章 368: Good Bones
Ranko groaned, leaning on her elbows over the bar counter and rubbing her eyes. "I swear, if she's late, I'm gonna…" She cocked her fist over the Phoenix' coated wooden bar counter, shaking it in mock threat.
Akane giggled, rubbing her wife's back through her red A-line dress. "Oh, shush. You're fine. I remember when you used to get up before sunrise every day to train. What happened to you?"
"I started singing and dancing until two in the fucking morning every night," Ranko grumbled, taking another long draught from the paper cup of iced coffee in front of her. "I'm a creature of the night now. Do you have any idea what this is even about, and why Izzi felt the need to torture me by doing it at fuck-you-o'clock?"
"Oh, come on, it's gotta be almost fuck-you-thirty by now!" The black-haired girl shrugged with a smirk. "Your guess is as good as mine, princess." As she spoke, she added a few more characters to the essay she was working on in her spiral notebook. "You should work on your homework while you wait. You don't wanna let it sit until the last minute. It always burns you when you do."
Chuckling, Ranko rolled her eyes at her beloved as she drained the remainder of her coffee into her mouth. "Why, so I can drool on it? I'm barely fuckin' conscious, Akane! I see two of you right now as it is!"
"Then, you'd better come kiss us both," Akane said, simpering into her lover's eyes as she leaned from her barstool over to join Ranko's lips with hers.
"Ugh! Sorry I'm late! Jun's babysitter got stuck in traffic." Ayako Jirito bustled into the room from the front door with a loud bang of her purse against its brass handle. Her black heels clacked across the hardwood floor until she reached the counter, tossing her keys to its surface with a sharp tink. "Where is everybody?"
Ranko growled under her breath, rubbing her temples at the sudden, jarring noises. She waved in the general direction of the front door as her sister approached, shielding her eyes from the bright sunlight flooding in through the tinted glass door. "Hiding from the worst fucking surprise party ev…" Her voice trailed off into a loudly-vocalized yawn as she stretched her arms toward the ceiling. "Aw, fuck. Mornin', Aya."
Ayako set a large brown paper sack on the counter between the two younger girls. "I figured you two probably would have skipped breakfast. I brought doughnuts."
The redhead perked up slightly on her stool, giving the newcomer a hopeful look. "Didja…"
With a giggle and a nod, Ayako nudged the bag closer. "Yes, goofball, I remembered to get you chocolate."
Ranko stood on the footrests of her bar stool and nearly pounced at the bag, tearing open the staples holding it closed at the top and reaching in for the flat sleeves of pastry paper stacked at the bottom. "Have I told you lately that you're my favorite sister?!"
"What about when you said that to Yui yesterday?" Akane asked with a snicker as her voracious wife searched for a dark brown confection among the options presented.
"She had candy bars! Look, nobody denied my loyalty can be bought," Ranko said with a giggle as she tossed aside a transparent white wrapper and bit into the frosted ring of cake with a quiet purr. Both of the other women in the bar joined her in her laughter.
Akane nudged her wife gently in the ribs with a devious smirk. "Well, if you're not careful, they're gonna buy you right into a bigger dress size, girlfriend. After all, you gotta look cute on stage for all the boys…"
Ranko flushed, hiding her face with her hand even as she chewed. She waited to respond until she'd swallowed. "It's fine. Julie's got us doing so much conditioning at cheer practice, I could eat a whole cake every day and I wouldn't gain a gram. Freakin' stadiums, man. Those things kill." As she finished speaking, another thwam from the front door drew her attention.
"Good morning, sisters dear!" Mei said with a chipper giggle as she burst into the bar, with Yui and Sakura in tow behind her. All three girls were dressed in blue jeans, casual shirts and sneakers, and Sakura's hair was tied back in a tight ponytail. Yui wore a green headband and a matching emerald cardigan over her yellow tee shirt.
Yui grinned as she approached the girls, tossing her yellow motorcycle helmet on the bar counter and reaching for the half-eaten pastry in Ranko's hand. "Ooh! Doughnuts!"
Ranko playfully swatted at her sister's hand. "Try it and you're gonna pull back a nub, sis! Get your own! I need my chocolate!"
