Nashioka High School.

The city’s elevator school. Uncomfortably excited about clubs. A school uniform that gives Yuuya anxiety.

The school is massive, all show and all budget. Even though there’s a private school for rich kids, Nashi High is the one that’s the most in-your-face in every conceivable way, from size to breadth of after-school activities. The uniform is a tan jacket on black, with purple detailing, and on top of sizes, it has multiple fit types so the students always look good wearing it. It’s so flashy, people from out-of-town mistake Nashi High kids for private school kids all the time. It’s excessive to the point of being embarrassing.

The clubs are the worst, though. Especially the sports clubs. So much drama. Screaming. Determination. Lately, every member of the team gets their chance to be unnecessarily hyped up. It’s stressful just watching them.

The prerequisites for clubs seem to be pitiful, too, on account of everyone being so damn excited about everything. Some people are ballsy enough to fly things like ‘Human Relationships club’ or ‘Insect Club’, based on the fliers. The school seems apathetic to it, and why shouldn’t it be? As long as they’re not asking for money or resources, the kids can happily can do whatever.

This is the school Yuuya will be attending for the next three years.

It sucks and Yuuya hates it.

He keeps vigilant as usual, though, primarily by arriving at four in the morning.

It’s a rather irregular ‘good habit’ he’s cultivated, thanks to how hard it is to move around when there’s people in the way. Rather than getting mowed over and attracting attention, It’s easier to catalogue the school at a time where there’s guaranteed to be no one around.

Yuuya pulls out the small cylinder of his phone and speaks into it while peeking through the windows with his flashlight.

“Susumu-kun – open Camera.”

“Understood.” Ding. “I have opened, Camera.”

“In Camera, turn on the flash.”

“Understood. I’ve turned on the flash in, Camera.”

Yuuya hums in acknowledgement, even though it’s only the phone’s voice assistant. Susumu-kun is only programmed to respond to his own name (or any nickname the user provides), so the phone remains silent.

Yuuya sticks the phone in his pocket, holds the flashlight in his mouth, and retrieves his lockpicking equipment. He has the door open in seconds. He doesn’t bother to check for alarms; it would be too inconvenient to various kinds of school storylines to have armed doors.

The process is quick and rudimentary, just a quick shot through the doorway and then moving on. Unfortunately, the school is huge, so by the time he reaches the top floor, he can hear some nondescript sports team screaming outside, prepared to train hard and lure in unsuspecting first-years on their way out of the entrance ceremony. Yuuya tilts his glasses up and pries open a window, so he can see the sky with his bare eyes. As he thought, a bunch of Passion Reds. Sports types are so predictable.

There’s no Yellow-Greens, probably because that’s first-year territory, and the first years aren’t here yet, on account of it being four in the morning.

“HEY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!”

Yuuya bites off a shriek and ducks out of the window. There’s a teenage Sports boy down there; a trustworthy, reliable Senpai type, based on how ordinary he looks in contrast to the thick braid his Passion Red thread has become.

He was seen…is it because he was hanging too far out, or was the guy looking for anybody in the windows? Why?

Yuuya finishes his last three shots and bolts up the staircase until he skids to a stop in front of the roof, which is obviously going to be locked.

Yuuya pulls out the key.

He has a lot of keys to a lot of roofs. If he’s learned anything growing up in this story-world hellscape, it’s that you always, always need access to a roof, and it’s always, always a good idea to deprive others of the privilege. Stealing roof keys is second nature to him now.

He opens the door to a stiff breeze and the crisp early morning air. The roof clearly isn’t designed for leisure, with a mesh fence around the perimeter, and literally nothing else of note. There isn’t even trash from students sneaking up to eat lunch. It’s weirdly empty for a high school’s roof, considering these are the most dangerous roofs of all.

Well, first order of business when checking out a new school’s roof. He pulls the head of his flashlight, converting it to area lamp mode, sets it down, and starts shoving at the fence.

It doesn’t do much for most of the perimeter, until he gets to the eastern side of the school, which overlooks the forest and a decrepit-looking old building that might be some sort of old school-house. It looks like it couldn’t house anything more than rats.

Naturally, here is where the fence wobbles precariously.

Yuuya hums, shaking it a little. Well, as is the case with most ‘accidentally falling off the roof’ plots, it probably requires some sort of impact.

He kicks it a few times. Bigger wobbles, but not enough to free it.

