Kaorin and Sakaki's Funtime Midlife Small Town Hokkaido Dairy Farm Lesbianstravaganza! Featuring Chiyo Mihama as the President of the United States.

Chapter 1:

Premonition

***

It is the summer of Kaorin's graduating year. She is at Chiyo's beachside villa. It is the dead of night, it is hot and the room is alive with the needful screaming of the insect chorus outside. Everyone is asleep but her. Kaorin has trouble sleeping these days. Right now... Kaorin is doing something that is, well, reasonably defensible if you know a bit about her circumstances and background.

You see, Kaorin is a very lonely girl, and she has been for some time, and it is, after all, very difficult and alienating to grow up a lesbian in just about any society. Hers is really no exception. Nor is it exceptional, in the context of the world she exists in, for a girl's teacher to stalk and serially sexually harass her, and for that to drive her into further isolation. That happens, you know? This is such a world. But right now Kaorin is not thinking about Kimura-sensei who is preying on her, and she is not thinking of herself as a lesbian yet, not even three years into a desperate and unambiguously romantic crush on a girl.

Given these parameters, it is not altogether unsurprising or damning that Kaorin is on her knees, sitting seiza-style and looking down, keeping an anxious vigil over the face of a sleeping Sakaki. Sakaki's mouth is slightly open, her dreaming breaths softly passing in and gently easing out. Her chest rises and falls. As often happens, Kaorin finds herself wedged in the interstice between arrestingly powerful emotions.

"I'm in heaven. This is heaven. I'm looking at heaven and she's in front of me right here."

"This is the closest I will ever get. This will never happen. This will be deferred until graduation and then I go out into the terrible world, where all the men are just like Kimura-sensei."

Kaorin is afraid of the indefensibility of the thing that she is doing. She is terrified of Sakaki's eyes fluttering open and seeing her in her moment of shameful adoration. Still, she cannot look away. Merely gaze, and tarry, linger and marinade in her chimeric emotional mixture of forlorn bliss.

This is it. This is all there is. This is the best it'll ever get and there's nothing to look forward to after this.

The moment of total resignation.

But fortune intervenes.

Just when Kaorin is about to look away, fall into her bedding, and slowly retreat into miserable, lonesome slumber...

A miracle happens.

Yes, indeed.

She hesitates, you see. And lets her sullen gaze loiter upon Sakaki just a second longer.

This brief instant of hesitation provides enough time for a miracle that is just about to happen.

Sakaki moves. Kaorin all but jumps upward from a violent full-body reactive shudder.

Kaorin eases just a bit. but only after confirming that Sakaki is not awake.

Sakaki lifts her arm up in front of her face, her palm facing away from her, her wrist bent forward at a decidedly feline angle.

The miracle happens.

Kaorin witnesses Sakaki give her hand a few gentle kitty licks.

Let me repeat that. Take a moment to carefully reflect on it. Open your heart and feel deeply and completely what this means to the girl who is enraptured witnessing it.

*Kaorin witnesses Sakaki give her hand a few gentle kitty licks.*

Kaorin's anxiety and dread melt away. Her need to weirdly stare dissipates.

Kaorin drops to her futon, in a state of blissed-out reverence, mouthing gratitude to all the gods and buddhas, anyone who will listen and might have played a part. She is crying, but her expression is stoic, and devoid of self-pity.

"Just when I thought things couldn't get any better... they did!"

How silly. What an absurd thing to feel coming off the cusp of an emotional nadir. Kaorin appreciates the humor of the situation, and laughs, and wipes her tears.

Just when you think things can't get any better... they do.

They do.

Soon Kaorin slips into troubled sleep. Into a deep, convoluted reverie. And then she awakens, and in just a few short decades, the future happens.