My Childhood Friend And The Cheat Ability

According to my childhood friend, “Cheat abilities are par for the course in reincarnation stories,” apparently.

Even Houjou Sumire agreed with this, more or less. She’s a friend I first made in high school, a literature-club member Ayu dubbed THE Literary Girl, so even though I don’t really know the first thing about it myself, I figured that must just be how it goes and let the matter drop.

Now, as for the childhood friend who actually comes out with lines like that in the first place, my card-carrying self-proclaimed reincarnator, Sakura Ayuri herself…

“Today’s the day I find out whether I’ve got some dormant cheat ability sleeping inside me! Clap clap clap~”
“You barge into someone’s room on your day off, and this is what you came here to do?”

Today was our day off. Ayu isn’t in any club, and neither am I, so of course she’d come barging into my room. Isn’t this exactly why I never make a dent in my game backlog?

“I mean, Gin’s the only one who knows I’m a reincarnator, so I can’t exactly do this kind of thing with anybody else.”
“Even I only half-believe it, like, ‘maybe, I guess?’ Besides, we did something just like this back in middle school and already settled it, didn’t we?”
“Now that I’m a high schooler, maybe a new one’s sprouted! And besides, the kind you always talk about, Gin — for someone who went to all the trouble of reincarnating, it’s kind of ordinary… I want something more unscientific and convenient!”
“‘Something convenient,’ huh… you know, if anyone who’d give their right arm for that ‘thing’ of yours heard you say that, they’d deck you.”

And yet that gift of hers is precisely the sort she can’t stand. She hates standing out in weird ways so much that she refuses to use it in front of other people, and thanks to that both Hina and I have been put through our fair share of grief…

Oblivious to everything going through my head, Ayu fished something out of the bag she’d brought along.

“Umm, let’s see… okay, here — first up, this.”
“…What’s this, a notepad?”
“I thought I’d test whether I can read people’s minds with it. You write down what you’re thinking right now, Gin, and I’ll guess what it says. How’s that?”
“I’m thinking I want to play games, so I wish you’d go home.”
“Don’t just come out and say it! Not to my face, and not for the test either!”

Well, no helping it. I’d humor her a little. It was a bit early for lunch, but I jotted down whatever food I felt like eating right then, the first thing that came to mind.

“Wrote it.”
“Hmm… gimme a hint!”
“You’re demanding a hint on your very first move?”
“This is a test for a cheat I don’t even know exists, you know? And even if it did, I’d still be a total beginner at it! C’mon, c’mon, gimme!”
“Ehh… what I want to eat right now.”
“Oho ho… hmmm…”

Hint in hand, Ayu narrowed her eyes and concentrated, then shut them to ‘receive’ something, then pressed her fingertips to her temple as if reading it off. She was the spitting image of someone flailing to wring an answer out of thin air in the middle of an exam.

“I’ve got it! …Pasta!”
“Nope, sorry — it was shabu-shabu~”
“How extravagant!”

I’d only said it was something I wanted to eat. I never said I’d written down what I actually planned to have for lunch. In other words, I’d jotted down a wish that probably wouldn’t come true, and Ayu, for her part, didn’t seem satisfied in the least. She was pouting.

“One more time! This time… yeah, dessert! Write down what you’d want for an after-meal dessert!”
“Ehh… you don’t have a mind-reading cheat anyway, so just give it up. Besides, now you’re setting the theme, so the range is even narrower than before.”
“One more time! One more time!”
“…Good grief.”

Nothing to do but play along one more time. Shabu-shabu had probably been a bit too hard, so this time I tried writing something safe, something she might actually land even on a wild guess.

“Mmm… hmm~…?”
“Are you trying to read it off my face, or off the notepad? If you could do that, wouldn’t it be a totally different ability, not mind-reading?”
“There aren’t enough hints…”
“Even though you narrowed it down this time…? Just so you know, shabu-shabu’s got nothing to do with it.”

Not sure it would even mean anything, I tossed in another hint anyway, but she just kept trying to read it off my face, so I stared right back at her, my expression loaded with a silent just hurry up and answer already.

That she still wouldn’t give up said it all. At this point, the girl simply wasn’t cut out for mind-reading.

“I’ve got it!”
“Go right ahead.”
“Pancakes!”
“Hmm~… hmm?”
“Huh, was I close?!”
“The correct answer is… vanilla ice cream~”
“That’s totally off! Why’d you make that iffy face just now?!”

