Editing City Series:Volume7 Layer 5 (section)

===Record 75: Each Season Has a Color===

'''08/03/1998

'''8:34

Midday was sweltering during the summer, so it was best to only do things at morning and night.

I finally started showing up at school in August. I passed through the gate and walked by the spiraling path lined with trees.

“Yeah, I’m definitely feeling very sleepy.”

My sleep-deprived mind recalled the video I had watched the night before.

“The One-Armed Exterminator of the Toxic Hell visits Beast Prison 1999. Why is it in those movies they always wash their shoulders so thoroughly in the shower scenes? Don’t they have other body parts?”

No, that wasn’t why I was sleepy.

I had stayed up so late watching a show discussing the results to the Battle of Babel preliminaries being held in Osaka. I’d been so busy I had a bunch of recorded episodes piling up, so I was in my room playing the videos since the end of last month.

Thanks to the Great Canopy covering the planet, we couldn’t launch satellites, so Babel had been developed as a broadcast tower to send people’s voices to the entire planet. Under the management of some corporations and the Emergency Teachers, high schoolers across Japan were engaged in a PR battle in Osaka in order to win the right to send out the first broadcast.

“I might’ve taken part if I wasn’t in the Chancellor’s Officers.”

I felt just a bit jealous when I thought about everyone getting in on all that excitement in Osaka.

But it wasn’t that big a deal. I was protecting Tokyo.

I nodded and looked out ahead to see a baboon of a boy lying on the path up ahead.

“Huh, that almost looks like the Professor. But what would he be doing lying on the ground here?”

He didn’t respond. He was looking up into the sky with his eyes rolled back in his head, the corners of his mouth curled upwards, and his teeth showing.

A solid kick got him moving.

“Oh, hey. So someone finally noticed me, did they? I was so bored and tired I ended taking a nap here, but no one noticed.”

“They probably noticed you and decided they were safer pretending they hadn’t. So how long have you been uglying up the scenery here?”

“Three days maybe? I thought I was a goner when it rained and now I’m too hungry to move.”

I had no choice but to reach out a helping hand.

“Here, eat this.”

“So it’s true what they say about idiot’s not realizing how pathetic they are. And since you’re an idiot, I will explain this as plainly as possible: I want you to punch something extremely hard.”

I punched him extremely hard.

“No, not me. Try hearing me out first next time. Are you ready? Ready or not, here it comes: I tried to use the scientific principle of guts to open the back of the third tree over there, but the lever inside was rusted in place.”

Hm. I looked over to see one of the tree trunks had been opened to reveal a metal pull-down lever on the inside. It was currently in the “spring” position.

“The student council asked me to switch these trees to their summer colors. Painting them would cost a lot, so I was wondering if there was a simpler but more exciting solution. So I checked around and – wouldn’t you know it? – there was! This was constructed in the Meiji era, so it’s pretty old.”

“I see. And it hasn’t been used to change the colors before because it’s rusted in place?”

I activated my Mobilized Writing.

'''If you throw a punch with belief in your heart, all things will receive the blow in accordance with the conservation of energy.

I tried punching it and all the trees lining the path gained their summer colors.

“Good thing the ink hasn’t deteriorated with time. Anyway, Professor, what are you going to do with the money this saved?”

“To fill my very empty stomach, of course. First, I will-”

I didn’t bother hearing him out. I punched the lever back the other way and sent a barrage into his stomach.

'''Author Comment:

These stories feature a lot of objects with a trick to them, don’t they? Like the gas lights. I think I like things that are slightly out of the ordinary, like light produced by something other than electricity.

You can see it in Holmes-era England or in the Teito Monogatari movie too, but the depictions of festivals in Natsume Souseki’s Sanshirou really set the mood with the light and the darkness.