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Since the beginning of the 21st century, at a rate that eerily flutters between being objectively consistent and being a wish-fulfilling mirage, the ever-shifting category of "young people" has begun to increasingly refer to people who rest their social dependence on the Internet. They are—with every miniature epoch—an online generation that has succumbed to an evolved form of Mean World Syndrome, a phenomenon once held by children who grew up to be bumbling Gen Xers after literally being raised by TV. But against all odds, this new generation has never been a monolith. It is, like any generation that came before it, wildly inconsistent, disparate, and free only from an individual perspective; the strangest and obscurest kinds of relations and bonds created by people in this generation are, really, the most powerful. The friendships they make are unplanned emotional experiments conducted haphazardly over personal messaging services. Many are bitter, many are sweet, some manage to be both.Haruko Haruhara, as carefree as she could be, stepped off her Vespa after a slow psychedelic cruise, and twirled back into her apartment through the doorway in the kitchen. As a new-age gonzo-journo fun-scumbag in a red vest, she had scored a count of at least tens of thousands of followers as an eccentric live blogger, sharp-witted but prone to overblown "alternative" riffing, since the start of the 2010s. It wasn't an occupation. She had already been writing off-kilter screenplays and pitching commercially impossible show ideas months before she dropped out of college, and had come right off of the structural breakdown of a comedy forum whose users had collectively gone haywire after electoral results. She was juggling a few failing sources of income, and had combined them to earn enough to privately seek out transfeminine hormone therapy. Haruko was self-made, including all the parts of herself that had been made by accident, or even totally against her will. Her sporadic, topical blogging lent credit to this. Her sense of humor was an active documentation of a person gloriously "making progress" by going so far into themselves that they shove everything old inside them out towards the terrifying newness of the world. Amongst a heap of self-cliches, she had a recurring inside joke; "I shit my nads". It had no meaning, and no origin besides being born by chance in a group call while she leaned ever-more into being the most regularly crossfaded out of everyone else for the whole year. It was the funniest thing on the entire planet. Inconsequential things like that were what her greatest memories were made of. She was a beacon of pure happiness to her friends to an extent so casual that any group she staked a presence within bordered on operating like a secret society. The latter would begin to very strongly overlap into the former as Haruko sought out not just her usual combination of cannabis and alcoholic energy drinks, but a newfound palate for LSD and trade cough syrup. Without eclipsing herself, she was finally having her Fear and Loathing moment. It was going to be so much fun.Tomoko Kuroki was struggling. Kids tend to do that, but for a computer-dazed autist, an odd girl in odd circumstances with sad traumas and big dreams, and anxieties about being able to achieve them, there was not much else to add. She was struggling in school, not just in the sense of getting bad grades, but in the sense of barely cooperating or functioning in any part of the school building. She regularly opted out of all schoolwork to have limitless computer time instead. She was struggling to explain herself to her parents in ways that weren't just still wanting a sippy cup with soda in it every night. And besides wanting to be a girl instead of a boy, there were no grand details. Weirdly, she certainly was waiting for someone to pick her up and give her a more exciting life, but was simultaneously closing in so tightly on herself that even the idea of going on vacation terrified her (maybe she just needed the right kind of vacation). Her sense of "adventure" was talking to herself in a school hallway, pretending to be a whimsical magical girl conjuring up a strange new world, losing herself in it, and getting giddy as the laws of reality fell apart. This was once interrupted by someone who had no idea what she was doing, and following that, she had preferred to strictly do it in her bedroom out of humiliation. Like a handful of other things, she got perverse pleasures from it that she had never articulated to anyone else, potentially not even herself. She was a 13 year old, with some immediate instinct; it was just muddled, mostly inherited from the shows that she tensely watched in her own private discretion. It would be so much fun if I was this, she repeatedly thought in circling mental loops. No school, just fun.One month in 2013, Tomoko had been given an incredible opportunity. Not the kind of "opportunity" that means you can conventionally succeed in the world, at least according to boring people, but an opportunity entirely valuable and comprehensible to her and her only. No school! She had proven to be such a burden to deal with at high school that it had been determined that her education was to be put on hold until they found "adequate teachers". This did not offend her at all, whereas her parents were at a loss. They had zero idea