Too Many Chocolates

# This Might Be Love!

## Chapter 3 - Too Many Chocolates

    "I-Is this really a Valentine's movie?" The girl next to me on the bed covered her eyes with both hands, fingers spread just enough so that her view of the laptop wasn't entirely obscured. The actress on the screen contorted her face into a silent groan, and Hanarin hugged onto my arm nervously. Her face was flushed pink, and small beads of nervous perspiration were forming near her hairline "I-Its's really different than I expected when you said we should celebrate Valentine's Day together by watching a movie."

    "It can't be... Valentine's is all about love and chocolate and little pink hearts. Not… N-Not… stuff like this!" I wrapped myself more tightly in the blanket, wanting to look away from the movie playing out at the end of the bed but curious about what it is which some people find appealing about movies like this one. Personally I would never watch something like this on my own. It's too mature! I doubt very much that Hanarin watches this kind of thing either. It's so… I mean, my stomach hurts a little just from seeing… Even if the leading man is kind of… Is it warm in here…?

    "Kazue, there's no way we're old enough to watch this! What kind of Valentine's movie even is it?! This is not romance!" The girl on my right chastised the girl on our left, whose room we had decided to congregate in for a while, snuggling up to watch amorous movies instead of studying for finals like we probably should be.

    "It has it right in the title: Saint Valentine's Day Zombie Massacre. And look, right there!" Kazue poked a finger toward the screen. "That's definitely a heart! A lot of movies in black and white use chocolate sauce as fake blood, too. So this is definitely a Valentine's movie…." Hanarin and I exchanged a concerned glance, wordlessly wondering how it could possibly be that this was our groupmate's idea of romance. "It's making me kind of hungry. Is there any chocolate left?"

    "Tons!" Hanarin passed me the gigantic, half-eaten box we'd been splitting before the movie got too gross, which I continued along to Kazue after popping a round candy filled with coconut cream into my mouth. "We've got like fifty boxes in our room!"

    "That's an excessive amount of chocolate. Ooh, this is a good part!"

    On screen, one of the women who had been accompanying the lead turned a corner and came face to face with a gigantic swarm of zombies who… They did something, and from the sound effects and music it was incredibly unpleasant, but both Hanarin and I thankfully missed it after pulling our blankets up over our faces entirely. Kazue laughed, probably as much at our squeamish attitudes as at the movie.

    "Kazueee! Can't we watch something romantic? This is too scary!" Whined Hanarin, gripping my hand like a vice. "I'll give you five boxes. No, eight! No! Fifteen!"

    Kazue closed her laptop with a chuckle. "That's basically the most romantic movie I have, but we can go to one of your rooms."

    "I have the perfect movie! We can go to my room! It's way more Valentiney than zombies! Oh, um, no offense…"

    "None taken. Eimi can't handle the good stuff either. Or Anette… I'll watch it with Kanon later."

    In the hallway, Hanarin needed to make a run to her room first. Which, conveniently, is barely a brisk jump across the hall from Kazue's.

    "Rinko, I really don't need fifteen boxes of chocolates."

    "Huh? Why not?! It's free chocolate!"

    "Because… nobody in their right mind could eat that much chocolate before it goes bad?"

    Our leader nervously twisted her heel against the carpeting. "R-Right. Nobody could…"

    "I'll take three boxes." Kazue sighed, not wanting Hanarin to feel too bad about her insatiable Valentine's appetite. "That way we'll each have our own the next time we watch a movie in my room."

    Rinko shuffled the boxes piled up in her arms, dropping several on the ground as she did. I offered to help, as did Kazue, but as soon as we said anything she seemed to purposely drop most of them and push them with her foot through her doorway before shutting it tight behind her. She was left with six gigantic boxes - three for Kazue, which she quickly deposited inside her room, and one more fresh box for each of us just in case the one we were splitting wasn't enough.

    "Where'd you get so much chocolate, anyway? Did you do a commercial we don't know about?" Kazue asked. Honestly I was curious about this too, but I've learned that sometimes asking such things of Hanarin just leave me more confused than before I'd wondered them.

    "It's from the Valentine's Fairy!"

    "From the… whuh?" I've heard of the Tooth Fairy, or even Santa and the Easter Bunny, but I've never heard of a Valentine's Fairy… "Is that like a nickname for Juney?

    Realistically, I'm not sure any of us would be entirely surprised if Junko bought Rinko fifty boxes of chocolates for Valentine's day, but I'd normally assume she has more class than that. Then again, Rinko always has had a thing for both quality and quantity, and the chocolates she's been sharing aren't in any way subpar. So far no two boxes have been alike either, so it isn't unthinkable that, paralyzed by having to make a choice, Junko would have blown her entire salary on one of everything to gift her roommate.

    "You know! The Valentine's Fairy. He's that little guy with wings and a bazooka that flies around giving people chocolate and making them fall in love!"

    "Hanarin, do you mean Cupid?"

    "And, uh, I think it's a bow and arrow, not a… bazooka…"

    "He's modernized, the same way Santa always replies to my emails every December. A bazooka is way more efficient!" The hallway was filled with the sound of Rinko laughing and making explosion noises. "You're in love! Boom! Now you're in love! Ka-blammo! Hey, why didn't they use a bazooka to fight those zombies?"

    I stood quietly, utterly confused over what was going on, half convinced that I had forgotten how to understand Japanese until Kazue confirmed that I was hearing Hanarin correctly.

