Chapter Text
Ken Takakura is 12 years old.
It’s the last day of school, and a school dance (just like in America!) has been organised to celebrate. Plastic chairs line the walls of the hall, all facing inwards towards the large, open dancefloor. There are drinks and balloons and snacks and ribbons.
Ken sits in a corner, jiggling his right leg and wishing he was somewhere else. Ken can’t dance; although if he’s honest with himself he’s never really tried. But he knows he’d be terrible at it.
He watches the other kids, standing or sitting in small groups, whispering and talking. Boys and girls, observing, each group waiting for the other to make the first move. The boys are mostly rowdy; joking and laughing and play-fighting. Preening for the girls, though they don’t even realise themselves that that’s what they’re doing. The girls mostly watch, doling out glances or giggling smiles, like princesses handing out favours at a tournament.
Slowly but surely, some of the braver boys venture across the gaping dancefloor and coax some of the girls to join them, accompanied by blushes and whispers. This makes everyone braver, and eventually the dancefloor is mostly full, some dancing as couples and some in groups, the rest hopping around, just glad that school is over for another year.
Ken sits in his corner and stares at his hands.
Some time passes and he thinks that maybe he could get something to drink. That’s when he hears someone clear their throat. He looks up, startled, blinking and adjusting his glasses.
There’s a girl in front of him.
She has glasses, too, and dark brown hair tied into two pigtails. She’s in his class, he thinks. Sawaki? She’s bright red and she’s looking at him.
“E-excuse me? Takakura?”
He nods, not really sure what’s happening.
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, then holds out her hand. “Would you like to come and dance with me?”
Ken’s mouth falls open.
Oh no, he thinks. No, no, no! She wants to dance? What do I do? Does that mean she likes me... it must, right?
He looks around frantically. Some of the other boys are already looking in their direction and laughing; Sawaki’s friends are all huddled together whispering. He looks back at her again. She looks nervous.
But he’s terrified.
He glances again at the laughing boys and then back at her. He can’t dance. He’s going to make a fool of himself. Rin Sawaki looks at him with pleading eyes.
“Takakura? Please?”
He can’t. He... he just can’t. It doesn’t matter if the boys laugh at him, they always do, but he can’t abide the fact that if he dances with Rin now they will spend the rest of the evening laughing at her. He mumbles a “No... sorry.” and shakes his head, eyes on the floor.
He hears rather than sees her walk away. The boys start to jeer and pelt him with plastic cups. He glances across the dancefloor; Rin is there, surrounded by her friends. She’s crying.
You did that, Ken, he thinks.
Ken Takakura shrinks back into the plastic chair as much as he can, and wishes he was somewhere else.
Ken Takakura is 20 years old.
He stood and looked at the entrance to the University Students Centre and swallowed hard. Black and white posters, stuck to the inside of the glass doors with jaggedly torn pieces of sellotape, proclaimed the date and time of RoleCon – the largest roleplaying convention in this part of Japan. He swallowed again. The date and time were today, and now. He suddenly wasn’t sure that this was such a good idea.
Jiji came up behind him and clapped him playfully on the back. He was so much taller than Ken that it still knocked him forwards a step. He sighed and adjusted his glasses, then turned around to look at his friend.
“C’mooooon, dude!” said Jiji, giving him a reassuring grin. “This is gonna be fun! Besides,” he said with a wink, “too late to chicken out now, man!”
Ken shifted uncomfortably where he stood, sending a glance back towards the glass doors. “But, I mean… I’ve never done this before. You know how nervous I am around people I’ve never met.”
Kinta, who had been straggling behind them, came and stood beside Ken, adjusting his own glasses with a flourish. “Chin up, Private Takakura! These peons will soon be trembling before our brilliance!” he proclaimed as he looked down his nose at the entrance in front of them. “We have roleplaying in our veins, you and I! Unlike Enjoji here, who gets by on his looks and questionable charm.”
Jiji laughed, throwing both hands across his heart as though he’d just been stabbed. “Kinny! I’m wounded, man! What’d I ever do to you, huh?”
Kinta smirked, pushing his glasses up with his finger. “Quiet down, you outlandish bastard. Let’s go in; glory awaits!”
They headed towards the doors, Jiji gasping theatrically and yelping “Outlandish?! Me?!” Ken hesitated and hung back, looking nervously down at the crumpled convention registration form in his hand. Kinta had been half-right, he supposed. He didn’t exactly have ’roleplaying in his veins’, but he had been doing it for a while now. He’d started playing Dungeons and Dragons when he was twelve, and had fallen in love with it immediately. He didn’t exactly have friends in school, though… so it hadn’t been until he started University that he played really regularly. He’d even somehow managed to get two (two! Count ’em!) friends out of it. Here at this convention, there would be loads of roleplayers. Loads. Of. Them.
