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Part 3 of 4. [Part 1, Part 2, Part 4]
Prince of Tennis. Tezuka Kunimitsu/Inui Sadaharu. PG. 2,076 words.
Tezuka takes over the Seigaku quiz bowl team. Inui joins him.
On the train ride to Gyokurin, Tezuka flipped through the twenty-page list of Nobel prizewinners that Inui had printed out for him. Inui stood beside him with his own list. Both of them had quizzed each other thoroughly on the contents of these lists and knew them forwards and backwards, but they looked at them anyway, just because.
This time, they walked around like they knew what they were doing and ignored the other teams who were staring and occasionally pointing.
"If I'm not mistaken, the Fudasei team has been talking about us," Inui observed. "We will be able to confound all of our opponents' data. It should give us a significant psychological advantage, especially in our first game, which should be a particularly tough match against Gyokurin."
"Yes," Tezuka nodded. They had put away their lists and were standing together nonchalantly until it was time for the first matches to begin.
The senior members of the Gyokurin quiz bowl club were running around frantically making sure that all the buzzer systems were set up, all the tables and chairs had been arranged, all the moderators had been briefed and all the questions in their sealed envelopes had been distributed. Inui and Tezuka were waiting for fifteen minutes before the Gyokurin captain rushed in, told four of his teammates to go ahead and play this match without him, and deputized one of them as substitute captain.
"They have definitely underestimated us," Inui whispered to Tezuka.
"Very careless of them," Tezuka murmured back. "Shh," he added, as an afterthought.
Their moderator for this game was a teacher from Gyokurin. She introduced herself to Tezuka and Inui and read the rules aloud, the way she was supposed to. "I will be asking you toss-up questions that are worth ten points each. If you think you know the answer, press your buzzer and wait for me to recognize you by name before you give an answer. In the second half, answering a toss-up question correctly will also give your team a chance to answer bonus questions worth a total of twenty points. On a bonus question, you may confer with your teammates, but this is not permitted at any other time and any team violating this rule will be disqualified form the tournament. Does anyone have any questions?"
No one did. Tezuka and Inui were poised, buzzers in hand, paper in front of them, leaning forward attentively. Their opponents were fidgeting.
"Question number one is in science. It was discovered in 1766 -- "
Tezuka rang in. "Seigaku, Tezuka," she said, looking at him doubtfully.
"Hydrogen," he said. The moderator stared at her paper to make sure she was reading it properly.
"That is correct," she said. "Ten points for Seigaku."
"What?"
"That can't be right!"
"Their team must be cheating!"
The moderator said there was no evidence of any cheating and would everyone please sit down. Inui pushed his glasses to the top of his nose. Tezuka began to feel excited.
The technique he had employed was somewhat similar to Inui's data tennis. It involved predicting what direction the question was heading in early on and interrupting the moderator to answer. It didn't come naturally to Tezuka, who would have preferred to listen to each question in its entirety, but Inui had coached him until he was reasonably proficient. After all, it would be impossible to beat the higher-level quiz bowl teams without taking risks.
"Question number two is in world history," the moderator continued.
Gyokurin's less-experienced players were completely demoralized and Seigaku dominated in the first half, 70-20. At the half, Tezuka and Inui sat back calmly while the Gyokurin players quarreled with each other about whose fault it was that they were losing to two Seigaku tennis players.
"How can they possibly expect to win like this?" Inui said, as the poor moderator asked for the third time for them to please give her their attention for the beginning of the second half.
"They don't expect to win," Tezuka said. "Which is why they won't. Zero percent chance," he added.
They didn't. When the Gyokurin captain stopped by to pick up the scoresheets, he laughed. "No, really, what was the score?"
"Two-hundred twenty to sixty-five," Inui chimed in. He held out his hand for a handshake that never came.
"How could you have let this happen? Were you even awake?"
Tezuka tactfully dragged Inui out of the room. "Who are our next opponents?" he asked.
Inui consulted his notebook. "Kakinoki," he said. "They should present no difficulty."
Tezuka frowned. "I thought they won both of their games last week."
"According to my data their playing is not exceptional. Their technique for winning involves distracting the opposing team with their revealing clothing."
