Sunlit Idiocy
Summary: Ohtori Academy's only piano goes missing, and Utena vows to find it for Anthy's sake.
Written: late 2002/early 2003
Disclaimer: Shoujo Kakumei Utena and associated characters (c) Be-Papas etc.
Class had ended, and Shiori was walking down the hall with a crowd of friends. “I’ve started piano lessons, you know,” she told them.
“Oh, piano lessons!” enthused the girl next to her. “And you’re already so good at fencing!”
“Yes, well,” said Shiori, tossing her hair, “I thought I’d try something new. Never hurts to develop a new talent, you know.”
Utena and Anthy passed the gossiping crowd on the way to their dorm. “Would I be imposing if I asked to play the piano, Utena-sama?”
“Of course not! We can go there now, if you’d like.”
The crowds in the hallway had cleared out by the time Utena pushed open the door to the music room.
Which was even emptier than usual.
“Where’s the piano?” said Utena.
Touga lounged in his chair on the high white balcony with his feet on the white café table. Also seated around it were Juri, Miki, and Saionji.
“This had better be worth it,” groused Saionji. “The only reason I attended your stupid tea party was because you said this meeting was vitally important.”
“You look like you’re enjoying yourself even more than usual,” Juri observed of Touga.
“Ha ha,” agreed Touga. “The reason I called you all together today is that the End of the World has a one-time, satisfaction-guaranteed offer: he will accept a letter from each of you, and grant the wish therein.”
“I thought the End of the World only wrote to you,” said Miki.
“Yes, the End of the World is my special pen-pal, but as duelists you also have a link to him,” Touga explained. “So please do work on your letters, and the next time we meet, submit them to me, and I’ll send them on to the End of the World.”
“Hah! What stupidity!” Saionji rose from his seat. “But nevertheless, I will deign to participate.” Looking down his nose at the other duelists, he turned stiffly and left.
“So what do we get today?” inquired Juri, after a pause. “Balloons? Darts? Throwing darts at balloons?”
A light shower of rain and tiny frogs passed overhead.
“This is actually a natural phenomenon,” said Miki, taking a frog out of his tea. “It occurs when strong winds lift small amphibians off the ground. Later they precipitate back down with the-“
“Yes, well, I have to get to fencing practice,” interrupted Juri, who hadn’t budged from her sitting-back-with-arms-crossed pose despite being covered with tiny frogs, and still looked dignified.
“Just remember your letters,” said Touga smoothly, taking a sip of tea and frogs.
Utena looked at the floor where the piano used to be. Four worn, blackened spots marked where the piano’s legs had been. The only skid marks led toward the wall, with its tall windows. Utena pointed this out to Anthy.
“There have been some showers lately. Maybe they left a trail, or footprints,” ventured Anthy.
They looked out the window, where they saw the usual lively activities of students passing through the grounds. The bare ground below the window was undisturbed.
“Or not,” said Utena. They pondered the limited possibilities for a moment.
“They’re always redecorating,” suggested Anthy, “and this could have involved a pulley. Perhaps it’s on the ceiling.”
They looked up. It wasn’t.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m attending a school designed by Salvador Dali,” commented Utena, “but so far I haven’t seen any furniture on the ceiling.”
Saionji sat in his small, dark, and confined world, namely a world where he and Anthy were passionate lovers separated by that evil affront to God, Utena. Saionji’s world had been bright and promising up to the point that Utena, or the anti-Christ, had appeared. Now his world was in the equivalent of a post-Armageddon era. The sun was obscured by pulverized Saionji-dreams, and mutants with pink hair stalked over the endless rubble. It wasn’t a happy place to be.
At the moment Saionji and his world were sitting facing a blank piece of rose-scented stationery. “I will save you, Anthy. I will be the one to show you something eternal…. I’ll….” His muttering trailed off into unintelligibility.
He lifted his pen, which had Hello Kitty on it.
Dear End of the World (he wrote with a flourish),
I have been your faithful servant for some time now, even through the parts I didn’t understand. And yet, my heartbroken lover Anthy and I have been the victim of a tragic story, a tragic story of passion, love,
and betrayal. (A 72-page account with a lot of made-up parts follows.)
As you can see (concluded Saionji) I have been deeply wronged, my youthful passion hindered at every turn, my beautiful rose stolen away, my dignity marred, my hair messed up, my once-future bride slapped by other people and not me, and also Touga keeps winning our Kendou matches. What’s up with that?
I beg of you, restore Anthy to me and me alone. Also, smite Utena Tenjou with a lightning bolt if at all possible.
Love and Hugs,
Kyou’ichi Saionji
Utena and Anthy sat in their room eating Cheez-its.
“Who would steal a piano?” Utena wondered aloud.
“I really don’t know,” murmured Anthy, feeding a Cheez-it to Chu-Chu.
“Maybe it was Nanami. She’s always up to something.”
Strolling outside shortly after, they found Nanami and her three attendants talking by the side of a pathway. Utena confronted Nanami directly. “Did you steal the piano?”
“Why would I steal a piano?”
Well, maybe you wanted to get back at someone. Like Miki.”
“Miki’s a nice boy. I wouldn’t have to get back at him,” sniffed Nanami.
“Anyone else?” demanded Utena.
“Not with a piano.”
“A violin, now, that’s easy to carry and expensive,” put in the Nanami lackey with pigtails. “And if you have a strong adhesive, you can attach it to the ceiling.”
“I’m not trying to attach musical instruments to the ceiling, I’m trying to find a piano.”
“What about you, Miss Himemiya?” Nanami asked sharply. “You’ve been quiet. What do you have to say about this?”
“If Utena-sama wants to find the piano, then I will help her find the piano. Furthermore, I enjoy playing the piano. Yet furthermore, the musical program of this school will deteriorate, as we students will no longer be able to play such Beethoven classics as “Mary Had a Little Lamb. Plus, Miki will probably cry.”
“If I hear anything, I’ll let you know,” said Nanami dismissively, with a snobbish air.
Miki chewed on the end of his mechanical pencil, which had little hearts on it, debating how to word his letter.
Dear End of the World (he printed neatly),
How are you? I’m doing fine. The weather recently sure has been nice, hasn’t it?
My request is that you give me Anthy, so I can date protect her and make let her play the piano. If you do, I’ll really appreciate it.
Your faithful blue-haired genius boy,
MIKI
P.S. When will I hit puberty?
Utena was getting worried about her chances of ever finding the piano. She’d mentioned the theft to Shiori, thinking that perhaps the piano had been moved elsewhere for her lessons, but it hadn’t-Shiori had only reacted with indignation that it had disappeared so soon after she’d begun her lessons. Utena had then gone to the teaching staff to see if they’d been doing any redecorating, or perhaps sold the piano to pay for a student psychiatrist, but that hadn’t been the case. Nor had they offered to help find it, merely writing off the loss and saying that it couldn’t be helped, and who really played the piano anymore anyway? Well, Anthy seemed to enjoy playing it, so Utena was determined to find out who’d stolen it.
Maybe, she thought as she sat on top of the bunk bed swinging her legs, Saionji had something to do with it. Saionji was always trying to have something to do with Anthy.
“Hey, Anthy, could you do me a favor?”
Up in his upside-down imaginary sky castle, Dios woke up. He blinked several times and surveyed the events occurring below.
He went back to sleep.
“Saionji-senpai,” called Anthy, walking toward her green-haired stalker.
“Anthy!”
