Extra Bonus Stuff

Nothing much to see here yet. Maybe once the game is done I could put downloads for the soundtrack or something.
Or game 'art' scaled up into hideous blurry desktop backgrounds that no-one in their right mind would want.

Actually, you can have this. For a taster of the writing style the game has. I wrote this in about 3 days, as what started as a little warm-up writing exercise. It couldn't fit the game proper, being written from the POV of another character. But it's too good to just languish in a text file somewhere, so have at it. Consider this something akin to official fanfic:

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'Out Here All Nite'

An excerpt from the thought processes of one Shiori Miura
In a wack alternate timeline in which the Mahjong Club doesn't get enough members, is disbanded, and she finds herself press-ganged into the joining the Newspaper Club (as in literally, the press ganged up on her).

  - - -

  MONDAY NIGHT - October 03

  Bitch on a stick.
  There are many roofs in the Barth-hole. Several of them accessible. Some of them even flat, so you can sit on them without having to resort to digging your heels into a gutter full of black sludge to not fall the fuck off. This isn't one of them. But Kiri and Terumi insisted it be this one. The pure steep gabled roof of the main building. Because the Book Club, apparently, are up to something. Or at least some of their members are. Natsumi joined them so I guess that's reason alone to be suspicious. Bitch is a loose cannon among loose cannons. A cannon so loose the balls probably don't touch the sides on the way out. Actually I think the turn of phrase suggests a different sort of looseness but I'll roll with it. Just like those cannonballs rolling out of Nats' loose fucking wizard sleeve of an okay I'll stop now.
  It's not pretty up here. Biting, unseasonable wind that the quad seems to be channelling directly towards me with a vengeance usually reserved for 'Princess of the Pranks' Tomoko Sugiyama channelling bags of dog shit towards Jun Fujimoto's face. Which is actually pretty fucking funny. I have a love/hate relationship with Tomoko. I hate her, but I love some of the shit she does. But I digress. Oh fuck me do I ever digress... Anyway it's pitch black. Which is kind of the point. I could have sat on the roof of the sports hall all nice and flat clutching these 'property of St. Barthram's Newspaper Club' binoculars, but one of the street lamps near the staff car park throws enough light up there that anyone discerning would notice my silhouette there. Here, nestled between the steep valleys of the dormer windows or whatever they're called, I'm pretty fucking invisible. Kiri worked herself so hard her ass sweat made the Ganges look like a thirsty man's piss in order to find the best space. Because (much like the cafeteria chef on ice cream day) we've got quite the scoop on our hands.
  I point the bins at the rooms across the quad from here. Code brown - that is to say, there isn't shit happening. Professor Aioi tidies some clamp stands and heat proof mats away and gives her desk one more wipe down. Benjy fucking drools into his bib while tidying geography books, and the Bear Grylls Society watch a copied DVD of a man shovelling five kinds of animal shit into his mouth then sliding down a hill on his ass. And the Book Club... are fucking reading. Scoop here, Kiri. You're gonna love it.
  Apparently the suspicious behaviour was thus. When the Newspaper Club meeting wraps up after a hard day of typing lies, we go through that part of the college to leave by the secret other exit. Because me and Terumi live in the shitty side of town so the main entrance adds a big loop onto our journey. And it's no fun walking around here at night knowing creeps like Benjy and a certain Mister Aoki - sorry, Ozborg - live locally. So you take what you can get. And we noticed that at that final graveyard shift bell most of the book dorks were leaving: the second year girl, the kinda decent looking boy with the surfer hair, Erina. But Yuki and Natsumi were taking their sweet time. And I said "big deal, the girl's obviously handicapped or whatever you're supposed to say nowadays, and Yuki's helping her out". No big mystery there Einstein. But then Terumi said she saw just the two of them go into that room on another day, rather than a club day. Which was, in her words, 'kinda sus, not gonna lie'.
  I suggested planting a camera in the room to catch them doing whatever they were doing. And we did. And would you know it the next Club Meet they left bang on time with everyone else. Maybe the fact the camera was this massive grey thing from the last century with a 'St. Barthram's Newspaper Club' sticker label-makered onto the side, embossed white text on red. With a big suspicious red 'RECORD' light blinking the entire time. We watched the footage and it was just some nerds reading, interspersed with Natsumi holding up a middle finger. Then the club disbanding early, then Tomoko coming in and mooning it. Then Terumi 'really not wanting to see that' despite replaying it like twice. And everyone but me deciding collectively that we would have to instead have someone sit sentry on the roof after hours to investigate this. And everyone slowly turning in my direction. The newb, the first year girl, the one without a fucking backbone in her head. So I slumped my shoulders in defeat and accepted my posting. And so here I am now.
  I look through the Book Club window. It's a nice angle I've got here to be honest. On roughly the same level. So I can see a good chunk of the front of the classroom. If Yuki and Natsumi choose the back of the classroom to prepare their terrorist weapons or forge thousand-yen notes or whatevs I'm boned though. Right now they're reading. Erina's reading something with a pink cover, probably romance trash. My boy from Bondi Beach is giggling to himself as he reads something, can't tell what, he's one of those who keeps the cover flat to the desk when he's reading. Maybe it's some embarrassing Erina-tier shit. I bet that's what everyone who reads with the book down like that reads. Lolita in a Mein Kampf slipcase. I might make that sentence my Tinder bio actually. But I'm digressing... again. I watch a little longer, trying not to focus too hard on him and to occasionally check out what Yuki and Natsumi are doing. Since that's, you know, my mission. It doesn't look like scheming, but then again Natsumi probably wouldn't look schemey while she schemes. She'd just look the same as she always does. Waving her arms around wildly (and frankly dangerously) while she talks, like if you interviewed an Italian man while hooking up his ballbag to a car battery. And Yuki's stood listening to her, that pained kind of look on her face - that of a parent or guardian listening to barely comprehensible drivel from a particularly stupid child. I've seen a lot of that look in my time. Anyway, so far nothing too out of the ordinary...