"Ah," Tezuka said. They won, 160-145, and refused to give their phone numbers to anyone afterwards.
"This should be our most difficult game of the day," Inui whispered as the Fudomine team filed into the room and took their places opposite. "They're good and not easily rattled. And that girl over there can beat me on the math questions."
Tezuka craned his head to stare at her before he realized that he was being impolite. "Don't get careless," he whispered back to Inui.
"Of course."
They made polite small talk with the Fudomine players while they waited for the questions to be delivered to their room. The girl that Inui had singled out turned out to be in Tachibana's class, and she promised to give him the regards of the Seigaku tennis club. Then the game began.
The first question was in math, and Fudomine's Shimizu beat Inui to the buzzer. Naturally, Inui's data was accurate. Tezuka worked on clearing his mind and getting ready for the next question, which was in Japanese history.
Tezuka buzzed in and answered the Meiji Restoration, which was incorrect. Fudomine got to listen to the rest of the question and answered Rurouni Kenshin, which was. "Questions about manga should not be under Japanese history," Tezuka said, louder than he'd intended.
"Did you want to lodge a protest, Seigaku?" the moderator asked him.
"No. I'm sorry. Please continue."
He missed a question he could have answered about Hokusai, and then he took one about the Tokyo Yakult Swallows' pitcher.
"Well done, Tezuka!" Inui hissed.
"It is all thanks to your training menus," Tezuka answered. "Shh!"
They struggled through the rest of the first half and ended up with a score 60-30 Fudomine.
"The score deficit is nothing," Inui said, "We can make that up in one question in the second half."
Tezuka nodded. "We need to play the best game that we've ever played."
"Question number eleven is in world history."
Fudomine took the question, but they missed all their bonus questions on world rivers. Seigaku scooped up their twenty points and narrowed their lead.
The next question asked for the roots of a quadratic equation, and Inui rang in as soon as the question had been read and worked out the correct answer while the moderator was calling his name. Again they swept the bonus, which was also in math, and the score was 80-70 in their favor.
"We can definitely do this," Inui said. They lost two straight questions and only made up ten points on the bonuses, but they remained calm. Fudomine fumbled a question about the bones of the inner ear, which Inui took, and they got ten more points for identifying two of four United States cabinet members correctly. Fudomine couldn't answer either of the ones they missed, so their scores remained tied.
There was a question about literature that no one knew, and then question number seventeen was in science. "This man is the only winner of two Nobel Prizes for Chemi -- "
"Sanger," Tezuka answered, and with the bonus they brought their lead up to thirty points, but then Shimizu beat Inui on another math question and they tied the score going into the final question of the match.
"Question number twenty is in geography. It is famous for a large statue of Jesus on top of a mountain. Name this Brazilian city -- "
Fudomine buzzed in and answered São Paolo.
"That is incorrect," the moderator said, and their team groaned. Tezuka didn't even wait for the rest of the question to be read to answer.
"Seigaku, Tezuka."
"Rio de Janeiro."
"That is correct."
They received a bonus in math, and Tezuka leaned so far over to watch as Inui was writing, he practically fell out of his own hard metal chair. Their final score was 170-140.
"We were completely defeated," the opposing captain said gracefully as he shook hands with Tezuka.
"Your team played very well," Tezuka responded. He said and did all the right things, but as soon as was at all polite, he and Inui broke away and scurried down the hall to find the tournament headquarters where the official scores were being written up.
Only half of the six games, including theirs, were posted. Inui began figuring out loud. "We did it, Tezuka! We made it into the top four!"
"How do you know?" Tezuka asked. "We don't have all the scores in."
"There is a sixty-seven point three percent chance that we have made it into the finals," Inui corrected himself. They stood back against the wall and waited for the final results, Tezuka silently, Inui with a lengthy explanation of the data underlying his projected results, until they had the score from the Kakinoki-Ooshogi game and both of them knew what it meant immediately.
