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Decadent Habits	By : OverMaster Category: +M to R > Mahou Sensei Negima/Magister Negi Magi Views: 8829 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I don't own Negima. No profit at all is made out of this story.

Chapter List
- 11
- 12
- 13
Credit goes to Darkenning again.

Yet again. Akamatsu Ken owns Negima, and no challenge to his ownership is intended by this parody. Credit to OverMaster for all his help and for the plot seed. Now let's get on with this story's second arc.

Decadent Habits

Chapter 12: Satsuki

After yesterday's furious rain, which had lasted well into the night and actually caused concerns about flooding, it was a relief for Satsuki to see today dawning bright and clear. It wouldn't have made a real difference to her if it had kept raining, since she'd have to open up the restaraunt regardless, but a clear day meant better business for her.

And today she'd had a very special customer coming in first thing in the morning. "This is so exciting," said Sayo as she sat at the counter, waiting for the meatbun to be brought out to her. "I haven't eaten anything in sixty years, and everyone says your food is the best on campus, so I'm really looking forward to this."

Satsuki smiled gently as she set the meatbun down in front of the ghost-driven robot, and said that she hoped it was as good as she was expecting.

"Ittadakimasu, " Sayo said cheerfully, then picked up the meatbun and took a bite. She began chewing vigorously ... then slowed ... then stopped.

Satsuki blinked and asked whether something was wrong.

Sayo swallowed. "Um. I'm, I'm sorry, Satsuki-san. I didn't think ... I'm still getting used to all of this, and the body lets me do almost everything else ... I didn't realize that it wouldn't let me taste your food. I guess ... even science and magic can't do everything, can they? I'm really very sorry."

In two years of operations, Satsuki had never seen such a crestfallen customer, and so she did something extraordinary. She offered to give back her meal tickets.

"Oh, no, no, that's not right, I mean, I did eat part of it, even if it's just going to get processed for biofuel ... um, but, that's sort of gross to talk about ... so, I think maybe I should go before you start to get real people as customers coming in ... see you around ... maybe ..."

Satsuki watched Sayo walk away sadly. It was awful. She'd never had an unsatisfied customer or an unearned meal ticket before this. What should she do?

There really wasn't time enough for her to worry much about it though. Almost as soon as Sayo departed, a large number of customers arrived as a group - Negi and his two roommates, along with his mother and a man whom Konoka introduced as her father, and Setsuna, and Yuna and Professor Akashi. They were all famished, and so she casually worked wonders to get them the food that they needed to build up their strength again.

She did feel a certain amount of curiousity about some of the social dynamics that were at work in this group. Asuna and Negi were as close as they ever were, but there was something a little more intimate about the way that they looked at each other. In pretty sharp contrast, there were some fairly upset looks being directed by Setsuna towards Konoka, who seemed more or less oblivious to them. The two older men also seemed a little unhappy about something, and uncomfortable in each other's presence. The only one she couldn't read at all was Arika.

But despite her curiousity, unless some of them started an argument in her place, their situations weren't any of her concern. It was her job to get them well-fed and make them feel at home, and she bent all of her abilities to that purpose. And when they left, well, some of them seemed in slightly better moods. They'd have to work their other problems out themselves, just like Sayo.

The difference was, she had done everything she could for them ... and she wasn't at all sure that she'd done everything for Sayo. She wondered why it was bothering her so much.

"Satsuki-san?" asked one of her waitresses, who'd come in to help her with the lunch rush. "Are you all right? You were muttering to yourself."

Had she? Well. It wasn't anything for anyone else to worry about. The important thing was to keep hard at work. And so she did, but the image of Sayo walking away all dejected and alone kept coming back to her throughout the day. It didn't impact on her work - or at least so she hoped! - but by the time came to close down for the evening, she was more than a little out of sorts.

Usually, she was tired from a good day's work, and more than ready to head back to the dorm, have a nice bath and then go to bed after some light reading. She was still tired, but the sensation of something left undone haunted her. So rather than head for the train station, she decided to go for a little walk to sort herself out.

Thinking about Sayo took her to the old part of campus, the parts that would have been part of her experience when she was alive. Many of these old buildings were now in very poor repair. She'd even heard rumors that the old clock tower, which had long since stopped telling the time, had been scheduled for demolition, only to be saved at almost the last minute.

Wait ... if it was an old, uninhabited building, why was there a strange light coming from its yard? Uneasily, Satsuki stole up to a break in the wall around it, and peered in.