  - - -

  How long do clubs go on for at this place anyway? Somewhere below me, Terumi and Kiri will be typing up pure libel and slander into the columns of their Barthram Bugle template file, probably nursing a cup of that hot choccy from the vending machine - a cup each, they're close but not, like, that way close. Cosy and warm. And I'm here, being careful which way I yawn so my breath doesn't condense on the lenses of the binoculars and obscure my vision. They're all still reading, so I wheeled my bins 'round everywhere else I could. Which was pretty uneventful. A street in the distance that runs parallel to the school railings, where a few randoms walked past under the glow of the lights there. Few cars went past, and a large armoured military type thing by the looks of things. I tried pointing my gaze straight up but it was hardly meteor spotting conditions - near 100% cloud cover on a moonless night, today was chosen specially for that very reason in fact, couldn't have been more perfect. For the club in general, not for me. I'd have preferred a warm windless night with a cushion under my arse, and maybe someone to keep me company, peel and feed me individual grapes like Caesar or whoever. I'm just about to fall asleep (and very possibly to my death) when a light flickering off in a room across the quad from me focused my attention again. I look but it's not Book Club. I think it's the Bear Grylls Society wrapping up whatever they do when they're not watching all that borderline scat-bestiality. Tents and stuff. Homoeroticism too. Or at least I hope. I might tell Kiri that too, that there's rumours around that the Bear Grylls Soc is a hotbed (love that word) of homosexual derring-doo. I mean, BEAR Grylls, it's in the name. And they go CAMP all the time. Fuck me. Hey they should send me to go undercover and investigate. I'll pretend to leave the Newspaper Club and join up with them, then head out on a trip with them and get to watch all sorts of boy-on-boy horseplay by the campfire, then in the dead of night when they think I'm asleep on my own in the girls' tent way off to one side, I can crawl through the undergrowth, covert dictaphone gripped between my teeth, and see exactly how Erina's brother and all those others keep warm when the campfire goes out. Stop it stop it stop it Shiori. We've got an actual job here and we're not doing it. Right...
  Suh-COOP, they're sharing out some kind of drink. Alcohol? Illicit substances, right here under the school roof- oh, it's cheap lemonade. The proper 50 yen supermarket stuff that tastes like fizzy water that saw a lemon on telly one time. Cheap bastards. OH and the girl with the glasses has spilt it all down herself trying to drink it. Dopey cow, hey I wonder if that sports day wet T-shirt contest will actually go ahead? We wrote it in the 'year at a glance' page in the first Bugle issue of the term (the Summer Term, HA HA HA OH MY!), and several of the teachers (well, Mr. Chandler, several times in several styles of sloppily forged handwriting we reckon) wrote in anonymously to say they really liked the idea and would do everything within their power to ensure it was a roaring success. Actually, I don't think there's very much in Benjy's power. Perhaps not even bladder control.
  Fuck me. It's only October, it should be warmer than this. What the fuck gives? I rest the binoculars (they're probably really expensive, but I'm not in the business of buying binoculars on the reg so what do I know) in the gutter and rub my hands together then blow air into them. It's a bit better but not much. I'm hoping these two bastards get it over with and fuck already, or whatever it is they're doing, so I can get back inside, tell Terumi what went down and fuck off home. But they're taking their time. I peep at them again; the girl with the glasses seems to be saying bye to the others. And she's out of there. Then it looks like the boy has stopped reading too. His book is face down on the table but I can't tell what it is just from the back. It's all blurb. And a kind of muted grey/black colour scheme. So it could be something non-fiction. Really funny non-fiction evidently. And Erina puts her little sad bitch treatise on knitting and tea and swooning in the presence of one Mr. D'Arcy in her bag too. The time is nigh. My time to shine. I sit up properly, fiddle the dial on the bridge of the bins a little (I don't know what exactly it does, both clockwise and anticlockwise seem to focus and unfocus pretty much at random) and watch with bated breath as Erina, then my guy, then some other rando who was sat too far back for me to see leave the room. And Yuki gets up, puts her pure inch-thick tome of badassery in her rucksack and starts talking to Nats. Who does the wavy arms thing again. Girl has ahead of her two illustrious careers, either air traffic control for a really busy airport, or dancing after taking unlabelled pills in an abandoned storm drain under Manchester at 3 a.m. I don't think that second one's a career actually since it costs money. Anyway, after a spot of talking, Yuki strolls over to the window and just sort of looks out. I'm hoping I'm as invisible as I hoped I was, that the big glass lenses peeping directly at her aren't reflecting any stray lamp light from somewhere the Newspaper gals hadn't accounted for. But I think I'm in the clear - her gaze doesn't linger anywhere or too long. She then steps back and - get this - pulls the roller blind down, shutting off another little square of light to me. Fuck. Now all I can see is Benjy picking at a cup noodle with a sick grimace on his face. A student mocked him for living in Japan for so long and still being unable to use chopsticks, so he has recently taken to trying to eat absolutely everything with the bastard things. Even things you just wouldn't use chopsticks for. And he doesn't seem to have the hang of it yet. Much like his command over the Japanese language, actually. You hear these stories about assistant English teachers, real shockers, and you just think, surely they can't all be that bad It's like, not possible for a human being to be that bad. Not even an American! But then you run into a lad like Benjy in the flesh and just think Jesus Christ.
  I wait on for another five or ten minutes, in the hope that the blind gets opened again - maybe Natsumi might open it expressly to piss Yuki off - but it doesn't happen. Instead, after a short while I see the classroom light go out, what little glow was escaping from around the edges where the blind didn't quite meet the sides of the window is extinguished. And I decide that I'm not going to get any more useful intel at this point so it's time to make my way back down. Which is easier said than done. Edging along the roof edge, then lowering myself down in front of the Newspaper Club window where with any luck someone inside there will see my feet dangling helplessly, and they'll grab a leg each and hoist me in and ask me about what I saw. But in the pitch black it's kind of hard to know where the Newspaper club room actually is. I can't see any light shining out, no yellow pool spilling into the quad below. Two floors below me. Shit it looks even higher now I can't see it properly. We tried a dry run early in the morning, before the grounds filled up, and it was scary then. And that's when I could see where I was supposed to be going. I look at the reflection of this wing of the building in the windows of the one facing. And I can't see shit there. Surely those bastards haven't fucked off home and left me? Surely?
  "Hello?"
  I say it into the night and it just disappears, echoless into the void. "Hello? Anyone?" I try again, louder this time, loud enough that I have a chance of actually being heard. But nothing. I start waving towards Benjy's room, that little yellow of square the only warmth in the night. But he's not looking, and even if he was he'd not see shit. He throws both noodle cup and chopsticks in the bin in a silent steaming rage, then knocks the light off and disappears into the corridor beyond.
  "Uh, Terumi?" I shout. "Kiri?"
  ...
  "Anyone?"
  But all I get in return is the rustling of the trees and bushes in the wind, and the distant hiss of traffic rolling past, crescendoing and falling away like breaking waves.