what she actually wanted to be, though, so she had no need to pay any mind to them. In the process of trying to find a homeschool teacher who hadn't been sold out, her workaholic parents had perfectly failed to her advantage. The worst case scenario was that she would be thrown into the miserable trench of scrutiny and interrogation known as inpatient, but that simply wasn't the case. Her mind was racing. She now suddenly had the freedom to shut herself away and stay up all night every night on the Internet, something which she had previously only occasionally managed to do on weekends. Everything from here was going to be a further progression of what she had been doing with her computer since the past year.Tomoko had gone down rabbit holes that had taught her more than any class: niche memes, conspiracy theories, amateur drug research, strange occult websites, cool underground music. She was a properly Internet-addicted prodigy who seemed to unwittingly spit in the cold faces of every bitter, gray and disaffected adult that wanted to scrutinize and interrogate her. One particular and persevering rabbit hole that she had gone down led her with sheer wanderlust to Haruko Haruhara, whose idiosyncratic presence had captivated Tomoko for months. They both regularly posted memes in the same places, and Haruko had in fact been aware of Tomoko since she had begun posting her strange and weirdly adorable image collages brewed up from her childish understanding of "hype" memes in all their charm and delirium that seemed to bring together entire swathes of weirdos. Haruko was, after years of neuroplastic progress ensuing from her rationed yet relentless drug use, sincerely sympathetic to weirdos, especially whoever was posting these strange new memes; no good-hearted person could turn down the thought of caring for a funny little online prodigy. Sooner or later, they would very likely interact. Tomoko had already made the first step.
Conversation between FreeBaseLineJunkie666 and tomoko8 began at 6:47 PM, March 2, 2013
tomoko8: hey if it is okay with you i wanted to add your username and talk to you because i really think you are cool and i have a lot of time to talk to people
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: omg
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: you're the same tomoko8 i'm thinking of right? the one who posted the comic things with those like
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: edits of those characters talking about being superior to everyone else and mentally broken
tomoko8: wow um yeah thats is me
tomoko8: that is* sorry
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: no worries lmao
tomoko8: i really like your memes if it is okay to call them that sorry i am really excited right now haha
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: awww omg seriously it's okay
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: can i ask you something, actually? did you ever feel like anyone else would see your art? because i felt like no one would care about any of the things that i started posting years and years ago when i was in high school, and looking back on it tbh i was dealing with things that i only genuinely managed to figure out when i turned 20.
tomoko8: um kind of
tomoko8: :3
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: hahahaha
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: listen. don't let anyone tell you that you're bad for being weird. i have a feeling you've been told before that you're weird in a bad way. no one can make you feel like something you aren't. you are legitimately unique. you're not just "gifted and talented". don't let them put that on you. you are more than that shit. i hear what you really want to be loud and clear. you have more freedom to have more freedom than anyone will ever make you think. i'm not a perfect example, no one is, and you're not either but you're fresh. it's okay to not be perfect. i can tell you have real ambitions no matter how young you are. in fact, you're at an incredible point right now, where even though you're in the first and more subtle crisis of your life, you can express yourself in ways that will stick with you when you enter adulthood. your art is silly and disturbing and i see my younger self in it. it isn't "outsider art". you're not bad for being an outsider. at all. i can't place your age but you are totally of your generation. please stick around, i'm in a great mood tonight.
tomoko8: wow
tomoko8: wow thank you
tomoko8: wow i have never rlly had anyone say this to me before at all
Tomoko had been sitting at her desktop computer quietly crying into her palms while reading the mindblowingly kind message Haruko had sent, who had forgotten to state that she was currently ultra-empathetic after coming back from a party with MDMA still running through her system and the lingering trance of a LSD blotter swirling around her. Tomoko saw this as who she really was; for the better, it was actually who Haruko was going to become as a result of meeting Tomoko. She didn't know that Tomoko was crying, cathartically and joyfully, shaking with excitement. Tomoko didn't know that Haruko was in the beautiful thrall of ecstasy, also shaking with excitement. This was the beginning of a friendship that would greatly entertain them both, but it still wasn't clear just how much they liked each other, especially on one half of the pair.
