo stayed quiet. Sakura kept her eyes on her sister's and caught her looking through her with a faraway gaze. Whatever Momo was seeing through that gaze, Sakura thought it was something uncomfortable for Momo to talk about, at least with her younger sister. At such moments, there was only one thing she could do.