  TUESDAY, October 04

  It was maybe seven the next morning when someone found me. The big wide guy who teaches woodwork shouting up telling me not to jump and that I had so much to live for. I told him I wasn't going to jump (If I was I would want my final resting place to be somewhere a little less shitty than the quad) and he told me to wait right there while he disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a ladder.
  "So what were you doing up there?" he asked as I shakily made my way down the ladder and back to terra firma. "Usually it's the other roof we have trouble with students going up onto without permission." How to explain this... How to do so in a way that doesn't cast suspicions on the Newspaper club. Or Yuki and Natsumi for that matter, I'm probably on my own within the Newspaper Club for thinking this this but I always stick by innocent until proven guilty.
  "It was, uh, I was pranked."
  "Ah," he said, nodding. "That Tomoko will get what's coming to her one of these days. Mark my words."
  I don't complain. And I wordlessly spend the next hour in Mr. Ishibashi's woodwork classroom, sipping a hot chocolate from the vending machine (that has a slight aftertaste to it of the soup the machine vended last thing yesterday) and being asked if I was okay because I 'looked pale'. Bitch I've always looked like this. It's what having no friends and being shit at sports does to you. Though sometimes I catch a close look at Megumi Kubota's ghastly complexion - we sit two desks away from each other in English - and worry a bit if I look like that to everyone else. And the only reason I don't notice it myself when I look in mirrors is because I've seen it so often I'm used to it, it no longer registers. I thought about trying to do some kind of sport or other once I started here. But then all the sports they offer here sounded shit when it wasn't just an idea for the future and was something I had to sign up for right now. So I didn't.
  I down the last little mouthful of hot chocolate - the bit where all the chocolate powder that doesn't dissolve settles so it's like taking a spoonful of melted, very cheap chocolate directly - and wonder if I should have opted for the strongest coffee that machine does instead. I must have got about an hour's sleep last night, and I've got a long day ahead of me.

  - - -

  At lunch time I'm in the library, trying to do the homework I wanted to do last night while at the same time trying not to fall asleep, when Kiri and Terumi rock up and pull some seats up to my desk.
  "Morning," smiles Terumi. "I mean afternoon."
  "Mission failed, I take it?" says Kiri. She's sat opposite me and sits as if interrogating me; hunched forwards, her chin resting on a fist and her cold blue eyes boring deep into mine for the fleeting moments I can bring myself to meet her gaze. Between them they do have a nice good cop, bad cop thing going.
  Bad cop, worse cop might be more appropriate actually.
  "Where the fuck did you two go last night?" I ask them.
  "Oh, I didn't feel well so I left." replied Terumi. "I had a sore stomach so I went home, but then it passed so it was probably just gas from the canteen prawn curry they served yesterday. I thought Kiri would have stayed to let you back down."
  Both of our gazes turn to look at Kiri, but our combined menace doesn't add up to a thousandth of what she can seemingly effortlessly muster in return. Bitch was just born to intimidate.
  "Well, I was." she started. "But then I realised I couldn't possibly lift someone your size down from the roof on my own, so I thought it would be better to just leave you be. It would mean more potential intel for the club to work with. You did get some intel on the Book club for us, right?"
  Well...
  As much as the whole currency of Newspaper Club is lies, damned lies and bullshit, I don't know how accepted lying to one another is, or if it's just lying to everyone who reads our shitty little rag that's acceptable. There's not really some journalistic code, some hypocritic oath I had to swear or anything that clears this up.
  "I may have seen one or two things," I say. "But these things probably raise more questions than they answer."
  They both sit forward, and Terumi brushes a bunch of hair behind her ear and out of the way as if that's going to make a god damned difference it's not made of noise insulation foam you dumbass it's hair.
  "Well, first, I saw Mr. Chandler. Eating his usual cup noodle, alone in his room. Still at it with the chopsticks, barely able to pick a single noodle up." I see cogs whirring behind Kiri's otherwise expressionless expression. I can almost see the headlines now, "CHANDLER SET TO STARVE BY 2010". She smiles a tiny little bit, then pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose with a finger.
  "Not really what we're looking for, Shichan."
  Well first off don't even fucking call me that if you want to be in possession of all your own teeth by the end of the day and second, I wasn't finished, was I?
  "In addition to that," I try my meanest, most piercing look on Kiri but it feels about as effective as waving a clenched fist at a guy in a tank, "I witnessed some happenings in the Book Club classroom that may be of interest to you. To us."
  And I begin to recount what I saw up there last night. Or what I remember of it. And maybe embellish a few things just to keep them interested. The lemonade that glasses girl shared out? Black market absinthe. With ten tapeworms in the bottle. And then Yuki and Natsumi closing the blinds of the room, but then the light going off... half an hour later, let's say. Long enough to let these two's imaginations run riot.
  "Interesting~!" smiles Terumi. She's been jotting bits and bobs down the entire time in a little notebook, bullet points in one of those pink gel pens that takes way too long to dry (because of the shit they put in the ink to make it pink I assume) so when you close the book and reopen it there's like a backwards copy of whatever you wrote on the back of the previous page. Fuck I hate that. Kiri seems to have just committed everything she needs to memory.
  I also tell them about the fact some of the Book Club denizens read in such a way that the cover of their book is pressed flat to the table at all times. As if they know they're being watched. As if they can't even trust each other down there. As if there's factions within the Book Club itself that could be isolated, agitated, pitted against one another. I try to think of some sort of twisted logic that would dictate it imperative I arrange a one-to-one interview with the surfer-hair dude pronto, but I can't think of one. Ass.
  Kiri gives a calm, restrained nod, but there's a slight smirk starting to crawl onto her face, an undeniable mischief in her eyes. Terumi, on the other hand, has written 'FRACTIONS!' in big letters on her notebook then drawn a few messy loops around it for emphasis.
  "Their club meets again, Wednesday night." Kiri says. "As does ours. As our roving reporter, Shichan, we expect you to do all you can in the pursuit of more dirt I mean information on the goings-on within the Book Club. And that will mean more covert surveillance of Club activities."
  Before I can even open my mouth to dispute this, the two of them spring up to their feet, simultaneously as if joined at the hip.
  "And we'll make sure you have a safe way down once you're done, too," Terumi adds. Kiri strides towards the library door, a no-nonsense power walk, and Terumi bounds along after her like a puppy if its owners took it to be spayed and accidentally lobotomised it by mistake.