    "They do later in the movie. But, uh, let's just… Actually that didn't explain anything…"

    "It didn't?" The brunette's face went blank as she tried to recall the original question that had led us here. "Oh! Right! Every year around Valentine's Day the Valentine Fairy hides chocolate all over the dorm for good idols to find! A bunch of the other idols were talking about it, and I thought it was just kids' stuff, but yesterday I found a cardboard box full of the stuff outside Lina's office. Then last night after my bath I got hungry and went to the kitchen and there was a huge pile of chocolates! So I took it back to the room for safe keeping, then went up to the executive floors, and it was all over the place!"

    "But… why did you take it all?"

    Hanarin blinked a few times at Kazue's question, then responded "Because it's chocolate! And because if you find it, it's supposed to be good luck in love, so our room is going to be the luckiest room in the entire dorm!"

    We exchanged another quick glance before laughing.

    "In that case, I'm sure Juney appreciates it."

    "It's already working, too. She has plans tonight."

    "Well then… you can't argue with results, can you?"

    This topic having been resolved as well as any of us thought it would - and content to ignore the fact that Juney has had plans for almost two weeks now - we continued down the stairs to my own room. Like Kazue, though for somewhat different reasons that don't involve insects, I have an entire room all to myself. Befitting the extra space, I've tried hard to make it suitable for entertaining guests. Not the entire group at once. There's not nearly enough space for that, and I can hear Eimi's shrieks for personal space whenever I think that may possibly be fun to try, so usually it's just me and a few of the other girls trying out new makeup techniques, watching movies, or playing videogames. If this were a normal evening, I wouldn't be surprised if I'd ended up spending it with Tae-Eun and our juniors, continuing our long-running Capsule Girls rivalry, but since Tae-Eun is busy tonight with "don't worry about it, I'm just busy, ok?", and all of our juniors are busy with their own group outing, those of us without plans decided we'd spend the evening together doing friendly Valentine's Day activities. Somehow we're the only three left, but there is a silver lining… The three of us fit in my room way better than a whole bunch of us! Especially with how these two can be.

    My room, as mentioned, is set up exactly for this sort of thing, though a quirk shared by both of my friends is that they're unencumbered by the need for any great amount of personal space. It means that even though I have two small chairs around my kotatsu in clear view of the modest television, plus a small couch in the back of the room, they prefer accommodations that are more… cozy. Kazue once explained to me at length the benefits of cuddling for your mood and health, though I admit I stopped paying my best attention when she shared that this was all based on the behaviors of her beloved roaches - in no small part because one of her pets chose that moment to make an appearance - and Hanarin's default state is pretty much either trying to get cuddly, grabbing someone to drag them off somewhere, or needing to be held onto by the hand so she doesn't run off chasing whatever idea just popped into her pretty little auburn head. This is why we all ended up on a bed again to watch another movie, a bit smooshed together but otherwise relatively fine with the arrangement.

    What's a little bit of cuddling among friends? Especially on Valentine's Day.

    "Are you ready for the most amazing Valentine's movie ever?!" I shouted, though quietly, since they were both right next to me.

    "Bring on the romance! WhooooPOOM!" Exclaimed Hanarin, mimicking the sound a bomb makes when it's dropped from a plane in war movies. Kazue was less enthusiastic, replying simply "Sure", more preoccupied with feeling my satin pillowcases and sheets than with the television.

    "Can you both see the screen? I made sure to pick something with subtitles so you can follow it."

    "Ooh, is it a Korean movie?! What's Valentine's Day like in Korea? Does the Valentine's Fairy visit you there, too?"

    "No, he doesn't." Because, as I'm sure you know, the Valentine's Fairy isn't a thing to anyone anywhere except Hanarin. "Other than that, the holiday is pretty similar. And this is a Japanese movie, but it's awful, so they dubbed over the actors' voices and released it in Korea instead! You're going to love it."

    "Awful? Awww it's not gonna be another weird movie, is it?" Hanarin covered her eyes with her hand to emphasize her point.

    "What's wrong with awful movies? Sometimes they're the most fun. Bad special effects are hi-larious." Kazue backed up my point, picking away at the plastic wrap of one of our fresh boxes of chocolates before giving up and carefully tearing a strip away with her teeth. Maybe we should have gotten a real dinner instead of just chocolates…

    "Just watch. You'll understand really quickly why this is the perfect movie."

    I pressed the large central button on the remote and the movie started. It's a historical drama set in the Sengoku period about the children of two warlords who fall in love even though their families hate each other. It's a cliche story that's been made into dozens of movies before - they basically ripped off one of the plays we read last year in English class - and the acting isn't actually that bad. It's just a little…

    From my immediate left, Kazue laughed so hard that, combined with my satin sheets, she almost fell off the bed, scrambling to stay onboard, which made me laugh nearly as hard. Hanarin ignored both of us, transfixed by what she was seeing play out on screen, which was a girl with very un-Sengoku period blonde hair chewing the scenery as she lamented being away from her beloved.

    "Where did you find this! Ohmygoodness Eimi's such a great actor!"

    "Megumin thought I'd enjoy it! She thought it would be funny to spring on Eimi tonight, but I guess they made other plans. It's their loss!"

    "Dam-Bi, you were right. This is an even better Valentine's movie than the one I picked out." Kazue could barely stop laughing long enough to talk normally, punctuating her phrases with little laughs and giggles.

    "She's right!" Hanarin slung an arm across me in a sort of half hug, not wanting to take her eyes away from the movie just in case something interesting happened. "This really is the best Valentine's Day ever!"

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