Omake (SHORT) -- Fluffy
She didn't really get the point of "shopping," Anna decided. The rest of the flight seemed to be enjoying the trip into the civilian levels of the arcology immensely, though Koujirou was complaining incessantly about being made to carry the various items that had been purchased. Anna had almost asked why he didn't just push it all into storage before deciding that there had to be some cultural reason for the otherwise-inexplicable behavior.
But where the rest of the flight seemed to derive great pleasure from comparing various clothes, accessories, and bottled mixtures of chemicals, Anna found these things to be rather… tedious. And even irritating, really. Time and again, the other four girls of the flight would try on an outfit and ask whether they looked nice in it. Sometimes the response would come in the form of shaking heads and talk of contrasts and colors clashing, other times there would be exclamations of wonder and admiration. But as far as Anna could tell, there was no discernible reason why a given set of clothes would draw a specific response. She'd also been coerced into participating in these activities herself a few times, and frankly, with all the attention, the cajoling, the… well, each occasion had left her feeling highly uncomfortable. She'd drawn the line at the tiny black dress Sandra had tried to get her into. Clothes were supposed to be clothes, not… not that.
She'd shut off her eyes and turned away when Yukari had come out of the dressing room in something even smaller.
That had been two hours ago. At this point, Anna really just wanted to leave the rest of the flight to their… to their normal things and go practice. With the wave force, ideally. In a nice, middle-of-nowhere, empty wasteland, where there wouldn't be anybody looking at her like… like…
"Anna! Where are you going? We're over here!"
But that would be rude, she told herself for the twenty-seventh time.
"Sorry. I'm coming."
Maybe, unlike the other fifty-nine stores she had entered so far today, this one would have something interesting. She could hope, right?
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The store was huge. The products on display were interesting. No, entrancing.
A hastily-performed analysis confirmed what her eyes suggested was the case: each item different from what she had seen before, and in turn different from each other. Their properties would, it followed, be equally varied. The possibilities were...
>>Flightchat Start: Text Only
>Anna Sanchez: "I will be perusing this store for an extended duration. Please feel free to continue without me."<
Behind her, the sign on the storefront read "Sleep World." In front of her, a visage of beauty stretched on seemingly to infinity. Mattresses, quilts, pillows, pillowcases, blankets, sheets. A quick query to the store confirmed that she was allowed to test every last item.
Tentatively, as if what was in front of her could vanish at any moment like a mirage, she approached the nearest display, a bed made with a leaf-print quilt and green pillows. A hand brushed over the fabric, confirming that the different molecular structure presented a texture dissimilar but equally pleasurable to what she had experienced in her room. She looked up from the bed, and threw her glance across the store, confirming one more time that she was seeing what she thought she was.
Then, turning off her impeller to better experience the sensations that were to come, she lifted the quilt and climbed onto the bed.
… Why was it sinking oh it stopped what --
Oh. Oh!
It was incredible. The mattress had conformed to her body. Everywhere was softness, and vanished were all the little imperfections she'd never even realized existed where whatever she'd been sleeping on hadn't matched her shape properly. She pulled the quilt up to her chin, and then tugged and pushed on it until the quilt was tucked into her sides just perfectly so that there were no gaps, every inch of her body matched up to the softness.
A tiny sigh of happiness escaped her as she just laid there, savoring the sensations. This was bliss… and there were still one hundred and thirty seven other beds to try.
…
...
If she could bring herself to get out of this one, anyways.
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Time passed. Water mattresses, foam mattresses, different arrangements of springs, fiber weaves in quilts, compositions of pillow stuffings, a hundred thousand differing aspects -- somewhere in the course of her education at this College of Comfort, she'd started having Durga record scans of the materials and designs. Then she'd had the thought that there could be more out there, if all of this could exist, and she'd started trawling the Arcology network for data.
At first, hundreds of designs and substances. Processes and blueprints for production, all meant for use on a large scale, but not without lessons potentially useful for single, customized items.
Not enough. She dug deeper, slipping past walls and security gates, dipping into locked containers and pursuing the matter to ever-smaller scales. Chemical equations, techniques for weaving polymers into complicated meshes, a million tiny cogs that ground together with each and every act of creation. A picture was painted, cross-referencing experience with data, matching sensation to product, product to part, part to chemical until the entire meaning of "bed" laid itself bare to her.
And then, then, she fed it a desire. The perfect meeting of every catalogued characteristic. An ideal, something God had not meant to permit existence in the mortal plane.
… and just as the models began to come together, the UN's achievements and conclusions pushed past their boundaries through Durga's more superior understanding of chemical and physical possibility, the incarnation of the concept of "comfort" into the world of humanity entering her reach -- she came to her senses, and shut down the computation.
There was no time for such indulgence, not when…
When…
What even were those?
In her fugue, Anna had found her way into a back corner of the store. Before her laid an entire wall of… not-pillows. Their interiors were filled with materials not dissimilar to what she'd seen in pillows. They were generally coated with fibers, but unlike a pillow or a blanket, the fibers were usually not woven together, instead presenting as forests of individual strands extending from where each was individually attached to a contiguous sheet of material that contained the stuffing.
And the shapes didn't make sense. Limb-like protrusions… no, not limb-like, they were limbs. And those were supposed to be ears, and eyes, and…
The arcology network had a ready-made image-to-term matching algorithm. A series of requests confirmed it: "Cat," "Dog," "Bird."
…
"Ah, there you are, Anna!"
Who…? Torn from her confused staring, Anna looked towards the voice. Yukari walked up to her, having just rounded a shelving unit.
Eying the wall of not-pillows, the asian third-year's face broke into a broad smile. "I hadn't taken you for a stuffed animal type of girl, Anna?"
"Is that what they're called? What… why are they?"
Yukari blinked. "They're stuffed animals. They're soft and cuddly."
"Of course they're soft. The material composition wouldn't allow for anything else. But why do they look like that?"
Taken aback, Yukari opened her mouth, paused, closed it, and mulled her words. Then she reached for the shelf and took a medium-sized rabbit off of it. "If… if this is obvious, stop me, but… a stuffed animal is a super-fluffy pillow that's shaped like an animal so that you can imagine it's not just a pillow. It's like... " She stopped for a moment, considering again.
Then she took the rabbit, held it up by the stomach with one hand, and used the other hand to move one paw in a waving motion at Anna. Altering her tone of voice dramatically, she said perhaps the strangest, most profound thing Anna would ever hear. "Hi! My name is Fluffy the Rabbit! Let's be best friends! I'm really soft and like being petted! Do you want to pet me?"
In her normal voice, Yukari then picked up where "Fluffy" had left off. "He's very soft, Anna. You should pet him." She held the rabbit out to Anna.
Slightly confused, but feeling like she might have grasped some of what Yukari was trying to convey, Anna raised one hand to the rabbit's head and ran it down his back, all the way to the tail.
… And ran it back up to his head. And back down. And up, and down, and up, eyes slowly widening and breath slowing, her previous definitions of "soft" and "fluffy" shattering into millions of pieces as her sense of touch registered sensations she had never dreamed of before this. She brought her other hand up, and began to rub it along one of the rabbit's legs.
"Do you want to hold him?"
A single, slow nod. Two hands, two arms, bringing rabbit to chest in unison. Stroke, and back, and stroke…
"If you like how he feels when you pet him, you could tell him that."
Somewhere, something clicked.
"You… are very soft. Fluffy."
"Thank you, Anna!"