Beside Anthy, Chu-Chu chittered in its mindless monkey-rat way. Saionji took one distasteful look at it and sent it flying into the nearest tree with a kick of his boot. Chu-Chu landed in a nest, where an extremely stupid robin immediately sat on its head and tried to hatch something out of it. (Which was futile, because all scientific tests show that Chu-Chu’s skull is empty.)
“Saionji-senpai, kindness to animals is one of the traits I…”
“Animals suck,” interrupted Saionji.
There was a pause while the Rose Bride quietly accepted this and decided to return to the topic she’d come to discuss.
“Saionji-senpai, I have only a small question I must ask you…”
“Anthy,” spoke Saionji, his fervent purple eyes staring into her green ones, “the answer is yes. I do love you. Passionately. Deeply. Will you marry me?”
“As I am currently engaged to someone else…” demurred Anthy. She remained politely silent while Saionji muttered various death threats and profanities under his breath. Once he had calmed somewhat, she continued. “Our piano was recently stolen. I was wondering if you are perhaps the one who has it.”
Saionji hung his head. “Yes, Anthy. I must confess. I am the one who has your piano. It was a desperate act by a youth in love. Now, Anthy, come with me, and you and I and the piano can live together in simple happiness.”
“Oh that’s all right, Saionji-senpai,” said Anthy, walking off. “You can keep it.
“Anthy! Wait! It was a lie!”
She turned back around, the same pleasant expression on her face. “Very well, Saionji-senpai. I will continue my search.”
“Anthy, I would never steal from you.”
Anthy nodded vacantly.
“Are you listening to me!?”
Utena, who was hiding in a nearby mulberry bush with a weasel, emerged hastily to prevent the Anthy-slap before it happened.
“Utena-sama!” Anthy said happily.
“You!” hissed Saionji. He turned back to Anthy. “How dare the cursed name of Tenjou Utena pass your sacred lips!? Oh, what has become of you!”
“Bye, Saionji-senpai!” called the dark-skinned girl as Utena dragged her off to safety.
To the End of the World:
You must already know about all that has happened to me. How I loved a girl, but she did not realize it, or if she did, did not care, and betrayed me. I think of her even now: Shiori, so innocent and yet so beguiling. I pass her in the halls, and she smiles at me, and I wonder what she is thinking, and if she knows what I’m thinking. Oh, how I wish she knew what is within me.
End of the world, let the miracle reach me. Let it touch Shiori and myself and bring our hearts together. I ask for a mir--
Juri lifted her Mickey Mouse ballpoint pen and hurled it violently across the room, where it penetrated three inches into the wall. She picked up her unfinished letter and tore it into pieces the size of hamster litter. She swept the pieces into the empty tin trashcan and dropped a match inside. A fire flared briefly, lighting her hard features eerily in the evening darkness. When the fire had died, Juri scraped out the warm ashes and proceeded to put them in the blender.
She stood on the front porch in her white nightgown holding the blender high in her right hand. “Absolutely not,” she said almost to herself. Juri emptied the ashes on the porch, where a halfhearted night breeze failed to blow them away. A small mutt that had been sniffing around the bushes on the lawn came up and started to eat them.
“I don’t need you,” declared Juri, staring sightlessly into the night, “and I don’t need your miracles.” Her voice could easily have deflected bullets.
The dog keeled over and stopped breathing. “Absolutely not,” Juri, oblivious, told the night.
Dios, unable to stay in his light doze, woke up again. He glanced at Ohtori Academy, then started to do a crossword puzzle.
Utena, Anthy, and Nanami were sitting around the low table in the Tenjou-Himemiya dorm with a list of suspects. Several names-Saionji, Nanami, Shiori, janitor-were already crossed off, but that still left a number of options.
“Miki’s our local piano player, so he might know where the piano is. Then again, I expect he’s completely innocent, and I don’t want to break the news to him.” Utena put a little asterisk by Miki’s name. “I doubt it’s Juri, she’s too aloof, and she doesn’t have any connections to piano playing. And of course it’s not Wakaba, I don’t know why I even put her on the list.” She crossed of Wakaba’s name.
“It’s not Miki’s twin Kozue, or I would have found out,” put in Nanami, whose interest had been piqued by the case and couldn’t stand not knowing the answer. She had set her lackeys and her neurosis-filled brain on the case, and Utena and Anthy weren’t about to look the gift cow in the mouth, so to speak.
Utena continued: “Touga, now, maybe he needed a piano for some reason. I wouldn’t put stealing past him.
“Don’t accuse my o-nii-sama,” Nanami said with shrill indignation.
“Oh of course not,” returned Utena. Fortunately Nanami missed her irony.
Anthy spoke up. “Then we have the probability that one person couldn’t move a piano by themselves.”
“Unless there were elephants involved,” Nanami said darkly.
Suddenly the three henchgirls burst through the door. “No fingerprints, Nanami-sama,” reported the girl with pigtails, standing at attention. “Radiation reads zero. Infrared reading indicates a suspicious figure outside behind the bushes-”
“That’s Saionji,” said Anthy.
“-in that case, no suspicious infrared readings. Here are the aerial reports.” The black-haired girl came forward and set down a stack of glossy white papers.
“Excellent work,” said Nanami in a conspiratorial voice. She turned back to Utena and Anthy. “With these diagrams-why are you so wide-eyed, Utena?-with these diagrams we can pinpoint any suspicious-”
A scream suddenly came from the direction of the music room downstairs.
All of the dorm’s occupants rushed down the stairs.
“Maybe we’ll find the murderer!” squealed Nanami.
“He’s not a murderer, he’s a piano thief,” Anthy reminded her.
“Well, maybe he’s a murderer now.”
Utena ran into the music room. Miki was lying on the floor, as motionless as roadkill. She checked his pulse. Fortunately, there was one.
“Hey, Miki, are you OK?” She shook the obviously-not-OK Miki, trying to wake him up.
“Miki!” shrieked Nanami, coming through the door.
“Oh my, said Anthy, hurrying forward.
Miki’s eyes fluttered open. “Pi… ano….” he croaked. “Noooo….”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get it back,” Utena assured him, helping him up. “Besides, there are other pianos. It’s not like they’re an endangered species.”
“Oh…yes.” Miki tottered forward without support. The girls watched him as he made it all the way to the doorway, then collapsed to the ground, twitching.
“Uh-oh, a relapse,” said Nanami knowingly. “Let’s see if we can move him to the nurse’s office, girls.”
Dios, giving up on thinking of a six-letter word for “stuck-up brother-obsessed bully” and got out his telescope. Ohtori Academy wasn’t doing so well. In fact, half of it was on fire. He glared in its general direction and then injected a sedative directly into his jugular.
“I’ve called all of you-”
“Both of us,” corrected Juri.
“-all of us together today,” smiled Touga, “to collect your letters to the End of the World.”
“Here.” Saionji tossed a package to Touga. Touga, who was already in a precarious position with his feet on the table and his chair on two legs, fell backward and hit his head on the ground.
“I said a letter, not a graduate’s thesis,” said Touga, righting himself and his chair. He had enough good humor today to last him through several undignified falls, and this served as an air bag for his ego. “What about your letter, Juri?”
“I didn’t write one.”
“But Juri! Everyone has to have their letter. Even Miki roused enough to tell me, on his deathbed, that his was underneath his math homework. One might even go so far as to say that if you want to remain a duelist, you write a letter.” He handed Juri a notepad with roses and a pen with girls in swimsuits.
“Why does this say ‘Utena is sexy?’”
