Chapter 452. An Exciting Night with Two Girls Outside the City: The Alleged Haunted Castle. (2/7)
“It was the maid cafe itself, it was only a maid cafe in name. There were no cute girls in maid costumes at all!” I slammed my fist against the wall out of frustration, albeit using some restraint to avoid making too big a commotion, as I recalled the traumatic scene I walked in upon that day.
“It was all... propaganda purported by the media. The images of the place that they plastered everywhere on their site and used in articles promoting their establishment were all a lie! A bloody fictitious lie to paint a pretty picture! Turns out they only wear those maid costumes for photoshoots as part of an advertising campaign to lure naive and gullible suckers in.”
“Weebs and otakus alike were nothing more than the unsuspecting prey whom’s foolish little dreams they greedily fed and thrived upon. It was the only maid cafe in our city after all.”
“I’d originally only really went for the food and ordered it for pickup, but not only did the food suck, there was not a single maid costume in sight when I entered to pick up my order. One out of ten, would not recommend.”
I’d only gone there for research purposes to write a scene for a story but...
“I was too naive back then and the fond memories I had of anime turned out to be nothing more than idealistic lies. From the ramen and yakisoba to the maids. All of it.”
I slumped down to the ground in an overdramatic fashion as my heart ached from the trauma of that day, where my final hopes and dreams crumbled to pieces and shattered.
“Dawn… anime... lied to me. The one thing I thought I could maybe believe in... The ramen that would soothe my weary soul… There was no chicken soup for this particular man’s soul. Only half-cooked eggs that when eaten made me want to throw up.”
“The eggs looked so good in the anime too. But that beauty hid an ugly underside. It speaks volumes about our society as a whole. That ramen was the perfect depiction and embodiment of our twisted society. We live in a society... Dawn. A society where nothing is ever as good as we’re led on to believe.”
“It looked great on the surface, but it left a bitter taste in your mouth when you finally ate it. Dawn... don’t make the same mistake I did. Keep your expectations low so you don’t end up a traumatized survivor like me.”
“Ran…” Dawn fell to her knees and grabbed both my hands.
I looked up into her serene eyes and asked, “What?”
“I understand, it must have been so hard on yuh to tell your story. But… yuh only tried ramen and yakisoba from one maid cafe, right?”
“Yeah… so?”
“Then… without trying another maid cafe how can yuh say for certain they’re all the same? What if it was just a one-off in your city and the others are better? We can go to the big city here again and try one! Yuh can’t give up after just one bad experience! Yuh have to stand up and never give in to despair!”
“Stop! Dawn, you’ve been deceived by shounen, you need to accept seinen. The world is a dark place, it’s not the blindly bright world depicted in shounen. You’re too naive.”
“I want to believe.”
“Pfft! Hahahaha! Like seriously? What are you two even doing?” Rosa held her stomach and crouched down low to the ground laughing herself to tears.
Dawn released my hand, a slight blush on her cheeks, having gotten too caught up in our little melodramatic act.
“Rosa, shhhh! If we’re too loud we might wake my dad up.”
“Ah. Pfft. Right…” despite quieting down, she continued to snicker while trembling. It seemed she found it even funnier when she realized she had to keep quiet. Somehow, things were always funnier when you knew you couldn’t laugh. When reading or watching something funny in a library, it often made things funnier than they really were. I suppose the inappropriateness of certain things was something that made one want to instinctively laugh.
Like a long drawn out silent fart that slowly builds in volume over time in a library versus at a loud concert. That sort of low-hanging immature humor was hilarious in the former case but not nearly as much in the latter case. The context of the situation could transform something completely normal and mundane into something ungodly funny.
“Let’s get out of here before Rosa dies from trying to hold back her laughter.”
“Yeah.”
I stood up, grabbed Rosa’s hand, and dragged her out of the house.
As soon as I climbed on the back of Dawn’s pickup truck to enter the token trunk, a loud tooty fart came from the direction of the stables. Caught off guard by the suddenness and the sheer volume, my hand slipped when climbing up and I fell into the trunk while bursting out into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.
God damn it! How did I fall for that low-hanging fruit? It was just the timing considering how I’d just been thinking about this exact topic.
“Are yuh okay?” Dawn rolled down the window inside her truck and asked worriedly from the driver’s seat.
Rosa who’d been holding in her laughter the entire time cracked and started laughing hysterically in the passenger seat while covering her face.
“I don’t get it? What’s so funny? Are yuh… just laughing because of a horse farting?” Dawn asked cluelessly. The sound of a horse’s loud fart was probably common for her to hear.
Neither of us could answer. We were laughing for two completely different reasons.
Dawn, who couldn’t figure out the joke, seemingly found our incomprehensible laughter funny and inevitably succumbed to her own fit of laughter.
Our skit got Rosa, a fart got me, and our laughter got Dawn.
…
It took a while for us to finally hit the road because of how long we were laughing. Only when we settled down were we able to depart.
I laid down in the trunk watching the moon and the stars while Dawn drove. In a way, it reminded me of my childhood whenever I traveled by car with my mother. Traveling by motorcycle was fun, but as we didn’t travel on it when it was dark out for safety concerns, I’d missed out on this feeling of nostalgia during our trip up until now. A motorcycle provided a completely fresh and different experience I was unaccustomed to, it wasn’t like a car where you could pull over anywhere at any time and take a nap inside.
It’d been about an hour since we left Dawn’s place and we still hadn’t arrived.
“Rosa, are we almost there yet?” I called out and asked.
“We should be. Keep an eye out for it though, I don’t know exactly where it is since it’s not on any map I could find online.”
“What? It’s not on a map? How do you even know for sure it exists then?”
“I don’t. I just saw the story about it online and wanted to go on a little adventure to check it out and see if it’s real or not.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You should have said that sooner.”
“If I did you would have resisted coming with everything you had.”
“Of course.”
“And that’s exactly why I didn’t.”
“Haaaaaah. Let’s just go back, there’s no way this place really exists if it’s not on any maps. People make shit up all the time online. The story you read is obviously completely made up.”
“We’re already all the way out here, don’t be such a downer. Just help us look out for it. It could be a good distance away down one of these rural roads.”
I reluctantly sat up and looked out into the darkness.
“It’s way too dark to see it if it’s far away.”
“Just keep looking. We can start heading down some of the rural roads every now and then.”
“... that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. The odds of us finding a place we don’t know the exact location of or road to turn off on is practically zero.”
“So what? We’ll find it.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
“My instincts.”
“Your… uh… animal instincts?” Animal, was naturally code for assassin since Dawn was with us.
“No, my womanly instincts.”
Womanly instincts? Are you kidding me? If it was your instincts as an assassin I might accept it. But womanly instincts? Hah! Yeah, right. The only thing those are good for is for sniffing out liars and cheaters. I’ll die of old age before those womanly instincts find a place that clearly doesn’t exist.
…
One hour later…
I looked up with a deadpan expression.
Scary.
What the hell is with womanly instincts?
Isn’t it too damn strong?