  - - -

  When the final bell rings to signal the end of the day, I make my way over to the Newspaper Club room. Room two-oh-six in what everyone just refers to as the Annex despite it being nearly the same size as the building it's grafted onto. In fact I think this building was here first. It certainly looks older. Kiri and Terumi are already there, typing away with manic ferocity on two large beige PCs that the college library no longer wanted, citing fire safety issues. Between them is an array of stationery, a half-drunk cup of vending machine hot chocolate, and Terumi's notebook from before, the careful pink bubble lettering from earlier obliterated when she closed the book before letting the ink dry.
  "Evening," I shout, and they both look up from their typing and give a wave.
  "We got you this," says Kiri, and when I look she has produced a length of rope from somewhere, either her school bag or her ass. "So you can get back in afterwards. Me and Terumi are heading off a little earlier tonight probably, so tie this to something once you get up there and leave the other end of it in here so you can climb down."
  Oh god no. A great forgotten memory of middle school gym class rises to breach the surface of my mind like a leviathan from the depths, or a turd that won't flush. The tears, the pointing and laughing, the rope burns on my inner thighs that were still sore months later and are probably still there now, faded battle scars.
  "I, uh, I can't really climb ropes." I tell them. Rather, I vowed never to touch a rope again so long as I lived.
  "You don't have to climb it," yells Terumi from the corner of the room where she's sat. Her voice has a tinge of that overly girly sing-song-y thing Megumi's has, but toned down somewhat. Megumi lite. "We'll help you up there, you just slide down it and back into the classroom. Easy!"
  "Oh god no, I... I can't. I don't have the upper body strength to." Kiri's having none of it, she doesn't even need to tell me as such, and I look to Terumi for someone else to fight my corner but she's pretending to be busy positioning a scandalous candid snap of Chubby Whistles appearing to frown while in the vicinity of a ska record. I don't actually know who our photographer is; the images always just make their way to us via a brown manila envelope slipped into Kiri's locker.
  I sigh and resign myself to my fate. I take the coiled rope and put my arm through it, so it sort of rests on my shoulder. Then I pick up the binoculars from the desk near the window and loop the strap over my head, leaving both hands free for maximum purchase on the gutter above.
  "Right then, let's get this over with," I say as Terumi toddles over to join Kiri, ready to help. We throw the window open as wide as it will go then I climb out onto the window sill. It's just as bastard cold as Monday, regrettably. Then just like in our practice runs and on Monday, Kiri and Terumi grab a leg each and shove me in the general direction of up, and I grab onto the gutter and pull myself up and over it until I'm there. On the roof. With my hands and knees covered in the greeny black sludge that gathers in the guttering. Isn't the caretaker supposed to, you know, take care, of the place, and clean out things like this every so often? Prrrick.
  I then realise that I'm still holding the rope. Both ends of it. The whole thing, looped round my shoulder like some sort of low budget attempt at an Indiana Jones costume. Genius.
  I then realise that they've gone and shut the fucking window.
  "If I make it 'til tomorrow morning alive I'm going to lynch you bitches with this fucking rope, so help me God!"

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT

  It's just a rerun of Monday night but I'm in a worse mood. I watch the activities of various clubs unfold through their windows, and fashion the rope I'm holding into an impromptu hand-warmer type thing. That is, I stick my hands in the middle of the tangle and hope it'll work like a string vest with really big strings. It doesn't. Every so often I pick up the binoculars and peer through them, just in case someone was to see me and consider me slacking on my duties. But nothing happens. There's not even anything here I could spin into juicy gossip with aid of a liberal dose of artistic license. The Bear Grylls boys look at a rucksack, Benjy Chandler caves and eats cup ramen with his bare hands, and the Book Clubbers sit and read. And get this, right - at the end of their club meet everyone fucks off at the same time. Even Yuki and Nats. In fact, Erina is the last one out; I watch her flick the light switch with a timid trepidation, as if it might be hooked up to detonate something.
  Though honestly a trick like that feels like Tomoko's style, so props to Erina for being cautious.
  At about this time I notice the light in the Newspaper Club room go out too, leaving the quad completely dark. All that's visible, besides a few stars overhead in the little gaps between the clearing clouds, is the glowing little aura of light under the one streetlamp I can see on that road next to college. The one me and Terumi would sometimes walk back along together before I received orders to do this shit. In the absence of anything else to do I watch that patch of road. The sparse trickle of taxis and little kei body pickup trucks, and again a large armoured car, military green and rolling by on tracks that do not look like they ought to be road legal. Rolling back the other way to on Monday. There is a history museum nearby, maybe they were doing something with it there? Oddly no sign of Terumi. She'd be obvious to spot - she doesn't look too distinctive aside from fluffy eternally-messy hair, but she has this winding, bounding hi-energy drunkard's walk that makes her easy to pick out a mile away. But I don't see her for a while. And then I do, like half an hour, an hour maybe, later. I lose track of time up here. It's too dark to read my phone screen 'cause it's one of those pokey liquid crystal ones, grey on green, and I can't afford to upgrade to a flip phone or anything. If I could see the screen I'd probably ring for someone to come and help me down. But I see her going past and raise her the middle finger on both hands and call her some colourful sailor type words, safe in the knowledge that she couldn't hear me and has likely forgotten I'm even up here.

