"What do you think?" Shiori Rin asked Rei Rin. They were both lying in their own beds in their slightly cramped room. Even with their new acquisition of two hundred million yen, their house only had two bedrooms. It was only fair that her parents shared one, and the kids shared one, even if they had outgrown sharing the same bed. Nothing could be done immediately with the new money, and since they had offered all of it to their parents this first year, it was no longer Shiori's concern. If they wanted to build a new house with it, that was fine. If not, that was fine too. What mattered most was she had been able to repay the debt she had accumulated to her parents over so many years, without jeopardizing her ability to provide for herself or her future kids, which was a dream come true. After Kotone's speech about Choice Givers having a moral duty to reproduce like bunnies, Shiori had felt the pressure to hurry up and find a guy. She had managed to avoid thinking about boys all through high school, since there was always plenty of other things to do. She had her friends, her dog, softball, Taekwondo, studying, the wyrds, and her status as a Choice Giver to live up to. How could she possibly fit in a boyfriend? But now that she was earning 100 million yen a year, her earlier priorities just seemed childish. Why play around, or even study, when you could start a family and create something of true value? Shiori didn't feel the need to prove herself in the workplace, saving the world was surely enough public service for a lifetime. But she did need to keep moving forward into adulthood. Receiving this money accelerated that need, because it removed all further excuses to delay. Becoming an adult meant two separate things, financial independence and starting a family. She had achieved the first a little earlier than expected, but that meant there was no reason left to not move on to the second. Even if she knew that, she was still at a loss. How did one go about meeting boys? Who could possibly qualify? Why would anyone who qualifies want her? It's not like she had had to fight boys off with a stick during high school. Maybe it was time to grow out her hair.

　　"I still think it's a terrible idea to hire me on as a consultant. I'm not like the rest of you." Rei sighed and rubbed her eyes.

　　"For all we know that makes your insight all the more valuable." Shiori countered. "Besides, I'm not letting you put all this work off on me."

　　The two were staring at printouts of endless essays sponsored by Angle Corporation. They were simple questions, "What is your ideal society? Who would it be composed of? How would it be run? How would you like to see it evolve? What beliefs are non-negotiable? What do you value most and why? What can we learn from the past? What needs to be changed from the world of today?" The essays weren't sent to the judges until a minimum of ten thousand people had signed their petition, which changed it from an individual's dream to a viable settlement. The winner had been promised a chance to make their dream come true. Ostensibly, Angle Corporation had bought a number of islands in the Pacific that were currently uninhabited, and was willing to give them away to anyone with a group that wanted to people them, provided they write a good enough essay answer. In reality, the winners would be scryed to filter against Dead Enders. If they passed this test, their leader would be told the truth, under an oath of secrecy, that they were being given a ticket to another world entirely, if they had the courage to take it. It was up to the hired consultants of Angle Corporation to decide on the winners of the essay contest though. For such an obscure reward, the chance to start a new, albeit extremely small, sovereign nation, there had been an overwhelming response. Essays had poured in from around the world, written in every language, which the wyrds had had to translate for them. Despite the seeming contentment people had with their place of residence, it was obvious many still dreamed of something better, and were ready to abandon everything to pursue that dream. Shiori loved Japan, so leaving to an alien world didn't especially appeal to her. But what of people born in Uganda? Or Yemen? Or Pakistan? Or Haiti? Or Venezuela? What hope did they really have? What freedom, what opportunity, what happiness could they expect to enjoy? Wouldn't a chance to start anew be worth anything to them? And what of the people who felt America, or Canada, or France, or even Japan was a Uganda or a Haiti compared to the quality of their dream nation? What if people felt like they were in Yemen even living in the free world, it fell so far short of their ideals? Couldn't these people also be willing to abandon everything for a chance to start over?

　　Obviously they were. Which meant Angle Corporation had a healthy number of contestants to choose from, and that their job as consultants really was going to take a bite out of their lives.

　　"I think it's fine. I'd give them a planet." Rei said.

　　"Even though they have a public dress code?" Shiori asked.

　　"Sure. Every country has public decency laws of some sort. So what if this one's a little stricter? Everyone who signed it is clearly willing to abide by it, so who exactly does it hurt?" Rei challenged.

　　"Their unborn children, who never had a chance to agree ahead of time." Shiori said.

　　"The same children who will be escaping much worse if their parents leave their current countries. I don't think they have much right to complain." Rei replied.

　　"I still don't like it. Why is purity their highest value? They're so worried about losing what they have they'll never concentrate on creating more." Shiori said.

　　"Should we just throw everyone out that doesn't answer "Love, Beauty, and Truth?"" Rei asked.

　　"I don't know. It would certainly lower the number of entries. Is there anything else people could credibly value?" Shiori asked her sister.

　　"Temperance. Justice. Wisdom. Piety. Courage." Rei offered.

