hanabi

She was so surprised to see her classmate here, and Agatsuma no less. Thinking about it she supposed it was going to happen eventually. But she truly couldn't believe her eyes. Agatsuma was here, and all on his own! Well... it was true that he seemed like the kind of person who preferred to eat alone. Maybe she shouldn’t bother him too much. ...But that wouldn’t be an ounce of fun!  

@mendinganew

When Hanabi strolled down the halls of her university she often was greeted with jeers. Some of it came from her peers in the art school who  misunderstood her BL career and the rest came from well-meaning schoolmates who misunderstood the field of art as a whole.

“Hey! Starving artist!” While it was somewhat true that she was occasionally on the brink of starvation, that was more due to her lack of knowledge in the kitchen. Hanabi didn’t need comments like that in her life, she didn’t have that much confidence in her career, after all. However, with school in the way she was realizing that dojinshi sales were not going to be enough to support her only she was only working on manga part time. So, she got a job.

Maid Restu. The name of her new work place was a corny play on words. Insinuating that it was a family restaurant, and a place of rest. She didn’t care, it was lovely, it was fun, it was… a paying job, after all. Her uniform was something that might be considered becoming on a high school girl, if Soubi was the judge. A short black dress, a white laced apron and a cute little cap. And it didn’t look bad on her, she thought, she had a rather slim figure and a good bust.

It wasn’t a seedy type of place where men came in giving aliases, and patted her backside as she walked away. It was a nice homely family eatery where she greeted her Masters, Misses, and young masters, and little misses with as much sincerity. Kids loved being waited on here, and parents didn’t feel embarrassed. Quite honestly, the skirts were even shorter at the other non-themed local family restaurants.

Hanabi was at the door greeting her customers when she came upon a pleasant surprise. She recognized the young boy walking in alone. 

“Huh? Hanabi-chan, I didn’t know that you worked here at all. And not really; it is my classmates who are a bit late.” Ritsuka answered as he walked into the restaurant and looked around at the various people that were wearing the same kind of outfit like Hanabi, but he really didn’t seem to question it. In fact, it didn’t seem to bother him that much to see that kind of maid’s uniform other than what he has seen in Yayoi’s manga collection; not like he would ever admit that.

“Yup! It’s a new part time job. School’s expensive, ya know.” 

Hanabi started self publishing manga six years ago. At the astonishing age 14. Impressive as that may sound, her first self-published manga was no gem. Still, she looks back at it with pride.

Four years after she began drawing seriously and already Hanabi felt ready to get her work out there. She graduated from hidden sketchbooks to a 20 copy printing of a sappy shoujo dojinshi.

A lot of manga influenced her when she was a kid, before the times that she began writing the actual manga. She would see it being read by the other children in school and when she didn’t have room in her allowance Hanabi would borrow copies of manga magazines from the other kids. Common around the classroom was Shonen Jump. Hanabi took to reading the stories in there before moving on to other genres. When she did move on, she discovered that more than the action she loved the romance stories. She loved the comedy that could be included, the deep emotions the storylines evoked, and the sweet tone they held. She noticed that manga varied so much. That she would find two very similar plots in different manga that were such parallel opposites. Plots, characters, emotions she wanted to express, they all began cropping up in her head and the sketches she had been making drew it all together. Hanabi wanted to make manga. She played around with little cartoons, sketching a few panels and trying to draw her characters in. She copied other styles for a while, not sure where she was the most comfortable. The cute story lines she leaned towards led to her developing horribly cheesy, cliche manga at first. And the iconic large eyes, carrot noses, thin necks, all the things she saw in various shojo mangas went staright into hers. It took her time before she began developing a style of her own, moving things around to suit her, playing with stylization and realism. Hanabi’s style has never stopped evolving to greater heights. Her writing bloomed from the start. It had been nonexistent but as she wrote and read more Hanabi discovered a love for it and a knack.