The blonde winced, selecting a jelly donut dusted in powdered sugar. "That time, huh?"
She received a blush and a sheepish nod in reply, but before either woman could say anything else, the front door swung open again, this time admitting Izumi and her husband Kaito. Izumi wore a denim knee-length pencil skirt and a cream-colored blouse with a pussy bow at her throat, and Kaito had a long black nylon tube strapped over the shoulder of his heavy flannel shirt. Ranko thought it might have been a sword at first, but the round tube had a zipper holding it closed at one end rather than a hilt.
"Fantastic," Yui said with a satisfied grin. "The gang's all here. We can get started."
Akane looked up, quizzically. "Wait a minute! I thought this was Izzi's surprise?"
"Team effort, sis," Izumi said with a grin. "Me, Yui, Sakura and Kaito have been working on this since a couple of days after Ranko got home. Now, c'mon. Let's go. Field trip time. Leave your stuff."
Ranko crammed the entire remaining half of her doughnut in her mouth, chewing with bulging cheeks as she dismounted her stool. She shuffled after Akane and her other sisters, following Kaito back out the front door and into the street beyond.
Kaito turned right and led the seven women to the next building over. Across the narrow alley was a large discount store - or at least it had been once. Like many of the businesses surrounding the Phoenix, the property had been vacated as part of the effort to buy up the land and demolish everything to make room for a new shopping mall - a plan that had been at least temporarily thwarted by Ranko's higher offer for the parcel of land on which the Phoenix stood.
Ranko's brother-in-law pulled the glass door of the storefront, and the redhead was surprised to find it unlocked. He led his wife and her sisters into the cavernous two-story space. Empty shelves lay on their sides on the ground, strewn about alongside empty soda cans and cardboard signage advertising a long-since-ended clearance sale. The far walls of the massive room were covered in graffiti, likely owing to the store having been left unsecured. A layer of dust and grime lay over every surface, and the once-white linoleum floor was marred with divots, grooves and stains from years of heavy industrial use. The air in the large space was stale and warm, and it felt oppressive - especially on skin made extraordinarily sensitive by the power of the Full-Body Cat's Tongue pressure point.
"Um, Kaito? You do know this is the kind of place where guys take cute girls when they wanna murder them, right? What the heck is going on here?" Ranko's eyes darted around the room, leaning closer to Akane for safety.
Yui grinned, squeezing Sakura's hand as she walked in front of the group and turned to face them. "Well, me and Sake have been talking, and… we have a crazy idea we wanted to run by you girls."
Ranko scoffed. "Are we gonna do crimes?! 'Cause, like, this is totally hide out and plan a bank robbery kinda shit."
With a chuckle and a shake of her head, Sakura spoke next, her eyes panning around the empty store as she did. "We were making a pretty high rent payment every month on the bar, and not having too much trouble doing it, until they tried to sell it, right? And then, Ranko bought the building. So, the money that used to go to the rent is all extra that we don't have to spend every month now." Sakura grinned excitedly. "So we got to thinking… what if we could find another use for it?"
Akane blinked, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. "What, you wanna open a department store or something? I don't think even Izzi can make enough outfits to fill a place this size."
Smirking, Ayako rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "I mean, this might be big enough to store all of Mei's stuffed animals. If we're really efficient with the shelving." She laughed as her diminutive sister hugged her about the ribs.
With a bright giggle, Izumi nudged her husband with her elbow. "Show 'em, honey."
Nodding, Kaito approached a disused countertop that had once supported a cash register. He slipped the long black tube off of his shoulder, using it to brush the trash and detritus off of the mauve-colored mica onto the floor. That done, he unzipped the end of the tube, and extracted from it a long roll of papers like a poster. With a bit of a flourish, he unfurled them on the countertop, using his wallet and his key ring on opposite corners to help them lay flat.
Led by Akane, the girls huddled around the counter to look down at the blueprint. It was a scale drawing of the building in which they now stood, but the layout was completely different inside.
"So, Miss Tendo," Kaito said with a grin up at Ranko, "I present to you, Club Firebird at the Phoenix." He tapped the corner of the paper, on which the words were written exactly as he had said them. "A fully-equipped live music venue. As befits the home of an international pop star."