Giving up on the cautious approach, Yuuya takes off his jacket, ties it to a less wobbly section, keeps it firm in hand, and flings himself at the fence.

As if reacting eagerly to the ideal death flag (which is, in fact, exactly what this fence is doing), the whole thing collapses at the slightest press of his shoulder, sending him flying along with the falling mesh.

He’s secured by the jacket, and ends up hanging from it with his feet on the ground by only his tip-toes.

Yuuya tilts backwards until he’s finally secure and flat-footed. He lets out a mild sigh and unties the coat. Far below him, three floors down, is the twisted remains of the fence.

“Seriously…it’s like baby-proofing a house.”

Next is…

Yuuya pulls out his phone and unfurls it. When it’s fully extended, the screen goes rigid, and the RomanSoft logo appears.

RomanSoft’s scrollphones are a very successful business venture in tech that is slightly more convenient to use. Rather than the more common and ubiquitous glass touchscreen phones, Scrollphones are designed like an ancient scroll, with a touchscreen that’s floppy and cloth-like until it’s fully extended, at which point it hardens for ease of use.

The screens have terrible picture quality thanks to that bit of tech, and since the only handle is at the top, they’re not as easy to type on or take pictures with. RomanSoft’s best selling point is actually how easy scrolltablets are to store, and how hard it is to break them. The scrollphones only sell because of the SHELLCHARAs.

The SHELLCHARA voice assistants are the most ambitious part of the whole line, especially considering they’re just a male and female anime avatar set. Susumu-kun and Tsuruya-chan are simple yukata-clad characters with cool, detached personalities, and the amount of marketing they have is insane. Yuuya is almost entirely certain there’s an upcoming plot about world domination through SHELLCHARAs, or a SHELLCHARA coming to life, or something stupid like that. He just likes it because it’s convenient.

Yuuya’s own Susumu-kun appears as the lockscreen. He slides it open, revealing the camera, and exits out to select the MyHouseline app instead. He opens the preexisting map of the school his brother sent him, and starts assigning pictures to each doorway marked on the map, helpfully labelled ‘Yuuchanschoolmapiloveyou.mhlm’. Eventually, he completes the picture assignments, and starts assigning markers.

To the roof itself – steal keys.

To the back corner of the school, out of sight – encourage some sort of club to lurk here.

To the sports supplies room – steal keys, patrol often. Disinfect just in case.

His brother had labelled extra classrooms, and thanks to the magic of an absurdly huge school with a normal student body population, there are a looooot of those. Yuuya’s not sure he can do much about that, besides labelling which club ended up with which room and avoiding them at all costs.

He scatters a few more markers – his classroom, the teacher’s lounge, the nurse’s office – and retracts the phone.

The rest of the school’s babyproofing will have to come along with the characters he sees. Who knows what dumbass plots this school has prepared.

Yuuya pulls his glasses up to do a basic sweep, mostly to check who’s heading in now that it’s nearly five.

He nearly drops the phone in his hand when his eyes catch the great scar on the skyline. The single, glowing white streak cutting through the steadily brightening nightscape is far away, but it is not at all hard to see.

Yuuya shoves his phone into his pocket and practically leaps at the fence overlooking the south end of the school. He clambers up it like a monkey and balances on the bar at the top so he can fully stand above it.

The streak of white seems to be far, far off, sitting on a hill that splits this area from the residential district. Even so, where most threads would be practically invisible at that distance, Yuuya can see it perfectly, with nearly the same clarity as the Passion Reds next to him. Most threads barely get larger than the circumference of a soda can…for it to be this visible, it would need to be at least the size of an oil drum.

More worrisome, though, is that there’s no such thing as a white thread.

“Just what are you planning…” Yuuya breathes. No matter how much he squints, the picture doesn’t change. He would have noticed a thread this obvious, no matter what, so either the person marked with it either just moved into town, or the thread is a very recent development.

Both a size and colour that hadn’t existed until now. The sight is making his stomach churn.

The Narrative seems to be making its move today too.

“What the heck are you doing up there?! That’s dangerous!”

Yuuya screams, and immediately loses his balance. He pinwheels backwards, and it’s only a colourful history of falling off things that lets him shove his hands forward and grasp the mesh before he falls all the way and cracks his head open on the cement roof. As it is, he feels like his fingers are being yanked out of their sockets, and he yelps out in pain.

