Chapter 4: Dog Days

There was nothing, Jaune had been told, quite so magical as a frisbee. Certainly, it was magical how they all seemed to be magnetically attracted to the centre of his forehead, like a thousand flimsy UFOs converging for a doomed attack on a sentient planet. Only when other people threw them, though. When he threw them, they would fly three feet and then turn 90 degrees in mid-air to try and dig a hole to the earth’s core, returning to the molten hell from which they came.

He’d had similar problems in the military, actually, only that time it had been clay pigeons. Skeet shooting was popular in the old country, where it was available; not only could it be parleyed into national glory if a particularly promising sportsman was found, but it trained the troops in how to empty their guns wildly into the air at the sight of flying objects. A lot of places were too rural to have anti-aircraft munitions on hand, so a couple of good old boys with liquor and shotguns was as good as you could get.

Still, he thought idly as a piece of plastic whizzed over his left ear, there were worse ways to spend a late fall morning.

Despite the chill in the air, Aru was still dressed in a short sleeved shirt and a pair of faded jeans as she took another disc from the stack. She’d been flinging them – with suspiciously impeccable aim – at him for ten minutes now, apologising when she hit him and giving him a quick thumbs up when he managed to catch one, which was basically never. He was mostly too focused on dodging to catch, and most of them seemed to sail past his head so fast he was surprised they didn’t melt. Occasionally he would reach up to snatch one out of the air before it could hit him between the eyes, but it was few and far between.

Standing at a distance and observing them with a clipboard was QP. She seemed to have realised at some point that sports science was, indeed, science, and she was therefore a budding scientist. Therefore therefore, she had the right – indeed, the responsibility – to wear a lab coat in public whenever she wanted. Nobody seemed to have told her you could just buy lab coats and wear them with no prior qualifications, which Jaune thought was a shame. She had a rather different allure when she was wearing one.

She had selected them as subjects in her current college study, ‘generously’ waiving the application process and showing up to personally haul them from their beds at ungodly hours of the morning. Her aim: to establish the difference in sporting capabilities between different types of kemonomimi, a task that apparently meant blowing twenty five dollars on frisbees for ammunition.

He didn’t mind it, honestly. He hadn’t gotten a chance to catch up with QP since she’d made him pudding at her house a while ago; their paths just hadn’t crossed over. He felt like… there had been a lot that hadn’t quite been said between them. It felt like a waste to leave things like that. He didn’t know what he wanted, or what she wanted. Or what Aru wanted, for that matter. But it seemed like this was an opportunity for him to find out.

It was also an opportunity to enjoy her cooking. She’d turned up armed with a picnic basket and promises of baked goods, which Aru, at the very least, seemed to think was a more then equitable trade for a morning’s work. If it was as good as the pudding she’d made for him last time, Jaune was inclined to agree. Time would tell.

“Hah… I didn’t realise I’d get this tired just from throwing frisbees. Jaune, you were ducking and diving all over the place… I don’t know how you do it,” Aru sighed, stretching out on the picnic blanket they’d prepared. “Maybe I’m getting out of shape… it’s that time of year, I guess. Haha.”

QP threw herself down on the blanket next to her, kicking her legs. “Aw. I think you’ve got a great shape, Aru! Sure, it’s soft and round and a little squishy, but that’s how bunnies should be.”

He took a long moment to gaze at the sky. Lots of very interesting clouds. All sorts of very interesting formations. If he had to speak, he’d definitely talk about that, and not about which bits of Aru were the softest, roundest and squishiest, and how he might have acquired that knowledge first-hand.

Aru smiled. “So you think it’d be weird if I got buff?”

“No. Then you’d be going against the trend, so it’d be a charm point,” QP explained loftily.

That was the thing about QP, he was discovering. You couldn’t win against her. She wanted to maintain that, since you were her friend, you were an awesome person who deserved her support, and she would go to great lengths to justify it to you. Aru tried to help you grow through careful applications of stick and carrot, but QP made you grow by giving you a blueprint of the awesome person she thought you already were and making you live up to it.

“What do you think, Jaune?” Aru asked. The look on her face was a little mischievous. “What’s your favourite body type?”

“Warm,” he said wryly, cracking open the picnic basket. You’ll have to try a little harder than that. “The body type isn’t that important, anyway. It’s the person that matters.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm,” QP echoed.

