Moral!1d4WGijdSc 2020/10/26 (Mon) 02:38 No. 2304 ▼ 
Okazaki Yumemi was missing—or at the very least, that’s how it felt to him.
Yojuu Ryu’s days of preparing lectures were becoming alarmingly more frequent. It was an unfortunate routine: On the days that he’d be heading the classroom, there would be a conspicuous pile of notes scattered across Okazaki’s desk in her office, and Okazaki herself would be nowhere to be found—as if she had disappeared into thin air. Regardless, until she came back, Ryu would wait at the graduate lab every day until the janitors excused him to lock the doors. Some times, it would be days. But other times, it would be weeks. And every time Okazaki came back, her body would be thinner, or her eyes would be wearier—whatever the case, it was normal for her to return with physical afflictions. Each time, however, her rosy eyes would be alight in passion as she spoke wildly about “dimensional barriers” and “the other place.” Frequently, too, would the professor demonstrate with rows and rows of whiteboards—on one particular day, she flooded the entire graduate lab’s boards with equations and abbreviated theorems, only to be later scolded by the head of the department. “Public space! These whiteboards are public space!” he had cried.
Yojuu Ryu worried. Though Okazaki’s increasingly frequent fits of physical intimacy tempered his anxiety, it wasn’t enough—in fact, it was
never enough. Perhaps absence did make the heart grow fonder. Whatever his turbulent feelings, it became obvious to Ryu that he was partial to Okazaki and extremely so. She kept dangling sweet temptations over his head until he realized that she had him under her thumb.
They had moved their acts of indecency to Ryu’s one bedroom apartment. He found it hard to evaluate what was worse: the fact that they previously engaged in physical relations at the graduate lab, or that they had evolved to a more intimate environment. Now there was little in the way to distract Ryu from how she was casually taking off her shoes in his home, how her red blouse revealed bare collarbone, and how a loose strap beneath her top fell dangerously off her shoulder.
“Why do you do this,” he
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Moral!1d4WGijdSc 2020/10/26 (Mon) 02:42 No. 2305 ▼ 
Okazaki Yumemi was missing… until she, suddenly and decidedly, wasn’t.
Ryu was effectively moved to full-time professor, complete with more hours and more pay. Of course, it wasn’t by choice. Okazaki Yumemi had extreme bouts of disappearing, so Ryu had no alternative but to fill her shoes. How she had managed tenure, he’d never know.
It was an idle day in his apartment when Yumemi appeared. And it was exactly that: She had
appeared. From his peripheral vision, the girl, as if she had always been there,
was.
Yumemi, who smelled faintly of ashen fire, shook off the sleeves of her crimson jacket and flung it down to the ground, exposing a black camisole underneath. Beads of sweat dripped down her cheek and to the floor.
Frankly, to the man who was previously considering what to make for lunch, it was all too much. But before Ryu could open his mouth to question her, she spoke first.
“Time, no—another world,” she said, nodding, as if she were continuing a conversation she had with him. As if she had never disappeared for weeks on end. “I’ve found it, Ryu.”
“What?”
“Do you believe in magic?” she said.
His mind slowed. “Not… really?”
“I didn’t either. But then I traversed. To other worlds. Or maybe another time, or another dimension, who knows? One where science alone does not dictate the elements. Say it is insane. Absurd, even. I could have been hallucinating for all I know. But I believe I may have been to where no mortal of our realm has been before.”
“Insane is… certainly the word for it.” But Ryu took a look into Yumemi’s eyes, and, within those ruby pools, there was clarity—an alarming amount of it. The nervous fiddling of her hands, her clear eyes gazing level into his own, her mouth which spoke words faster than her mind could process: Ryu could not make sense of it.
“Then call me ill,” she said, feverishly laughing all the while. It was a rare set of laughs that threatened to expose her age. “And embrace me. I’m giddy,” she added.
The man hesitated. Though he missed her to
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Moral!1d4WGijdSc 2020/10/26 (Mon) 02:44 No. 2306 ▼ 
The next day, when Yojuu Ryu came to, the first thing that the man saw was Okazaki Yumemi. There in his bed, clad in only a white undershirt and the rest of his bed covers, she was scribbling away furiously on a notepad. The sunlight from outside seeped through the blinds and trickled towards the red-headed woman. Ryu laughed to himself. She was no more radiant than she usually was—and Ryu found himself likening her more to a tumultuous storm than the sun—that is to say, he saw her as she was: Yumemi. Her disheveled hair, her voice deep and cracked in the morning as she muttered to herself, the snort she did at her own notes—they were all Yumemi-like.
Her pen slowed the moment Yumemi noticed Ryu awake. “Hello,” she said gruffly.
“Good morning.”
As good as it was, the morning was quiet.
“I have a lecture to do today,” he said to break the silence. “It’s Monday.”
“Ah,” she said dismissively. “So it’s Monday.”
Perhaps anybody else would have written off the red-headed woman’s words as eccentric. Time moved at different paces for different persons, after all. To Ryu, however, they were words of foreboding.
“Yumemi,” he said.
“Hmm?” Her pen stopped. Yumemi shuffled around the covers to face the man, and as she did, her bare thighs were painfully exposed to the man, temporarily rendering the man silent. The previous night flashed through his mind, though he quickly dismissed it.
I want you to stay, he thought to her.
Ryu, however, was a coward. “It’s nothing. I need to get ready for work.”
And as he showered, and as he made breakfast and prepared coffee, his thoughts swarmed him.
Could it be today? No, it couldn’t be, he thought.
She’d have the decency to tell me, right? His distractions gave rise to a missing twenty minutes of his schedule, which had made him decidedly tardy. He’d be five minutes late to the lecture hall, at least. Ryu cursed and left his breakfast unfinished. Finally, the man yelled out to Yumemi, “I’m off. I’ll be back after the
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