Chapter 89: Preparations

"Uh... I-I’m not too sure if there’s anything here I’d really like, Kohaku..."

"It’s fiiine, come on, try one!"

"I-I don’t know... isn’t it a little... small?"

"Eh?"

I glanced down at what I was holding. In my hands was... a bikini. Small or not? Well... it was a matter of perspective!

[It’s not every day you get to put your cute heroine in a thong. Don’t judge me!]

"It’s structurally sound! There’s string involved. String is a structure."

"Kohaku, that’s three pieces of string!"

"Four, if you count the one at the back, which you should, because it’s doing the most." I pushed it into her hands. "Look, you don’t have to buy it. Just put it on. If you hate it, I will personally never mention it again for the rest of my natural life."

Lily held it up by one strap and looked at it like she was looking at a spider in a cup.

"And if I like it?"

"Then we’ve both won and the world is a better place."

She stood there for about eight seconds. Then marched into the changing room, and yanked the curtain shut so hard the rail rattled.

[YES.]

I sat down on the little bench outside and waited. There was rustling. There was a pause. There was a second, longer pause, and then a very quiet "oh no" that I chose to interpret as encouraging.

"You okay in there?"

"I-I’m fine! It’s just. There’s less of it than I expected once it’s on?"

"That’s how they work, sweetheart."

The curtain opened about four inches. One blue eye looked out at me.

"You can’t laugh."

"I would never."

"And you can’t do the thing."

"What thing? I have no thing. I’m a simple woman with simple tastes."

She came out.

I want to say that I conducted myself with dignity.

"Ohhhh my," I said, and I leaned back on the bench with my knees apart and my hands on my thighs like a man who has just been served the good sake. "Would you turn around for me? Slowly. Slowly, now. Ahh, yes. Yes. This is very educational."

"KOHAKU!"

"No, no, this is important research. Purely academic." I made a frame with my fingers and squinted through it. "The hips are doing something remarkable. Somebody should write it down. Odette! Where’s Odette, she has a pen!"

Lily grabbed a folded towel off the display and threw it at my head, and she was blushing all the way down her chest, and she was also, I noticed, checking herself in the mirror again while she did it.

[She likes it. She absolutely likes it. I am a genius and my heroine is going to be devastating at this beach.]

"You are the worst person I have ever met," Lily said.

"I’m the best thing that ever happened to you. Now hold still, I want to see if the light hits it differently when you-"

Two hands closed around my throat.

"Guh!?"

The bench went over backward and my head hit the floor and Serena Frostfall was on top of me with her thumbs on my windpipe, and her face was doing something I have genuinely never been able to describe.

"What. Are. You. Doing!?"

"SHE ASKED ME TO LOOK!"

"I did NOT ask you to look!"

"You asked if it was too small, and that’s a question about looking, and I was providing a professional opinion!"

Serena squeezed harder. Somewhere above me, a shop assistant asked whether we were all right, and Lily told her that we were, which I felt was an extremely generous reading of the situation.

---

{Serena}

I let go of her eventually.

I have let go of her before and I will let go of her again. Anyone else who spoke to me the way she does would have been finished on the first day. But, it’s fine. I can murder her anytime I like.

Everdawn went back in to change. I took the next room because it was there, and because leaving would have looked like fleeing, and I do not flee.

Then I stood in a box of mirrors for four minutes doing nothing.

[This is a training exercise. Open-water endurance. Nobody wears anything remarkable to an endurance assessment.]

The rack by the door had some sensible things on it. High-necked, thick-strapped, the kind of garment that exists to cover a person up and get out of the way. I had one in my hand. It was blue and it was appropriate.

I put it back.

The noise she’d made out there was still in my ears. That stupid, gluttonous, old-man noise, aimed at a girl in four strings, and Everdawn had turned around for her, and Everdawn had gone pink about it and looked in the mirror twice.

[... This woman has been a horrible influence on you, Lily. You actually enjoyed the attention.]

The thing on the second rack was two triangles and a strap. In an instant, I put it together in my head, like how two and two makes four.

If I put that on, I’d get a similar reaction, wouldn’t I?

[Absolutely not.]

I stared at it. It was practically whispering. Curiosity bubbled in my head.

I took it into the room with me.

There was a practical objection, and the practical objection was significant. My body was... a bit too much for this outfit. I spent a while working out the geometry of it with my jaw clenched. I concluded that if I was careful, and if I did not think about anything in particular, it would hold. The only addition I made was a shirt tied around my lower half. The swimwear on its own would absolutely reveal... that thing I wish I could cut off.

[Heh, wait till you see this, you damned fox.]

I opened the curtain before I could reconsider.

Sakana was still on the floor where I’d left her, sitting up now, rubbing her throat and saying something to Everdawn about hats that could go with the swimwear.

I casually yawned.

"Alright, I think I found something," I said, making it clear as I could that I hadn’t taken this for her, but for me. I think it worked.

She looked up.

Her ears went straight back. Her tail stopped. Her mouth opened, and nothing came out of it, and that alone was worth the price of the garment, because I have never once managed to make that happen on purpose.

"Well?" I said. She kept staring. I blushed and glared. "Come on, fox. You have an opinion about everything. Have one about this."

Her eyes came up from my hips, got as far as my chest, and stopped there.

"Hhh," Sakana said.

Then she fell over.

The fox girl went straight down sideways onto the floor of the shop with her eyes rolled back, and Everdawn screamed, and the assistant came running, and I stood in the doorway of the changing room in two triangles and a strap with my heart going like a war drum.

My jaw dropped.

And, where the curiosity had sat earlier, it had been replaced by... a small satisfaction.

[She fainted because of this?] I looked down at myself.

I felt myself beginning to smile. It took everything I had to force it off my face.

---

{Kohaku}

In my defense, it’s not every day you get to see your OCs in the most lewd outfits imaginable. Sure, I had a bit of a pervy oji-san moment there, but, good god was it worth it.

I came back around on the floor with a folded towel under my head and Lily’s face about six inches above mine.

"She’s awake! Kohaku, can you hear me? How many fingers?"

I coughed.

"Depends on whose, hehe."

"OH, THANK GOODNESS. SHE’S NORMAL AGAIN." Lily sat back on her heels and immediately turned furious. "You hit your head. Twice! In one hour! The lady wanted to send for a healer and I said no, because I know you, and you would have flirted with them."

[I would have.]

"That’s a slander and you know it... I’d have flirted with the stretcher bearers too."

The shop assistant hovered somewhere behind her with a cup of water and an expression that said she wanted all three of us out of her store before anything else happened in it.

Then I heard the counter.

I turned my head, which hurt, and there was Serena. Back in her uniform, hair fixed, standing at the register with her chin up. And on the counter in front of her, folded into a neat square by somebody’s professional hands, was two triangles and a strap.

She paid for it in full. She did not look at me once.

"Thank you for your business, miss!"

"Mm."

She took the bag, walked past me on the floor, stepped over my legs rather than around them, and went out the door into the street.

I lay there for a second.

[Wait.]

I sat up so fast the room tilted.

[She bought it. She bought it, which means she’s bringing it, which means it’s going to be at the beach. Where I will also be. For six days.]

"... Stop smiling. That face you’re making is disgusting," Lily said, swatting at my shoulder.

Six days of open-water endurance, spirit handling, and one supervised evening social, and I had exactly one job for all of it, which was to make Serena Frostfall get along well enough with these people that she’d stand next to them in a war she doesn’t know is coming.

I cannot do that job face-down in the sand.