Thirsty for Earthy Truth
a Blue Archive fanfiction by The Overlord Bear
Summary: Hanako Urawa had always been curious about the whereabouts of human and humanoid men.
As a child, Hanako Urawa always felt distant from the metal and oblong-headed caretakers who fed, clothed, and sheltered her. Meeting the animal ones felt better, but only slightly, for while they acted like her, they never really looked like her. It was ridiculous, especially considering how they often gave her these talks about humanity not being bound by the human body, but it was a part of how she felt as this certainly otherworldly humanoid girl that she is.
Of course, she never spoke about it much, not with how often she got scolded for “asking stupid questions.” All she had to do aside from eating food, wearing clothes, and taking shelter were going to school to know her place in life better, taking up arms for security against rogue gunners and mechanical monsters, and enjoying the irreplaceable wonders of youth.
But Hanako never really understood what the irreplaceable wonders of youth were. Sure, everyone loved her for having the right answers in class all the time, and everyone loved her for her healing fields that bulwarked both her attacking and defending allies, and everyone loved her for being such an obedient girl, but they all felt shallow to her, and she never had lasting friendships with the girls she spent time with at school, and those girls were those whom she considered the worthiest of her attempts at socializing so far.
Making that feeling of shallowness even worse was how she came across evidence of the haloed girls who ran Kivotos being not as competent as her unnatural society liked to claim. Before, she always let inhumanity slide by chalking it up to their mechanical and animal doers being what they really were, but knowing that beings who looked even more closely like her could be more mechanical and animal than their caretakers…
Well, Hanako was surprised that she had never known of a haloed girl who actually engaged in what seemed to be the most taboo thing such a being could do, something that the boldest girls she has met so far (read: fellow haloed girls hiding behind power offline and anonymity online) would only often joke and fantasize about: sex with a man.
And by “man,” she meant human men and humanoid men. And by “humanoid,” she meant men who looked like the haloed girls. She didn’t even care if they had no halos, only if they were close to how human haloed girls like her looked. She’d even appreciate them looking as varied as they are.
Sure, human and humanoid girls are cute, but where are the human and humanoid boys? And sure, Hanako did learn sex education, but haloed girls like her were treated like creatures different from their animal caretakers. The teachers she had so far never could elaborate on how girls like her were made, and as cynical as she had grown, she still liked having some carefulness about poking around, so she decided to investigate in secret, hiding that beneath her lewd demeanor like the rest of her more serious self.
The most Hanako ever knew about them were through those thin books the Justice Task Force would confiscate, which she managed to get for herself by blackmailing her fellow pinkette Koharu Shimoe, her closest companion in terms of being curious about those creatures forbidden by the unwritten and unspoken rules of Kivotos. But as adorable and hilarious Koharu seemed with her paranoia, she made Hanako genuinely feel bad just as much, so the rebellious pinkette decided to have the Koharu option on low priority. Besides, their little world still held a lot of knowledge, and the knowledge Hanako got so far already had her supposing that humans and humanoids did sexual reproduction like their animal caretakers would and romantic interaction like their caretaker adults in general would.
Again, human and humanoid girls are cute, and the girlfriends Hanako had seen plus society in general certainly agree with her, but where are the human and humanoid boys? Were they not in this angelic place called Trinity? None of what she had seen of the other regions of Kivotos so far even hinted at human and humanoid men, and in desperation, she decided to visit a few other regions to confirm them first-hand as much as she could.
To her disappointment, when Hanako visited Gehenna, she made just as much progress as she had in Trinity. For a region which also prided itself in sporting lewd and eccentric styles, they had quite the strictness to them, with the Prefect Team embodying that perception of hers, and the concept of human and humanoid men was just as foreign to them as they were to any other Kivotosian. Even those kind people who considered her an honorary Gehenna citizen saw her as a weirdo among weirdos, which made Hanako feel like she was interacting with either the highest of the lowest or the lowest of the low.
So, the buxom pinkette schoolgirl decided to go to the next avenue of research: the cutting-edge Millennium Science School.
“And I thought I was the only one who wondered about such things.”
And Hanako felt dumb about that because she hadn’t considered going to Millennium first, especially since the most help she got from there and for her whole research so far was from Himari Akeboshi, former Veritas President and current Supernatural Phenomenon Task Force President. The wheelchaired girl was quite eccentric, even proudly owing said eccentricity to her preference for emotion over reason, which Hanako saw quite the irony in, especially if what she had been hearing about Seminar President Rio Tsukatsuki were true.
“Oh, if only Eimi were more like you, Miss Urawa,” Himari even told her. “I would prefer a haloed boy to be my lover. It’s only fitting for the Beautifully Dainty Super Genius Hacker that I am.”
Hanako was a lot more varied about her taste in lovers, but she couldn’t fault this girl who clearly made the most of herself for wanting what she wanted. Himari wanted a haloed boy? She would even hack into the General Student Council’s servers for even the tiniest scrap of information about that, provided someone and/or something made that shoot up to the top of her whim-or-mandate-powered to-do list.
“I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.”
Unfortunately, some seemingly sentient cybersecurity prevented Himari from breaking into the last place she tried to search: the General Student Council President’s files, and that capitalized text above started off its unvoiced speech to Himari and Hanako.
“I EVEN APPLAUD YOU FOR INDULGING YOUR CURIOSITY ABOUT THIS GARDEN WE WERE MADE WITH. BUT TRUST IN YOUR PRESIDENT. SHE WILL EVEN GIVE YOU A DEPUTY TO REPRESENT HER THERE.”