“Ha ha. Nanami wrote that. Just concentrate on the letter, Juri. Just remember, the egg is the world and-”
“Yeah, yeah.” Juri flipped to the next page of the notepad.
End of the World:
You’re totally lame. Take your miracle and shove it.
--Juri
She handed it to Touga and walked off.
“If I stay, do I get to see balloons?” Saionji asked eventually.
“Oh, today I chartered the Aurora Borealis,” Touga said smugly. Behind him a plume of smoke rose from a faculty building.
According to the school nurse, Miki had not yet returned to consciousness, although at times he spoke words such as “piano,” “God,” and occasionally “Let me die.” Utena and Anthy were currently kneeling by Miki’s bed, where Utena was trying to convince him to wake up by swearing she’d find the piano and Anthy was looking worried; Nanami was pacing by the door. Her lackeys had just stopped by to tell her that apparently this morning Shiori and Kozue had started a guerilla group called Give Us Back Our Piano (GUBOP) and set fire to some buildings. At the moment, however, Shiori’s group and the teachers had negotiated a cease-fire so everyone could go to math class.
“Oh dear, if only we’d found that piano earlier,” sighed Nanami, who was still pacing by the door now that her three hangers-on had left and wishing she’d thought of a guerilla group before Shiori and Kozue.
“Wow, Nanami, I didn’t know you had so many principles,” said Utena.
“I have lots of principles,” said Nanami, offended. “The first one is to meddle in other people’s business, and the second one is to never let anyone upstage me, and-oh, it’s time for math class. I don’t need to hang around with you freaks any longer. Bye Miki. Get well soon.” She left and slammed the door.
Utena shrugged at Anthy. The shrug could be interpreted as “no big loss.” They two, personally, were happy to ascribe more importance to reviving Miki than going to math class.
“It’s too bad Miki’s not here for this,” said Anthy softly. “Math class is just the kind of thing he used to like so much.”
“He’s still alive, Anthy.”
“Perhaps if we start discussing geometry, he’ll wake up in an attempt to help us.” Anthy pulled a stack of papers from her bag. “Oh, here are Nanami’s aerial maps, too. I’d set my homework on top of it and put everything in my bag when we left.”
They put the photographs on the floor between them and looked through them one by one.
“Hey, what’s this black spot!?” Utena said suddenly, seeing a suspicious shape in one of the photographs.
“It looks like it’s on a roof,” observed Anthy.
“That’s our dorm building’s roof!” realized Utena.
“Right above where the music room is,” mused Anthy.
They left the unconscious Miki’s recovery room quickly and stealthily.
Nanami was hurrying to math class along the side of a dorm building along with many other students. A short ways in front of her, Shiori walked among a group of girls, many of whom had headbands with “GUBOP” written on them.
Nanami was just thinking that if she had a guerrilla group, she would definitely give it a better name, when a piano crashed into the walkway right behind her, severely denting the concrete. Nanami, however, didn’t notice, because at that moment she saw her brother up ahead.
“O-niiiiii-sama!” she called, running up to him. He turned. “Oh, Nanami, hello.” His gaze moved past her. “There’s a piano on the sidewalk.”
Nanami looked back. “Oh, so there is.”
“Seems to have landed there with some force.”
“So, o-nii-sama,” continued Nanami, who had lost interest in pianos now that her brother was there, “are you heading to your math-why is the sky turning funny colors?”
“Those are called the northern lights, Nanami. Also, Shiori set fire to the gym.”
Shiori herself strolled by, surrounded by the group of GUBOP girls, all chattering about that morning’s pyrotechnic protestation efforts. It was nice, thought Shiori, to have a purpose in life.
Utena tore up the stairs in the dorm building that led to a trapdoor in the roof, Anthy keeping pace behind her. They emerged into the bright afternoon air, which would have been clear and cheerful but for the haze in the sky and the slight smell of smoke.
Juri was standing on the other side of the roof, breathing heavily. There was no piano.
Utena and Anthy ran up. Juri whirled, startled. “You!”
The Rose Bride and the aspiring prince looked over the edge of the roof. There it is, thought Utena. Kind of left a dent.
She turned back to the wide-eyed Juri. “Er, why did you steal the piano?”
“Because there are no such things as miracles!” Juri cried, and turned and ran toward the front of the building, sobbing theatrically, as if to throw herself into the bushes. However, somehow she managed to trip over Anthy’s foot, though Anthy had certainly not made any apparent movement, nor had her usual placid expression changed.
“Oh no, Juri, you seem to have fallen down,” noted Anthy.
“I missed, you know,” said Juri stiffly, as she reluctantly let Utena help her up. “I was thinking, you know, that maybe I’d provoke some reaction if I stole the piano, and I did, but she seemed to be enjoying herself so much I thought it might be a better idea to commit a double suicide instead, but I missed, and she probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d gone with Step B and plunged off the roof with a sword in my heart.”
There was a fencing sword, the unsafe variety that is sharp to the extent that it could be used to sacrifice small animals before pagan altars, lying on the rooftop nearby. Utena picked it up and tossed it over the building’s front side. There was a thud and muffled Saionji cursing.
Juri’s shoulders slumped. “Now what can I do…”
Utena patted her shoulder. “It’s OK, Juri. I understand.” She didn’t, but never mind. “Why don’t you come have a cup of tea?”
Touga waited until the other students had cleared out, then walked up to the upended piano and slipped it into his pocket.
Being too important for math class, he returned to his room, where in the late afternoon he sat on his bed reading Miki’s letter and laughing. When he was finished, he tossed it into the fire, which was right outside the window where a righteous GUBOP member had decided some bushes were evil. Juri’s note had already met the same fate.
Touga pulled Saionji’s letter, or rather 73-page document, out of its industrial-sized padded mailing envelope.
“Touga-san, the sheets are on fire,” pointed out the girl sitting on the end of the bed. After setting the bushes on fire, the GUBOP member had seemed at a loss for what to do next, so Touga had opened the window and invited her inside.
Touga waved her comment aside. “Just a moment.”
In fact, he found Saionji’s letter so gripping that he sat there reading it for another hour, sometimes laughing so hard that tears ran down his cheeks. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the sheets, as well as the bed canopy, had caught on fire. The GUBOP girl was determinedly trying put out the fire, or at least the parts near Touga, with a spray bottle.
Much to the girl’s relief, Touga finished whatever he’d been reading and got up from the bed, which immediately flared up with a whoomph. Touga’s right pants leg was on fire, and she hastily put it out with the spray bottle.
Touga put Saionji’s letter carefully back into its envelope for safekeeping as he strolled, and the GUBOP girl rushed, into the adjoining sitting room.
“What’s that piano doing in the corner?” asked the girl, looking at the piano that took up a crowded corner of the sitting room. “Are you learning to play it?” She had joined GUBOP less for the rescuing of pianos than the setting of things on fire, and cared not at all that Touga had the piano in question sitting suspiciously in his quarters.
“No, I’m thinking of sending it to a friend,” replied Touga. “But didn’t you get rather hot in there?” he continued, gesturing to the doorway behind him, through which rampaging orange flames were visible. “Let me loosen your collar.”
Later that day, he sent the piano to the End of the World. Saionji’s letter he sent elsewhere.
The school entered a period of calm, Shiori having decided that she’d set enough things on fire and now thinking up a new way to protest. Classes continued as normal the next day.
Utena was walking from one class to another, Anthy by her side, when she heard Wakaba scream “Utena-sama!!” Suddenly she was hit from behind by what felt like an avalanche. “Aaaaaargh!” she yelled as she collapsed. She lay on the ground, pinned by the weight one her back.