  I wake up early the next morning (having gotten a bit more used to the art of sleeping on a pitched roof without dying) and spend the first hour or so watching the dawn creep across the sky and wondering just how I'm going to explain being up here again, holding a rope in what can probably only look like a belt-n'-braces, two methods at once suicide attempt. But luckily it's Professor Ishibashi again who walks past first, sees me, then turns back immediately to grab his ladder.
  "That Tomoko," he says, shaking his head as I step off the bottom rung of the ladder and try to wipe some of the gutter gunge off my hands onto my already completely ruined skirt. "She's in for a lot of trouble, that young lady." He looks me up and down again. "What's with the rope?"
  I look at the rope I'm still holding. And the binoculars, still round my neck. And realise that this 'prank' story is maybe on thinner ice than I first thought.
  "I guess she was planning to tie me to the roof so I couldn't escape. Not like I was going anywhere anyway." He just nods, collapses his extendable ladder, and tells me to get a hot chocolate from the machine and I'll feel a bit better. Then he walks off and I leave in the opposite direction. What, I have to buy the hot chocolate myself now? Fuck that.

  - - -

  I don't run into Terumi or Kiri on Thursday or on Friday morning, and I don't go out of my way to look for them because I'd probably lamp them if I did find them. But I'll have to catch up with them some time. Tonight's meeting. Not that a lot happened on Wednesday in Book Club as far as I could see. But maybe the absence of suspicious business is suspicious in itself. Maybe the fact that Yuki and Nats didn't stick around might set off alarm bells in Kiri's head.
  Maybe they're onto us.

  On Friday night I show up to the Newspaper Club room for the third and final meeting of the week. It's not really coincidence the Book Club meets on the same three days; it's sort of the default for clubs and societies here. The only ones that change things up are sports clubs that need use of the same facilities, and Tomoko Sugiyama's infamous Going the Fuck Home Club, which takes place every night, rain or shine. Today I'm prepared. I bought three hot chocolates from the machine then poured them carefully into a Thermos flask I brought from home. So in the likely event I'm up there for the long haul I can at least not freeze half to death. It's the start of October, what the actual inexcusable fuck, why is it even this cold at night? I knock twice on the door before opening it, as is customary for whatever reason, and am greeted with Terumi and Kiri already here and beavering away. I swear they must skip last lesson and get here early or something.
  "Hi," I say to them. "I guess I'm up on the roof again?" There's a hint of something I don't even try to conceal in my voice there. It's no secret I resent the fact we're not taking turns up there. Maybe Terumi would be good, taking down notes about everything with her shitty pink gel pen that doesn't fulfil the one job a pen is meant to do.
  "Hi. Your, eh, services up there won't be needed tonight, Shichan." says Terumi, swivelling around on her office chair to face me. Again with the name.
  "How come? Did we receive any scandalous tip-offs about the Book Club's extra-curricular activities?"
  "Uh, kind of. I mean not really. We've just got a bunch of other stuff to catch up on, you know. For the next Barthram Bugle."
  "I could help you with that. I know how to type."
  Ish. A adolescence misspent by the glow of BBS and imageboards long after midnight instilled in me an ability to type fast, if not completely accurately.
  "It's okay. I mean, it's not really Newspaper club business, it's just, like, something I'm helping Kiri with."
  You know, Terumi. For someone who refers to herself as a journalist you're remarkably bad at lying right to people's faces. You should work on that. But I know when I'm not wanted somewhere. (Generally there's two conditions: Number one, I'm alive, and number two I'm in whichever particular place. Then I know that I'm not wanted by everyone else in that place. Easy really.)
  "Then I'll leave you two to it." I dig into my bag, pull out the rope and the binoculars and set them down on the desk among stacks of loose paper and old editions of the Barthram Bugle. I somehow doubt I'll be using these over the weekend.
  And then I give them a wave and am out of there. Relieved that I don't need to spend another night up on the roof. But concerned. That those two are up to something. Plotting. Scheming, one could even say.

  And I get more than just an inkling of a feeling it's about me.