tomoko8: you are really nice
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: i'm glad i can make you feel comfortable. seriously.
tomoko8: i have been crying just now because you are so nice to me
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: really? awww oh my gosh i'm here
Haruko sent a hugging emoticon. Reclining back in her gaming chair and spinning a little with her headset on, she got up to spontaneously grab and pour a glass of orange juice and dunk a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it as a makeshift orange cream; it was a "serotonin high food" communally recommended in a similar fashion to eating apples on acid. She gleefully drank it in the kitchen, looking out at the fading glimmer of the sunset refracting through the clouds, which in her post-trip vision looked like it was lit up by stained glass windows. She had seen many things with the same visual potency before; a few months prior, while pursuing playing in a local baseball league, she had incidentally—with very little fanfare—helped a persistent little boy swing at an earth-threatening asteroid and punt it into oblivion, and the sky had turned bright with immense, lucid color. It was nice. There was a comfortable lukewarm temperature characteristic of spring that felt like it could still fit in winter, a comparative warmth that Haruko was used to and that Tomoko happened to almost entirely prefer.
tomoko8: *hugs*
tomoko8: thank you
tomoko8: i hope we can talk more i want to share more memes i have made
tomoko8: is it still ok to call it memes i think it is not so i am sorry if it is not
tomoko8: hello?
tomoko8: sorry if i annoyed you
tomoko8: sorry
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: oh shit i'm so sorry i was eating lmao
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: hey actually, if you want to call instead then we totally can. would you be up for that?
tomoko8: hi
tomoko8: yeah!
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: hell yeah lmao call when you're ready, gimme a moment tho i need to fix the audio drivers for my mic
Tomoko wiped off her tears with her shirt and got her webcam ready, the one default source of audio that was on hand. She had used it in the past for her personal videos where she was acting out her fantasies. She propped it up on a book, and then another book, and yet another book; then one less book, because she wasn't entirely visible with three books. She fidgeted a little, smirking to herself with anticipation, finding it hard not to pace around the room. She focused back on the call at hand and clicked the button.
Call between FreeBaseLineJunkie666 and tomoko8 began at 7:12 PM, March 2, 2013
"Hi..." Tomoko began, with a hesitance that constantly sat at her core."Can you hear me? Oh shit, haha, are we doing a video call? Okay! Yeah! Fuck it, let's go.""Yeah, I can h-hear you..." Tomoko smiled. In an effort to try to make herself smile, she instead came off as queasily happy. This had an unintentionally adorable effect.Haruko's webcam, of a much higher grade and quality, turned on, flickered and blinked. "Are you like, standing? Pfff, hold on. Your chair is right there, right?" "Yeah, it is. Do you want me to sit on it?" "Yeah, don't exhaust yourself, like, standing up during a video call. At all. Do you have your camera on a bunch of books?" "Yeah. I'm just used to it because I stand up when I make videos and stuff like that."Haruko perked up, speaking straight into the mic on her headset with a crisp tone that was heard in her appearances on imageboard podcasts and their "call-in" nights. The faint sound of whirring and rhythmically punctuated electronic music playing on her headset through a music player was bleeding through her mic. "Yo. You make videos?" "Yeah, I like to do videos where I'm a magical girl and, and I twirl around and... I make the world blow up and stuff. And I make all the effects and the sounds and it looks really cool." Tomoko was twiddling with her hands and glancing to the side with a proud, quivering smile. "That sounds so fucking sick. I dig that! You do you! Blowing up the earth and, like, all that shit. You do you." Tomoko kept looking at Haruko knocking her hair to the side, her expression focused and resting but occasionally smiling and grinning with a laugh. She was a person like any other, but surrounded by a context that gave her a colorful and vivid significance. Tomoko felt something about this. A blush ran through her face. "Thank you... You look... Y-you look, heeee, really good today, I hope that's okay for me to say... That rhymed... You look really good. I don't know any people who look like you..." Haruko chuckled and smiled. "Damn, thank you! Yeah! I fiddle with my hair 'cuz when I comb it out sometimes stray hairs just kind of sit on my nose and bother the shit out of me." Tomoko listened to her as she continued to go on a tangential rant about facial sensitivity, hair care and hygiene, and enjoyed every second of it."You're really cool, Haruko. Can I... call you that.""I mean, yeah, that's my name, hahaha... On here I only let certain people be privy about who I am. I can trust you because no offense, you seem a little isolated.""Yeah."A silence filled the call, just barely filled by the crackle and hum of Haruko's headset, and the watery, digitally filtered sounds of things happening outside Tomoko's bedroom. Suddenly, it turned awkward without either of them having to speak or move. Haruko quite literally read the room and kindly threw over a question."Hey, actually, should we be calling right now?" "Huh?" "It's just, like, I can hear people doing chores outside or something through your mic and this doesn't, like, feel right. You said you had free time to call whenever, right?" "Yeah. ...Should we try again later when my parents go to bed? They're downstairs." "Holy shit, hahaha, lucky. ...Anyway. Yeah. I'll still be here, I just don't want to put any stress on you." "You're not. Th... thank you though."
