Taro gave a friendly nod and a half-smile to Akito as the other boy introduced himself, failing to notice what some would assume to be a rather standoffish appearance with his typical teenager slump. He took the boy’s blunt question on whether or not he was going to captain the train as a joke and gave Akito a soft, approving laugh. Taro decided that it would be pedantic to inform the kid that captain wasn’t a term used in railroading, largely because he preferred to be called captain next to the more proper, and decisively less cool, engineer. Likewise, Taro was pretty close to figuring out that driving the train, assuming if anything from playing a simulation with a keyboard actually carried over into real life (which was perhaps the world’s largest “if”), was a really, really terrible idea that would likely end up in an actual crash.
He offered a warmer smile to Nao and was about to tell the two of them that he was looking forward to not being frozen with them before a piercing whistle derailed his train of thought. Snapping his head back and forth like a frantic dog, Taro wheeled around on his heels to see a tall woman half-dragging what he assumed to be her friend towards them. His jaw slackened dumbly as the tall, somewhat intimidating girl called them all “dipshits” as if it was a perfectly natural way to greet somebody. He quickly fixed his dumbfounded expression, observing that at this rate there would be more people on the train not paused by the clock than the other way around. Maybe this—what’s the word, event? Phenomena? Mass hysteria?—was fading away.
Then again, perhaps it was just growing stronger.
”A snuggle pile?” asked Nao.
“It’s like a cuddle party except—woah,’ said Taro, but his decisively unhelpful explanation was lost as the train began to rock. Quickly, he grabbed an overhead handle as the rocking grew more and more unstable. The frozen figures around them began to eerily glow. Okay, okay, Nira’s right, something’s different this time.
Maybe all of this was just some elaborate dream, the kind of one where you wake up from it, go about your day, do all of your chores, and then wake up once again just absolutely exhausted. If he was dreaming, he’d much rather it went back to the train full of girls and the one token other guy scenario than whatever ghost train nonsense this all was. Perhaps he thought real hard by squeezing his eyes closed then he would find some way to shift things back to how they were. That was a thing, right?
Taro tightly pressed his eyes shut until spots began to burst in the darkness like fireworks. The whole time he could hear a very loud ruckus going on all around him. By the time he opened his eyes, he already had a pretty clear picture as to what had happened thanks to the loud cursing lady. His eyes bounced from the cursing lady, to the lain flat-out Akito, to Nira crouching down over him playing nurse. He didn’t see the source of the pipsqueak voice; maybe that loud lady’s friend? Taro lifted an eyebrow as Yuumei began chewing out Nira for trying to help Akito. He stepped to the two girls, making a calm down motion with his hands and opened up his mouth to try and diffuse the situation, whatever the hell it was about.
“Oh,” said Taro, looking down the tiny little blue flame dude.
At least he knew he was no longer dreaming; this stuff was too crazy for him to have made up.
His mind reset; he rubbed his eyes and looked back. Clearly, he must have still be seeing spots.
“Oh,” he said again.
Clearly he wasn’t ready to unpack whatever the hell that thing was. He shifted his attention to Akito; everyone else was, rightfully, distracted by the world’s tiniest member of the blue man group. Bending down over Akito’s face, Taro gave him a sly smile and whistled low as he saw the bump on his forehead from where, assuming if the play-by-play was accurate, the tiny little guy had flew into the boy before knocking him on his ass. Taro decided it wasn’t his place to judge Akito for getting stomped out by a thing the size of cup; the kid would likely be embarrassed enough as it was. I know I sure would be. Good thing it wasn’t me, thought Taro, counting his blessing.
“Hey, buddy, you awake down there? Remember your name? The date? Need a hand getting up? I’ve personally never laid down on a train’s floor, but I would imagine that it might not be as comfortable as it looks and certainly a thousand times more disgusting than I ever could imagine it to be,” he said, his head turning to the girl who had just started talking as he offered out his hand. “Like, you’d probably want to take at least a million showers when you get home, and probably burn those clothes too. Hell, if I were you I wouldn’t be able to wait to —”
“… We need to get out of here, don’t we?”
“—put a pin in this,” he said, standing up as his hand dropped to his side. The smile on his face was a little too big. “Miss—sorry, don’t know you name yet—is right. If the weird little thing says we shouldn’t be here, then we probably shouldn’t be here. Hmm, if only this train had like a special room or something that controlled pretty much anything. Why, if we found that we could be out of here like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Man, but how could such a magical room even exist?”
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