Chapter 215: Chapter 214 – Stormy Path

Shhhhhh….

Yuna stood underneath the head of her shower as it poured warm water onto her, steam curling around her. She lifted her head, letting the water press against her face. The warmth of the shower seeped into her as she relaxed, her shoulders loosening. A sigh escaped her.

‘One of these days, I should go and get a massage,’ she grumbled as she rubbed her back. The muscles felt tight and there was an odd itch that she couldn’t get rid of. ‘It’ll go away eventually. But my muscles aren’t going to get any less stiff.’

Training for the Libra Taskforce was in full swing and its effects were showing now. Though she had only been at the training for a few months, she already felt stronger and her status reflected that. Some other effects of the training were perpetual soreness and an increased appetite. 

‘I need to find some healthy foods I can stock up on that can give me the most calories,’ she thought. Her hand went to the shower handle and reluctantly turned off the stream of water. ‘And a massage place as well.’

She remembered the masseur back in the LIA training facility that would give the trainees massages to relieve their muscles. The Libra Taskforce didn’t have one in their training camp which didn’t surprise Yuna. It was only a camp. She would be surprised if their base didn’t have one.

‘I should look these things up online.’ The glass door of the shower slid to the side and, after drying her body, she wrapped a towel around herself. Then her thoughts went to a note she stuck on her bulletin board a few weeks ago. ‘Oh. That too.’

Another sigh escaped from her as she put on her night clothes. Then she left her bathroom and went to her bed, a laptop resting atop it. She picked it up before flopping onto the bed, bouncing up and down slightly. 

‘Let’s start with the foods.’

For the next hour, she browsed the web for recommendations on healthy foods that could also fill her up. She made a list as she went, checking prices here and there to see if they would fit her budget. 

‘The amount I get from the Taskforce isn’t that much, so I have to be really cheap,’ she thought as she scanned through some prices with a frown. ‘Why are healthy foods so expensive?’

When she had a list of decent length, she moved on to finding a nearby massage place that she could drop by one day when she had time. In Junction, there were quite a few places to choose from. With a little searching, she found a place that was close to the Academy and with prices that seemed reasonable. The ratings were quite high as well.

‘Perfect. What else do I need to do?’ She checked the time, her eyes flickered to the bulletin board above her desk. ‘I should check if I have any work to do.’

She turned her attention back to her laptop and began tapping away as she went to various sites and checked on her messages to see if she had missed anything. There was nothing. Everything that she needed to do for the day and even the week were done save for things that she had no control over like future assignments.

‘What time is it?’ Her laptop clock told her that it was 20:37. ‘Should I sleep right now?’

But Yuna knew that it was much too early. She wouldn’t be able to fall asleep at all and would have just laid there in bed staring at her ceiling. The bulletin board drew her eyes towards it again.

Placing her laptop to the side, she went up to it and took off a note that was pinned on it. A reminder of her conversation with Yuki and what he said to her at the end of it. 

‘He actually sounded a bit worried,’ she thought as she recalled Yuki’s tone. ‘That’s rare.’

It also made her worry. If Yuki was showing visible signs of uneasiness, then that had to mean that the topic that Yuna had brought up wasn’t an easy one in any metric. And his advice at the end was to look up something before deciding on a course of action.

‘I’m not really sure how to look it up though.’

He had recommended searching up girl and girl relationships, but just thinking about typing those words into a search bar filled her with an odd dread. She didn’t want to find out why Yuki wanted her to look such things up. But there was also an urgent need. 

‘I have to figure this thing out.’

It would be better for her health if she did. Her feelings would invade her anything she had time to pause and breathe. And with those feelings, Zero would appear within her mind, only serving to amplify those emotions. Yuna tried to clamp down on them, but it was like trying to stop a tsunami. The only way she could handle them was to simply ignore them.

‘But I can’t keep doing that. I need to figure this out before I see her again. If I don’t, I don’t know what will happen when she’s near me.’

The note crumpled in her hand. Why did Yuki want her to look up such things? Was it to show her examples of her own problems and see how other people went about solving it? Or was it to warn? She was leaning towards the second one, but she hoped it was the first. 