For a second even I figured it hadn’t so much as grazed the mark, but then a thought crept in: well, pancakes do sometimes come with vanilla ice cream on top… And for a moment I wavered. Still, the one doing the guessing insisted it was totally off, so the pancakes she’d pictured probably hadn’t had any ice cream on them. A wrong answer after all.

“Well, let’s call it: Ayu has no mind-reading cheat.”
“…Well, whatever. Being able to read minds would come with its own huge pile of headaches anyway… okay, next up is this!”
“Right, right, no good would come of it… wait, next?”
“Of course! Depending on who’s dreaming them up, you can come up with endless cheats! Testing just one isn’t gonna cut it!”
“Ehh… what a pain.”
“…And yet you go along with it even while you complain. That’s why I love you, Gin.”
“Well, thanks a lot.”

Eh, whatever. Teasing Ayu like this was fun enough in its own right. So this was how my day off would go, huh. With that, I turned to face her.

◆◆◆

Clairvoyance

“Five of clubs!”
“Too bad — seven of diamonds.”

◆◆◆

Psychokinesis

“Hnnng…!”
“Well? Think it’ll float?”
“…Fwoo! Fwoo!”
“What that proves isn’t psychokinesis, it’s your lung capacity, wouldn’t you say?”

◆◆◆

Precognition

“For starters, if you had precognition, you’d have pulled something good in that lottery the other day, wouldn’t you?”
“Okay, that’s a wrap!”

◆◆◆

“I’ve kind of been suspecting this for a while, but…”
“What?”
“Isn’t this a test of esper powers, not cheat abilities?”
“Esper stuff is something nobody can do either, so anyone who can pull it off might as well count as a cheat, right?”
“That’s way too sloppy… well, same goes for that precognition just now, but if you had a cheat for studying or sports, it’d show up in everyday life, I suppose.”

I worked through the pasta my parents had made me while Ayu ate the bread she’d brought from home, and that was how we passed the lunch hour. Cheeky as ever, Ayu had even wheedled an instant cup of consommé out of my parents.

“What’re you gonna do once you finish that? Still gonna test more stuff?”
“Hmm~ I’m all out of ideas, though… what should we do?”

Hey, I was the one who got barged in on, and I’d meant to play games from the start, so don’t ask me. It’s not as if this girl would mind watching me play even something single-player… but I wasn’t really in the mood for that anymore either.

It was just as the two of us started mulling over what to do next that it happened.

— Bzzt! Bzzt!

Ayu’s phone was buzzing. An incoming call, by the look of it.

“Ah, a call.”
“From who?”
“Hmm… it’s Hotaru.”
“Ugh.”
“‘Ugh’…? Uh, mind if I grab this real quick?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll keep quiet.”
“Thanks… Hello? Hotaru?”

Our senior Hotaru. Kazufuku Hotaru, to give her full name, was a girl a year above us who lived close by, not as close as Ayu’s house was to mine, but near enough to reach on foot in no time. She seemed genuinely fond of us underclassmen, Ayu especially, and looked out for us to no end. For various reasons, though, I was a little bad with her.

“Right now? We’re over at Gin’s place, eating lunch and figuring out what to do next — well, I guess we’re free-ish… uh-huh, uh-huh, ahh… let me check with Gin real quick.”

Huh, this involves me?

“Gin, she’s asking if we wanna head over to Hotaru’s place right now… wanna come too, Gin?”
“Her place? …I can guess why she’s inviting you, Ayu… but is it really okay for me to tag along?”
“Yeah, she says she’s got tea and snacks ready, at least. You might get bored, Gin, so she says she won’t force it, but…”
“Hmm…”

Well, even if I felt a little uneasy around her, that was just me being one-sided about it. Hotaru’s character itself was good to a fault… or, in a sense, was that actually the insidious part?

Anyway, setting that aside. Knowing that senior, this so-called tea-and-snacks spread had almost certainly been laid out with my share included too, either on the assumption that Ayu would be over at my place, or after she’d gone and checked in advance. Because that was just the kind of person she was.

“…Well, if she’s gone to all that trouble getting things ready, it’d be rude to refuse… I’ll come.”
“Then I’ll tell her so. …Hello, Hotaru? Gin says she’ll come too. …Yeah, right, after we’ve had lunch…”

There probably wasn’t any more room for me in this conversation, so I left Ayu to carry on the call and got back to eating. She was having bread and I was having pasta, so mine took longer. I needed to hurry up and finish.

“Hwahh… uh-huh, uh-huh…”

I just hoped nothing troublesome would come of this. With that thought, I ate my pasta, stealing a sidelong glance at my childhood friend, who was still neglecting her bread to chatter away on the phone.