“Utena-sama, you seem to be caught under a piano,” said Anthy.
A piano? But we already know what happened to the piano…and we managed to calm Juri down…thought Utena, as she managed to shift the object aside with Anthy’s help. Finally being able to stand and take a good look, she saw that it was a piano, one made entirely of wood. Wakaba was lying on top of it, holding onto one end and kicking her legs happily.
“What exactly is this?” asked Utena cautiously.
“It’s a piano!” Wakaba leapt off the piano to stand in front of Utena. “I made it in shop class! Do you like it?”
“Er, it’s very nice.”
“Want it? I don’t play the piano. And I heard something about a piano theft, or a murder attempt, or was it a Godzilla attack? La dee da. Want it? I’d give it to you, Utena-sama!”
“The music room does need a piano.” She glanced at Anthy. “Why not? But first, can we stop by the nurse’s office?
Miki was revived by the sound of Anthy’s piano playing, and managed to continue life as usual (in other words, plagued by weird events, surrounded by weird people, and with the occasional duel and weird song) now that the school now had a piano. It wasn’t the best piano; even the keys were made of wood, at least until Nanami took some time off from drowning kittens or whatever she does in her free time to donate some ivory she’d gotten somewhere.
Shiori was miffed that her purpose in life had been taken away so soon, and sulked in her room for days. The most enthusiastic members of GUBOP, the hardcore ones who wouldn’t let anything like a piano having returned stop them, continued to riot and set things on fire and chant their slogan (“Riot and Set Things on Fire”) despite all the detentions they were getting. Eventually the faculty, in desperation, negotiated with the sulking leader Shiori and agreed to pay her an undisclosed sum if she and her group promised not to set anything else on fire, at least not anything important.
Juri had stated, after a nice hot cup of Anthy’s Special Chamomile, that she wouldn’t try to kill Shiori again, at least not by any method involving a piano. So Utena was able to relax.
Except that Touga was walking around looking very pleased with himself, not to mention slightly singed. He must be up to something, she thought, and avoided him as best she could.
At one point the thought crossed Utena’s mind that even though she knew who’d stolen the piano and why, she didn’t know what had happened to it after Juri had pushed it off the roof. Utena told the thought to go away.
Saionji was standing in the Romance section of a pleasant bookstore. He was putting a volume back on the shelf when another title, The Rose that Got Stepped On, by Utena Kiryuu, caught his eye. He’d never heard of an “Utena Kiryuu,” but nevertheless he picked it up and flipped to a random page.
Anthy stared deeply into my eyes, her warm, slender, beautiful, cool,
dark hands clutching my own. “Oh, Saionji-sama,” she said, her voice like
a sigh of wind under jungle trees.
“I know,” I said. My heart beat like one of those musical instruments
you hit with sticks.
“You would not believe the uncouth barbarism of the girl who calls
herself Utena Tenjou. She believes that girls need not wear skirts. She’s good
at sports. She talks like a boy, she wields a sword manfully, she believes that
recalcitrant girls should not be slapped. She has pink hair. Oh, Saionji-sama,
it’s awful.” She put her delicate face in her delicate hands and sobbed.
I put my manly hands on her delicate shoulders. “I believe you, Anthy.
I would believe such evils of her.”
Then Utena herself appeared, the shifty eyes set in her unattractive face fixed
on myself and Anthy, utterly ruining our tender moment of intimacy.
“Utena-sama,” murmured my Anthy, and I could tell that someone needed to be
slapped. Oh, Anthy, my former bride, how could this…
“HEY!!” said Saionji.
Touga, Juri, and Miki were sitting around café tables on the balcony. Miki was timing things with his stopwatch, Touga was lounging, and Juri was reading a newspaper. Visible on the back page was the headline BOY WITH KENDOU SWORD RAMPAGES THROUGH BOOKSTORE.
How are your burn wounds, Touga?” asked Miki. Touga had been sporting various bandages.
“Oh, nothing I can’t handle,” replied Touga gallantly.
“By the way, has the End of the World received our letters yet?” continued Miki eagerly.
“Yes, yes, of course. Unfortunately, yours was rejected. Because of bad grammar.”
“Oh, it…it was?” Miki chewed on his lip and tried to think of any grammatical mistakes he might have made.
“Don’t feel bad, Miki. Juri’s letter wasn’t ah, appropriate either, and, well, you can just ask Juri about that…”
Juri looked up icily and then returned to her newspaper.
“And Saionji’s letter…”-Touga had to pause because he couldn’t resist chuckling-“Saionji’s letter, now…”
At that moment Saionji busted open the double doors to the balcony. “I challenge all of you to a duel! To duels!” he yelled wildly.
“Wow, Saionji’s pissed,” observed Miki.
“Not that he usually isn’t,” put in Juri from behind her newspaper.
“I have a feeling he needs to work off some anger.” Touga drummed his fingers on the side of the chair.
“Pay attention to me!” demanded Saionji, waving his Kendou sword around in an unsafe manner.
Juri folded up her newspaper. “Look, Saionji, we don’t have the Rose Bride. Go duel Utena.”
“Utena… yes….” Saionji stroked his Kendou sword.
Once again Utena Tenjou found herself in the dueling arena in the sky. This time, in addition to the upside-down illusory castle and the great view, there was a piano. Anthy was playing “Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku” on it.
“Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku” is a mysterious song, believed by some to contain the secrets of the universe. Following is its transcription and Plato’s translation.
Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku
Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku
Shussei touroku, senrei meirou, shibou touryoku
(Absolute Destiny Apocalypse
Absolute Destiny Apocalypse
Birth records, death records, DUI records)
Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku x2
Watashi no tanjou, zettai tanjou, mokushiroku
(Absolute Destiny Apocalypse x2
My birth, your birth, the birth of Elvis)
Yami no sabaku ni sanba, uba
Kin no mekki no tougenkyou
Hiru to yoru to ga gyakumawari
Toki no mekki no shitsurakuen
(In a dark city in the desert
Neon-plated gambling signs.
All around the mulberry bush,
We all fall down on the weasel.)
Sodomu no yami
Hikari no yami
Kanata no yami
Hatenaki yami
(Darkness over Gomorrah
Darkness over Sparta
Darkness over Canada
Partly cloudy in Spain)
Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku
Zettai Unmei Mokushi-yami, Mokushiroku
Mokushi kushimo
Shimoku kumoshi
Moshiku shikumo x 1,000
(Absolute Destiny Apocalypse x2
Blah blah blah blah
Blah blah blah blah)
(End)
A number of scholars suspect that Plato was slacking off that day, but never mind.
“If I ever find out who published my le-who perpetrated that insidious crime,” Saionji was threatening, “they’re gonna get it, but meanwhile I’ll take care of you.”
“Did you say something?” Utena turned from admiring Anthy’s piano playing.
“Aaaaaaargh!”
Later that day, when things had quieted down and Saionji’s prone, unblinking body had been dragged from the arena (he had gone into severe shock after losing, although frankly after having lost twice against Utena already he should have expected it), Dios woke up groggily. After he had revived himself somewhat with a glass of cold water, he glanced down and noticed a piano sitting on one side of the arena. Someone had been renovating. I should take up a hobby, thought Dios, and drifted down to give the instrument a try.
Thereafter Ohtori Academy was haunted by mysterious, untraceable piano playing drifting in from the distance. At first it made quite a racket, but the unknown piano player’s skill gradually rose to the point that it was pleasant background music.
