The previous evening, the Namidare household was filled with the sound of noisemakers.

“Happy birthday, Rekka! Yahoo!”

“Don’t point those things at me. And don’t say ‘yahoo,’ Dad.”

“Boo! You’re so boring, Rekka!”

This idiot, who was far too old to be puffing his cheeks out like an angry squirrel, was my dad, Jigen Namidare. He was a stay-at-home dad with a beard who looked best in an apron. All the delicious-smelling food on the dining room table was stuff he’d made. Even the cake was homemade, which I thought was honestly pretty impressive. I wished he hadn’t written “Rekka, I love you!” in chocolate icing on the cake, though.

“All right, let’s start eating.”

“Mom’s not here yet.”

“Mom’s busy getting ready for tomorrow. So she says we can start without her.”

“I see.” He was probably talking about her job transfer tomorrow.

My mom was a talented career woman, and she’d been given the honor of transferring to her company’s HQ outside Japan. Since she was congenitally incapable of doing any chores on her own, Dad had decided to go with her, but I’d decided I was going to stay in Japan. Part of it was just that I wanted to try living on my own. Fortunately, my parents had both agreed.

My birthday was actually tomorrow, but for that reason, we were holding the party tonight.

“Want me to put the candles on the cake?”

“No way.” Blowing out birthday candles was a little too childish for me. And it was kind of lame, just having your birthday with your family.

“Did you not invite Satsuki this year?” I asked.

“That’s right. She wanted to come, but I had something important to talk to you about, so I said no.”

“Hmph.”

“Oh? Are you lonely without her?”

“Huh?! A-Absolutely not! Just, you know... We’ve always had our birthdays together, so it feels a little weird.” We’d had our birthdays together for the past ten years. Of course it felt weird.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Shut up. Stop grinning.”

“Right, right. Sorry!”

Why did my dad always like to screw around like this? I didn’t hate the guy or anything, but I wished he’d grow up a little.

I was a little curious about what he meant by “something important,” though.

“So, what did you want to talk about?”

“Hmm... yeah. I guess I should tell you.” Dad chewed on a bit of parsley as he began to talk.

“We Namidares have a special bloodline, you see.”

“A special bloodline?”

“Yeah. I guess you could call it the Namidare bloodline. Whenever a Namidare boy turns sixteen, he becomes... well, something special. Something a little unusual.”

“This is the first I’ve heard of this. It makes me sound like the hero of a manga or light novel or something.”

“You’re pretty sharp, Rekka.”

I had been joking, actually, but for some reason he gave me a compliment. What was sharp about that?

“This special something makes you rather like the hero of a manga or light novel.”

“Do I turn 2D or something?”

“I kind of wish I got the chance to do that. You might not be able to come back if you did, though.”

“My head hurts...” At this point, I decided my dad was just making things up.

“So what is our ‘bloodline,’ exactly?” I asked, intending to mostly ignore him. The trick to achieving a happy family life was not just telling him to shut up.

“It’s hard to explain, meow.”

“Don’t say ‘meow.’ It’s creepy.”

“I’m trying to be creepy-cute! So anyway, it could be manga or a light novel. Just imagine a story where a demon kidnaps a princess, and a prince comes to save her.”

“A story?”

“That’s right. But let’s say that in the story, the prince loses in battle to the demon. Or let’s say he never existed. What would happen to that story, you think?”

“A bad ending, right?”

“That’s right. And when that happens, we Namidares get called into the story to take the hero’s place. That’s just one example. A story can be any kind of weirdness that we find ourselves in.”

“A story, huh?” It was a little abstract, but I got what he was saying.

“Basically, our bloodline has a tendency to get caught up in strange things. Also, we have a tendency to run into aliens, psychics, and people from the future, nyo.”

“Don’t say ‘nyo,’ either. And I don’t know anybody like that.” I didn’t want to get caught up in any stories, anyway. Not that any of it seemed in the least bit plausible.

“But...” As I chewed the lettuce in my salad, I thought to myself... If this was true, I’d just run away and leave the story behind. If I was just a bystander who was getting caught up in it, that meant it was supposed to be somebody else’s problem, right? So I wasn’t really obligated to help anybody. And no way in hell was I going to.

“Sounds pretty rough.”

“Hahaha! You don’t believe me at all, do you?”

“What, did you really expect me to believe that? If it was true, wouldn’t you be off creating world peace right now or something?” I looked at my dad, who was chowing down on a chicken wing. He was clearly nothing but an ordinary stay-at-home dad.

“It depends on the individual, but from the records our ancestors left behind, it seems like once you become an adult, the ‘stories’ stop coming for you.”

“That sounds pretty convenient for you.”

“You don’t trust me, huh? Well, that’s fine. Once you find yourself caught up in a story, you’ll have no choice but to believe. So anyway, get ready for that to start tomorrow.”

“Sure, okay.” Were we finally done?

Well, it was a pretty entertaining way to spice up a birthday. I could give him that.

“Oh, there’s one more thing.”

“There’s more?”

“Yeah. This is important.” My dad put down his chopsticks.

I looked up from my food to see what was up, and saw my dad had a surprisingly serious expression on his face. I sat up straight without even thinking about it.

“A lot of really difficult things are about to happen to you. We’re just normal people, so we can’t solve all the problems like a real hero could. If you think your life is in danger, it’s okay to run. But... I don’t want you to just give up on the stories you find unfolding around you. Can you promise your dad that?” I hadn’t seen him looking this serious in a long time.

When I was still a little kid, I’d once found a cat in a cardboard box that was floating down a flooded river. While I stood there panicking, my dad ripped off his shirt and jumped into the water without a second thought. Then he’d taken the sick cat to the vet, and once it was better, he’d run all over our neighborhood trying to find it a home. To a kid like me, he looked like a hero.

“Yeah, I’ve got it. I don’t know if I can be the hero of a story, though.” Maybe I’d remembered how he’d seemed to me back then, because I nodded.

I still thought this whole bloodline thing was a joke of my dad’s, though.

My mom finished her packing for tomorrow and came into the dining room.

“Hey, guys!”

It might be weird for me to say this, but my mom was really pretty. She was often mistaken for being a decade younger than she really was. I had no idea how my dad had managed to land someone like that.

“You’re late, hon! The food’s almost gone! And I worked so hard to make it, too!”

“I’m late because I’ve been doing all your packing, Jigen.”

“You were the one who said you wanted to do it.”

“And I said that because if I let you do it, your stuff wouldn’t have fit in the trunk.”

“Hahaha, sorry.”

Mom sat down, and we all started to talk. It was our last night together, so we talked for a long time. I forgot all about the stuff Dad had said about the Namidare bloodline.

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