There, seated amid a wild garden of flowers, with a contemplative expression on her face as she looked up at the clock tower, was Aisaka Sayo. The light shining from her would have told Satsuki that this was Sayo herself, not her robot body, even if nothing else did.

"Hello, Satsuki-san," Sayo said calmly, without turning to look at her.

Satsuki blinked. How in the world had the ghost girl known she was here?

Sayo laughed gently, and now she did turn to look at her with a gentle smile. "You were talking to yourself, and I heard you."

Satsuki flushed. That was beginning to become a very bad habit for her. She started to apologize once again.

"No, no, the mistake was mine. And it was silly of me, anyway. I don't really need to eat, so why should I waste food just to have its taste? When I was a real girl ... I'd have been angry at a ghost who did things like this, when my sister and I went hungry a lot of the time."

Satsuki decided not to press the issue. At the moment, she was really more curious about the reasons that she, a completely normal girl, could see a ghost who was usually invisible.

"I don't know. But ... people can see me, when I'm here. It's just how it works. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this is where it happened."

It? Oh. Satsuki realized just what it she was talking about, and felt ashamed for not guessing at once.

"It's all right, Satsuki-san, it was a long time ago. And ... I don't even really remember it. There's no pain. I cried a lot when I remembered about what had happened before, but ... well. It happened, and there's no getting away from it. So now I come here, when I need to be alone to think about things."

Satsuki wondered what had happened to her sister.

"She grew up, and got married, and had a son, who had a daughter, who had another daughter ... whose name was Asakura Kazumi. I guess that makes what we do incest, from a certain point of view."

Oh, now that was ridiculous, surely no one would consider ... wait, what they did?

Sayo giggled a bit at Satsuki's expression. "Love finds a way. And I do love her, and I think she loves me, too." Her smile turned a little sad. "I'm going to miss her when she leaves."

Wait, was Asakura leaving? Adjusting to the idea that Asakura did that ... well, actually, that wasn't hard at all, but Satsuki hadn't heard anything about her leaving.

"Of course she will. Everyone does, eventually. I've seen generations of girls come here, and eventually, all of them leave. Well, a few stay, or come back to work as faculty, but most just leave when they're done with their schooling. Asakura might stay until university, but sooner or later, she'll find a job somewhere else ... and that will be that." There was sorrow in her voice, but also acceptance.

Satsuki swallowed, and pointed out that Sayo could go with her, now.

Sayo shook her head. "The robot body won't last too long. Neither will the doll. Just like people leaving, sooner or later, everything breaks, too. Eventually, I'll have to stay here ... and I've decided that I don't want to do that."

What did she mean by that? That sounded very ominous.

"I suppose it is. You see, I've done a lot of thinking about this, recently. I've spent sixty years here, as a ghost, watching people come and go, watching things change ... and I was completely content. I was lonely, a little, when the people in class got to leave when I couldn't. But now I know that I was missing so much. I was just watching life, not being part of it, the way that I have this last year.

"So when Asakura leaves ... I'm going, too. I'm going wherever ghosts go when they stop being ghosts."

Where was that?

"Don't know. Maybe Misora's right, and I'll go to Heaven, or Hell, or Purgatory. Maybe Satomi's right, and there's nothing. All I know is ... when I say goodbye to her, I'll say goodbye to everything else, too. Because I was alone, and then I wasn't ... and I don't want to be alone again." She sighed, then blushed. "Sorry, that was pretty morbid, wasn't it? Don't look so sad, Satsuki, it won't happen for a while. It'll be okay. Really."

Satsuki had to go. The train ... she had to hurry if she was going to catch the last train. If she wanted to get home, she had to hurry.

"Well, good night, then. I'll see you tomorrow, maybe."

She walked away from the clock tower, head spinning. She'd known that Sayo had been around for a long time, but she'd never really considered what that meant before now. Nor just how much the last year might have changed things for her, to the point where she was willing to give up eternity rather than go back to the way things had been. And she had made that decision calmly. And the way that she'd spent her "life", just observing people rather than becoming involved with them ... and how long it had taken her to realize that wasn't enough.

She caught the train, and went home. But she didn't sleep very well. Her room, once shared with Chao before the Martian girl had gone away, had always been a place where she could rest and recuperate, but now it just seemed empty. The light reading she'd been planning on doing lay forgotten, and instead she decided to consult the encyclopedias that Chao had left behind. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, but she recognized it when she found it.

Of course, even having found it, she had no idea whether it would work. There was so much she didn't know or understand about the concepts involved. But at least she'd know that she'd done everything in her power to satisfy her customer. That thought finally let her sleep.