He had the creeping feeling that he was being ganged up on. It wasn’t particularly new. The Waruda were all female, and he was the newbie on top of that, so he’d come in for some interesting comments while he was finding his feet.

“I think,” QP said slowly, “the most important thing is how somebody smells. That’s what I look for.”

“That’s just like you, QP. It’s a very… pomeranian way of thinking,” Aru giggled.

“I’m totally right, though! Jaune, back me up. You can tell what kind of person somebody is just by smelling them, right? Like, if you’ll like them or not? Come on! Canine solidarity!”

He rubbed his chin. “I wouldn’t go that far, but… there are definitely scents that are more appealing than others. And sometimes you find one that really clicks with you.”

Scent had been one of the major catalysts for him getting close to QP the last time they’d met. She’d been in heat then, so just being around her was a headrush. He’d gone out by himself and done a little research on heat in kemonomimi by himself later, and it was apparently latent until a similar type was nearby. Or, in other words, she’d only started to experience it because he’d come into town.

Since then, her scent had changed. It had become sweeter, more comfortable. Top notes of caramel, blended with the other scents that clung to her in day to day life – fabric softener, pencil shavings from her reports. The healthy scent of an active young woman, in the prime of her life.

It was a smell you could fall in love with, if you weren’t careful. Aru had a beautiful soul and many charms, but when it came to aroma, QP was in a class of her own.

“Oh, so that’s how it is for you two, huh… Oh. QP, you didn’t pack any drinks for us?” Aru asked.

“I didn’t think we’d need any.” The dog bit her lip. “It’s kinda cold out today, right?”

“For you, maybe.” Aru wrinkled her nose with amusement. “I think out of all of us, you’re the only one who minds the cold.”

“Hey! It’s not my fault. When you look at a normal pomeranian, they’re like, maybe 60% fluffy coat. So of course if you take away all the poof, a pomeranian would get cold, right? That’s how it is for me.” She sniffed quietly. “I’m more of a summer person, anyway.”

Summer was the beach and swimsuits. Summer was tan skin and volleyball shorts, toned legs and heaving chests. A summer QP was a QP Jaune could get behind, and even though he had missed the window to see her, he tucked the image away in his imagination for further perusal.

“Well, I don’t know about you two, but I definitely need a drink. You guys stay here, and I’ll go grab something from the coffee shop.” If you looked deeply into Aru’s eyes, you would see salted caramel macchiatos and pumpkin spice lattes spinning in the abyss. “Do you want anything?”

When they shook their heads, she stood up and went on her way. Left alone, QP and Jaune looked at each other, and silently vied for the position of who would be last to speak.

“So,” QP said, after her natural aversion to not making noise got the better of her.

“So.” He sat up, and flicked his ears towards her. Attentive, but relaxed. That was the impression he wanted to give.

“I was surprised to find out you knew Aru,” she carried on, although he got the feeling she had revised her topic at the last second.

“Mm. She threw coffee all over me this one time, and since then she’s been making me feel right at home.” The clouds continued to be very interesting. “It’s been helpful. Things are still very different to my home country, but… I feel like I’m settling in.”

“She’s great at that kind of thing… Honestly, I’m kind’ve relieved that you two get along.”

“Why?”

“Aru’s a good judge of character. More than good, she’s crazy awesome. The best. If she thinks you’re a good person, you’re a good person,” she said. “I mean, I thought you were a good person deep down anyway, but if she thinks so, then it’s definitely true.”

“Well…” He rubbed the back of his head. It felt like a compliment, but he didn’t really know how to react to it. “I try my best.”

There was another long moment. He could almost feel the pressure of the silence building up, like gas in a bottle of champagne. He didn’t mind long periods of quiet, but he felt like QP did. Just as he was about to make some meaningless small talk to try and make her comfortable, she sat up.

“So… so… aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh! I suck at stuff like this!” she burst out, and snapped her gaze to him. The dam had broken. “I tried to call you like four times last week, and you never picked up or called me back! What’s with that, huh? Why’d you even give me your number if you’re not gonna pick up? It’s so frustrating!”

“You’ve been calling me?” he asked. His hand went to the phone in his pocket. No missed calls, no messages. “What was it about?”

“...I was wondering if, um. You. And me. We could go somewhere. Together. On a date!” she said hotly, her cheeks flushing. “Quit looking at me like that! I don’t… usually do dating. I don’t know how you arrange it and everything.”