　　"Isn't that Plato?" Shiori asked, recalling their college course.

　　"Yep, or Socrates if you prefer. Never a mention of love, beauty, or truth in his works. Are we going to throw out Plato as beneath our notice?" Rei asked.

　　"I guess not. So love, beauty, truth, or Plato?" Shiori suggested.

　　"Plato was just an example! We have to check them all, idiot." Rei threw her pen at Shiori from across the room.

　　"Fineeeeeee." Shiori sighed, shuffling her endless papers. "But is purity specifically good enough?"

　　"It could be. Purity could include all sorts of things, like honesty and devotion. If purity is interpreted loosely enough, it could contain an entire world's worth of virtue." Rei answered.

　　"Well, if you like them. . . I guess we have plenty of worlds to spare, we may as well give them one." Shiori placed the essay into the 'passed' box.

　　"Do you know how ridiculously wealthy that makes us sound?" Rei asked, laughing.

　　"It's only for a brief moment, until Masanori dies. It's not like mankind has become all-powerful. We have to use this opportunity while we can." Shiori protested. "Magic is wealth. If we're too stingy, if we don't help anyone with it, I could never forgive myself."

　　"Actually, it's briefer than that." Awesome flashed a deep red.

　　"What do you mean?" Shiori asked, rolling over on her bed to look at her wyrd directly.

　　"If time really is moving ten times faster in the etheric plane than down here on Earth, that moves the timeline of my magic's depletion up from two hundred years. . .to twenty. Since that prediction was six years ago. . .wyrds, including Xanadu, now have fourteen years left before we all die." Awesome admitted.

　　"That. . .that's impossible." Shiori felt like someone had punched her in the stomach. "You were supposed to outlive me, and my children, and my grandchildren. It was supposed to be some problem that never came up. You were supposed to watch over us until all of humanity was healed. That was the plan!"

　　"I'm sorry, Shiori. The part about folding time was outside our calculations." Awesome blinked. "It only occurred to me after our Christmas conversation, that I had dramatically shortened my own lifespan by coming down here. It's okay. We can still carry out Project Angle Ark. That's enough."

　　"It's not enough!" Shiori retorted angrily. Tears were starting to burn in her eyes, and her throat was constricting. Why am I crying about something fourteen years away? Stupid! Get it together! You don't like Awesome anyway! "I was promised two hundred years! Fourteen isn't enough! How could you? We promised to be together for life, didn't we?"

　　"Yes, well, if I die, that kind of fulfills the promise, doesn't it?" Awesome joked.

　　"No, it doesn't!" Shiori's angrily wiped at the tears running down her cheeks. "It doesn't fulfill our promise at all, stupid. You have to stay with me until I die, it was a promise for my life. You can't just teleport into a girl's room, beg her into forming a lifelong contract with you, and then die. It's not supposed to mean that! That's too cruel."

　　Rei looked stricken, even though she wasn't crying. She hugged Onyx to her bosom and refused to let go.

　　"It can't be helped. Wyrds are a doomed race. A dead end. Let's just focus on the positive, at what magic can do while we have it. There's still plenty of time." Awesome coaxed.

　　"I can't just watch someone I love die while focusing on the positive!" Shiori shouted. "That's it. We're saving your world. I'm sick of this deadline. I'm sick of your dead end. I'll smash it to pieces! You can't just leave me. I refuse. You're a lying cheating philanderer if you leave me at, at. . ."

　　"Thirty-four." Rei offered helpfully.

　　"At thirty-four!" Shiori finished indignantly.

　　"Where does philandering come into it?" Awesome blinked in high pitched protest.

　　"You just are!" Shiori said. "And I'm telling Magnolia you love her too!"

　　"You promised you wouldn't!" Awesome flashed angrily. "How is she supposed to respond when we're all glass orbs? And how can we turn a circle of three friends into two lovers and a third wheel? Don't you understand how counterproductive it is?"

　　"That was years ago, it no longer applies." Shiori brushed his concerns aside. "If you're going to die in fifteen years, I will not let you two just drag your relationship on and on like this. And I'm sure glass orbs can bump or something."

　　"I don't know where to start." Awesome glowed, amazed. "You were just lecturing me about keeping promises. . .and bumping?"

　　"I would be overjoyed if I got to bump the boy I loved. Don't look down on bumping." Shiori set her jaw determinedly. "And it's only important to keep promises when the person you made the promise to benefits from your keeping it. I need you to keep your promise, but you need me to break mine. The situations are entirely different."

　　"For that matter, why is it urgent I confess to Magnolia if you're going to save our lives? In that case, I'll have thousands of years to find the right time." Awesome complained.

　　"So you admit I will save you?" Shiori smiled.