  - - -

  I decide to do a spot of skulking. A little investigating of my own. Maybe I was a little too quick to dismiss the possibility I'd need the binoculars between then and Monday. Fuck. I take the quieter and less used corridors through the main building up to the Geography department, on the third floor. And up there in the room next to Benjy's cave (I can hear him sobbing through the wall as he struggles to pick up rice balls with chopsticks) I stake out my spot. It's dark, it's empty, and it affords a nice view across the quad and into the Newspaper Club room. In fact it's practically directly across from them. I can barely see anything because it's so small, but I can at least see that there's lights on and people moving around. That'll be Kiri and Terumi. Can't see what they're doing, just Terumi typing while Kiri paces and talks, dictating her ideas to her, that's how they usually work. I was generally in charge of editing the boring things, like page layouts and formatting and things. But I wrote a few articles. I wrote up that big exposé about who was whizzing in the school pool and/or curry. Got some awards for that one, and by that I mean Terumi bought me like one packet of curry bread one lunch time and that was it.
  It quickly becomes apparent that waiting here trying to perv on other students is no more fun than doing so from the roof. It's warmer, I'll give you that, but you have to contend with geography room smell and the constant fear that someone will walk in, turn the light on and find me. And I have a feeling that my readied excuse - I'm hiding so Tomoko doesn't find me and put me on the roof again - might not be taken all that seriously. Especially if it's Tomoko who opens the door and finds me. And slinking round empty classrooms after hours to engage in acts of mischief seems like her scene. When it becomes obvious my fellow club members are just typing and talking (if they are planning anything sinister there's no way in hell I'd be able to tell from here) my attention shifts to the classroom itself. I've never been taught in this room, and from what little light there is I can see the various maps and such that adorn the walls. Light enough to know they're maps, not light enough to know where they're maps of. I then turn my attention to the bookshelf next to me - it's pushed right up against the wall and the windowsill so there's a little thin area where generations of students have chucked pencils, litter and unwanted homework and allowed it to gather. I spot a cool eraser in there, and I try for a while to fish it out with a long ruler scavenged from the teacher's desk. But it's too far in. So I stop.
  I'm half awake, slumped forwards with my face pressed against the cold glass when the light in the Newspaper Club room clicks off and startles me back to reality. They'll be leaving. And perhaps if I was to nonchalantly bump into Terumi as she leaves the school grounds (since we both walk back that way anyway) I could pretend I'd been prowling round the Book Club room, listening in and trying to get to the bottom of the mystery within. And have just coincidentally finished at the same time she has.
  I yawn and struggle to my feet and shoulder my backpack, its extraneous flask of hot chocolate sloshing and gurgling deep under the layers of late homework sheets and rejected Bugle article drafts. I'll have it with dinner probably, or some of it anyway. It's like 3 portions, I could have it cold for tomorrow's breakfast if it really came down to it. I'm just thinking about how well cereal and cold chocolate that's beginning to sediment out into layers would taste together when I realise I haven't been alone.
  "Hey there."
  A voice from the doorway, and when I turn around all I can see is a large bulky silhouette filling the doorway, his head almost grazing the top of the frame and his sides trying their darnedest to reach its sides.
  "Evening, Mr. Chandler." I begin to bow since he's a teacher, then stop because he's a teacher not really deserving of much respect. I run through the hiding from Tomoko excuse in my head and it sounds even lamer than it did before. And if it gets out that my being stuck on the roof twice overnight wasn't actually anything to do with her - like if date-stamped CCTV footage of her joyriding Professor Aioi's moped surfaces or something - then I'm going to look an even bigger twat than I already do.
  "Are you all right in here?" Benjy asks, his voice a delightfully easy to mock nasal twang with a hearty slice of regional US dialect colouring it. "Classes are over, you can go home."
  "I'm okay, I was just..." Just what? "...kinda waiting around I suppose."
  He looks me up and down. And it takes me a second to realise why it feels so weird. 'Cause it's not the usual mildly lascivious gaze he runs up and down the bodies of female students under guise of uniform checks. It's a look of, not quite pity, but perhaps recognition. It doesn't take much to imagine that in his own high school and college years this berk wasn't exactly belle of the ball. And the sight of another student living his old life, killing time silently and alone in a dark classroom after everyone else is either home or engrossed in clubs and social activities, probably fills him with an urge to pay it forward, to impart some kind of older-siblingly advice that he was never himself given. Alternatively it could just mean he's learnt to be a little more covert in his perving.
  "Well, uh, I need to, you know, lock up these classrooms, you see, so I'm going to have to ask you to leave if that's okay." He jangles a big old bunch of keys, adorned with a brightly coloured Pokémon keyring toy nobody over the age of twelve would generally be comfortable in ownership of. "But if there's anything you need to talk to, you know, talk about to, I'm always just in my classroom." He gestures towards the wrong wall, the one bordering the room that isn't his, but I get his point. And while literally any other time an invitation into Benjy's classroom alone would have the sirens and alarm bells blazing away, there was something in his voice there I felt; an honesty, a fragility, a yearning to do right by a kindred spirit.
  Maybe it's to redeem all that other filthy shit he supposedly did. I've heard the stories. Admittedly not from people I'd trust to tell a story without embellishing it a little bit, but I've heard them. My footsteps echo uncomfortably loudly as I make my way through the empty halls, down towards the entrance where I plan to intercept Terumi.

  - - -

  And Terumi never showed her fucking face. Which is kind of odd. Either she used the main entrance and walked the long way around, or she sprinted full force away from the club room while I was being waylaid by Benjy. And neither seem too plausible somehow. Because I waited, loitering on the street corner looking like the most unhireable prostitute on the planet for a good half an hour. And there was fat chance she was still anywhere in college because either Benjy or a caretaker would have turfed her out and I'd've seen her. So I guess they're going to great lengths to avoid letting me in on whatever this brilliant idea of theirs is.
  I didn't even see that cool army vehicle go past. I guess it's not a regular thing, must be someone from out of town. On loan from the military history museum for some really strange party/wedding/funeral/other. I wonder if they do that? Not like I'm picturing me and Daihachi (I think he's called that, I overheard some other boys talking about him today) tying the tin cans to the rear bumper of Ted Bundy's Beetle on the big day or anything. But just because it's a missed business opportunity for museums if they aren't doing that sort of service. Yeah, the land speed record car exhibit is currently closed because it's on loan. No, not to another museum, to Junichi for his eighteenth. ...Fuck.
  I don't know.

  MONDAY, October 10

  On Monday morning I enter the college grounds with a plan. Not exactly a bulletproof plan, but a plan nonetheless. The thing with me with plans is, they always go differently to how I initially wanted them to go. So my reasoning here is, if I start with a plan that's got a 0% success rate, then it'll warp and morph into a completely different plan during its course, and there's potentially a slightly above-zero chance that that new plan will succeed. The only way is up. I have in my bag a high-ball glass and a screwdriver - the tool, not the drink, though lord knows I might find myself in want of one of those too by the end of it all. At some point today I'll need to pay a visit to the Geography corridor. But first... the library.

  And it's in the library I hit the first of likely many snags in my plan - my ass has been in contact with a seat for a grand total of like five seconds, tops, when I find my little table surrounded by none other than Terumi and Kiri.
  "Morning you two," I say. Curt, dismissive almost, rearranging my mighty doorstopper of a copy of Applied Mathematics Concepts for Physics Students, Eighth Edition in such a way that makes it obvious I'm more interested in it than I am them.
  "Enomoto setting his usual homework?" asks Kiri.
  "Man, he always goes so hard on the first years," says Terumi. "I always hated maths."
  "Same here," I reply. It's one of my stronger subjects, but that doesn't mean I gotta like it. "How did your, whatever it is you were up to on Friday, how did that go?"
  A subtle satisfied smile from Kiri, "It went well. Today is business as usual with the club." And seeming flustered embarrassment from Terumi. Someone clearly fucked something big up, naming no names.
  "And when you say 'business as usual', for me that means..." I trail off as I realise exactly what it fucking means.
  "Yep, that's right!" Terumi beams. "Field work. You're back on the roof. And this time we've got a better way of getting you down afterwards. See, there's the big ladder in the technology department, and once Book Club finishes doing their stuff one of us can bring that around to the quad."
  Why, tell me, do I not have a great deal of faith in either of these arseholes to actually follow through on this suggestion and bring the ladder? Besides, I think they'll find that there's not a big ladder in the technology department. Not today. Or at least, not by the end of the day. Kiri and Terumi keep chatting on, something about setting the crossword for the next Bugle issue and how hard it is, oh poor you guys, so I thumb through chapter 8 and find the bit about angles of incidence and chromatic aberration and all that. And lament the fact I forgot to bring my Thermos flask. I get the feeling it might end up being another long 'un.