After that doubly embarrassing show, Yuuya gives up all pretense of balance and just drops like a log onto the ground. He bangs his side up, but he’s on solid ground, at least.

Feet come up to his face. Sporty feet. Yuuya glares at them.

“How did you even get up here? Are you a first year?”

Yuuya flops over to lay on his back so he can look up at his verbal assailant. It’s the Reliable Senpai. He seems to be wearing a basketball jersey. Yuuya honestly couldn’t say if he’s part of the screaming group from earlier or if he’s here to prep the gymnasium; all Sporty Types are the same to him.

“You listening to me?”

The important thing here is that he is staring straight at Yuuya.

Yuuya grumbles and covers his flushed face with his hands. That’s the thing about roofs in Nashioka. You can’t be on one without some sort of event triggering. Who knows when you’re going to trigger a suicide event, or a bullying event, or an obnoxious main character togetherness event, or a completely inconvenient confrontation event…

“What happened to the fence?!”

Ugh, shut up shut up shut uuuup.

“What are you doing up here? Answer me, already!”

Yuuya is grasped by the front of his school jacket and pulled upright. He grudgingly removes his hands from his face to look at Reliable Senpai.

He has short black hair and attractively narrow, sharp black eyes, as well as a decently muscular build. If Yuuya had to pick a defining character trait, it’d definitely be the eyes.

The eeeeyes.

Yuuya recoils a bit farther into himself, and puts the hands back on his face. It’s unlikely Reliable Senpai will see him blush in the piss-poor lighting of his flashlight, but the self-loathing is doing a good job overwriting that bit of logic.

Even with his face covered, hiding away like this, Yuuya can feel the attention on him, eyes drinking in his every detail where most people would find their gaze sliding over him. He can feel the heat of Reliable Senpai’s hand fisted in his shirt, slowly being drowned out by the blood pumping fire through his veins. His mind is going crazy, and he knows he won’t be able to help himself anymore. His control snaps.

Yuuya bites down on Reliable Senpai’s wrist, hard.

Reliable Senpai shouts out in pain and drops him like a rock. Yuuya stumbles away from him, and takes off for the door. Just before he heads down the stairs, he turns to look balefully at Reliable Senpai, who is nursing his arm and looking bewildered.

“D-Don’t stick your nose into other people’s business.”

And with that, he flees.

Yuuya is not having a good week.

He’s sure the Menacing School Principal is saying something important at the front of the auditorium, what with the booming and incredibly foreboding tone of voice, but there’s a few more key things to worry about here.

For example, Reliable Senpai is lined up with a few students around the front, and he’s sending him a death glare that could melt plastic. Yuuya scrapes his tongue against his snaggletooth nervously, but otherwise ignores him.

The rest is just the usual fears, amplified by the amount of people he’s forced to be in the same room with. The convenience of the school entrance ceremony day lies in the ability to see every student’s thread with a face attached. Here, Yuuya can catalogue as many people as he needs to.

But today, all he sees is hell.

Most students are a Thoughtful Yellow-Green, and of the regular Daily Greens that litter the crowd, he has no doubt the first day of school will ignite a small ocean of Love Pinks. There’s already a decent number of them spawning already, including that old classmate of his that had her heart broken by that other classmate.

More troubling is the frequency of Violence Purples and Adventure Golds in here. This is a breeding ground for Battle storylines. Why? Weren’t love comedies and otherworld adventures getting reasonably popular? Does the Narrative just not care at all about trends in media? Is it trying to stress him out? Is it trying to make him suffer?

There isn’t really any such thing as the supernatural, so chances are, a bunch of these kids are going to end up in the city’s underground Battle Tournament.

Burning the damn place to the ground and spitting on the remains is probably not a reasonable reaction to this problem. He’ll figure it out some other time.

To top it all off, the Menacing School Principal has a pair of thick, winding Violence Purple and Drama Blue threads going on there. Yuuya wants no part of that.

The rest is a sea of Daily Greens. Some of them are thicker than others, but nothing Yuuya can’t handle.

How is he supposed to handle all those Battle characters, though? They’re practically designed to drag unsuspecting nobodies into their messes. Leave them alone and suddenly Yuuya will be held hostage at gunpoint with the rest of his class to lure out some plucky Protagonist.

And he’s already attracted the attention of the Reliable Senpai. He’ll have to…actively apologize and explain himself. Awful.