"We did it! We're going to districts!" Inui was glowing and Tezuka was making an exhibition of himself and all the other quiz bowl teams were staring at them as they exchanged high fives and hand clasps and Tezuka was long past caring. He barely heard the official announcement of the final results: in the first seed, Gyokurin; second, Fudosei; third, Fudomine; and fourth, Seigaku. He managed to gather the information packet about district finals that would have gone to their coach if their coach had bothered to show up and the two of them were ready to leave.
Tezuka didn't know what he was expecting when Inui pulled him aside on their way out. He didn't figure it out when Inui placed one of his hands on Tezuka's right shoulder and wound the other one into the hair at the back of Tezuka's head. He still didn't understand when Inui kissed him.
Their glasses clashed and Tezuka's heart stuttered and Inui's lips were soft and thorough and his hands were warm, insinuating their way under Tezuka's shirt and finding the planes of his back. Tezuka forgot how to think, how to move, how to breathe; when Inui let him go, his own legs wouldn't support him, and he stumbled and fell back against the stone wall.
"Inui," he said finally, and then stopped, because he didn't know what else to say.
"I'm sorry," Inui said, looking down. "I always get your data wrong. I thought that you -- that we -- I'm very sorry."
He backed away and fled, not even noticing that he had left all this things on the ground at Tezuka's feet. Tezuka reached out, automatically, to gather the scattered papers and found underneath them the black and white notebook labeled "Tezuka Kunimitsu, Quiz Bowl".
Tezuka had never seen the inside of any of Inui's notebooks. Partly because it would be wrong and dishonorable and a grievous invasion of privacy and partly because Inui never, ever permitted anyone else to have access to them.
He hardly even hesitated before opening it, and he hated himself for it.
The first few pages appeared to be notes on his tennis, written in some kind of hybrid notation that probably only Inui could understand anyway, although he traced the pages with his fingers and picked out the arc of his zero shiki drop shot, the spin on one of his serves. In the later pages there were notes he had taken on their quiz bowl matches, which were tolerably clear.
Interleaved were pages he could make absolutely nothing of, until he found his own name and realized that they were in mirror writing. He read slowly and laboriously, until he blushed even hotter and snapped the notebook shut and cursed himself for having opened it in the first place.
He dialed Inui's number three times, but Inui didn't answer.
mayhapPart 3 of 4. [Part 1, Part 2, Part 4]
Prince of Tennis. Tezuka Kunimitsu/Inui Sadaharu. PG. 2,076 words.
Tezuka takes over the Seigaku quiz bowl team. Inui joins him.
On the train ride to Gyokurin, Tezuka flipped through the twenty-page list of Nobel prizewinners that Inui had printed out for him. Inui stood beside him with his own list. Both of them had quizzed each other thoroughly on the contents of these lists and knew them forwards and backwards, but they looked at them anyway, just because.
This time, they walked around like they knew what they were doing and ignored the other teams who were staring and occasionally pointing.
"If I'm not mistaken, the Fudasei team has been talking about us," Inui observed. "We will be able to confound all of our opponents' data. It should give us a significant psychological advantage, especially in our first game, which should be a particularly tough match against Gyokurin."
"Yes," Tezuka nodded. They had put away their lists and were standing together nonchalantly until it was time for the first matches to begin.
The senior members of the Gyokurin quiz bowl club were running around frantically making sure that all the buzzer systems were set up, all the tables and chairs had been arranged, all the moderators had been briefed and all the questions in their sealed envelopes had been distributed. Inui and Tezuka were waiting for fifteen minutes before the Gyokurin captain rushed in, told four of his teammates to go ahead and play this match without him, and deputized one of them as substitute captain.
"They have definitely underestimated us," Inui whispered to Tezuka.
"Very careless of them," Tezuka murmured back. "Shh," he added, as an afterthought.
Their moderator for this game was a teacher from Gyokurin. She introduced herself to Tezuka and Inui and read the rules aloud, the way she was supposed to. "I will be asking you toss-up questions that are worth ten points each. If you think you know the answer, press your buzzer and wait for me to recognize you by name before you give an answer. In the second half, answering a toss-up question correctly will also give your team a chance to answer bonus questions worth a total of twenty points. On a bonus question, you may confer with your teammates, but this is not permitted at any other time and any team violating this rule will be disqualified form the tournament. Does anyone have any questions?"