  At lunch time I execute Phase II of my plan. The part that seems most likely to fail tragically. I empty the contents of my school bag into my locker - well, nearly all of them, I leave the screwdriver there, you know, of course - and then head over to the girls' toilets. To partake in some shit that Tomoko would probably heartily approve of.

  And then before I know it, it's the end of the day. And Club time. And time to turn my attention back to the Book Club and their dishearteningly sporadic goings-on. I greet Terumi and Kiri halfheartedly as I enter the room.
  "We doing the rope thing again?" asks Terumi.
  "Again? We didn't fucking manage last time." I snap at her. "Anyway, you said there was a ladder you could use."
  "Oh yeah," she says. "There is."
  "Well, up you go." Kiri gestures to the window, already open in preparation. And again (but in a somewhat more well-rehearsed fashion) I loop the binoculars around my neck, step out onto the windowsill and give the signal to be hoisted up into the night. I always wonder what kind of chance there is that someone in the Book Club might have seen this manoeuvre in action over the past week and a bit. And adjusted their behaviour accordingly. They might not be able to see me, but they'll know I'm there. Somewhere. Lurking.
  I have my bag up here with me. Told those two it had my flask of hot chocolate in it. Which it doesn't. Because I'm about to pull off Phaze III of my plan, and if it all goes well I won't need to worry about staying up here too long. I instinctively pick up my binoculars and point them at the Book Club room, caught up in routine I guess. They're starting to file in now - nowhere near as punctual as our little team, tut tut - and dig their books and such out of their bags. Nothing remotely untoward so far.
  I had put some thought into where I could potentially go in order to get a better look at the Newspaper Club room next time I was told my services weren't immediately needed that evening. I'd considered just finding my way up onto the roof of the main building, but then I realised that it's sort of hard to look into the windows of the annex unless you're on practically the same level as them. They're quite set into the masonry, hence it's possible for someone as clumsy as me to climb around on them without falling to my death. You get a few degrees of wiggle room vertically, but that's it. So The floor with Benjy's room and that other classroom would do in a pinch (as they did that time), but those rooms are all in use, and if I was hanging round there again Benjy would adopt me for the evening and feed me cup noodle and try to prise conversation out of me. So that idea was scrapped.
  I watch Benjy again for a little bit. He's graduated from cup noodle and is now trying to eat this little lunchbox he's packed with sticky rice and curry sauce. And he's having a right job of it, if I must say so myself. I've seen two-year-olds put away meals with less mess than that. Dumb bastard. And then I pan my gaze along, to admire my handiwork from before.