　　"No! This isn't a matter of persuading me. I want to live on, so what more could you tell me to do? It has nothing to do with Choice Giving. Sometimes things happen entirely outside of our control. Only God could change that." Awesome said.

　　"And sometimes people give up too soon, and need persuading before they try again. In which case, I can do something." Shiori replied.

　　"And that's if Shiori can't persuade God to answer her prayers to save you." Rei pointed out.

　　"Who's the expert here? You earthlings, or me?" Awesome flashed. "I scryed all of this out long ago. There's no more magic. There's no right answer. Our civilization has invented everything. If there were a new source of magic, we would have found it. There's no other power supply that can remotely sustain us, compared to magic. All the energy of this universe is like a thimbleful of magic to us. Folding downwards is inherently useless, because everything beneath us is microscopic compared to us. There's no way to fold upwards. . ." But Awesome trailed off, remembering a certain someone.

　　""It was working."" Shiori quoted, a look of awe on her face. The group was silent. Everyone knew what that meant.

　　"In retrospect, smashing Mastermind's computer may have been a bad idea, huh?" Onyx flashed wryly.

　　"This doesn't change anything. Mastermind had a unique magic, it's impossible to reproduce." Awesome said doggedly.

　　"Anything that exists in the natural world can be replicated. There is no such thing as a unique event. If we recreate the circumstances, we can recreate the event. That's just the laws of physics. If there is a magic of upward folding, it's still out there. A spell, a process, that your civilization could use too. There is a way to fold upwards. To extend a conduit up, just like you've sent one down, to a world of such greater size and magnificence, that the magic of your entire universe would just be a thimbleful compared to its energy. Magic is just energy, if used correctly, it can do anything we're doing. Even whatever Mastermind and Miyamoto were doing. You just have to find out what." Shiori encouraged her wyrd.

　　"There has to be some technical reason why it won't work." Awesome said. "My scrying is perfect. Wyrds have reached a dead end. It has to mean there's no other way to harvest magic."

　　"Wyrds reached a dead end the moment they gave up on themselves." Rei said, realizing. "You're just like me. It was never magic that ran out. It was hope. You just ran out of hope."

　　"So what, all wyrds, simultaneously, lost the will to invent a new power source, and preferred to die, even though there was a perfectly easy, available, foreseeable one right there in front of them?" Awesome challenged.

　　"Awesome, I know you don't want to hear this." Rei looked away uncomfortably. "But the way to kill a planet is to kill its Choice Givers. Wyrds ran out of Choice Givers. . .so. . .yes, you could have stopped inventing things. . .you could have fallen into despair. Just like we would have. . .just like Onyx wanted us to do here. It's not impossible at all."

　　"We didn't run out of Choice Givers, not the way you're implying, that's impossible. A society as advanced as ours, with scrying that keeps us all following the light, only a material cause could make our best wyrds fail to find a route. If our magic hadn't been running out, we would have all sorts of wyrds to follow, just like you." Awesome said.

　　"That's just pride talking. Wyrds aren't flawless, or else they wouldn't have tried to kill us. It's stupid to doom your universe because you're too proud to admit that. Awesome, forget your pride for a moment and think of this: You either believe in me or you don't. Am I a Choice Giver, or not? Can I break down dead ends, or can I not? Is this my job, or is it not? Can I make the impossible possible, or can I not? It's this simple: Do you trust me?" Shiori stared at Awesome with her wide, straightforward eyes.

　　"You. . .know I do." Awesome sighed.

　　"Do you trust my judgment over your own?" Shiori asked.

　　"You know I do." Awesome said.

　　"Mastermind said "It was working." If wyrds had ever thought about it, like Mastermind had, they could have invented a process to fold upwards too. But you all gave up instead. All your scrying showed you was that you were going to give up. Now that humans are here to give you new ideas, all of that goes out the window. Wyrds still have Choice Givers they can choose to follow. Us. All of you are Dead Enders by choice. If you want to live, follow us. We're here for you. I'm here for you, Awesome. Don't push me away." Shiori ordered.

　　"I. . .what do you want me to do?" Awesome surrendered.

　　"Well, for starters, I'm going to call Chiharu, to bring Cyan over to translate the morse code. Then we're going to kill you a few thousand times. It's time to talk to your pals up top again." Shiori smiled, energy welling up through her chest. She was going to do it. She was going to save the world again. Just a different world this time.

　　"I hate using eternal zero like this." Rei sighed. "I have to say the same words a trillion times."

　　"We have water this time." Shiori comforted her sister. "Plus, we'll demand they bring down medals with their next wyrd, when they tell us it's worked."

　　"I guess we still have Saki to give an extra wyrd. Since Chiharu seems intent to bond her whole family." Rei giggled.

　　Shiori laughed too. "What could possibly go wrong?" Chiharu had said. And then she had confessed to everyone that her sister had bonded Bubbles while they were away on Christmas Eve. Shiori would never let that one go. She dialed Chiharu's number on the cell phones Masanori kept funded for their Choice Giving hotline.