No one did. Tezuka and Inui were poised, buzzers in hand, paper in front of them, leaning forward attentively. Their opponents were fidgeting.
"Question number one is in science. It was discovered in 1766 -- "
Tezuka rang in. "Seigaku, Tezuka," she said, looking at him doubtfully.
"Hydrogen," he said. The moderator stared at her paper to make sure she was reading it properly.
"That is correct," she said. "Ten points for Seigaku."
"What?"
"That can't be right!"
"Their team must be cheating!"
The moderator said there was no evidence of any cheating and would everyone please sit down. Inui pushed his glasses to the top of his nose. Tezuka began to feel excited.
The technique he had employed was somewhat similar to Inui's data tennis. It involved predicting what direction the question was heading in early on and interrupting the moderator to answer. It didn't come naturally to Tezuka, who would have preferred to listen to each question in its entirety, but Inui had coached him until he was reasonably proficient. After all, it would be impossible to beat the higher-level quiz bowl teams without taking risks.
"Question number two is in world history," the moderator continued.
Gyokurin's less-experienced players were completely demoralized and Seigaku dominated in the first half, 70-20. At the half, Tezuka and Inui sat back calmly while the Gyokurin players quarreled with each other about whose fault it was that they were losing to two Seigaku tennis players.
"How can they possibly expect to win like this?" Inui said, as the poor moderator asked for the third time for them to please give her their attention for the beginning of the second half.
"They don't expect to win," Tezuka said. "Which is why they won't. Zero percent chance," he added.
They didn't. When the Gyokurin captain stopped by to pick up the scoresheets, he laughed. "No, really, what was the score?"
"Two-hundred twenty to sixty-five," Inui chimed in. He held out his hand for a handshake that never came.
"How could you have let this happen? Were you even awake?"
Tezuka tactfully dragged Inui out of the room. "Who are our next opponents?" he asked.
Inui consulted his notebook. "Kakinoki," he said. "They should present no difficulty."
Tezuka frowned. "I thought they won both of their games last week."
"According to my data their playing is not exceptional. Their technique for winning involves distracting the opposing team with their revealing clothing."
"Ah," Tezuka said. They won, 160-145, and refused to give their phone numbers to anyone afterwards.
"This should be our most difficult game of the day," Inui whispered as the Fudomine team filed into the room and took their places opposite. "They're good and not easily rattled. And that girl over there can beat me on the math questions."
Tezuka craned his head to stare at her before he realized that he was being impolite. "Don't get careless," he whispered back to Inui.
"Of course."
They made polite small talk with the Fudomine players while they waited for the questions to be delivered to their room. The girl that Inui had singled out turned out to be in Tachibana's class, and she promised to give him the regards of the Seigaku tennis club. Then the game began.
The first question was in math, and Fudomine's Shimizu beat Inui to the buzzer. Naturally, Inui's data was accurate. Tezuka worked on clearing his mind and getting ready for the next question, which was in Japanese history.
Tezuka buzzed in and answered the Meiji Restoration, which was incorrect. Fudomine got to listen to the rest of the question and answered Rurouni Kenshin, which was. "Questions about manga should not be under Japanese history," Tezuka said, louder than he'd intended.
"Did you want to lodge a protest, Seigaku?" the moderator asked him.
"No. I'm sorry. Please continue."
He missed a question he could have answered about Hokusai, and then he took one about the Tokyo Yakult Swallows' pitcher.
"Well done, Tezuka!" Inui hissed.
"It is all thanks to your training menus," Tezuka answered. "Shh!"
They struggled through the rest of the first half and ended up with a score 60-30 Fudomine.
"The score deficit is nothing," Inui said, "We can make that up in one question in the second half."
Tezuka nodded. "We need to play the best game that we've ever played."
"Question number eleven is in world history."
Fudomine took the question, but they missed all their bonus questions on world rivers. Seigaku scooped up their twenty points and narrowed their lead.
The next question asked for the roots of a quadratic equation, and Inui rang in as soon as the question had been read and worked out the correct answer while the moderator was calling his name. Again they swept the bonus, which was also in math, and the score was 80-70 in their favor.
