Chapter Text
“…Where did you find… this?”
Ringo Ando turned the object over in her hands, examining all sides to it. If she hadn’t known any better, she would’ve chalked it up to a piece of unknown, alien technology; and while it might be alien in origin, Ringo had a pretty good idea of what it was.
“I was planet-hopping. Found it in a pile of junk. You like this kind of stuff, right?”
It seemed to be a phone. It folded out like a miniature computer, displaying the Latin alphabet with hiragana denotations above the keys. Not exactly like an old phone or anything, but it certainly didn't strike her as anything she could recognize.
“I mean… yes? But you’re sure it’s not dangerous or anything, right?”
Ecolo tilted his head, floating in the air in front of Ringo, arms folded. “Why would it be?”
“Did you already forget about that pendant that you 'gave' Ally?” Ringo gave him a slightly exasperated look, and Ecolo smiled sheepishly. If space blobs could blush, he would be blushing.
“Okay, okay. That was definitely on me. But it was supposed to be for you, I didn’t think it would end up with her.”
“And you didn’t think it’d be a danger to me?” She looked at Ecolo crossly- if there was one thing she found endlessly frustrating with him, it was his carefree attitude towards danger. Just because he was halfway intangible and immune to physical harm didn't mean that everyone else was.
“Well, Ally's magic draws on her feelings of love. But your magic draws on like… scientific principles, right?" Ecolo put his arms behind his head. "The, uhh… power of atomic bonds, covalence, or whatever you called it. That’s why it’s all electric. So, um, I didn’t think it’d do anything super bad. Besides, Rafisol turned out fine! I knew you and the other girls could handle her."
“Okay. Sure. But no more cursed pendants, please.” Ringo sighed. “I think I’ve already established that. Regardless… thanks." She tucked the phone into her sweater pocket, nodding in gratitude. "I’m gonna have Ris take a look at it tomorrow, if that’s okay.”
“No problemo! It’s yours now, Ringie. Do whatever you want with it!”
“Yeah. Thank you, Ecolo. See you again soon?”
“Ringo, what’s the hold-up?★” A voice hollered from the hallway, making both Ringo and Ecolo flinch slightly before the door of the clubroom opened. A shaggy head of dull purple hair poked in, covering the eyes of a short-ish boy in a white shirt and blue slacks. Though his vision was obscured by long bangs, it was easy to tell that he was staring at Ecolo with a blank face of unrecognition and slight shock. Standard fare.
Ringo handwaved towards the boy. “Coming, Mags.” She gave a brief nod of acknowledgement and a smile to Ecolo, before quickly gathering her belongings and rushing out the door.
The door clicked shut, the lights went dim, and Ecolo was alone in the clubroom.
Ringo's shoes echoed against the linoleum floor as she jogged a bit to catch up with her friend. Classes had finished hours ago, and most clubs had adjourned their meetings by now. The halls of Suzuran Junior High were largely empty at this point of the day, and a gentle autumn breeze blew past the two students.
"Ringo,” Maguro Sasaki; local Popular Boy and Ringo’s best friend, started. “What was that thing? Genuinely. Did an experiment go weird while I wasn’t looking?★”
“No, it’s…” Ringo pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes for a moment. She felt tired, given that she had this conversation every month. “That’s… Ecolo. He’s… they're? He's never really clarified pronouns or anything… but he's a friend. He comes by to say hi sometimes.”
“Oh, is he from Amitie's town?★"
“Not… exactly. But yeah, it’s Puyo stuff.”
“You’ve made a lot of new friends, huh?★” Maguro chuckled, holding his hands behind his head and stretching as he walked. “Used to just be the two of us. Then Ris joined the mix, and then all that crazy space warp stuff happened and you met all those new people.★”
“Yeah, it’s nice.” Ringo smiled, warmth and slight embarrassment spreading across her cheeks. She’d never been very popular in school, with Maguro having been her only friend her whole life, but things had changed so drastically in the past year. She thought of Amitie, the cheery, airhead magician, and the long train rides across the world as the two of them worked to close the space warp that had introduced her to Puyo. She thought of Arle, the friendly adventurer who often got fed up with the antics of the people around her, and her delicious specialty curry that you sometimes had to fight her bunny-friend Carbuncle over just to get a bite in. “I wish I could see them more often.”