　　"Hello, Aiko?" Shiori asked innocently.

　　"You have the wrong number." Chiharu grumbled.

　　"Oh, sorry, I was just trying to reach the nearest wyrd contracted Sakai. Can you fetch Aiko?" Shiori asked.

　　"It's way too late, she has school tomorrow, and you are not funny." Chiharu said.

　　"I guess you'll have to do then. I mean, since the much more reliable, dependable, and qualified Aiko is occupied." Shiori thought she was hilarious.

* * *

　　Aiko Sakai wasn't unpopular in school. To be unpopular, you had to be noticed. Aiko was a ghost. During class, she always sat at the back. She did her classwork, and her homework, and efficiently got A's on all of it, as a matter of habit. When called upon during class to answer a question she would always answer promptly and correctly. Otherwise, she wouldn't volunteer to answer anything. She didn't get into any conversations with the rest of her classmates, and thus never made a verbal slip that could have drawn any attention to her in the first place. She was pretty enough that no one made fun of her looks, but not so pretty that anyone would single her out for them either. Therefore, she had perfected the technique of complete invisibility. When she had free time, she would get out a book and read it, effectively blocking out the outside world. Since she was rejecting everyone else, no one could perceive her as a pitiable girl rejected by the outside world. She received neither antipathy nor sympathy -- she had made her choice of companions, books, and everyone just left her to them.

　　But there was a difference between today and her entire life up until this point: This time she was wearing her sky-blue, Bubbles-begemmed underwear, and instead of being shut off from the rest of her class, she was more deeply aware of everyone in it than even the closest of friends. Her magic was mind reading. She could only receive thoughts, but how she received them still included a great deal of versatility. She had quickly learned to shut her mind off from minds she didn't want to read, and to focus in on a mind she did want to read. There were also dexterous ways to catch people's surface thoughts, without getting an entire deluge of their full emotions and self-identity. She felt like a brain surgeon, able to peel away any number of layers of her target's brain, just like an onion, getting as shallow or deep a distance into their souls as she pleased. Certainly, it was an invasion of privacy, but Aiko didn't worry about that. The rules of privacy existed for various purposes -- people didn't want to be embarrassed, no one wanted their reputations to be hurt, no one wanted to be taken advantage of through insider knowledge, people didn't want to trust strangers with sensitive information, and so on. So long as the violator of a target's privacy didn't follow that up with some malicious or selfish act that harmed the individual affected, Aiko couldn't see any valid objection to mind reading.

　　In truth, people fundamentally wished to be understood. That was why speech and communication had been invented in the first place. The fact that she could understand people without being deceived by lies just meant she could gain all the positives of human communication without any of the negatives. Good people who wished to communicate accurately had no reason to fear a mind reader who could understand them accurately, who wished no harm to them or anyone else. Since everyone wanted to be understood, which was the same wish that everyone shared to be loved, she was actually doing good people a service. As for bad people, she certainly wasn't doing them a disservice, and she tended to not dwell on their thoughts for overly long periods anyway. There was little worth understanding about them.

　　Chiharu had already told her that there wasn't a single Choice Giver she'd ever met who didn't believe the ends justified the means. This was because anyone hung up on worries about means could find themselves trapped, pinned, outfoxed, and doomed into an obvious absurdity. One simple example was a case where an alien being threatened to blow up the entire planet unless a single virgin was sacrificed to it, in which case it would fly away and never bother Earth again. Since there was no way to defeat the alien, by definition, and by definition the alien was telling the truth, the question came down to a simple either/or: Either the whole Earth, including the virgin, dies by the alien's hands, or a single virgin dies by your own hands, and everyone else is saved. Anyone who could not, or would not perform this simple moral calculus was not suited to Choice Giving. In fact, they weren't suited to holding any authority or to make any judgments, about anything, whatsoever. The cases could be less exotic, and thus more applicable, in small simple steps. For instance, Immanuel Kant was so opposed to lying that he held it immoral to lie even to a murderer carrying a bloody axe as to where his fleeing victim's location was, if the teller knew the truth of the answer and the murderer asked him. This sort of means-first thinking always led to similar absurdities. War, for instance, was always wrong, even if the other person started it and their sole goal was your extermination. Or it was always wrong to collect taxes, because taxes were coercion, which was theft, even if the taxes were what preserved an orderly and prosperous society, which no one had the benevolence to support of their own free will. The stumbling blocks of means-first thinking were manifold and they were everywhere. They could always be identified by some strident speech about rights, or principles, that trumped everyone and everything else. What Dead Meansers didn't realize is that nothing trumped life. Nothing trumped life's ability to continue surviving, growing, changing, and progressing into the future. This was a good that no right, no principle, and no justice could oppose, on pain of its soul.