The moment the ceremony is over, Yuuya does his best to muscle past the rest of his year. Seeing as he has no muscle whatsoever and is in fact slightly underweight, he’s crushed instantly. He grunts and pushes, but they’ve become an impenetrable wall, and that damn Reliable Senpai is coming straight for him.

“E-Excuse me…”

Naturally, he’s ignored.

Yuuya slackens in the throng of people. So in the end, it still comes down to this.

He takes out a switchblade.

Well, it has the shape and function of a switchblade, but the blade itself is a glorified metal tongue depresser that couldn’t stab through a loaf of bread, let alone a person.

On the other hand, it’s good for poking.

Yuuya drives the non-knife into the side of the nearest student in his way, and with a screech of pain and a leap, Yuuya’s path is finally clear. He pushes forward, and when new people move into his way, a flash of metal gets them out it.

When he finally escapes, he makes a mad dash out of the school and dives to the side of the building. He stumbles and collapses into the wall, lungs raw and stripped from the effort of running for twenty seconds straight.

It would be so easy to just become a hikiNEET. Never leave his house. Live off his family’s careers. Consume a lot of caffeine. He feels sick and dizzy with stress of dealing with this. Or fatigue from all the running. Hard to tell.

Of course, the defining trait of a Passion Red is their never-give-up attitude, so Yuuya doesn’t get very long to sulk. Reliable Senpai comes running up to meet him.

“Hey, you. What the hell are you up to?”

Yuuya looks over his shoulder to give Reliable Senpai a filthy look. “What does it matter to you?”

“I’m part of the School Delegate Committee. It’s my job to make sure each student represents this school positively.”

“School Dele…? Wouldn’t that be the Disciplinary Committee’s job?”

He clears his throat. “One of the members has. Uh. Found them lacking. And Systematically destroyed them.”

What the hell.

“If you have time to antagonize innocent first years who only want to look around rooftops, manage your own members.”

“Why don’t you try and take care of that guy! I have basketball practice, and the other members have their own clubs to consider!” He pauses. “And don’t try to get out of this! I saw the fence on the roof!”

Yuuya slowly gets to his feet, careful to keep his back to Reliable Senpai and his hands over his face. His ears are burning, but hopefully Reliable Senpai can be reliable enough to not bring it up, or make fun of him for it like Yamada-san did.

“…The fence was wobbly.”

“…Huh?”

“The fence. It was wobbly and unstable. If I just went to a tea-teacher and said ‘it’s wobbly’, they’d definitely put it off, so I figured, if it were ana…ann…an obvious hazard…”

“…And you were at the school because you magically knew about the fence?”

Yuuya shakes his head. With trembling hands, he pulls open his phone and opens his MyHouseline app. The school blueprint comes up, and he shows it to the Reliable Senpai while avoiding eye contact. There’s no hiding the blushing now. He runs his tongue roughly over his snaggletooth.

“What’s this?”

“A p-picture map of the school,” Yuuya mutters. “The app is for realty, but I-I use it as a visual reference. I have a…a navigation problem.”

“And you couldn’t do it in the day because…?”

“I have a bullying problem too,” Yuuya lies.

Luckily, Reliable Senpai is far too reliable for his own good, and can’t resist being depended on. His expression softens. “You know, if anyone bothers you, the School Delegate Committee is always willing to help students in need.”

“L…Like the disciplinary committee-slaying demon?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him, he hardly comes to school to begin with.”

“…Take care of your own members, already.”

“Ah…sorry. Well, even if it’s him causing the trouble, we’ll take care of that too. You can depend on us.”

This guy’s wholesome beyond all imagining. Yuuya is sick to his stomach at the sheer degree of trope adherence.

“…I’ll hold you to it.” Yuuya nods stiffly at him.

He doesn’t receive a happy beam, or a manly grin. All he’s treated to is visible recognition a problem has been resolved, a slackening in his posture, and those sharp all-seeing eyes glazing over and sliding away from Yuuya’s suddenly irrelevant form.

The Reliable Senpai leaves without so much as a parting word.

Yuuya should be happy about it. He should be pleased that the attention is off him, and he’s free to move as he pleases again. It’s the best possible relationship he could hope for.

But somehow, all he feels is the turning of his stomach and the anxious chill creeping down his spine.

Yuuya curls up into a ball against the wall and lets out a low, shaking breath. His fingers tangle up in his hair.

“…I want to go home.”