For some reason it reminded Utena of her prince. Occasionally she hummed along.
----------
THE END
Written: late 2002/early 2003
Disclaimer: Shoujo Kakumei Utena and associated characters (c) Be-Papas etc.
Class had ended, and Shiori was walking down the hall with a crowd of friends. “I’ve started piano lessons, you know,” she told them.
“Oh, piano lessons!” enthused the girl next to her. “And you’re already so good at fencing!”
“Yes, well,” said Shiori, tossing her hair, “I thought I’d try something new. Never hurts to develop a new talent, you know.”
Utena and Anthy passed the gossiping crowd on the way to their dorm. “Would I be imposing if I asked to play the piano, Utena-sama?”
“Of course not! We can go there now, if you’d like.”
The crowds in the hallway had cleared out by the time Utena pushed open the door to the music room.
Which was even emptier than usual.
“Where’s the piano?” said Utena.
Touga lounged in his chair on the high white balcony with his feet on the white café table. Also seated around it were Juri, Miki, and Saionji.
“This had better be worth it,” groused Saionji. “The only reason I attended your stupid tea party was because you said this meeting was vitally important.”
“You look like you’re enjoying yourself even more than usual,” Juri observed of Touga.
“Ha ha,” agreed Touga. “The reason I called you all together today is that the End of the World has a one-time, satisfaction-guaranteed offer: he will accept a letter from each of you, and grant the wish therein.”
“I thought the End of the World only wrote to you,” said Miki.
“Yes, the End of the World is my special pen-pal, but as duelists you also have a link to him,” Touga explained. “So please do work on your letters, and the next time we meet, submit them to me, and I’ll send them on to the End of the World.”
“Hah! What stupidity!” Saionji rose from his seat. “But nevertheless, I will deign to participate.” Looking down his nose at the other duelists, he turned stiffly and left.
“So what do we get today?” inquired Juri, after a pause. “Balloons? Darts? Throwing darts at balloons?”
A light shower of rain and tiny frogs passed overhead.
“This is actually a natural phenomenon,” said Miki, taking a frog out of his tea. “It occurs when strong winds lift small amphibians off the ground. Later they precipitate back down with the-“
“Yes, well, I have to get to fencing practice,” interrupted Juri, who hadn’t budged from her sitting-back-with-arms-crossed pose despite being covered with tiny frogs, and still looked dignified.
“Just remember your letters,” said Touga smoothly, taking a sip of tea and frogs.
Utena looked at the floor where the piano used to be. Four worn, blackened spots marked where the piano’s legs had been. The only skid marks led toward the wall, with its tall windows. Utena pointed this out to Anthy.
“There have been some showers lately. Maybe they left a trail, or footprints,” ventured Anthy.
They looked out the window, where they saw the usual lively activities of students passing through the grounds. The bare ground below the window was undisturbed.
“Or not,” said Utena. They pondered the limited possibilities for a moment.
“They’re always redecorating,” suggested Anthy, “and this could have involved a pulley. Perhaps it’s on the ceiling.”
They looked up. It wasn’t.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m attending a school designed by Salvador Dali,” commented Utena, “but so far I haven’t seen any furniture on the ceiling.”
Saionji sat in his small, dark, and confined world, namely a world where he and Anthy were passionate lovers separated by that evil affront to God, Utena. Saionji’s world had been bright and promising up to the point that Utena, or the anti-Christ, had appeared. Now his world was in the equivalent of a post-Armageddon era. The sun was obscured by pulverized Saionji-dreams, and mutants with pink hair stalked over the endless rubble. It wasn’t a happy place to be.
At the moment Saionji and his world were sitting facing a blank piece of rose-scented stationery. “I will save you, Anthy. I will be the one to show you something eternal…. I’ll….” His muttering trailed off into unintelligibility.
He lifted his pen, which had Hello Kitty on it.
Dear End of the World (he wrote with a flourish),
I have been your faithful servant for some time now, even through the parts I didn’t understand. And yet, my heartbroken lover Anthy and I have been the victim of a tragic story, a tragic story of passion, love,
and betrayal. (A 72-page account with a lot of made-up parts follows.)
As you can see (concluded Saionji) I have been deeply wronged, my youthful passion hindered at every turn, my beautiful rose stolen away, my dignity marred, my hair messed up, my once-future bride slapped by other people and not me, and also Touga keeps winning our Kendou matches. What’s up with that?
I beg of you, restore Anthy to me and me alone. Also, smite Utena Tenjou with a lightning bolt if at all possible.
Love and Hugs,
Kyou’ichi Saionji
Utena and Anthy sat in their room eating Cheez-its.
“Who would steal a piano?” Utena wondered aloud.
“I really don’t know,” murmured Anthy, feeding a Cheez-it to Chu-Chu.
“Maybe it was Nanami. She’s always up to something.”
Strolling outside shortly after, they found Nanami and her three attendants talking by the side of a pathway. Utena confronted Nanami directly. “Did you steal the piano?”
“Why would I steal a piano?”
Well, maybe you wanted to get back at someone. Like Miki.”
“Miki’s a nice boy. I wouldn’t have to get back at him,” sniffed Nanami.
“Anyone else?” demanded Utena.
“Not with a piano.”
“A violin, now, that’s easy to carry and expensive,” put in the Nanami lackey with pigtails. “And if you have a strong adhesive, you can attach it to the ceiling.”
“I’m not trying to attach musical instruments to the ceiling, I’m trying to find a piano.”
“What about you, Miss Himemiya?” Nanami asked sharply. “You’ve been quiet. What do you have to say about this?”
“If Utena-sama wants to find the piano, then I will help her find the piano. Furthermore, I enjoy playing the piano. Yet furthermore, the musical program of this school will deteriorate, as we students will no longer be able to play such Beethoven classics as “Mary Had a Little Lamb. Plus, Miki will probably cry.”
“If I hear anything, I’ll let you know,” said Nanami dismissively, with a snobbish air.
Miki chewed on the end of his mechanical pencil, which had little hearts on it, debating how to word his letter.
Dear End of the World (he printed neatly),
How are you? I’m doing fine. The weather recently sure has been nice, hasn’t it?
My request is that you give me Anthy, so I can date protect her and make let her play the piano. If you do, I’ll really appreciate it.
Your faithful blue-haired genius boy,
MIKI
P.S. When will I hit puberty?
Utena was getting worried about her chances of ever finding the piano. She’d mentioned the theft to Shiori, thinking that perhaps the piano had been moved elsewhere for her lessons, but it hadn’t-Shiori had only reacted with indignation that it had disappeared so soon after she’d begun her lessons. Utena had then gone to the teaching staff to see if they’d been doing any redecorating, or perhaps sold the piano to pay for a student psychiatrist, but that hadn’t been the case. Nor had they offered to help find it, merely writing off the loss and saying that it couldn’t be helped, and who really played the piano anymore anyway? Well, Anthy seemed to enjoy playing it, so Utena was determined to find out who’d stolen it.
Maybe, she thought as she sat on top of the bunk bed swinging her legs, Saionji had something to do with it. Saionji was always trying to have something to do with Anthy.
“Hey, Anthy, could you do me a favor?”
Up in his upside-down imaginary sky castle, Dios woke up. He blinked several times and surveyed the events occurring below.
He went back to sleep.
“Saionji-senpai,” called Anthy, walking toward her green-haired stalker.
“Anthy!”