Ranko's eyes bulged and her jaw fell slack as she peered over the blueprints with renewed interest. "... what?!"
Kaito tapped a large trapezoid that ran the vertical length of the room on the paper, about a third of the way from the left. "So, this would be your stage, almost as wide as the building. It'd come out pretty close to the dimensions of the stages they're building for you on the road, according to Nabiki. Behind it, you've got dressing rooms, prop storage, private bathrooms, all that good stuff."
"Wait, like, I wouldn't have to get dressed upstairs and come out through the kitchen?!" Ranko blinked. "That would be…"
"You sure you wouldn't miss stopping off for a snack on your way to the stage?" Mei giggled, throwing her arm around her taller sister's back.
Izumi's contractor husband laughed, motioning to his immediate surroundings with a wide sweep of his arm. "All this area where we're standing? That's your dance floor. We figure the fire marshall will let us put about a thousand people down here, give or take."
"A thousand?! That's…" Ranko covered her mouth with her hands.
Yui nodded with a grin. "No matter how popular you've gotten, we could only grow your crowd so much in the bar. There's just no room to pack in any more bodies. But in here? We could get fourteen, fifteen hundred people, easy! We'd be bigger than Steam, even. I mean, sure, it's no Tokyo Dome, but…"
"But, Kaito said a thousand. Where are you gonna put the rest?" Ayako asked, rubbing her temples with a mystified expression in her eyes.
Kaito smiled excitedly, as if he'd been waiting for the question. He removed his wallet and keys, rolling up the blueprint to reveal another one stacked under it. The second layer featured a similar layout, but with two wide wings on the right side, forming a chevron opened toward the trapezoidal stage. "Upstairs."
He motioned to the two triangles, turning and pointing upward to the two corners on the near wall where they met the cavernous ceiling of the two-story structure. "We build two balconies for seating, for people who want to sit and watch the show rather than dance. Leave a little space in the middle there for a proper audio and visual control booth for Ariel. And then over here…"
He motioned to a shape at the top of the image, overlooking the stage. "Akane gets a VIP balcony." He traced his hand leftward along a long, narrow rectangle that ran across the back wall. "With direct, hidden access to the backstage area through this hallway right here, and then down the back steps direct to her lady love's dressing room."
Ranko smiled as she felt Akane squeeze her hand, and leaned to her side, resting her head on her wife's shoulder.
"Upstairs, we've got a huge press room for Natsuko to manage the fan newsletter. We'll build a whole workshop right above the dressing room for Izzi to work on the costumes and get them out of our living room, and office space here for our new entertainment director."
Ranko shook her head in disbelief. Everything was coming at her way too fast, and she'd not had anywhere near enough coffee to handle it. "Wait, when the fuck did we hire an entertainment director?! And why didn't anybody tell me?!"
Mei giggled, raising her hand and wiggling her fingers in the air. "Mei Hotaro, entertainment director of Club Firebird at the Phoenix. A pleasure to meet your acquaintance, Miss Tendo. Truly. I'm sure we'll be working very closely together in the future. I'll have my people call your people?"
A nod of affirmation came from the Phoenix' new proprietress. "Mei's been dealing with our entertainment schedule since we were a karaoke bar, before Ranko showed up." Yui flashed her blue-haired sister a bright smile. "And it's high time she settled into an actual career."
"Hold up, though. We won't be able to sell liquor over here without a whole new license. The city says we can't have people walking the sidewalk with booze." Ayako gazed with incredulity at Yui, shocked that her sister would not have considered such an obvious limitation.
Kaito snickered. "That would be true - if we had separate buildings. But we are gonna blow out the wall. Right over there." He pointed to the center of the east wall. "Knock a hole in the wall of the bar, over by the booths opposite the bar, and we build a little connector across the alley. If we own both parcels, we can combine them into one larger one with the city planner's office, and then voila! One big-ass night club, with a connected music venue, and folks can buy a drink at the counter and walk right in here with it."
"So, wait… You wanna tear a hole in the bar?! It'll be fucked up for weeks doing that!" Ranko was relatively sure the cavernous room was spinning with confusion and possibility.