The next day went pretty much like every other day. She got up early and headed to the restaraunt to get started on the day's baking, served her morning customers alone, served the lunch crowd with the help of the waitresses and waiter. But towards the end of the afternoon, she explained to her staff first, and then the other customers, that Chao Bao Zi would be closing an hour early tonight to handle a private function. She had already posted a sign indicating this beside the stall's window. Some people seemeed a little unhappy about this, but nobody raised a fuss. Satsuki hoped that she'd have a chance to make it up to the unhappy ones later.

Eventually, the eating area was empty, and she sent her wait staff home early as well, explaining that she could handle the function herself. They seemed surprised at this, particularly the older one who claimed to be seventeen but probably wasn't, but Satsuki was fairly sure that the waiter and one of the waitresses, whom Satsuki suspected were trying to work up the nerve to ask each other on a date, were actually pleased to havve some time off.

She shuttered the stall's windows and sat down to wait, but her special customers didn't keep her waiting long. "Sure hope that the private function is us, or there's been a real miscommunication somewhere along the line," Asakura said with her usual lazy grin as she walked in through the stall's doors with Sayo, in her robot body, traling along behind. "How's it going, Sacchin?"

Satsuki frowned slightly. She didn't like being called that, and Asakura knew it. It made her nervous, as though things were about to go horribly wrong.

"Sorry, sorry," Asakura chuckled. "So what's the occasion?"

Regaining her usual good humor, Satsuki explained that she thought that she'd found a way to give Sayo the experience of eating that her robot body hadn't.

"Really?" Sayo gasped. "How will you do that?"

She elaborated on her research, how she'd discovered an old Chinese tradition of a ghost festival where the ancestor spirits of a family were invited to take a meal with them. A shi, or personator, would be possessed by the ghost and eat. Her idea was for her to take the position of the shi and let Sayo possess her while she ate a vegetarian meal that she'd cooked up for just this purpose.

"Possession?" Asakura asked, eyes widening as she looked at Sayo. "Can you do that? I mean, I know you can possess the doll, but a person?"

Sayo's hands were up over her mouth. "I don't know," she said. "I never have before this. Satsuki-san, are you sure about this? It sounds a little dangerous."

Satsuki nodded. She wasn't blind to the danger; that was why she'd wanted Asakura to be present, so that if anything went wrong there was someone who could call for help. She'd also undertaken what she could learn about the ritual preparations for a shi before all of this, so as to minimize the risk. (Of course, her own skepticism, which suggested most shi had just been people looking for a free meal, didn't help matters, but she didn't share that doubt with either of them.)

"Well ... if you're sure, Sach- Satsuki-san, and you really want to do this, Sayo ... I say go for it," Asakura said, pulling out her pactio card. "Anything happens, I'll call Negi immediately and bring him and the others here to help."

With that assurance, Satsuki turned to look at Sayo. She swallowed - the robot body was incredibly realistic - and then nodded, sitting on one of the countertop stools and leaning back. Her head sank forward as though she had fallen asleep. But the way that Asakura's eyes moved as though watching something that Satsuki couldn't see told the real story.

It was far too late for second thoughts, so Satsuki sat down in front of the bowl of soup and noodles, with a vegetable platter as a side dish, said a quiet ritual blessing, and indicated her readiness to proceed as she picked up the chopsticks. She wondered what it would be like; would the world just go black as Sayo slid into her body and took over her senses, or would it be as though frames had been cut out of a movie, or -

All at once, the scent of the soup seized hold of her attention completely. It was bizarre, really. She smelled soup every day, and while it was always a pleasant smell, this was like nothing she could even imagine, like she'd never even imagined the idea of soup. And her hand moved forward on its own to pick up some of the noodles with the chopsticks and bring them up to her mouth.

And if the scent had been like a glorious chorus of song, then the taste was that raised to an even higher power. Every single one of her taste buds was crying out in ecstasy at the blend of flavors that the soup and noodles represented. She stabbed out with the chopsticks to pick up a tomato slice and pop it in her mouth; more rapture.

More noodles, more vegetables, it was glorious -

"Hey. Hey! Slow down, Sayo!" Asakura said, grabbing her by the shoulder. "If you eat so fast, you'll make Satsuki-san sick when this is over."

Slowly, her head turned to look up at Asakura's worried face, for once not looking mischievous and tricksy, and looking past it to see the gentle, loving heart that she'd come to know so well these past months. "It's just so good, Asakura," she heard her voice say slowly, but to her ears it sounded nothing like her voice, just like recordings of it never did.