Call between FreeBaseLineJunkie666 and tomoko8 ended at 7:17 PM, March 2, 2013
Tomoko was filled with a post-interaction excitement that made her temporarily forget that she could still talk to Haruko, just with her keyboard. She pranced around her room, mumbling something to herself about being a "meme lord" and an "elite shitposter", manically smirking and wiggling her hands around, quoting inside jokes and imageboard memes in their corresponding voices. Despite having a mound of seemingly random and topically scattershot tabs up on her browser (almost 50 in total), she paid no attention to them during her happy reverie. Gradually, the "something" that she felt earlier was coming to fruition. Being flustered by Haruko swishing her hair, her voice, her rants, not just her charm, but the resemblance of a big sister, without any family unit. Someone who she could really enjoy being with... She came to a stop, felt the urge to go to her bed and leaped onto it, lying down and covering herself with her duvet like a blanket. Haruko could be so nice to me, she thought to herself, beginning to become aware that she was having more than average feelings about her idol and new crush. She could ruffle my hair when I'm sad and reward me when I do good things and hold me and touch me and... Her inner voice fell silent with the imagery of Haruko groping her, blushes flowing across both of their cheeks, Tomoko drooling and noisily exhaling. She laid there for half an hour, slipping into a dream from the comfort of her nap, and wiggled around in her duvet. It was all playing out. With no recognition of romance, she instead kept imagining the scene intensifying, growing in pleasure until it became impossible to visualize. It was a miasma now.Tomoko opened her eyes to find that she had done it in her bed again. She recognized the feeling of a wet stain on her duvet. "No, no no no no no, gross, gross," she frantically repeated to herself in a flat tone of voice, grabbing a towelette. Wiping away the cum after the wet dream she had just had, weirdly shaken and left disturbed by herself, she approached her worn down office chair and sat down, beginning to type. She was struck by the vivid realization that this wasn't right and was immediately doubting herself, full of guilt; she still continued to type, pacing herself with the taboo at hand.
tomoko8: hey is it ok if i talk about something kind of personal idk
tomoko8: i do not want to make you uncomfortable but it is kind of about sex stuff
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: oh shit
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: honestly? yeah. as long as we set boundaries
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: i don't want to like
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: be too encouraging
tomoko8: ok so i started thinking lots and lots about you after the call and i got really excited and i went to bed so i could nap and i had a wet dream about you and i am sorry
tomoko8: you are really cool and we do not have to do anything like what i was dreaming about at all i feel really bad about it
tomoko8: :'(
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: hey, no, it's okay. seriously
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: i can't say i feel the same because i. do not know you as well as you wish i did. and i want this to be a learning experience for you, so
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: enjoy these feelings, but don't try to summon them into reality. i knew people who grew up similar to you, learning about sex without sex ed, feeling really guilty about it, crying when they had wet dreams. it's okay. you know your boundaries, right?
tomoko8: i wanted to cry when i woke up and felt wet but i already cried earlier and my body does not let me cry too much
tomoko8: im weird
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: you shouldn't feel bad. just remember that it's too early to really like
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: get with people. but you should not feel bad.