Beside Anthy, Chu-Chu chittered in its mindless monkey-rat way. Saionji took one distasteful look at it and sent it flying into the nearest tree with a kick of his boot. Chu-Chu landed in a nest, where an extremely stupid robin immediately sat on its head and tried to hatch something out of it. (Which was futile, because all scientific tests show that Chu-Chu’s skull is empty.)
“Saionji-senpai, kindness to animals is one of the traits I…”
“Animals suck,” interrupted Saionji.
There was a pause while the Rose Bride quietly accepted this and decided to return to the topic she’d come to discuss.
“Saionji-senpai, I have only a small question I must ask you…”
“Anthy,” spoke Saionji, his fervent purple eyes staring into her green ones, “the answer is yes. I do love you. Passionately. Deeply. Will you marry me?”
“As I am currently engaged to someone else…” demurred Anthy. She remained politely silent while Saionji muttered various death threats and profanities under his breath. Once he had calmed somewhat, she continued. “Our piano was recently stolen. I was wondering if you are perhaps the one who has it.”
Saionji hung his head. “Yes, Anthy. I must confess. I am the one who has your piano. It was a desperate act by a youth in love. Now, Anthy, come with me, and you and I and the piano can live together in simple happiness.”
“Oh that’s all right, Saionji-senpai,” said Anthy, walking off. “You can keep it.
“Anthy! Wait! It was a lie!”
She turned back around, the same pleasant expression on her face. “Very well, Saionji-senpai. I will continue my search.”
“Anthy, I would never steal from you.”
Anthy nodded vacantly.
“Are you listening to me!?”
Utena, who was hiding in a nearby mulberry bush with a weasel, emerged hastily to prevent the Anthy-slap before it happened.
“Utena-sama!” Anthy said happily.
“You!” hissed Saionji. He turned back to Anthy. “How dare the cursed name of Tenjou Utena pass your sacred lips!? Oh, what has become of you!”
“Bye, Saionji-senpai!” called the dark-skinned girl as Utena dragged her off to safety.
To the End of the World:
You must already know about all that has happened to me. How I loved a girl, but she did not realize it, or if she did, did not care, and betrayed me. I think of her even now: Shiori, so innocent and yet so beguiling. I pass her in the halls, and she smiles at me, and I wonder what she is thinking, and if she knows what I’m thinking. Oh, how I wish she knew what is within me.
End of the world, let the miracle reach me. Let it touch Shiori and myself and bring our hearts together. I ask for a mir--
Juri lifted her Mickey Mouse ballpoint pen and hurled it violently across the room, where it penetrated three inches into the wall. She picked up her unfinished letter and tore it into pieces the size of hamster litter. She swept the pieces into the empty tin trashcan and dropped a match inside. A fire flared briefly, lighting her hard features eerily in the evening darkness. When the fire had died, Juri scraped out the warm ashes and proceeded to put them in the blender.
She stood on the front porch in her white nightgown holding the blender high in her right hand. “Absolutely not,” she said almost to herself. Juri emptied the ashes on the porch, where a halfhearted night breeze failed to blow them away. A small mutt that had been sniffing around the bushes on the lawn came up and started to eat them.
“I don’t need you,” declared Juri, staring sightlessly into the night, “and I don’t need your miracles.” Her voice could easily have deflected bullets.
The dog keeled over and stopped breathing. “Absolutely not,” Juri, oblivious, told the night.
Dios, unable to stay in his light doze, woke up again. He glanced at Ohtori Academy, then started to do a crossword puzzle.
Utena, Anthy, and Nanami were sitting around the low table in the Tenjou-Himemiya dorm with a list of suspects. Several names-Saionji, Nanami, Shiori, janitor-were already crossed off, but that still left a number of options.
“Miki’s our local piano player, so he might know where the piano is. Then again, I expect he’s completely innocent, and I don’t want to break the news to him.” Utena put a little asterisk by Miki’s name. “I doubt it’s Juri, she’s too aloof, and she doesn’t have any connections to piano playing. And of course it’s not Wakaba, I don’t know why I even put her on the list.” She crossed of Wakaba’s name.
“It’s not Miki’s twin Kozue, or I would have found out,” put in Nanami, whose interest had been piqued by the case and couldn’t stand not knowing the answer. She had set her lackeys and her neurosis-filled brain on the case, and Utena and Anthy weren’t about to look the gift cow in the mouth, so to speak.
Utena continued: “Touga, now, maybe he needed a piano for some reason. I wouldn’t put stealing past him.
“Don’t accuse my o-nii-sama,” Nanami said with shrill indignation.
“Oh of course not,” returned Utena. Fortunately Nanami missed her irony.
Anthy spoke up. “Then we have the probability that one person couldn’t move a piano by themselves.”
“Unless there were elephants involved,” Nanami said darkly.
Suddenly the three henchgirls burst through the door. “No fingerprints, Nanami-sama,” reported the girl with pigtails, standing at attention. “Radiation reads zero. Infrared reading indicates a suspicious figure outside behind the bushes-”
“That’s Saionji,” said Anthy.
“-in that case, no suspicious infrared readings. Here are the aerial reports.” The black-haired girl came forward and set down a stack of glossy white papers.
“Excellent work,” said Nanami in a conspiratorial voice. She turned back to Utena and Anthy. “With these diagrams-why are you so wide-eyed, Utena?-with these diagrams we can pinpoint any suspicious-”
A scream suddenly came from the direction of the music room downstairs.
All of the dorm’s occupants rushed down the stairs.
“Maybe we’ll find the murderer!” squealed Nanami.
“He’s not a murderer, he’s a piano thief,” Anthy reminded her.
“Well, maybe he’s a murderer now.”
Utena ran into the music room. Miki was lying on the floor, as motionless as roadkill. She checked his pulse. Fortunately, there was one.
“Hey, Miki, are you OK?” She shook the obviously-not-OK Miki, trying to wake him up.
“Miki!” shrieked Nanami, coming through the door.
“Oh my, said Anthy, hurrying forward.
Miki’s eyes fluttered open. “Pi… ano….” he croaked. “Noooo….”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get it back,” Utena assured him, helping him up. “Besides, there are other pianos. It’s not like they’re an endangered species.”
“Oh…yes.” Miki tottered forward without support. The girls watched him as he made it all the way to the doorway, then collapsed to the ground, twitching.
“Uh-oh, a relapse,” said Nanami knowingly. “Let’s see if we can move him to the nurse’s office, girls.”
Dios, giving up on thinking of a six-letter word for “stuck-up brother-obsessed bully” and got out his telescope. Ohtori Academy wasn’t doing so well. In fact, half of it was on fire. He glared in its general direction and then injected a sedative directly into his jugular.
“I’ve called all of you-”
“Both of us,” corrected Juri.
“-all of us together today,” smiled Touga, “to collect your letters to the End of the World.”
“Here.” Saionji tossed a package to Touga. Touga, who was already in a precarious position with his feet on the table and his chair on two legs, fell backward and hit his head on the ground.
“I said a letter, not a graduate’s thesis,” said Touga, righting himself and his chair. He had enough good humor today to last him through several undignified falls, and this served as an air bag for his ego. “What about your letter, Juri?”
“I didn’t write one.”
“But Juri! Everyone has to have their letter. Even Miki roused enough to tell me, on his deathbed, that his was underneath his math homework. One might even go so far as to say that if you want to remain a duelist, you write a letter.” He handed Juri a notepad with roses and a pen with girls in swimsuits.
“Why does this say ‘Utena is sexy?’”
“Ha ha. Nanami wrote that. Just concentrate on the letter, Juri. Just remember, the egg is the world and-”
“Yeah, yeah.” Juri flipped to the next page of the notepad.