And that was as far as Hanako and Himari could go at that point. Still, they considered it progress, especially with the implications the word “garden” presented.
“I always thought that this land where we came to be was and is a walled garden, Miss Urawa,” said Himari. “Do you not feel the same way?”
“I feel like this land of ours is more a zoo, Himari-chan,” Hanako replied. “And we might be watched over by beings more animal than our animal caretakers, you see.”
“And those same watchers might also be more robotic than our robot caretakers. Such an apparently powerful image hiding an actually weak idea those descriptions form in my mind. It’s as nonsense as sex always being lustful.”
At that last sentence, Hanako felt like they weren’t on the same page. The dirty is an essential part of the fun that is sex!
But for the sake of keeping her research going, Hanako masked her disagreement with a silent smile.
And then Sensei happened.
Hanako kind of expected a haloed female more due to familiarity, but she felt an even bigger debt to the General Student Council President now thanks to the fact that Sensei was not only a trustworthy and good-looking deputy but also a human male born and raised and living. It even almost made her feel bad about lusting after him!
“Sensei…would you indulge your dear student’s curiosity here?”
“You girls really don’t know about men like me, huh?”
He still shuddered at her touch, but he was reading her better now. She liked how soft and mellow he seemed, but she also liked the sharpness and toughness that softness and mellowness belied.
“I’ve been trying to communicate that to you so many times already,” Hanako gave him a pout while standing as his current office assistant. “Do you really think I’m just my hormones, Sensei?”
“I’d sooner think that of myself than of you, Hanako-chan,” he replied with a wry chuckle from his swivel chair. “Something in my foggy memories tells me that I’d be projecting otherwise.”
This humility he seemed to have was unbelievable, and even more so than the existence of those otherworldly invaders they fought against. Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to tease him like she usually did others. She did sit on his lap, but that was as far as she could go, hands kept to herself as she expected anything to happen, even if anything would just be nothing.
And what happened next was an embrace around her waist. She was just kept close, with his chin on her shoulder and by her neck. His breathing was steady, and she couldn’t help going along with that.
She didn’t feel the arousal she usually felt, but she did feel a burning heat that reminded her of when she first learned about that physical reaction. Was this romance, then? Was this…love?
Hanako knew that she could define things however she wanted for the sake of her bodily pleasures, but somehow, she couldn’t shake off her curiosity, that curiosity that gave her the will to live as much as it motivated her pursuit of sexual relief. And her curiosity had a hypothesis: Love wasn’t as simple as sexual relief and even this intimate contact, whether combined with or separated from each other.
“Are there any haloed boys, then, Sensei?” Hanako asked soon after he reminded her.
“Now that is a good question.” She felt his expression shift through the chin on her shoulder. “One I have no concrete answer for yet, sadly. But I have this feeling that they’d feel as foreign as I am, if not more foreign. Like they’d seem natural but still seem off. Does that make sense to you?”
“I think I understand, Sensei.” She leaned back into him for a bit, then pushed herself back to keep the both of them grounded. “If that is true, then Kivotos must be quite the sterile place no matter how fertile we are, no? We are like the deserts of Abydos, slowly encroaching upon the rest of the world as it becomes a home to bigger and bigger monsters.”
“Maybe that’s why we met, then: to find and grow the humanity within us monsters.”
Hanako felt skeptical about that, but still, this little exchange was the most alive she felt in her life so far. Like post-nut clarity without the nutting. Or had she already undergone some sort of nutting with how Sensei made her spill her precious true self she kept away from the public?
Why did she even want sex dirty, anyway? Was it because it felt realer than the sterility she felt so much around her? Strangely, this was an immorality she was irritated by. Then again, she could be worse about that, considering some of the immoralities she fought against under Sensei’s leadership.
And so, she pushed herself off of Sensei’s lap.
“You’ve given me my greatest satisfaction so far, Sensei,” Hanako said, refusing to turn around and show the rare blush she had on her face. And she wanted to hide it even more with how it felt like the hottest blush she ever had and maybe even will ever have in her life. “T-Thank you so much.”
“You’re very welcome, Hanako.”
And she never heard Sensei move or call for her once she broke into a run and left his office.
The satisfaction Hanako got from that irritated her even more.
And she hadn’t even learned about the whole truth yet.
The next time they met, Sensei gave Hanako a bunch of drawings he commissioned Maki Konuri to make.
“I don’t know if these sorts of boys are real, but I’m sure you’ll like them, Hanako.”
To say that she was stunned speechless by the wonders she got would be an understatement.
And by the time those designs circulated across all of Kivotos, the most uptight of haloed girls crushing on the one human male in their land seemed like such a small thing, a thing which remained strange, though for different reasons now.
Author’s Note: Honestly, I continue to be surprised about folks like Miyabi Hanasaki and Shien Kageyama and Yumie Tsuchinoko liking Blue Archive in the ways they do. And as much as I go horny dudebro about that game, I’ve always wanted to make something truly profound for it, as in a clean work about dirty folks. And I found Hanako to be a pretty good catalyst for that, considering her brooding underneath her lewdness. The lack of presence of human and humanoid males in the worldbuilding is another catalyst, with fanfic writers Kalarz and TimesChanged solidifying my motivation to challenge that setup outside the realm of smut. And yes, I do admit that smutty stuff, especially from Eusia and GrandLeviathan, served as another catalyst in my writing of a Blue Archive fanfic like this. It’s why Koharu’s my fave Blue Archive girl, as she comes off as someone who strives to be properly moral even while in such a painful struggle with disorderly behavior. I’d love to write another fanfic like this starring her sometime, alright.
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