  - - -

  In the classroom right next to Benjy's room, the one I had that rather unexpected heart to heart in, there is a big bookshelf pushed up to the wall with all the windows in it. Behind that bookshelf, pinned between shelf and windowpane and held up by the little inside windowsill, is a mirror, freshly unscrewed and swiped from the girls' toilets that very lunchtime. A few scraps of ancient homework wedge it in, sticking it fast on such an angle that it tilts light rays downwards at a rate of about 1 centimetre vertically for every 20 horizontally. And angled vertically too, by an amount that was more pure guesswork than by any kind of design. (I used the big ruler on the teacher's desk for the precise work.) But if the quad is about 30m wide, that gives a tilt, shift, whatever of 3 meters over the 60 the light has to travel. So when I point the bins at it what I see reflected back to me, in gorgeous high-res detail, is the warm glow of the interior of the Newspaper Club room. Success! My biggest fears were that a.) some girl would waltz in needing a piss when I was half way through removing the mirror from the wall, or that b.) someone would use the classroom in the afternoon and fuck with my mirror placement. Because those calibrations were a bitch. The final check, of course, was just before lunchtime ended, nipping across to the empty Newspaper Club room, picking up the binoculars and peering across the quad. And lo and behold, reflected in my little mirror was the exact spot where I knew I'd be sitting spying right now. I could tell by the shape of the moss patches, which is kind of sad in a way. But useful.
  Fucking FIENDISH, Shiori! I almost can't see through the binoculars I'm smiling at my own ingenuity so hard, my cheeks digging into the bottom bit of the eyepieces. So far though, the club itself seems rather boring. Terumi is typing something, I can't read what because the text is too small from an effective distance of 60m, but I just make out see the name Benjy in the headline so I know it's gonna be good. Kiri is pacing, glancing at the door occasionally, or at the window. For a second a chill goes down my spine as I consider the possibility they'll pull shut some blinds or something, but then I realise I don't think there is any blinds or anything in there. Hence when it's midday in the height of summer and we're working overtime on lunch break the day before we need to hand the finalised issue in we all swear like sailors as the sun casts glare on the PC screens. Yeah, I think I'm safe there. And clearly Kiri thinks she's safe too. She checks the window's shut, glances around in case I'm dangling right above her trying to get down or something, then beckons to Terumi who gets up off her spinny office chair. I smile as yet another unforeseen benefit of my setup makes itself clear. Even if they were to look up at the geography room next to Benjy's, the mirror should be reflecting me back at them - me, sat in the darkest most undetectable part of the roof. They'd see pitch black and not even know it was a mirror. And they'd probably need the binoculars to do that too, and they're up here in my clammy shaking mitts, so do your worst, Kiri.
  I'm not even paying the remotest bit of attention to the Book Club or to Benjy's eating habits now. It's all Newspaper Club room now. They're stood in the middle of the room, talking about something. I kind of wish I could hear them right now. Kiri's not got her usual demeanour about her, usually she's lecturing poor Terumi like a teacher giving a stern word to a misbehaved student, or a supervillain addressing his favourite minion. But now there's something missing from her mannerisms, replaced by a hint of trepidation in her face, and a hesitance to her lip movements. And then Terumi steps closer to her and says something back. And then they kiss.
  After a few seconds with the bins away from my face to regain some semblance of composition, I get right back to looking again. And they're still at it - a proper kiss, not just a little peck on the cheek or anything. I'm looking at Kiri's cheek right now in fact, and there's definitely more than one tongue in there. Wriggling around. I watch intently for a while - not going to lie, kinda mesmerised at this point - as they break apart momentarily before starting again with renewed vigour each time. Kiri has her arms awkwardly around Terumi. Terumi has a hand on the back of Kiri's head, sort of pulling her into the kiss like a kraken grabbing a ship and messing up her ever prim tidy tomboy hair in the process. Kiri's hair, not the ship's, obviously. And I can't see her other hand, but... oh. there it is. A gentle but firm hold on Kiri's ass. They break apart for a little longer this time and Terumi stands back, the two of them with matching flushed cheeks and shit-eating grins. Kiri removes her glasses and slides them along the table to the far end where they stop about half a centimetre from the edge - if I had my stolen ruler with me I'd be able to be a little more accurate but no can do, I'm afraid. And Terumi loosens and discards her little necktie thing, prompting Kiri to do likewise. And I feel like I shouldn't be watching, now, there's no benefit from me seeing any more than I've seen; there, my curiosity has been sated, enough already, that kind of thing. But I can't look away. I'm shaking slightly as I breathe, a combination of the cold, the adrenaline rush (oh, do girls' bodies even 'do' adrenaline? Or is it a boy thing? I slept through most of biology so answers on a postcard) and an uncontrollable giggling at how unreal it all seems. By the time I manage to get my view refocused on the two of them Terumi's top is off and tossed unceremoniously into the corner by the computers. And Kiri is struggling with her buttons. Which Terumi gladly helps with, undoing the last three in startlingly quick succession, like a starving man tearing into, I don't know, the last coconut on the island but this coconut happens to be held shut with buttons? Kiri timidly reaches out to cup Terumi's tits, and that's a look of jealousy if I've ever seen one! Hah. Terumi lets her skirt fall to the floor while Kiri is clearly occupied, revealing a pair of light blue underwear with that little lacy stuff 'round the waistband. They look reassuringly like something I would wear which is good, I suppose. It's not the sort of thing that ever comes up in conversations between me and other girls (because conversations between me and other girls are vanishingly rare... le sigh) so I always harboured a fear that I buy the 'wrong' types of knickers and that if I ever got undressed in front of a boy he'd laugh me out of the house and presumably his life for wearing granny knickers or something. I can't see what Kiri's got on, she's kept her skirt on for now. Wait, no, now it's off but Terumi's so on top of her that I can't see much, other than they're black, or maybe really really dark blue. And they're deep kissing again but there's hands going everywhere, places I didn't know hands had any business going. Grabbing or caressing or struggling desperately with bra fastenings. Working up a bit of a sweat. And to think they make me eat lunch on that table! Anyway holy shit did I ever get more than I bargained for tonight.
  I spend a little longer watching them, unable to tear my eyes away from the spectacle I suppose, and by the time they're at the stage of putting back on the clothes they flung to all four corners of the room earlier my arse hurts from sitting on the roof tiles so I let the binoculars hang around my neck and begin what I suppose is Phase IV of the plan. I edge myself along the roof, this time in the other direction, away from the window of the Newspaper Club room. Right along in fact to where it reaches a corner, then I keep going over the ridge to where I left Professor Ishibashi's ladder earlier on. It's an odd little nook off the staff car park where I doubted anyone would look, and if they did look they'd see a ladder that was presumably in use by a caretaker or something so they wouldn't whisk it away and strand him up there. I shakily make my way down to the ground and try to remember just what Ishibashi did to get the ladder to collapse back down to a carriable size. But I can't. Meh, I'll leave it here and if anyone asks me about it I'll say I saw Tomoko with that ladder one time on Monday. That should take the pressure off me. And now it's time to take care of one last thing.
  I half jog through the empty corridors into the main belly of the building. Last time I looked, the Book Club dorks were just starting to pack their books away and wander about the room talking, a tell-tale sign that most of them would vacate in a matter of minutes. Leaving, I hope to myself as I ascend the stairwell, Yuki and Natsumi. As I step out into the corridor I can just see Erina turning the far corner and starting down the stairs at the other end. I hang on for a minute or so just in case there's anyone else. And then I pull the high-ball out of my bag and tiptoe towards the closed classroom door. Breath held. Glass silently raised (not like a toast, silly, like literally lifted up) and pressed to the door at ear height. I don't know if this actually works, I've seen it done in cartoons and things but then again I've seen people being fooled by tunnel entrances painted onto rock faces in cartoons so they're probably not the best thing to extrapolate my physics knowledge from. Anyway, I can hear them talking.
  "So the booking's looking good. For the 15th." Yuki's voice. "And it sounds like we're all free then, for one reason or another. Your plan of collaring Suzue for an extra study session at hers was an inspired move."
  "So..." Nats now. I think. Without visual cues their voices are kind of similar. "When do we tell them? And what if someone else suggests throwing Erina a party of their own in the mean time?"
  "Good point."
  "Then would we like have to make it not a secret any more, or just take whoever it is aside and be like, 'hey, wise guy'?"
  Ahh. Now isn't that just the most boring shit it could have possibly been.
  "Oh and Yuki, I might have managed to have locate us a few strippers too. Boy ones and girl ones!"
  A sigh, then a "Natsumi, no..."
  Okay, now hold the phones. First off: man, I'd kill a nun with an ice skate just to see what Natsumi's trademark wild hand gestures did to differentiate the 'boy' and 'girl' strippers.
  And secondly, maybe this is something the Newspaper Club might want to hear about after all...

  - END -