Maguro gave her a wide grin as the two of them treaded down the stairs to the first floor. His grin morphed into a slight, confused frown.
“Ecolo.” He said. “Have I… met him?★”
“It’s, uh, a little complicated." Ringo fidgeted with the hem of her skirt, trying to think of a good way to explain Ecolo’s unusual condition. "He said that he's, um, a spacetime traveler, and that people don’t really… remember him. That their minds can’t process him. I’m the only one who can remember. He thinks it's because I'm honest with myself, that I simply accept the strangeness I'm confronted with. Not that you’re not honest with yourself or anything, but… I don’t know. It’s weird.”
Maguro looked thoughtfully in the distance, scratching his head. “So I’ve probably met him a bunch of times, and my brain’s just been like, 'Nope’, afterwards, huh?★” His face cracked into a grin again.
“Yeah.” Ringo let out a disappointed sigh as she pushed the front door of the building open, and stepped out into the brisk autumn. Fading sunlight showered over both of them, tinging the world in a pretty gold. The slow breeze felt nice on her face. “That’s how it usually goes.”
She and Maguro walked in silence briefly, navigating their way out of the school grounds and into the larger shopping district, where the two of them lived. A few streetlights flickered on in response to the rapidly fading day.
“…What’s he like?★” Maguro asked.
“He… causes a lot of trouble sometimes. Like his hobby is giving me a headache or something. And he’s super clingy.” Ringo laughed. “But he means well, I think. He's actually pretty nice when he isn't messing with you. Though, I don’t think he has any other friends except for me...”
“Wow. That sucks.★”
“Yeah, it does.”
Ringo felt for the phone-like object in her pocket.
"What's that?★"
"He gave it to me." She pulled it out of her vest pocket fully. "He likes to bring me what he finds whenever he visits."
"Woah, what is that?★" Maguro reached for her hand, and she let him take it as he held it up to the dying afternoon light. "It looks like… a Nokia, but like, from the future or something.★" He stated, as he handed the gadget back to Ringo, who stuffed it back in her pocket and re-adjusted her grip on her bookbag.
"I have no clue where he finds this stuff sometimes. I was gonna have Ris take a look at it tomorrow and see if the two of us could approximate what repairs it needs to function again."
"Well, you two have fun with that.★" Maguro toyed around with his kendama. It seemed like he always needed something in his hands to fidget with, or else they'd gain a mind of their own and start folding all his homework sheets into paper cranes. "Try not to blow up the club room or anything; I left a pack of soda in the fridge.★"
"There hasn't been an accident in weeks!"
"I'm just saying that if something happens to my soda, there's gonna be a problem.★" Maguro shrugged. "But, hey, we should put a sign in the lab that says something like; 'It has been this number of days since an explosion has occurred', and every time Risukuma blows up a flask, we make him go change the number back to zero.★"
Ringo laughed a little too hard, hearing it echo off the buildings surrounding the two. "I don't think we're making it past twenty on that counter.”
"Not with the big guy around, no.★" Maguro chuckled. "Because you know he'll be like. Oh no, I "dropped" this flask full of dangerous chemicals, and it'll go flying with impeccable precision and hit the sign and explode it so no one but us will ever know about his shame.★"
"And then he'll act like nothing is wrong?"
"Yeah, exactly~★"
The two of them laughed loudly. Ringo could see the scenario playing out in her mind’s eye. Their senior, as observant and thoughtful as he was, had a strange temper towards a few subjects; he’d confessed to the two that he had an interest in a psychology career in the past, but his temperament simply wasn’t right for the job most of the time. And when he said that his “temperament wasn’t right for the job”, he had meant that he had a bad habit of trying to scare off any problem he didn’t feel like dealing with.