End of the World:
You’re totally lame. Take your miracle and shove it.
--Juri
She handed it to Touga and walked off.
“If I stay, do I get to see balloons?” Saionji asked eventually.
“Oh, today I chartered the Aurora Borealis,” Touga said smugly. Behind him a plume of smoke rose from a faculty building.
According to the school nurse, Miki had not yet returned to consciousness, although at times he spoke words such as “piano,” “God,” and occasionally “Let me die.” Utena and Anthy were currently kneeling by Miki’s bed, where Utena was trying to convince him to wake up by swearing she’d find the piano and Anthy was looking worried; Nanami was pacing by the door. Her lackeys had just stopped by to tell her that apparently this morning Shiori and Kozue had started a guerilla group called Give Us Back Our Piano (GUBOP) and set fire to some buildings. At the moment, however, Shiori’s group and the teachers had negotiated a cease-fire so everyone could go to math class.
“Oh dear, if only we’d found that piano earlier,” sighed Nanami, who was still pacing by the door now that her three hangers-on had left and wishing she’d thought of a guerilla group before Shiori and Kozue.
“Wow, Nanami, I didn’t know you had so many principles,” said Utena.
“I have lots of principles,” said Nanami, offended. “The first one is to meddle in other people’s business, and the second one is to never let anyone upstage me, and-oh, it’s time for math class. I don’t need to hang around with you freaks any longer. Bye Miki. Get well soon.” She left and slammed the door.
Utena shrugged at Anthy. The shrug could be interpreted as “no big loss.” They two, personally, were happy to ascribe more importance to reviving Miki than going to math class.
“It’s too bad Miki’s not here for this,” said Anthy softly. “Math class is just the kind of thing he used to like so much.”
“He’s still alive, Anthy.”
“Perhaps if we start discussing geometry, he’ll wake up in an attempt to help us.” Anthy pulled a stack of papers from her bag. “Oh, here are Nanami’s aerial maps, too. I’d set my homework on top of it and put everything in my bag when we left.”
They put the photographs on the floor between them and looked through them one by one.
“Hey, what’s this black spot!?” Utena said suddenly, seeing a suspicious shape in one of the photographs.
“It looks like it’s on a roof,” observed Anthy.
“That’s our dorm building’s roof!” realized Utena.
“Right above where the music room is,” mused Anthy.
They left the unconscious Miki’s recovery room quickly and stealthily.
Nanami was hurrying to math class along the side of a dorm building along with many other students. A short ways in front of her, Shiori walked among a group of girls, many of whom had headbands with “GUBOP” written on them.
Nanami was just thinking that if she had a guerrilla group, she would definitely give it a better name, when a piano crashed into the walkway right behind her, severely denting the concrete. Nanami, however, didn’t notice, because at that moment she saw her brother up ahead.
“O-niiiiii-sama!” she called, running up to him. He turned. “Oh, Nanami, hello.” His gaze moved past her. “There’s a piano on the sidewalk.”
Nanami looked back. “Oh, so there is.”
“Seems to have landed there with some force.”
“So, o-nii-sama,” continued Nanami, who had lost interest in pianos now that her brother was there, “are you heading to your math-why is the sky turning funny colors?”
“Those are called the northern lights, Nanami. Also, Shiori set fire to the gym.”
Shiori herself strolled by, surrounded by the group of GUBOP girls, all chattering about that morning’s pyrotechnic protestation efforts. It was nice, thought Shiori, to have a purpose in life.
Utena tore up the stairs in the dorm building that led to a trapdoor in the roof, Anthy keeping pace behind her. They emerged into the bright afternoon air, which would have been clear and cheerful but for the haze in the sky and the slight smell of smoke.
Juri was standing on the other side of the roof, breathing heavily. There was no piano.
Utena and Anthy ran up. Juri whirled, startled. “You!”
The Rose Bride and the aspiring prince looked over the edge of the roof. There it is, thought Utena. Kind of left a dent.
She turned back to the wide-eyed Juri. “Er, why did you steal the piano?”
“Because there are no such things as miracles!” Juri cried, and turned and ran toward the front of the building, sobbing theatrically, as if to throw herself into the bushes. However, somehow she managed to trip over Anthy’s foot, though Anthy had certainly not made any apparent movement, nor had her usual placid expression changed.
“Oh no, Juri, you seem to have fallen down,” noted Anthy.
“I missed, you know,” said Juri stiffly, as she reluctantly let Utena help her up. “I was thinking, you know, that maybe I’d provoke some reaction if I stole the piano, and I did, but she seemed to be enjoying herself so much I thought it might be a better idea to commit a double suicide instead, but I missed, and she probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d gone with Step B and plunged off the roof with a sword in my heart.”
There was a fencing sword, the unsafe variety that is sharp to the extent that it could be used to sacrifice small animals before pagan altars, lying on the rooftop nearby. Utena picked it up and tossed it over the building’s front side. There was a thud and muffled Saionji cursing.
Juri’s shoulders slumped. “Now what can I do…”
Utena patted her shoulder. “It’s OK, Juri. I understand.” She didn’t, but never mind. “Why don’t you come have a cup of tea?”
Touga waited until the other students had cleared out, then walked up to the upended piano and slipped it into his pocket.
Being too important for math class, he returned to his room, where in the late afternoon he sat on his bed reading Miki’s letter and laughing. When he was finished, he tossed it into the fire, which was right outside the window where a righteous GUBOP member had decided some bushes were evil. Juri’s note had already met the same fate.
Touga pulled Saionji’s letter, or rather 73-page document, out of its industrial-sized padded mailing envelope.
“Touga-san, the sheets are on fire,” pointed out the girl sitting on the end of the bed. After setting the bushes on fire, the GUBOP member had seemed at a loss for what to do next, so Touga had opened the window and invited her inside.
Touga waved her comment aside. “Just a moment.”
In fact, he found Saionji’s letter so gripping that he sat there reading it for another hour, sometimes laughing so hard that tears ran down his cheeks. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the sheets, as well as the bed canopy, had caught on fire. The GUBOP girl was determinedly trying put out the fire, or at least the parts near Touga, with a spray bottle.
Much to the girl’s relief, Touga finished whatever he’d been reading and got up from the bed, which immediately flared up with a whoomph. Touga’s right pants leg was on fire, and she hastily put it out with the spray bottle.
Touga put Saionji’s letter carefully back into its envelope for safekeeping as he strolled, and the GUBOP girl rushed, into the adjoining sitting room.
“What’s that piano doing in the corner?” asked the girl, looking at the piano that took up a crowded corner of the sitting room. “Are you learning to play it?” She had joined GUBOP less for the rescuing of pianos than the setting of things on fire, and cared not at all that Touga had the piano in question sitting suspiciously in his quarters.
“No, I’m thinking of sending it to a friend,” replied Touga. “But didn’t you get rather hot in there?” he continued, gesturing to the doorway behind him, through which rampaging orange flames were visible. “Let me loosen your collar.”
Later that day, he sent the piano to the End of the World. Saionji’s letter he sent elsewhere.
The school entered a period of calm, Shiori having decided that she’d set enough things on fire and now thinking up a new way to protest. Classes continued as normal the next day.
Utena was walking from one class to another, Anthy by her side, when she heard Wakaba scream “Utena-sama!!” Suddenly she was hit from behind by what felt like an avalanche. “Aaaaaargh!” she yelled as she collapsed. She lay on the ground, pinned by the weight one her back.