Izumi chuckled, throwing her arm over her celebrity sister's shoulder. "Yeah! I can't think of any suitable time, when the foot traffic in the bar will be way down. There's certainly no period of time coming up when our celebrity entertainer will be unavailable for almost a month anyway."
The redhead grinned in realization. "December! I'll be in China."
Kaito nodded, wagging his finger at his sister-in-law. "You got it! My construction firm does all the buildout over here between now and November, and then come December, you get on a plane, and we shut the Phoenix down for a couple weeks for demo and renovation. We reconfigure the bar space, take out the current stage to add some more tables, maybe expand the kitchen a little bit, and build our connector space. By the time you come back on Christmas, it's all done, and we open the place with one hell of a New Year's Eve bash."
"The kitchen! What about the kitchen?! Who's gonna cook for all those people, without Mei or Mom?" Ranko gesticulated wildly, as if she wasn't sure what to do with her hands.
Biting her lip, Yui turned to another of her sisters. "Well… we were hoping…"
"How did I guess," Ayako asked, shaking her head with a grin.
"Oh, come on, Aya! Come back! You've always loved to cook, and we've missed you like crazy since you stopped working full-time! Plus, by the time we can get this off the ground, Jun will be a year old. He can stay with Kage and his mom, or we could even set up the apartment upstairs as a nursery for him and Mioko. Please?" Yui reached out for her sister's hand. "I can't do this without Mama and my big sister."
Slumping her shoulders, Ayako nodded softly. "No promises, but I'll talk to Kage about it."
"YES!" Mei pumped her fist excitedly with a spritely little hop of excitement. "We're gonna get our Aya back!"
Sakura beamed, her hand rubbing Yui's back through her green cardigan. "We really think we can pull this off, you guys. After the mall project fell through, the prices for land in this part of town are falling through the floor now that everybody bugged out. They're practically giving it away, just so it isn't kilometers of empty buildings in every direction. We think we can get this huge-ass space for about what we were paying for rent before. We'd have to take a loan out against the main building to cover the construction costs, but the payments on that would be easily offset with all the extra revenue once we get this place up and running."
With a smirk, Ayako nudged her blonde sister in the shoulder. "I gotta give it to ya, girls. It's one hell of a big swing. You have talked to Mama about this, right?"
Yui rolled her eyes with a little shake of her head. "The Phoenix is ours now, Aya. All of us. Mama trusts us. But yeah, of course I asked her about it. We wouldn't be having this conversation if she thought it was a bad idea. I ran it by Nabiki too, and she said she'd help us with the negotiations. Kaito can handle the permits and shit through his company. But at the end of the day, we don't do this unless all of us are on board."
She turned to the short redhead leaning on Akane's shoulder. "Especially our star. We wouldn't be in the position to do this at all if not for you, Ranko, and there's no point building a stage without talent to put on it. Obviously, me, Sake, Iz and Mei are all in, but that still leaves you three. We're not like someone we know and love, who goes off and does stupid crap on her own without consulting anybody. We don't sign shit unless the vote is seven to nothing."
Ayako crossed her arms, giving her sister a sharp nod. "If you girls and Kaito are all absolutely sure you can pull this off, I trust you."
"Don't look at me," Akane said as Yui's eyes fell to her. "On this one, I follow Ranko's lead. What do you think, princess?" She reached down, taking Ranko's hand in her own and giving it another little squeeze.
Izumi snickered. "Not for nothing, Akane, but there's gonna be a great big dance floor that's indoors and secure. I don't imagine we'll have an awful lot of music acts booked at ten in the morning on Mondays and Thursdays… if you know anybody who might like to use the space as a dojo."
"Really?!" Akane blinked. "You guys would let me do that?"
Ranko turned to look at her. "Nowhere could be home for me, unless it was home for you, Akane." She stood up on her tiptoes to kiss her taller wife on the cheek. "And if they're building all that storage, there'd be places for stuff like mats and training weapons when we're in music mode."
"Well, then… does that mean we're in?" Akane asked, the hopeful tinge in her voice betraying her air of neutrality.