"I know, I know, but you have to be more moderate," Asakura was saying, but she barely heard her. She was distracted by the faint scent of the other girl's sweat. She knew that it ought to smell gross, but it was one of the sweetest scents she could imagine. And Asakura was leaning over so their faces were so close, making it easy for her to close the distance and kiss her.

Asakura jerked back. "Hey - hey, Sayo, I don't think you ought to -"

"Wouldn't it be nice, Asakura?" she heard herself ask, wistfully. "I know you like what we do together, but surely you'd like having a warm body beside yours."

"Well, uh, may-maybe, but I don't think Sacchin would like it much if we, if you, if she - oh boy."

Her head moved back and forth. "I don't think I can do anything she really doesn't want to do. If she were fighting me at all, I think she'd win, and I wouldn't be able to do anything ... so she doesn't mind," her voice explained. She slid off the stool and pushed herself up against Asakura, who was so much taller than she was.

"Well, that's, that's nice, Sayo, but ... I mean, it's Satsuki, you know? She's, she's just not my ..."

Her hand reached up and caressed the side of Asakura's face. "It's me inside, Asakura. Does it really matter what the outside looks like? Please?" She could feel tears running slowly down her cheeks. "No one has ever touched me, Asakura. Please? Can I please be selfish just this once?"

For a moment, Asakura was clearly wavering ... then she collapsed. "Oh, geez, I may hate myself in the morning," she muttered, then leaned down to return the kiss she'd been given.

Gently, she moved Satsuki's body back so that it rested against the counter top and bent over to start kissing her way down her throat. With the hand that wasn't cradling Satsuki's head, she started to open up the buttons of her chef's smock, exposing the blouse and skirt below it. Her fingers toyed mometarily with the blouse buttons, but then paused and went down to hike up the short skirt, revealing Satsuki's panties.

Oddly, Satsuki couldn't feel her cheeks growing red with embarrassment at all, even when Asakura slowly went down to those panties and pulled them down her hips. Her eyes closed, and her neck tilted back as she felt Asakura's breath down there.

A few moments later, one eye quirked open a bit. "Um, Asakura?" she heard her voice ask.

"Just ... give me a minute, okay?" Asakura said weakly. "I've never actually ... never done this with anyone, and ... I never expected ... ah, hell with it." She leaned forward and pressed her lips to Satsuki's other lips.

She cried out at once, and reached out to grab hold of Asakura's hair, holding onto it for dear life as unimaginable sensations ran up her spine and flooded her brain. And just when she thought it couldn't get any better, it did. And she screamed at the top of her lungs -

And then a few moments later, as she recollected herself, Satsuki realized that there was no longer any distance between herself and her actions. She tried to bring her rapid breathing back under control, and looked down at Asakura, who'd fallen back to land on her rear a few feet away. "Uh ... Sayo?" the other girl asked hesitantly.

Satsuki shook her head.

"Satsuki-san," Asakura said, weakly, then quickly turned away. "Um, you, you might want to ... um ..."

Privately, Satsuki thought it was bit late for modesty, but was nonetheless grateful for it as she quickly returned her clothes to a semblance of normality. Aloud, she wondered where Sayo had gone after ... well, after.

Asakura glanced over at the slumped form of the robot body. "I think she's gone dormant. Sometimes, when she goes through too much, she just collapses into the doll, and stays there for a while." Her tone grew wry. "Which means I'm going to have to carry her home. Man, what a slacker." She turned back to look at Satsuki, and her face became very apologetic. "Listen, I am really sorry about all of this, Satsuki-san. I didn't think things would turn out like this, and -"

Satsuki finished buttoning up her smock as she assured Asakura that it was quite all right. She was willing to do whatever she had to do in order to satisfy her customers.

Asakura stared at her. "Seriously?"

Seriously.

"Oh-kay then," Asakura said, shaking her head as she stood up and went over to pick up the robot in a fireman's carry, pulling its arms over her shoulders and its hips around her own.

Actually, Satsuki speculated, she wouldn't mind if they did that -

"Yeah, no," Asakura interrupted. "I'm, I'm sorry, Satsuki-san, but ... you're just not my type, you know? You're a sweet girl, and I'm sure that there's someone out there who'll love you like I love her. But ... no. This won't happen again."

... all right, then. She waved as Asakura as the girl carried the robot out the door and away from the converted cable-car. Then she turned to look at the remainder of the soup and vegetables that had been left when Sayo had become ... distracted.

Shame to waste them.

She sat down to finish the soup, and if it became a little more salty as she ate, she was too busy to notice.

Next: Kaede.
- 11
- 12
- 13
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Decadent Habits