Haruko had carved out a moment of beautiful, endearing indifference for herself in something very strange. A 13 year old trans kid was talking to her, a 23 year old trans woman (who, albeit, was no stranger to perversion), about wet dreams. She leaned back in her gaming chair, gazing at the ceiling fan. A blitz of minuscule hallucinations came from the shutters. Her trip had been a little biologically prolonged, in a similar fashion to stimulants sticking around and making your chest feel like it's imploded and caved in. Only here, the tension she would otherwise feel was absent, and her morale remained. She hadn't met someone like this before, but she had the pre-intuition to grasp that someone like this could exist. Thinking about it, things started to click: the energetic splatter of imagery in Tomoko's memes, her excited but clearly clingy drive to post with all the people she had entered into fleeting context with, all the restraint she had tried to weigh on her feelings. It all made sense now! She was a horny little pervert! Yet it shined back, not to the point of Haruko mimicking her, but to a level of irony that did not escape her at all. For someone who had made herself a local legend by being a disruptive presence who still brought some kind of joy to people, she was now virtually face to face with someone who was the exact same, only with no legend to her name.
tomoko8: yeah i get what you mean
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: this is so new to me lmao
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: i'm here for you though
tomoko8: would it be ok to call again later? i wont talk about it again
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: yeah totally!
Tomoko was still shaken, but for better or worse found comfort in being told what to do by the girl that she was crushing on. Night had come, and her parents were about to go to bed. After gorging on shitposts and tabs of loose "research" for two hours, Tomoko decided to start the call back up.
tomoko8: i want to call again now if thats ok
tomoko8: i wont have my camera on again
Silence from Haruko suddenly hit Tomoko. I really hope I haven't upset her. Oh no, her inner voice panicked, I didn't mean to do anything wrong...
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: oh god sorry lol i was in a group call
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: yeah hold on
Call between FreeBaseLineJunkie666 and tomoko8 began at 9:39 PM, March 2, 2013
"Neither of us are doing webcams this time, right? Yeah. Anyway. Let me get this out of the way, actually. Would you say you have a crush on me?""Y... Y-yeah... Um..." Tomoko curled up in her office chair, twirling around in an attempt to hide her sincere embarrassment. "Is that okay...?" Haruko paused. She had a sudden stroke of genius, smirked with self-fulfillment, and fully leaned into her headset mic, half-whispering with a breathy tone:"I love you, unconditionally."There was a longer pause."Tomoko, do you know what unconditionally means? It doesn't mean I can't love you. It just means I love you in an open, caring way. Your fantasies don't have to be satisfied as they are. They're beginnings. Now that you know what it means to cum, you can learn what it means to not have to feel the need to cum in the first place. ...I love you. Unconditionally. You know?"Tomoko muted to bawl her eyes out, sobbing into a pillow to hide the noise. Haruko immediately figured that she was alright, and that she just needed a moment; something about it still sat with her oddly, as all moments of the day so far had. It was less like a "first day as friends with a new friend", and more like a new kind of day that couldn't be pinned down. This was how she knew, deeply and unconsciously, that this was going to be a friendship that would last. Haruko had finally met someone on par with her—purely in terms of effect, not similarity. It was like a friendship with someone she could have actually met at high school, except sheared of all the mundanity of getting to know someone in the real world first. It was dazzling and golden. The fact that it had been thrown to her and that she had caught it in the haze of a psychedelic trip was so assuring that she didn't even bother trying to predict what its future outcomes would be. Confronted by a strange, imperfect prodigy whose every ray she beamed outward spoke of being rejected by her parents, her school, and her surroundings in general, Haruko simply wanted to take care of this funny little thing by her own obligation."I-I... huuuu... e-eeeeee-heeee-heeee... I loooove youuuu... Haruko..." Tomoko weeped and hiccuped until it was out of her system. "I love youuu... Thank you... I'll... I'll... I'll grow out of this someday..."Yes, Haruko's inner voice blurted out in triumph. Yes you fucking will.