And therein lay the rub.
Ken had always been shy, especially around people he didn’t know. He’d grown up in a quiet household; his father stoic and his mother timid. They loved him and cared for him, he knew that; but feelings were something that no-one ever spoke of, and he spent a large part of his childhood being the obedient, good boy who simply pretended that he didn’t have any. At least, not any that were difficult.
At school he was mostly a cipher. Never really seen but never entirely ignored. The bullies tended to leave him alone; Ken always suspected that it had less to do with any altruism on their part, and was more likely because they simply couldn’t be bothered with him.
Of course, the thing with Aira had turned the last couple of years of his high-school existence upside-down. But after how that had all ended… well, he’d just come to understand that he quite simply wasn’t deserving of human affection. That’s all there was to it.
Ken looked up from the paper in his hands and back at the doors. He closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. “It’s now or never, Ken,” he said to himself, clenching his fists and crumpling the paper in his hand even further. “If you don’t go in there now, you-“
“KEN! SERIOUSLY DUDE!”
Ken yelped and opened his eyes with a start. Jiji was poking his head out through the doors, eyebrows raised. “Dude, don’t just stand there! What are you gonna do, go home? I drove us here!”
Ken managed a nervous chuckle and ran a hand through his hair, pulling at it as he did so. “Uh, r-right. It’s okay, Jiji, I’m coming.” He took another deep breath and walked towards the doors, laughing as Jiji stood there waving his arms, guiding Ken in like he was guiding a plane on a runway.
-------------------------
Ken had initially been surprised by how well organised the convention seemed to be, and by the variety of stuff that was available to play. When Jiji had brought the brochure with him to one of their regular gaming sessions, it had been the fact that Ken already recognised a lot of the gaming systems that had helped convince him to sign up. Not that Jiji would have taken no for an answer anyway.
They’d been playing together for nearly two years now, and had tested a lot of different stuff. D&D, Vampire: The Masquerade, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulu, Traveller, and a lot more. Jiji, who had the attention span of a labrador puppy, was constantly buying any new stuff he came across and insisting they had to try it out. Kinta was always more than happy to oblige – he was often more interested in achieving the ’perfect build’ than actually playing the game.
As for Ken... well, he wasn’t too bothered either way. For him, roleplaying had always been kind of an escape. For a few hours every weekend, he didn’t have to be awkward, boring, weird Ken. He could be someone else. Someone better.
Looking around once he’d passed through the glass doors, he kinda wished he was someone else right now.
Everyone here was dressed like they were in a metal band. He didn’t think he’d ever seen so much black before. He looked down at what he was wearing and groaned. Jeans, red Converse, and a goddamn fucking Kermit the Frog t-shirt. He reached up and pulled at his hair some more. Even amongst other nerds he didn’t fit in.
He looked around and saw Jiji nearby, leaning up against the wall and already flirting shamelessly with a girl in a long, black satin dress. Well, that was him occupied for the foreseeable future. Ken huffed a little in annoyance. Honestly, it would probably be a miracle if Jiji made it on time to any of their sessions. Kinta had already disappeared; probably wanting to be early for their first game, so that he could pore over the rulebooks one last time.
Ken sighed and hefted his backpack. Directly ahead of him on the wall was a large whiteboard, which had been divided into squares. Moving closer, he saw that it was a schedule for the day – the names of each session, what roleplaying system it was, who was running it, and what room it was in. He started looking for the games he’d signed up for; it was mostly sci-fi settings, with weird tech and alien races, or eldritch horror stuff. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the fantasy settings; he just didn’t really think he had the imagination to pull it off if he was going to be playing with strangers.
His gaze slid across the board and came to rest on two large columns on the right hand side, marked with the word ‘Freeforms’. Hmmm. He hadn’t signed up for any of those; Jiji, on the other hand, had been super excited.
“C’mon Ken! You gotta do it man, the Freeforms are gonna be ah-may-zing!”
Ken looked at Jiji as he waved around the information booklet for this Convention thing he’d been babbling on about. It had taken two weeks of convincing to get Ken to agree to go, but this ‘Freeform’ stuff just seemed weird.
“I don’t even know what it is, Jiji.”
Jiji grinned. “It’s the coolest thing ever! Get this – it’s roleplaying where you actually PLAY the characters!”
Ken raised an eyebrow. “Jiji, that describes every roleplaying system known to man.”
