The Unremarkable Yukinoshita

In the span of a few breaths, I considered many things, taking into account all sorts of possibilities. In the end, I still felt that this was a police station, and we were facing the police. If we concealed anything while giving our statement, it could very well lead to an unfavorable outcome. Besides, even if we didn’t say anything, would the homeless man and the middle-aged man who was looking for his daughter, who were also brought to the station, not say anything?

It seemed that from the very beginning, I only had one option.

I didn’t conceal much and told them everything that had happened. Of course, I didn’t mention a single word about secrets that only concerned us, like System-Hime or our transformation. I just said that a few of us roommates, on a whim, went to that abandoned dormitory building to do a ghost-hunting livestream and unexpectedly saw visions and a ghost.

What I found a little strange was that the female police officer in charge of taking notes didn’t show any expression of surprise. Her beautiful, wheat-colored face only showed seriousness and concentration. No matter what I said, she just clattered away on the laptop keyboard, recording everything truthfully.

At first, I thought the police might have already known about the existence of supernatural phenomena in this world, but later I found out that wasn’t the case at all.

At that time, the few of us were kept at the station and were having a free late-night snack in the cafeteria. I overheard the wheat-skinned female officer who had taken our statement chatting with a few other officers at a diagonal table.

The wheat-skinned female officer, while chewing on a steamed bun with a spicy millet filling, asked, “The witnesses on my side said they saw visions and a ghost. How about you guys?”

Male officer A put down his bowl of seaweed and watermelon soup and said, “That middle-aged man with the injured knee said he went to that abandoned dormitory building to look for his dead daughter, and that he saw his daughter’s ghost in the end.”

Male officer B took a bite of a brown sugar and chocolate-filled bun and said, his speech a little slurred, “It’s about the same on my side. The homeless man, who’s the suspect, kept saying he was forced by a ghost to do those things. He really didn’t look like he was lying.”

The wheat-skinned female officer, who was long used to the bizarre late-night snacks at the police station, took a bite of her spicy millet-filled steamed bun. Her sharp eyes were filled with a polished wisdom. She said with conviction, “Since everyone is saying the same thing, there can only be one possibility, and that is… that abandoned dormitory building, due to being sealed for years without ventilation, has accumulated a toxic gas that causes hallucinations. The witnesses, the homeless man, and that middle-aged man, who all stayed in the building for a long time, inhaled an excessive amount of this toxic gas, which is why they had these hallucinations!”

Hearing this, male officers A and B were immediately filled with awe. “Your reasoning is as sharp as ever!”

At the diagonal table, I, who was drinking tea with a poached egg in it, almost spat it all over Saber’s face.

Hallucinations?! You’re saying everything we saw was a hallucination??

Saber, across from me, also had a look of astonishment, clearly not expecting that her experiences tonight would be attributed to a delusion by the police.

She widened her verdant eyes, her voice trembling. “S-so everything we saw was a hallucination?? The whole night was a hallucination?!”

“Don’t believe it! It’s not like that! How could the whole night be a hallucination…” I whispered to Saber in a roaring tone, trying not to attract the attention of the police officers.

“I-it’s not like that?” Saber, who clearly trusted me more than the police officers she had just met, immediately believed my words. “So it wasn’t just the whole night that was a hallucination… you mean the daytime was a hallucination too?!! “

Saber’s delicate, pretty face was filled with terror, like an English butler who had been caught having an affair with the mistress by the master of the house.

She leaned forward, getting close to me, and asked in a tiny voice that the police officers couldn’t hear, “By your logic, does that mean our transformation during the day was also a hallucination? I’m still my original self right now, I didn’t turn into Saber at all??? No way!”

The beautiful girl with blonde hair and green eyes, like an elf, immediately brought her hands back and, through her navy blue vest, started rubbing her own chest, her eyes filled with concentration, muttering, “No way, my chest is still here, it’s so soft, it’s definitely not my old pecs… Could it be that even this sensation is part of the hallucination?!”

She opened her small, cherry-pink mouth, with an expression that said “this hallucination is too terrifying, I can’t stay here any longer.” Then, without any warning, she shot out her hands, like twin dragons emerging from the water or playing with a pearl, and directly grabbed the unremarkable chest of Yukino, who was sitting next to her.

Yukino didn’t even react at first, her elegant face full of confusion. “…What are you doing?”

But Saber just repeated to herself, “It’s soft… it’s soft too! This hallucination is too terrifying. It’s not just changed my sight and hearing, it’s even changed my sense of touch. Does this mean I’ll have to live in such a topsy-turvy world of hallucinations from now on? Mistaking men for women, and women for men… In fact, the police officer who took our statement wasn’t a wheat-skinned older sister, but a muscular man full of philosophical aura, and the one who gave me a full bowl of tomato soup just now wasn’t an auntie, but an uncle??”

It took a great deal of effort for me to explain to Saber what was going on without letting the police officers hear clearly, pulling her out of her painful fantasy of having to be homo for the rest of her life, and she burst into tears of joy.

Looking at the sobbing Saber, anyone who didn’t know better would have thought she was a fallen girl who had just been rescued from a den of demons by the police uncles.

When I had a moment, I sorted out the current situation.

The matters of System-Hime and our transformation were secrets that we had never told any outsiders, and the police knew nothing about them. As for the things we did mention, like the visions and the ghost, the police had dismissed them as hallucinations caused by toxic gas in the abandoned dormitory and had not taken them seriously.

Indeed, for police officers who had never believed in ghosts and supernatural forces, toxic gas and hallucinations were the most logical explanation. They had only received a call from a viewer of our stream; they hadn’t watched the stream themselves, so they didn’t know that the visions and the ghost were also shown on the screen.

I had no intention of arguing this point with the police, nor did I want to ask the Tw*tch website to retrieve the recording of our stream to force the police to believe that we weren’t hallucinating. Because there was no point in doing so. Even if we proved that what we said was true, so what? It wouldn’t do us any good and would only bring us more trouble.

So this matter, at least for us, was over.

The diligent wheat-skinned female officer and a male officer drove us back to the school in a police car. Recalling the imposing manner of the wailing sirens when we were taken away by the police car earlier, many students who were not yet asleep or had been woken up were leaning out of their dorm windows, watching us from afar, watching us being taken away by the police.

I wasn’t quite sure what kind of morally corrupt crime story they had already concocted in their minds.