He smiled and raised an eyebrow. “So, when calling me didn’t work, you decided to grab me out of my bed with a study as an excuse?”

“It’s not an excuse! This is genuine science! But… that might have been a part of it. A bit.” She chewed her lip, her ears drooping. Then, almost immediately, they perked up. “Hey.”

“Hm?”

“What happened,” she said, pointing at his hand, “to that super ancient phone you had last time?”

“Oh. I shot it. Accidentally,” he shrugged. “I always heard those phones could shrug off bullets, but I guess it depends what ammo you’re using.”

“So, you have a new phone?” she asked patiently. “With a new number?”

“I guess so. A lot was going on at the time, so I didn’t really listen to a lot of the details when they sold it to me – oh.”

He was struck by the sudden realisation that he was an idiot.

“That would be why I wasn’t getting your calls.”

He had not, before this moment, considered the possibility that QP was capable of glaring, or the further possibility that said glare would make him feel like a fruit shrivelling on the vine.

When he had recovered, and was sure she wasn’t going to make any sudden lunges for his throat, he scratched his head in what he hoped was a charmingly nonchalant manner. “I, uh… Well. I should give you my new number then. And if you still want that date, I’d be delighted. I’d love to get to know you a bit better.”

She made a valorous attempt to look as though she was mad. But the suddenly wagging tail gave the game away, and they both knew it.

“J-just so you know! You shouldn’t get your hopes up for me to put out on the first date. I know we skipped straight to that the first time, but I want to do the… you know. All the kissy stuff, as well,” she said. Her voice was grumpy, but she had the expression of a dog who was inordinately pleased with herself – the natural state of being for QP. “The first time was special.”

“Yes,” he replied quietly. “It really was.”

A delicate pause, but not an unpleasant one. The entire world seemed to shift into the background. It would have been a beautiful moment, if he left it. But unfortunately, there were still things that needed to be talked about.

“I should probably say. Me and Aru are a bit… closer, than you might have realised. We’re not dating, and we haven’t really done much of anything, but there’s been… developments.” This was, he thought, probably the most tactful way he could say that he’d been between her legs – but only in a geographic sense.

“Oh, I figured that out. Sometimes, when I visit her, she still has your scent on her. You can’t fool a pomeranian’s nose!” She paused, and carefully arranged the words in her head. “But Aru’s amazing. She’s one of my favourite people, so I can understand why. It’d be weird if you didn’t like her, honestly. So it’s fine. Besides, that’s what dating is about, right? Seeing how it fits and… figuring out what you wanna do in the future. So don’t worry about it.”

She seemed confident, although Jaune didn’t know how confident she’d necessarily be if she looked through his phone and found the little folder of scandalous selfies that Aru was quietly building there. But it was fine. One way or another, they’d figure it out between them.

“But anyway. When you look at this data, you really kinda suck at frisbee, huh?” QP said conversationally, having apparently plumbed her emotional depths for the day. “In similar studies, kemonomimi almost always have a small advantage over baseline humans, but you’re way below the average.”

“I was in the military,” he frowned. “When we see objects flying at us, we don’t catch them. We duck.”

“Huh. Is that so? I guess that’s why you’re kinda muscular. How’s your cardio?”

“Not… as good as it used to be. I don’t do a lot of running nowadays.”

“That’s what I thought. You don’t have a good diet either, do you? Aru said something like that, but now that I’m looking, I can totally tell. Your tail fur’s not glossy at all.” She looked him up and down, as if to confirm her suspicions. “If you just do push-ups and stuff without thinking about your diet or other exercise, you’ll do more harm than good, you know?”

“I know, I know. Mostly I just do it out of habit… Why are you so concerned about what my exercise routines are like, anyway?”

She put a thumb on her chin as she thought about how to word her answer. Tact was not something she excelled at. “We-elll… it’s a little bit to do with my course, I guess? But also! You’re pretty good looking now, but you’ve got potential to be super hot with the right diet and routine. Besides, your lift strength seems good, but wouldn’t you like to be more flexible and have more stamina?”

“And what,” he asked wryly, “might I use those for?”

“All sorts of things,” she replied, not looking at his face. “Anyway, here! Look at my tail fur. This is the level of tail fur glossiness you should be aspiring to!”