Usually by throwing exploding beakers at the problem. Hell, he’d even done it to Satan of all people once. Though, for all his grand and terrible power, Satan was pathetically easy to pick on.
Maguro peeked around Ringo’s shoulder at the empty street vendor’s stall they walked past.
“Man~, the takoyaki stands’ closed.★” Maguro sighed.
“You literally have fresh octopus at home, and you can make better takoyaki than most street vendors I’ve seen.”
“Yeah, but I have to actually make it. Sometimes I just want an easy bite, you know?★”
The strong scent of fresh fish came from the end of the street corner, and the two stopped as they approached the open door of the fishery.
“Well, here’s my stop.★” Maguro turned to smile at Ringo. “Catch you tomorrow, Ring-a-ling.★”
“See you tomorrow, Mags.”
The boy ducked into the fishery, a fat black-and-white cat rubbing up against his leg and following him eagerly, expecting him to serve its dinner as he headed towards the back of the venue.
Ringo stood alone on the sidewalk.
Ringo's phone buzzed under her pillow.
She jolted awake, startled by the noise, catching a glance of the clock. 23:40. She never got notifications for anything but texts, and the only person texting her at this ungodly hour would be Maguro, probably sending her some weird meme he found online.
But it could be something more important, and the anxiety of that thought wouldn't let her fall back asleep. So she reached under her pillow and pulled out her phone, sliding her text widget open.
Hey Ringo ★
I know it's weird to text you at this hour but that friend you were telling me about today ★
I've definitely met him before ★
Ringo's breath caught for a second.
Ecolo?
Yeah ★
When we went to Primp, that first time ★
Didn't he get super mad at me for hanging out with you somewhere? You know what I'm talking about right ★
Like he called me a dummy or something ★
lol
I don't know why I'm just now remembering that ★
I don't know HOW you're remembering that. You've never remembered anything about him.
Well yeah obviously cuz you told me about how people can't or whatever ★
But I remember now ★
It was after you and amitie ran me around the town and made me use the Beauty Beam™ on poor unsuspecting citizens ★
I beat him at puyo and he just kinda made fun of me and wandered off somewhere else ★
Maguro, do you recall anything else about him?
Not really sorry ★
That's fine.
But that's… really, really strange.
Well ★
Just thought you might be interested, we can talk about it more tomorrow at lunch if you're down ★
Sorry if I woke you up ★
Night Ringo ★
Night, Mags. See you tomorrow.
Ringo set the phone down on her nightstand and turned to face the ceiling, folding her hands over her chest.
It was her. It had only ever been her. At first, Arle could also remember Ecolo, but that eventually faded with time. Mentioning him only prompted a quizzical stare from her now. Amitie had been there when Ringo first met Ecolo, and had talked to him herself multiple times, but she had forgotten each encounter immediately after. Maguro and Risukuma had both been outright possessed by Ecolo but had simply discarded any notion of his existence within the week, their recollection of the end of their first adventure fringed with a haze of something subtly missing.
Ringo was the only one who remembered. Who could remember.
So why, just now, did Maguro recall something that he was never able to before?
Her brain buzzed with wonderment.
…
…There were a lot of times that Ringo really wished she was able to contact her other friends. Sure, she could text Maguro and Risukuma whenever she wanted, but sometimes she'd go weeks or months without seeing Amitie or Arle. And trying to anticipate when Ecolo would come by was kind of a crapshoot. He just seemed to show up whenever he felt like, would spend maybe ten minutes with her, and then would go off on his way again.
And she had a lot of questions about things. Questions about magic, questions about other worlds. Questions she usually couldn't get answers to unless she was lucky enough to warp herself to Primp during a Puyo battle, or if she got Ecolo to stick around long enough to do more than exchange pleasantries and whatever weird artifact he'd found that week.
Ringo thought about the phone that Ecolo had found again. As she drifted back to sleep, an interesting idea started blossoming in her mind.