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‘Let’s get this over with,’ Yuna thought, her jaw set. She tossed the crumpled note into a trash can beside her desk. ‘It can’t possibly be that bad.’

She went back to her bed and picked up her laptop again. Making a new tab, she set the browser mode to private and her laptop connected to the Valkyries’s server secured by Uriel. Just in case. 

For her first search, she typed in what Yuki had said to her word for word. The term “girl and girl relationships” came up with mainly definitions and synonyms. Some were about friendship rather than love. Yuna already knew she was way past that. 

‘“Lesbian”,’ she read. ‘“A woman who is attracted to other women romantically and or sexually.” So that’s the word.’

But Yuna was sure that that wasn’t what Yuki wanted her to learn about. The word meant nothing to her. She edited her search term, adding a what to it to create it a question. The results changed to accommodate the added word and became a page full of links to articles and forum boards. 

She clicked on a few of the articles, but they seemed to mainly be just longer definitions of what girl and girl relationships were. The forum questions were just question about what exactly lesbian relationships were and they were usually answered quite bluntly with a few sentences. 

‘I’m going to have to go deeper,’ she thought, pressing her lips together. 

The next search term that she put was “opinions on lesbian relationships”. The immediate results looked to be much more promising and much more related to what Yuna believed Yuki wanted her to look at. There were a number of opinion pieces as well as forum threads. 

She read the pieces first, but quickly realised that they were of no substance. They read positive, however the tone felt flat and there was a distinct lack of emotion. It was as if the writer was being forced to create the article. The threads were no better. They were filled with passive aggressive comments on the moderation of the thread and Yuna could see why. Many comments were removed, making it impossible for her to understand anything.

‘But it seems tame,’ she thought as she scrolled through the first page of results. ‘There are a few questionable comments, but that’s normal for online talk.’

Her questions still weren’t answered though. The reason Yuki had told her to look these things up was so that she understood the underlying mood around these types of relationships. What she had read only heightened her curiosity. The amount of nonanswers meant that something was there. She just needed to look for it harder.

With a few minutes of clicking and changing pages, she search bore fruit. But she wouldn’t describe the fruit as fresh. It was fruit that was rotten. 

As she went deeper and deeper into the web, she began to see words and slang that she had never read before. She could feel the disdain grow the more she read and with the disdain a certain sense of hate that soon grew to engulf everything else. People calling people within such relationships useless to society and a danger. Pointing at them and claiming that there must be something wrong with their heads. Some tried to sound as if they were pragmatic and said that people that were attracted to those of the same sex needed to seek medical attention. Others didn’t even try to hide their calls for them to outright be removed.

Yuna had never read or felt such hate before. She wanted to rip her eyes away and throw her laptop away, but she felt glued to her seat, unable to stop herself from reading. These people. How was it possible to hate others that had done nothing to them? 

Hidden among that black sea of anger and violence, Yuna also found a few people struggling to get themselves heard. People that wanted to get their stories of their experiences out to anyone they could. These scared Yuna the most. The hatred could be chalked up as people online ranting about the feelings they suppressed in the day. But these stories told her the opposite.

The stories were all the same. Discrimination. Hateful speech. Violence. And sometimes even death. Not just words that could be written on the fly, but tales of real life. While it was possible that these stories were embellished somewhat, they had to be based on some truth. And that was enough to worry about.

Yuna began to understand why Yuki wanted her to look this up. She understood why he sounded worried. Yuki was worried about what she would do. He was worried about the reaction that the world would have. 

‘I need to thank him,’ she thought when she at last shut her laptop. ‘I think he just saved me from.’

But that didn’t mean that more problems weren’t just introduced. 

‘Then what do I do?’

That familiar question reared its head again and Yuna’s stomach clenched. Her path forward which had just recently began to clear up was now hit by a storm. A storm filled with hate and danger. 

‘I can’t just go forward now. I have to make sure to keep myself safe. I have to make sure that Zero stays safe.’

She laid back in her bed and stared at the ceiling blankly. She wouldn’t be getting any sleep tonight.

 

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