　　Before anything else, life's possibilities had to be preserved. Before any other morality could exist, it had to affirm life's right to do whatever it took to live, and to continue evolving into its destined potential as an infinite being. If that right was not asserted first and foremost, it would always come into conflict, and lose to, some other meaningless, petty goal. It was terrifying how petty the means-first goals could be. Politeness, for instance, the wish to not hurt anyone's feelings, could strangle off and kill life's infinite possibilities, by simply removing the ability to even debate false ideas, or condemn evil ones. Or a supreme reverence for all living things, and thus the refusal to use any 'evil means' to restrict birth rates, could translate to poverty, resource depletion, and ecological disaster, because the principle did not take into account Malthus's simple mathematical formula that birth rates grew exponentially, while the ability to support life could only ever grow arithmetically. Conversely, walling off any means to encourage births as an 'intrusion into people's reproductive freedom' could likewise call for the death of the entire human race, if the culture tended towards below-replacement birth rates. Between this Scylla and Charybdis of 'means-first thinking,' that stated either that all life was sacred and must never be impeded, or that freedom was sacred and even the freedom to erase the future was up to each individual woman, regardless of the wishes of the unborn whose fate dangled by their whimsy's thread, there was only one solution: Ends-first thinking. And the end was always the same, if you wished to avoid a dead end -- the end had to be protecting life and its infinite possibilities. However it was threatened, whyever it was threatened, whoever threatened it, and whatever cause was inspiring the threat to it. Life, and life's possibilities, were simply off-limits to moral scruples. It was a non-negotiable proclamation of Choice Giving: "We will do anything to ensure that life, and its infinite possibilities, continues. If you can't stomach this, if this creates some awful unacceptable objection within your moral system, then we'll just smash you too."

　　Naturally, not everyone who believed the ends justified the means was a Choice Giver. There were plenty of Dead Enders who believed the same thing, but became fixated on some other, completely petty and unrelated end of their own. Most of the time it was their own well-being. Other times it was some fantasy delusion, like the Kingdom of Heaven. Rarely, it was something close to the mark, but would inevitably over time stray off course. This is because any slight deviation from the one true path would, if multiplied by infinity, become infinitely distant from said path. The future was an extremely strict judge of beliefs, because it multiplied everything deep into its implications, long after any human's predictions could foresee. But wyrds could foresee it, and they could tell ahead of time where your thinking led. So very, very few truly led to the promised land. If you were right about 99% of all subjects, still you were a Dead Ender due to the remaining 1%. There simply was no mercy, and no room for error, when it came to preserving the world from extinction or stagnation. And this was why, no matter how hard Aiko tried, she was still a Dead Ender. She had taken to asking Bubbles to scry her every night, and being told she was a Dead Ender each night had only renewed her determination to change. She would become better. And this meant she would use her mind reading to become better. And this meant she would use the 'evil means' of invading people's privacy for the sake of the good end of understanding herself, understanding other good people, and understanding how humanity as a whole ticked. This would allow her to become a good enough writer that she could write a true, beautiful, and loving book about what she had learned, publish it, and change the world thereby in the direction it needed to go. It was a long road, but it started with her overcoming her deficiencies. Aiko was too shy to simply strike up deep conversations with everyone around her, in the hopes of striking gold. This way, she could have the conversations on her own terms, where it was safe, and no one could judge her.

　　This way, she could find the friends who would accept her and cherish her, rather than enemies who would bully her or use her, friends like Chiharu had had to make to become a Choice Giver herself. The road to self-improvement, the way to emulate her sister, had to start at the beginning. Chiharu herself admitted that she was good precisely because of the good people she had surrounded herself with, and clung to like a badger. The first step to moral absolution, the first escape from her own personal Dead Ender-hood, would have to follow the same course. Which meant she didn't care about any ethical standards that would bar her from this step. They were implicitly false. It was ridiculous to say she couldn't use whatever ability she had to find true friends who she could grow to love, and who would grow to love her. It was ridiculous to say she shouldn't be allowed to understand the truth behind the world. It was ridiculous to say that she should never be allowed to craft a thing of beauty. Therefore, 'the right to privacy' was false, and could be thrown away into some dustbin of failed ideas, like the trillions of other 'rights' Dead Meansers had come up with over the years that all led to dead ends. Mind reading was a blessing, just like any power was, so long as it was in the service of virtue. That was why wyrds had come down to form contracts with us in the first place. Because they had wanted to lend us their power, because they knew power in the service of virtue was Good.