Kinta snorted and looked up from the AD&D Second Ed Player’s Manual he was leafing through. “He’s talking about LARPing, Takakura.” He looked at Ken and made ‘air quotes’ as he spoke. “Live Action Role Playing?” Snapping his book shut, he leaned back in the sofa he was sitting on, flamboyantly adjusting his glasses. “It’s like a hybrid between roleplaying and amateur theatre that takes the worst parts of both. Usually no dice, very few stats, often no ‘proper’ character sheet and big groups. Just Goths wandering around talking to each other in British accents for two hours. Avoid those things like the plague.”
Ken blinked and looked over at Jiji. “Actually, for me? That does sound like a complete nightmare.”
Jiji ran a hand across his face and slapped Kinta playfully with the booklet. “Kinny! Why you gotta sink my battleship, huh?” He looked back at Ken, almost pleading. “C’mon, it’ll be fun, I promise! You’re my bestest bud, I don’t wanna do it alone!”
Amazingly, Ken had held firm. Jiji had a knack for convincing him to do a lot of stuff he normally wouldn’t; but the thought of humiliating himself in front of twenty or thirty other people had been too much. He looked across the rest of the whiteboard; where was their first session? He adjusted his glasses and tugged at his hair a little, and that’s when he heard the voice.
“Newbie, huh?”
Ken bristled. He hated people thinking he didn’t know what he was doing. “Honestly,” he thought, “you put one Kermit the Frog t-shirt on, and everybody thinks that you’ve never roleplayed before.” He tensed his shoulders and turned towards the voice, speaking as he did so. “For your information, I’ve been roleplaying for quite a number of-“
And that’s when he saw her.
Auburn hair, cherry-brown eyes and quite possibly the pinkest sweater he’d ever seen in his entire life. She was staring at him with a tiny smirk on her face.
Him.
She was staring at him.
His breath hitched in his throat, and all he got out was a squeak that sounded like “yeeee.”
Her smile broadened and she nodded with the air of someone who was very satisfied with themselves. “Yup!” she said. “Convention newbie, all right! Let’s see what you’re signed up for.”
At that she reached out and grabbed the crumpled registration form from Ken’s hand, and before he knew it he was watching, horrified, as she scanned the paper with her eyes.
“Wait! I... um... what are you doing?” he spluttered.
“Wow,” she drawled, pulling her hands away from his frantic attempts to snatch the paper back. “Lotta sci-fi stuff here... and extradimensional horrors too, I see. Guess you like the occult, huh?” Her eyes met his over the top of the form, and then flicked down to his chest. “Nice shirt,” she said.
Ken groaned inwardly. “W-well, a lot of science fiction is based on known facts! It makes it easier to roleplay!”
The girl scoffed. “Pfft! Aliens are facts?”
Ken huffed and folded his arms. “There’s plenty of proof, you know. More than there is for a bunch of fantasy children’s stories about monsters or... or ghosts!”
The girl grinned, leaning forward and pushing her finger into his chest. Ken gasped at the touch; for some reason it felt so hot that he thought she might burn a hole in his shirt. “Oh-ho!” she said. “Paranormal phenomena are well documented! And are you trying to say that you think that stuff like the Baba Yaga is for kids?”
“Ghost hunting is pseudoscience!” he hissed. “And the Baba Yaga is literally a story to scare children!”
“Admit it,” she said with a grin, “fantasy is just too hard for you!”
“Too hard!?” he cried. “Of course it’s not too hard!”
Grinning triumphantly, she reached over and grabbed a pen from the whiteboard. “In that case,” she said, “you won’t mind me signing you up for something.”
Ken blinked. Wait, what?
“What!?” he said.
She scribbled something on his registration form. “’Murder Most Regal’ needs players,” she said, “so I’m signing you up for that. I’ll take your form to the organisers so they can add you to the list.”
“What!?”
Satisfied, she put the cap back on the pen and gave Ken a grin. “See you tomorrow, spaceman!” she said, and headed off down the hallway with a wave. She stopped just before she disappeared round a corner, turning around to look at him again. “That is, if you even have the balls to show up!” she called out. And then she was gone.
Ken stood there and wondered what the hell had just happened. He turned quickly around, scanning the whiteboard for the name of the game he’d just been pressganged into. He didn’t see it at first; not until his gaze moved over to the large columns on the right-hand side.
The freeforms.
There it was: ‘Murder Most Regal’ – a tale of murder and intrigue set in a fantasy Royal Court. Freeform for 30 players. No Costume Required.’
Ken went pale and swallowed hard.
“Oh boy,” he said.