“Utena-sama, you seem to be caught under a piano,” said Anthy.
A piano? But we already know what happened to the piano…and we managed to calm Juri down…thought Utena, as she managed to shift the object aside with Anthy’s help. Finally being able to stand and take a good look, she saw that it was a piano, one made entirely of wood. Wakaba was lying on top of it, holding onto one end and kicking her legs happily.
“What exactly is this?” asked Utena cautiously.
“It’s a piano!” Wakaba leapt off the piano to stand in front of Utena. “I made it in shop class! Do you like it?”
“Er, it’s very nice.”
“Want it? I don’t play the piano. And I heard something about a piano theft, or a murder attempt, or was it a Godzilla attack? La dee da. Want it? I’d give it to you, Utena-sama!”
“The music room does need a piano.” She glanced at Anthy. “Why not? But first, can we stop by the nurse’s office?
Miki was revived by the sound of Anthy’s piano playing, and managed to continue life as usual (in other words, plagued by weird events, surrounded by weird people, and with the occasional duel and weird song) now that the school now had a piano. It wasn’t the best piano; even the keys were made of wood, at least until Nanami took some time off from drowning kittens or whatever she does in her free time to donate some ivory she’d gotten somewhere.
Shiori was miffed that her purpose in life had been taken away so soon, and sulked in her room for days. The most enthusiastic members of GUBOP, the hardcore ones who wouldn’t let anything like a piano having returned stop them, continued to riot and set things on fire and chant their slogan (“Riot and Set Things on Fire”) despite all the detentions they were getting. Eventually the faculty, in desperation, negotiated with the sulking leader Shiori and agreed to pay her an undisclosed sum if she and her group promised not to set anything else on fire, at least not anything important.
Juri had stated, after a nice hot cup of Anthy’s Special Chamomile, that she wouldn’t try to kill Shiori again, at least not by any method involving a piano. So Utena was able to relax.
Except that Touga was walking around looking very pleased with himself, not to mention slightly singed. He must be up to something, she thought, and avoided him as best she could.
At one point the thought crossed Utena’s mind that even though she knew who’d stolen the piano and why, she didn’t know what had happened to it after Juri had pushed it off the roof. Utena told the thought to go away.
Saionji was standing in the Romance section of a pleasant bookstore. He was putting a volume back on the shelf when another title, The Rose that Got Stepped On, by Utena Kiryuu, caught his eye. He’d never heard of an “Utena Kiryuu,” but nevertheless he picked it up and flipped to a random page.
Anthy stared deeply into my eyes, her warm, slender, beautiful, cool,
dark hands clutching my own. “Oh, Saionji-sama,” she said, her voice like
a sigh of wind under jungle trees.
“I know,” I said. My heart beat like one of those musical instruments
you hit with sticks.
“You would not believe the uncouth barbarism of the girl who calls
herself Utena Tenjou. She believes that girls need not wear skirts. She’s good
at sports. She talks like a boy, she wields a sword manfully, she believes that
recalcitrant girls should not be slapped. She has pink hair. Oh, Saionji-sama,
it’s awful.” She put her delicate face in her delicate hands and sobbed.
I put my manly hands on her delicate shoulders. “I believe you, Anthy.
I would believe such evils of her.”
Then Utena herself appeared, the shifty eyes set in her unattractive face fixed
on myself and Anthy, utterly ruining our tender moment of intimacy.
“Utena-sama,” murmured my Anthy, and I could tell that someone needed to be
slapped. Oh, Anthy, my former bride, how could this…
“HEY!!” said Saionji.
Touga, Juri, and Miki were sitting around café tables on the balcony. Miki was timing things with his stopwatch, Touga was lounging, and Juri was reading a newspaper. Visible on the back page was the headline BOY WITH KENDOU SWORD RAMPAGES THROUGH BOOKSTORE.
How are your burn wounds, Touga?” asked Miki. Touga had been sporting various bandages.
“Oh, nothing I can’t handle,” replied Touga gallantly.
“By the way, has the End of the World received our letters yet?” continued Miki eagerly.
“Yes, yes, of course. Unfortunately, yours was rejected. Because of bad grammar.”
“Oh, it…it was?” Miki chewed on his lip and tried to think of any grammatical mistakes he might have made.
“Don’t feel bad, Miki. Juri’s letter wasn’t ah, appropriate either, and, well, you can just ask Juri about that…”
Juri looked up icily and then returned to her newspaper.
“And Saionji’s letter…”-Touga had to pause because he couldn’t resist chuckling-“Saionji’s letter, now…”
At that moment Saionji busted open the double doors to the balcony. “I challenge all of you to a duel! To duels!” he yelled wildly.
“Wow, Saionji’s pissed,” observed Miki.
“Not that he usually isn’t,” put in Juri from behind her newspaper.
“I have a feeling he needs to work off some anger.” Touga drummed his fingers on the side of the chair.
“Pay attention to me!” demanded Saionji, waving his Kendou sword around in an unsafe manner.
Juri folded up her newspaper. “Look, Saionji, we don’t have the Rose Bride. Go duel Utena.”
“Utena… yes….” Saionji stroked his Kendou sword.
Once again Utena Tenjou found herself in the dueling arena in the sky. This time, in addition to the upside-down illusory castle and the great view, there was a piano. Anthy was playing “Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku” on it.
“Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku” is a mysterious song, believed by some to contain the secrets of the universe. Following is its transcription and Plato’s translation.
Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku
Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku
Shussei touroku, senrei meirou, shibou touryoku
(Absolute Destiny Apocalypse
Absolute Destiny Apocalypse
Birth records, death records, DUI records)
Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku x2
Watashi no tanjou, zettai tanjou, mokushiroku
(Absolute Destiny Apocalypse x2
My birth, your birth, the birth of Elvis)
Yami no sabaku ni sanba, uba
Kin no mekki no tougenkyou
Hiru to yoru to ga gyakumawari
Toki no mekki no shitsurakuen
(In a dark city in the desert
Neon-plated gambling signs.
All around the mulberry bush,
We all fall down on the weasel.)
Sodomu no yami
Hikari no yami
Kanata no yami
Hatenaki yami
(Darkness over Gomorrah
Darkness over Sparta
Darkness over Canada
Partly cloudy in Spain)
Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku
Zettai Unmei Mokushi-yami, Mokushiroku
Mokushi kushimo
Shimoku kumoshi
Moshiku shikumo x 1,000
(Absolute Destiny Apocalypse x2
Blah blah blah blah
Blah blah blah blah)
(End)
A number of scholars suspect that Plato was slacking off that day, but never mind.
“If I ever find out who published my le-who perpetrated that insidious crime,” Saionji was threatening, “they’re gonna get it, but meanwhile I’ll take care of you.”
“Did you say something?” Utena turned from admiring Anthy’s piano playing.
“Aaaaaaargh!”
Later that day, when things had quieted down and Saionji’s prone, unblinking body had been dragged from the arena (he had gone into severe shock after losing, although frankly after having lost twice against Utena already he should have expected it), Dios woke up groggily. After he had revived himself somewhat with a glass of cold water, he glanced down and noticed a piano sitting on one side of the arena. Someone had been renovating. I should take up a hobby, thought Dios, and drifted down to give the instrument a try.
Thereafter Ohtori Academy was haunted by mysterious, untraceable piano playing drifting in from the distance. At first it made quite a racket, but the unknown piano player’s skill gradually rose to the point that it was pleasant background music.
For some reason it reminded Utena of her prince. Occasionally she hummed along.
----------
THE END