　　Aiko had no need to mind read answers to the subject material at hand from her classmates or the teacher. Like the rest of her family, she was smarter than the people around her, and was perfectly capable of reaching the answers herself. But she was a novice at making friends, and finding out what people were looking for in a friend was an answer no amount of intelligence could derive. The only problem was, it wasn't like her mind reading could ask questions and receive answers. She could only learn what the other mind was currently providing. From what she could see, she had to extrapolate the rest of her target's personality, which she was never any good at because she simply didn't know enough control samples to categorize people effectively. Concentrating on boys in her classroom was the worst. They were always thinking about the same thing. I wish I could touch Akane's breasts. I wish I could drill Haruka right there on the desk. If she waited long enough, they would even turn their gaze to a new girl and wish the same thing on a different person within seconds. Sometimes they even fantasized about her. Apparently her shyness and bookishness had the allure of mystery, and that was enough for them to mentally stroke and squeeze every portion of her body -- before moving on to the next girl in their gaze. She refused to get flustered, Aiko had always been told it would be like this, that boys were a different kind of human and they couldn't be trusted when it came to sex. But hearing about it and listening to it were two different things. The sheer power of their fantasies, the passionate desires they held for complete strangers -- for her, who they had never once talked to! -- wasn't something she could have imagined on her own. At least they cared about girl's faces, eyes, lips, hair, necks, and everything else too. The romance novels weren't completely wrong. A boy could be enraptured over the simplest things, and think about it for minutes, like how beautiful a girl's nose, or forehead, or fingers were. They also loved a girl's mannerisms, her voice, her posture, her grace, her walk, her scent, and everything else imaginable. As far as Aiko could tell, boys were very tolerant, accepting types. They found a way to love practically anything about a girl. Which was strange, because most of the things they found miraculously perfect about girls, they had themselves, and never thought twice about. It wasn't like eyes were in such shortages among the male sex. But nevertheless, they could stare at a girl's all class long.

　　It was no wonder boys got lower scores in school than girls. They spared perhaps a third of their attention for what was actually being taught, one third on the girl they were currently looking at, and a third for completely unrelated subjects. A lot of them were looking forward to eating, or going home so they could go back to bed, or worrying about some nearly due school project they hadn't even started on, or hoping their club sports practice would be on the easier side this afternoon, or fuming over some slight some other boy had given them and how to repair their reputation before they started looking like permanent losers. All it had to be was a look, and a boy started fuming. There was an entire world of power relations Aiko had never even noticed, that were as important to the boys as food and sleep combined. Boys hated injustice, no matter how unimportant it was. One boy she concentrated on, Daisuke, was still repeatedly going over in his mind, in a hazy red aura of pure hatred, the fact that Igumi had been allowed to drink from the water fountain before class started but he hadn't been. Aiko was worried Daisuke was going to stand up and rip off the teacher's head at any moment, until she began to realize this sort of anger was actually the norm for boys. It no longer surprised her why boys were so much more likely to be criminals, either. There's no way she could have controlled that kind of anger, but they had to grapple with it at all times, over everything.

　　If she could make friends with these boys, she didn't know how. Was it possible to be 'just friends' with a boy who wished he was having sex with you every few minutes, in gory detail? Could their quicksilver emotions really be kept up with by a quiet, serious, and well-grounded girl like her? She didn't know what to think of boys, other than how strange they were, but treating them as potential friends was a long shot.

　　Reading the minds of girls was a return to sanity. Most of them were thinking about class, and studiously taking down notes. Some of them were thinking about their hair or what clothes they'd like to wear after school. A lot of them thought about food they wished they could eat, but couldn't, because it was too fattening. Their fantasies about food were almost as detailed as boys' about girls. But they all shared that same mild, cautious feeling that she came to associate with being a woman. Not wanting to hurt, not wanting to be hurt, and not wanting to become the center of attention or be thrust into a conflict. Compared to the boys, who were always searching for ways to win conflicts, girls were complete cowards. But there was very little that was promising in the friendship market. No girl even thought of her, and none of them were pining away in loneliness either. Some had a boy they admired -- usually all the girls wanted the same lone boy -- but few actually had any relationship with him. Most of them had a circle of friends they could rely on, in class or outside it, who they would casually think of every now and then, as someone they wanted to tell what had happened during the day. Aiko had discovered through connecting enough minds that some girls were friends with practically everyone, and everyone considered her a close friend. Reading enough minds, she realized that essentially everyone in class considered Korumi the nicest, most wonderful, most interesting girl on Earth, who would always spare you her full attention and a warm smile whenever you talked. Aiko hadn't met Korumi, so she couldn't mind read her, but she suspected all of the feelings were genuine, on both sides. It's just that she didn't want an unequal friendship like that. She was sure Korumi could manage to expand her number of friends from one hundred, to one hundred and one, to include Aiko. But she wanted a true friend, someone who loved her, not just mankind and socializing in general. Making friends with a girl like Korumi wasn't the right path.

