// Old intro, written before I realized the protagonist should be MUCH more of a failniece, with the aunt still in the picture
Her name was Miyuki and she was a child soldier. She was fourteen inches tall and her lavender-tinted white hair came down to her hips, as long as the gun, which was pointed towards the ground. Not straight down. At a bit of an angle, like she was ready to raise it and shoot you. When I talked out loud about my computer problems to her I imagined that if I meandered or whined, she would raise it and shoot me. Miyuki was hot but she had a beastly temper.
She was wearing the nothing-much of a bikini bra from the beach episode, two little lavender triangles covering her jutting nipples and connecting around her torso with glue-strands. It was obviously a shameful toy and the only reason I didn't mind having it next to my wide screen monitor was that no one would come into my room. I'd had no visitors for two years since my aunt died. When Hilda had lived I kept Miyuki in the closet in a box topped with cardigans and church dresses.
Hilda and I had been at a bit of a long running standstill at the time she passed away. It was unclear which one us was taking care of the other, although she liked to say she was the caretaker of course. I was a little too old to drag along to church, and she was too frail to live alone. And to both of our surprise, after I dropped out of college I started to outearn her. I had found a job administrating the computer systems of a mid-sized business on the other side of the country. One of my gaming friends had found me the job, despite not even knowing what I looked like. Even after several tries of explaining how I'd gotten the job, Hilda couldn't wrap her head around it. She did not understand my life at all. I understood hers, I thought, and shuddered at its smallness.
When she died, though, the smallness was quite large. She had heaps of stuff all around our three bedroom house and it was all threaded through with her small, crotchety personality. Now that she was gone and not trying to control me it was safe to love her and miss her. I cried for weeks. I still haven't cleared out the house. I threw out all the crosses on the walls and lost steam to do the rest. I know I should, but there was no reason to and no one to force me to keep going. Several days after Hilda's funeral I took out Miyuki and put her boldly on my desk.
...
As I did uncommonly but not rarely, I fell into a bit of a reverie while stroking Miyuki. I had her gripped firmly about the pelvis with my left hand and was stroking her breasts with my right, thumbing at the ridge of plastic where the lavender triangles covered her erect nipples. She said, "Pervert! Stop that immediately!"
I dropped her in shock. Almost flung her away. Did fling her away. Her back hit the edge of my desk with an uncomfortably fleshy, boney kind of crack, and she fell to the floor.
I gasped in horror and bent over to see if she was all right, and she had that gun pointed at me. There was a small but distinct bang. I fell to the side and my chair rattled all the way to the other side of the room. I turned my face up and could see a small hole in the ceiling, with a tiny rainfall of plaster dust ...
Miyuki shouted at me, wiggling up into a standing position. I backed up humbly in true terror, thinking of the line of air it could draw through my brain. The thing was, I couldn't understand what she was saying. She was speaking Japanese. I had been able to make out her first sentence because it was something girls said quite often in anime. I speak a little bit of Japanese from, well, all the anime, but I couldn't keep up with her rapidfire accusations.
"No Japanese," I said, with my hands up. "English?"
Angry feminine squeaks.
I knew enough Japanese to say "I don't speak Japanese" in an unflustered state, but I was too flustered to put together such a sentence. Stupidly, I said, "Dubbing, please?"
"Dubbing?" Miyuki said with enough incredulous scorn to melt plastic. "You want me dubbed? What a stupid, uncultured preference!"
"I'm sorry. But at least I can understand you now," I defended myself. She was now speaking in English. We could now communicate, which, it occurred to me, opened up a whole host of other problems.