The redhead blushed, frowning a bit as her eyes panned across her family. "I mean… it's a lot. It's a lot of pressure. We just managed to keep from losing the bar, and we'd be risking it again on another loan. You guys would be putting so much trust in me." She sighed heavily, her shoulders slumping in dismay. "I… don't know if that's the best plan. I'm not exactly Little Miss Reliable lately."
Yui stepped forward, resting her slender hand on Ranko's shoulder. Her ruby ring sparkled in the sunlight streaming into the derelict store through the glass front door. "Ranko, listen to me, blockhead. Yeah, you're impulsive. You're reckless. You're downright fucking crazy, girl. But I think I speak for all of us when I say I'd follow your crazy anywhere. You've given us reason to throw our hands in the air more times and choke your freaking brains out than I can count, but you've never let us down when it mattered. Not once. We believe in you, little sister."
The redheaded songstress smiled, pulling away from Yui and Akane's grasp. She wandered half the length of the dilapidated storefront in silence, approaching a long, disused counter that had once been part of the store's perfume and makeup department. She hopped up on it, turning to face her family.
"Once upon a rhyme, not so far away, there lived a little girl who had lost her way. Her fairy tale had been an epic fail from the beginning…"
Ranko's eyes panned the room from her makeshift formica-and-pressboard stage as she sang, gazing into every dusty corner of the neglected space. She imagined it full of people dancing, cheering for her and her friends.
Club Firebird. A place just for them.
"Her heroes taught her how to make a stand, went and put a microphone in her hand…"
"One thing's for sure," Akane said as she watched her lover pace the length of the octagonal countertop. "It wouldn't be a homey little dive bar anymore. This would be… pretty freakin' big time. It's a totally different vibe from your hole in the wall, baby. Are you guys sure you're ready for that kind of change?"
Ranko shook her head, hopping down from the counter. "The atmosphere of the Phoenix was never about the fact that it's small." She grinned up at Yui. "It didn't feel homey because it's cramped. It felt homey because it's home, for all of us. I did a lot of thinking about this, when it looked like we were gonna lose the place. It was never the walls, Akane."
Her eyes panned the crowd of people who had plucked her off the streets, wrapped their arms around her and given her a place and a purpose. "It always was the family. Our family has grown. Maybe it's about time our home does, too."
"Does that mean…"
Ranko interrupted Sakura with a nod and a smile. "Let's fucking do it."
Ayako approached her youngest sister, wrapping her arms tight around the smaller girl. "Together."
クリエイターの想い 
AnneOminous
AnneOminous Hey, friends and Firebirds!
Last Monday, I preview released Chapter 1 of Book XIII, with a "this is not the start of the official release schedule" disclaimer. My reason to release it when I did was largely to celebrate Ranko's birthday on November 25, but more broadly, because due to life stuff, time spent building up ThePhoenixSaga.com and my fan Discord server, as well as the Phoenix: Reignited Edition project, we were currently in the longest gap between leading-edge content in Phoenix history, and it's been slowly driving me insane.
Now, I can hear the gnashing of teeth from here. Anne, your self-care! You can't commit to two 3-chapter-a-week release schedules! You're absolutely right. I can't right now. I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow to try and hopefully start the process of getting my medical situation back on track, and I am hopeful that will unlock my currently-dormant superpowers again.
But, I can do something.
So, starting today, I am going to begin releasing the 40-plus chapter monstrosity that is Book XIII - but doing it at only ONE chapter a week right now, on Mondays - essentially, continuing the pattern from the lone release I did on the 25th. This means without touching XIII at all, I have enough backlog right now to get me into almost February.
Should my health situation improve and allow me to open up the throttle for writing speed again, I can always expand the release schedule for XIII back to the originally-planned Monday/Wednesday/Friday cadence. I'm hopeful to be able to do that sooner rather than later, but I give the community my word I will not do so until and unless I am confident that I can do so without risk of harming myself or failing to meet the designated schedule due to burnout or overwork.
This way, I can stop feeling like I'm failing the folks who have reached the leading edge and are waiting for more, while also taking care of myself and keeping the Reignited ball in the air. It seems like the safest, sanest compromise I can find. I am doing this in support of my mental health, rather than in spite of it.
So, yeah! Starting now, the Phoenix opens for business again - and you are not ready for the end of Phoenix Odyssey and the announcement of Series IV!
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