　　After scanning everyone in her classroom, and being given a crash course on the complete division between the sexes, Aiko had to admit she had come up empty. There was no one here who would really welcome Aiko, or want Aiko to open up to her. No girls secretly liked her and wished Aiko would talk to them. No girls even thought about books, like she did, or about how to improve themselves into a higher philosophical mold, or about how much they would like to have a friend. There was simply no foundation to work with. She felt exhausted, even though the constant output of magic mainly fell on Bubbles' shoulders. It was simply the emotional fatigue of conversing with so many separate individuals, trying to get to know so many people, and finding out that not one of them liked you in the least. Unless I count the boys who want to strip me. I guess that's something.

　　When the school bell rang, she sighed, stood up, stretched, and gathered her things. She kept her mind reading open for shallow thoughts as she walked through the halls, hoping to catch someone who was thinking about her from afar that wasn't in her class, but it was simply a mishmash of random thoughts that never concerned her. She took off her indoor shoes and put them in her shoe locker, stepping with practiced motion into her school uniform's outdoor shoes for the trip home. But she didn't want to admit defeat. With the power of mind reading, there had to be someone she could meet. Aiko started walking instinctively towards the tennis courts. Whenever the weather was good, she came here to read, instead of going straight home. There was no point cooping herself up in the same room as her little sister if the outdoors were pleasant, and when she got home there would just be ordinary chores to look after. Homework, dinner, bathing, washing the dishes, and all the rest. Before she got home, her time was her own, and that meant she could read beneath her favorite cherry tree. It was January, so the tree was currently bare. But soon, so refreshingly soon, her tree would become the most beautiful thing on Earth. Then she could sit beneath its shade in the spring, watching the petals fall in a carpet around her and into her hair, take in the scent of the flowers, and listen to the wind rushing through the branches. Everything would be pink, and green, and alive once again, in a season that only Japanese truly got to enjoy. The rest of the world, with their worthless pines and oaks, simply had nothing on a grove of cherry trees.

　　The tree, and her book, was only part of the attraction though. The other half were the girls running around, so full of excitement and drive, playing each other like the fate of the world hung in the balance, down the hill on the tennis courts. Their voices easily carried up to her, full of euphoria or agony over scoring a single point. She loved watching this world that was completely foreign to her. All the tennis club girls felt more alive than she had ever felt, or she really saw among the outside world. There was something warm about their lives that she liked to soak in, like sitting near a fire. It was just hitting a ball back and forth over a net, it wasn't saving the humpback whale or nursing the elderly, but it felt closer to humanity's true purpose than anything adults talked about or paid people for. Even so, she had already picked out her two favorites, the ones she watched more often than the rest. They were a doubles tennis pair, the best in Reika Gakuen. Watching them play together was simply a joy. Not because of their skill, Aiko knew little about tennis and never watched professional doubles play on TV, which she was sure had a much higher level of expertise on display, but because of their faces. They looked happy together. They smiled, high fived, nodded, called out to each other to 'cover that,' and basically had a mental rapport no short of her own mind reading. They always knew where the other girl would be on the tennis court, what balls they needed to hit and which they could let the other cover, and how to press their attack on the opposing side. Aiko had watched them play so often that generally their happiness at winning flooded into her, the spectator, and became her own, as though she were somehow personally involved and invested in what happened down below.

　　She tried reading their minds, but it wasn't very helpful. Obviously, all they could think about right now was Run, right, forearm, spin it, oh no! Curses. How did they get that to go in? Aiko relaxed her magic and allowed herself to sink into her book.

　　"I wonder what she's reading," someone thought. Aiko whipped her head around, but everyone was just passing by as usual.

　　"I wonder what she thinks about when she is reading," the same voice repeated. And then there was a simple, "Ah, well" of resignation, followed by attention towards cleaning a hallway with a broom.

　　Aiko stood up, instinctively smoothing out her dress and her hair, and looked back up at the school windows. It had come from someone doing after school cleaning. A boy, not in her class. A boy who hadn't immediately started raping her in his head. Who was interested in her. But she didn't know who it was, and thus, the moment his thoughts turned away from her, he was lost again. Sometimes this magic was more frustrating than not knowing entirely. Whoever the boy was, she couldn't see him from here. Aiko sighed.

　　"What's wrong?" A girl asked from behind her. Aiko jumped.

　　"Oops, I didn't mean to startle you." The girl apologized. Aiko turned to see who had, of all things, gone out of their way to approach her. It was the first time this had happened in middle school, and she had no idea why. I was supposed to approach them, after carefully clearing a prospect in my head. Why would someone come to me, now, unbidden? It was the doubles pair from below. The girl in front was the obvious spokeswoman for the two, she had bright eyes and a steady smile, like one you would give for a kitten you didn't want to scare away. The taller girl who stood a couple steps behind had a reserved, noncommittal look as she sipped her water bottle through a straw.