The morning wore on. When Aru returned, she was moderately caffeinated, having taken the chance to sit down, relax, and calculate how many frisbees she’d have to throw to work off the calories from a pumpkin spiced latte. (The answer, depressingly, was more than the number of frisbees that she had thrown, possibly in her entire life up to this point). She had a cup of hot chocolate in one hand for QP, and an iced tea in the other for Jaune.

She came back to find QP with her lab coat hiked up, and Jaune pensively examining her ass as her tail wagged in front of his face. The bunny sighed, and smiled to herself in a wistful kind of way.

She turned around quietly, and started to walk back to the coffee shop. If she was going to keep up with those two, she’d need to start drinking something a lot stronger.

* * *

 Four hours later, in a remote and secluded location protected by layer upon layer of nerds, QP and Aru’s war council convened for the first, and hopefully final, time.

In actuality they were in the basement of the local tabletop gaming shop, where Syura had managed to land a part time job. She had initially been hired as a calculated move based on the fact that she was female, but this had quickly faded to irrelevance due to the fact that Syura could play every game there with all the skill and prowess of true geek royalty. Anybody who got distracted by her feminine wiles would quickly find that she was very much aware of what a trap card was, and employed them liberally in her nefarious plans for total nerd domination.

In time, people whispered, she was sure to inherit the shop, and it would become one of the eight gyms that tabletop gamers would have to compete at before they could be crowned a true dungeon master. As a result of her exalted status, she’d been given the key to the basement, which looked like, but was legally distinct from, an actual dungeon.

As Syura’s room-mate, QP had declared that “what’s yours is mine and mine is yours, except for any pudding in the fridge which is mine exclusively unless you’ve been good,” and tucked the keys into her pocket. Allowing Syura access to a dungeon was dangerous; allowing her to live in a basement was also dangerous. If the two conditions could be combined, her power would be absolute, and absolute power corrupts every cutie.

“Okay, Aru. It’s time for girl talk. Serious girl talk,” QP said grimly.

The rabbit felt her smile tighten. The last time they’d had ‘serious girl talk’, they’d ended up duelling with a pair of pugil sticks, which QP had suspiciously close to hand. There were, Aru had noted, some foam battleaxes resting against the wall; like Chekhov’s gun, she couldn’t help but think they were intended to be used.

“So. Uh. Jaune told me that you and him were um, close. Just… you know, out of interest, how close are we talking?”

Aru sighed. She’d been wondering when this question would pop up, and hadn’t exactly been looking forward to answering it. It was inevitable, though. She generally didn’t bother to keep secrets with QP; the dog had an innate affinity for rabbits, and it made her extremely perceptive when it came to Aru (and what passed for her love life). Likewise, she’d known that QP and Jaune were at least attracted to each other. It was hard to mistake the wagging tails, the alert ears, and the private smiles for anything else.

“Well… We had a date the other day, although it didn’t go quite as planned. We kissed, once or twice. A few times.” She paused, before swallowing her embarrassment and continuing. “And, uh, I might have sent him a few pictures where I’m… less than a hundred percent clothed. Or, you know, fifty percent. Or… twenty percent. I kept my socks on, is what I’m saying.” She raised her head, having thoroughly appraised her own feet to keep from blushing too hard, and looked QP in the eye. “What about you?”

The dog looked away. “He… helped me out when I was in heat.”

Aru, who whose heritage included two species who bred all year round, did not look up, and thus did not see the point as it sailed cleanly between her ears and past her head. “Oh, he went out and bought you medicine? That was nice of him.”

“There, um, isn’t medicine. He helped out the… old fashioned way. With me on top.”

Aru looked at her best friend in the entire world, and felt the cogs turn in her mind. When they’d spewed out the only applicable answer, she blushed. Then she got out her phone, scrolled hastily through her pictures until she found one with a good angle, looked at her friend, and blushed even harder.

“How?” she asked.

“Uh… well, we took our clothes off, and–”

“No, I mean, how did it fit?” Aru spluttered. “I’ve seen what he’s packing, and just the, um, geometry of it doesn’t really make sense. I’d have trouble taking that much, and I’m bigger than you. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t tried to do it properly with him yet! How could you have… I mean…” She held her hands out with an approximate measurement. It would definitely have been at the belly-button, as far as she could tell.

“You’re bigger, but I’m flexible and I have good muscle control,” QP said loftily. “And… I was in heat. I think that took care of most of it. It honestly didn’t even hurt – it felt like it was just the right size.” She sighed dreamily. “I was thinking, maybe that’s like a sign, you know? Like it was made just for me.”

