It was small, but it was unmistakably a house. He pushed open the gate and walked up the short path, which was messy; not from neglect but merely a result of nature running its course. He knocked on the door and was greeted by a woman a bit older than his stepmother.

He smiled at her charmingly, leaning on the doorframe, and asked if her brother Kiyosumi-kun was in. She laughed and went pink, told him he was wicked and sweet in the same breath, and ushered him inside.

She asked if he knew Kiyosumi through tennis.

No, not really, he didn’t pay much attention to tennis at all. Chess was more his sort of thing, which caused her to stare at him as though he had grown a second head.

He changed the subject. He introduced himself as Koutarou, just Koutarou, and complimented her dress, her hair, her barely perceptible makeup. She gave him a swift but not unkind swat as a reward for his flirtations and advances, and went to call her son.

Sengoku came racing down the stairs with a lot of noise and Koutarou privately marvelled that there was room for a staircase in the tiny house. Sengoku had been home from school long enough to have taken off half his uniform, replacing it with a bright, cheerful T-shirt. He grinned hugely.

Koutarou had time to lift one hand in lazy greeting just before Sengoku swept down, grabbed his arm, called a quick “Thank you!” to his mother, and dragged the older boy upstairs.

When they were in Sengoku’s bedroom – small, cramped, untidy, dusty, the hub of chaos, smelling slightly of sweat – Koutarou calmly extracted his arm from Sengoku’s grasp and fell casually into a sitting position on Sengoku’s bed, opposite Sengoku’s computer. “So,” he said coolly, “let’s see it.”

Sengoku looked comically insulted, swinging the computer chair around, knocking over a stack of school work, and sitting in it the wrong away around. “How can you say it, just like that?” he asked, pouting. “This is a big deal – big, big!” He waved his hands, emphasizing his ridiculous point. “You need to build up to something like this.”

“Sengoku,” Koutarou said, one eyebrow twitching, “this was your idea.”

“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve a bit of ceremony to make it special,” Sengoku said, but he spun himself around in the chair to face the computer. The monitor sprang to life and the redhead messed around with the mouse and some files for several minutes before he was apparently satisfied, at which point he threw himself onto the bed next to Koutarou.

Koutarou shifted aside a bit and made himself comfortable watching the monitor. The two sat in silence for sometime, interrupted by the occasional, quickly muffled, chuckle from Sengoku. After twenty minutes, Koutarou cleared his throat. “Can midgets really be used like that?” he asked, glancing at Sengoku out of the corner of his eye.

Sengoku scratched his head. “Dunno. No one’s ever asked. I think so, but they probably need a ladder, or someone holding them up.”

“I guess it doesn’t really matter when you’re lying down.”

“If don’t think they were lying down.” Sengoku grinned.

Another silence, in which Sengoku didn’t even try to stop sniggers from leaking out.

“You haven’t shown Choutarou this stuff, have you?”

Sengoku shook his head. “It didn’t really seem like his kind of thing.”

“Good. Keep it that way.” Koutarou paused and tilted his head, watching the monitor with growing fascination.

“Worried he might get ideas?”

Koutarou’s eyes narrowed and he straightened. “Not at all,” he said tightly.

“Of course,” Sengoku agreed soothingly. “It’s not like he has access to tennis rackets, anyway, right?”

Koutarou’s jaw tightened, one hand curling into a fist.

Sengoku swallowed. “Hey, look, ninjas!”

Koutarou’s eyes went back to the monitor automatically. After a minute, he said, “When I was in junior high, one of my classmates talked about seeing a video like this. I thought he was making it up, though.”

“Oh, no way, this stuff’s really popular. I’ve got, like, ten videos from the same director. This one’s his newest, though, so that guy was probably thinking of one of his older movies. A lot of the same themes, though.”

Koutarou nodded, hypnotized. “He must have been . . . I’m sure I would remember if he’d mentioned gelatin.”

“It’s the sort of thing that’s hard to forget,” Sengoku agreed.

After another twenty minutes, Koutarou licked his lips. “Sengoku . . . does your mother have any lime gelatin in the house?”