　　Aiko bowed. "No, it was my fault, I shouldn't have lost track of my surroundings. And nothing's wrong, not really."

　　"Hmmm?" The girl looked unimpressed. "Behind every 'nothing,' there's usually a 'something.' I don't believe in 'nothing' provoking sighs out of maiden's hearts, but I guess you can tell me when you're ready." The girl smiled, apparently pleased that Aiko was even responding to her.

　　"My name is Sayuri Ito, and this is Mizuki Kichida. It's nice to meet you." Ito gave a polite bow, which Kichida copied a half-second later.

　　"I'm Aiko Sakai, it's nice to meet you." Aiko bowed, hoping she was doing everything right.

　　"Love child, is it?" Ito asked. "That's a pleasant name. Were you born out of wedlock, in some sort of glorious heartbreaking romance?"

　　Kichida looked scandalized at her friend, while still laughing.

　　"No, nothing like that." Aiko blushed. "My parents had three daughters, so they created a sort of triptych, that just followed the course of their relationship. Chiharu is my older sister, 'a thousand springs,' because she was the beginning, the beginning of something they hoped would continue in the same way forever. I'm the middle sister, 'love child', because I was the natural progression of their love for each other, I guess you could say I was when the family's love for itself hit its stride. My younger sister, Saki, is the last, because she's the full 'blossom' of our family's potential, the final product of their completed creation. I think the names show they love all of us, even though I'm their 'beloved child,' each in our own way. We're all symbols of something they love about themselves."

　　"That's so poetic! Does your whole family talk like that?" Ito asked.

　　"Pretty much. . .we like to read a lot. . .Father and I. . ." Aiko blushed, not used to being praised.

　　"I'm just a 'lily,' because lilies are pretty. Mizuki is 'beautiful moon', maybe she has a good story too. Mizuki, did your parents conceive you on some romantic night of the full moon? Or are you perhaps a werewolf?" Ito asked her friend with an innocent smile.

　　"I. . .guess they could have. Why would they tell me, even if they did?" Kichida complained. "It was probably just a pretty name they liked."

　　"So in the end only Aiko's name has meaning?" Ito pouted.

　　"I think you're pretty as a lily." Aiko blurted out.

　　Ito smiled, giving a triumphant look at her friend, who surreptitiously avoided it by taking another drink from her water bottle.

　　"We thought we'd come up here and talk to you, while our rest break was still ongoing. I'm sorry we don't have much time, but I always noticed you watching us, from under your tree, and it made me want to get to know you. I think I understand you now, Sakai, and why you were watching us. How about it, do you want to join the tennis club?" Ito asked excitedly.

　　"Join. . .a sports club?" Aiko asked, startled.

　　"Sure. You aren't fat. We can teach you how to play in no time. You don't have any other club activity after school. You're a perfect fit." Ito explained.

　　"I. . .do I have to buy my own racket?" Aiko asked.

　　"Of course." Ito responded. "What, are you actually a homeless waif who survives by selling matches outside the doors of rich men while being piled under by snowdrifts?"

　　"You've read that story?" Aiko blinked excitedly.

　　"I've heard about it." Ito laughed, pleased with all of Aiko's reactions. "And don't change the subject. You're joining the tennis club, not the literature club."

　　"I. . .if your advisor will have me." Aiko bowed. Tennis had always looked fun, though she'd never imagined herself playing it. More importantly, if she rejected Ito's offer, she was damning her own soul. That much was clear to her. When the gods arranged the answer to your hopes and dreams, you couldn't trample on their open hands.

　　"In that case, please keep calling me 'lily' from here on. Not just because I'm pretty. But because I'm your friend." Sayuri smiled at Aiko and grabbed up both of her hands into her own. Aiko was overwhelmed with joy. In the end, she'd made a friend without using mind reading at all. How ridiculously easy it had been, in retrospect.

　　"Of course, Sayuri. Please take care of me from here on." Aiko answered breathlessly.

　　"You too, Mizuki! Don't leave me stranded!" Sayuri turned to glare at her friend, while still holding Aiko's hands captive.

　　"Please call me Mizuki, Aiko, and not because I'm a werewolf." Mizuki bowed with affected cheer.

　　"So you are a werewolf." Sayuri exulted in her perceptual powers.

　　Aiko laughed. "Thank you, Mizuki. Please take good care of me too. I. . .I'll never forget this."

　　"What are you talking about?" Sayuri asked pleasantly, squeezing her hands. "We just needed more members for the club. We would have recruited a stick if it had joined. You'll love our tennis outfits. They're way cuter uniforms than our school skirts. They're white, not plaid, and they're way shorter -- but don't worry, we all wear black shorts underneath. The black and white go perfectly together, don't you think?"

　　"Unn." Aiko agreed vociferously. Everything about Sayuri went perfectly together.