"We can definitely do this," Inui said. They lost two straight questions and only made up ten points on the bonuses, but they remained calm. Fudomine fumbled a question about the bones of the inner ear, which Inui took, and they got ten more points for identifying two of four United States cabinet members correctly. Fudomine couldn't answer either of the ones they missed, so their scores remained tied.
There was a question about literature that no one knew, and then question number seventeen was in science. "This man is the only winner of two Nobel Prizes for Chemi -- "
"Sanger," Tezuka answered, and with the bonus they brought their lead up to thirty points, but then Shimizu beat Inui on another math question and they tied the score going into the final question of the match.
"Question number twenty is in geography. It is famous for a large statue of Jesus on top of a mountain. Name this Brazilian city -- "
Fudomine buzzed in and answered São Paolo.
"That is incorrect," the moderator said, and their team groaned. Tezuka didn't even wait for the rest of the question to be read to answer.
"Seigaku, Tezuka."
"Rio de Janeiro."
"That is correct."
They received a bonus in math, and Tezuka leaned so far over to watch as Inui was writing, he practically fell out of his own hard metal chair. Their final score was 170-140.
"We were completely defeated," the opposing captain said gracefully as he shook hands with Tezuka.
"Your team played very well," Tezuka responded. He said and did all the right things, but as soon as was at all polite, he and Inui broke away and scurried down the hall to find the tournament headquarters where the official scores were being written up.
Only half of the six games, including theirs, were posted. Inui began figuring out loud. "We did it, Tezuka! We made it into the top four!"
"How do you know?" Tezuka asked. "We don't have all the scores in."
"There is a sixty-seven point three percent chance that we have made it into the finals," Inui corrected himself. They stood back against the wall and waited for the final results, Tezuka silently, Inui with a lengthy explanation of the data underlying his projected results, until they had the score from the Kakinoki-Ooshogi game and both of them knew what it meant immediately.
"We did it! We're going to districts!" Inui was glowing and Tezuka was making an exhibition of himself and all the other quiz bowl teams were staring at them as they exchanged high fives and hand clasps and Tezuka was long past caring. He barely heard the official announcement of the final results: in the first seed, Gyokurin; second, Fudosei; third, Fudomine; and fourth, Seigaku. He managed to gather the information packet about district finals that would have gone to their coach if their coach had bothered to show up and the two of them were ready to leave.
Tezuka didn't know what he was expecting when Inui pulled him aside on their way out. He didn't figure it out when Inui placed one of his hands on Tezuka's right shoulder and wound the other one into the hair at the back of Tezuka's head. He still didn't understand when Inui kissed him.
Their glasses clashed and Tezuka's heart stuttered and Inui's lips were soft and thorough and his hands were warm, insinuating their way under Tezuka's shirt and finding the planes of his back. Tezuka forgot how to think, how to move, how to breathe; when Inui let him go, his own legs wouldn't support him, and he stumbled and fell back against the stone wall.
"Inui," he said finally, and then stopped, because he didn't know what else to say.
"I'm sorry," Inui said, looking down. "I always get your data wrong. I thought that you -- that we -- I'm very sorry."
He backed away and fled, not even noticing that he had left all this things on the ground at Tezuka's feet. Tezuka reached out, automatically, to gather the scattered papers and found underneath them the black and white notebook labeled "Tezuka Kunimitsu, Quiz Bowl".
Tezuka had never seen the inside of any of Inui's notebooks. Partly because it would be wrong and dishonorable and a grievous invasion of privacy and partly because Inui never, ever permitted anyone else to have access to them.
He hardly even hesitated before opening it, and he hated himself for it.
The first few pages appeared to be notes on his tennis, written in some kind of hybrid notation that probably only Inui could understand anyway, although he traced the pages with his fingers and picked out the arc of his zero shiki drop shot, the spin on one of his serves. In the later pages there were notes he had taken on their quiz bowl matches, which were tolerably clear.
Interleaved were pages he could make absolutely nothing of, until he found his own name and realized that they were in mirror writing. He read slowly and laboriously, until he blushed even hotter and snapped the notebook shut and cursed himself for having opened it in the first place.
He dialed Inui's number three times, but Inui didn't answer.