Aru shuffled uncomfortably in her seat. It was sweet, in a way, but she was coming to terms with the idea that not only could QP have sexual intercourse, but she’d already done it and she’d done it with a guy Aru was quite interested in herself. It was a lot to take in.

“But it was kind of a whirlwind thing, right? It felt totally natural at the time, but afterwards, I thought about it and I felt bad since we did it all out of order. You’re supposed to dates and then kissing and then sex, but we’ve done it all backwards. So I want to start again from dating.” She paused. Her tail swished uncertainly. “I was, um, wondering if you had any tips.”

Aru laughed breathlessly. “Um… haha. QP, you, uh… you know I might be interested in him myself, right?”

“I know. But I think that’s fine. Whoever gets him, at least one of us ends up happy, right? And they say not to let guys get in the way of friendships. So no matter what, we’re still friends, and we’re still a team. And teams share information so they can pound the opposition into the dirt! So let’s strategise!”

Aru had several things she could have said, none of which she did but all of which she considered. Firstly, there was the fact that QP was talking about pounding people into the dirt mere moments after they’d discussed sex, which was a mess of issues in its own right. Secondly, she wondered whether QP could actually distinguish love from volleyball, or if she had conflated the two pleasurably within her own head.

But, mostly, she was touched by the heartwarming (if slightly incoherent) reasoning. It had that same guilelessness she sometimes saw on letters to Santa, and for which she had a definite weakness.

“Well… What kind of tips are you looking for?” she asked at last.

“Oh, you know. Stuff like… what do I wear, what’s a good thing to go and do, what kind of girls do you think he likes…”

“Big ones,” Aru said distantly.

QP narrowed her eyes. “The girls? Big, like, how? You mean, uh, chubby?”

Aru shook her head. “Big.”

“Maybe… bust size?”

“I mean, yes, but no. General bigness.”

“So, tall?” QP’s ears seemed to droop at the thought; although her chest had grown by the time she hit college age, her height had not exploded the same way.

“Kind of.”

“How tall?”

“Maybe… twenty to thirty foot?”

QP nodded sagely. Then she blinked. Then she shook her head and made a noise like she’d been tricked. “What?”

“So, I don’t know if you read the paper the other day–”

“I didn’t.”

To be fair, actually reading the Ebimanyou Town Gazette was a grand undertaking by itself. The town was populated principally by weirdos and eccentrics, all of whom seemed to have a knack for creating or solving problems – usually the former more than the latter. There was no such thing as a slow news day.

Quickly, Aru gave a very brief and somewhat edited recap of her growth incident, which had indeed been featured in the paper – on page 17, as a matter of fact, underneath an advertisement for dish soap. Apparently ‘giant half-naked local business owner streaking through the streets’ only merited that much. It was that kind of town.

“But, long story short… He was into it. I think, really into it. I ended up asking Krila how to do it afterwards, and… I’ve been messing around with it, a bit. It’s tougher to stop growing than it is to start, and I can’t do it without ripping my clothes, but it’s definitely a thing you could try.”

Even as she said it, Aru was aware of the patent absurdity. When normal girls gave each other dating tips, they taught each other how to accessorise. And here she was, telling her best friend that if she wanted to get her man, she needed to use sketchy magic to make herself ten foot tall.

What was even more worrying was that QP nodded.

“Actually, I think I can do something like that. It’s kinda related to my part time job, right?” QP said. ‘Part time job’ was their secret code for when they needed to talk about being either the unimpeachable judge of all children and deliverer of yuletime joy, or the cosmic deification of beating up people for abusing the power of sweets to cause conflict. “See, apparently there was once this thing called the Battenburg Behemoth, and just in case it ever comes back, Amami taught me–”

As she listened to QP’s explanation, Aru’s eyes widened. Then they closed. Then, like donuts, they became glazed.

QP was not talking about parlour tricks and adding a couple of inches to your height. She was talking about kaiju battles, how to get Godzilla in a half-nelson and laugh in the face of the square-cube law. She was talking about using a cosmic sledgehammer to crack entirely mundane walnuts.

She was not, particularly, a dog with any concept of ‘restraint’.

Aru shivered. She could see what was coming from a mile away.

And soon, so would everybody else.