Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ My College Romantic Comedy Was Wrong, As I Expected ❯ My College SNAFU: 8 ( Chapter 8 )

Part of me thinks I should ignore my last experience, go off to an agriculture school in a rural part of Tokyo and learn about fermentation from a WW2 war criminal who successfully bombed the USA and Canada with anthrax using hydrogen balloons released into the jet stream with self-destruct timers. They actually got there too, but the government hushed it up until the 1990’s when it was declassified. So that guy was a college professor who made the finest Sake in Japan under a secret label and traded it with members of the Diet to keep his funding alive for more common purposes like research trips to Sweden to buy surstromming cans and making yoghurt taste better and deal with students with “issues”.

I could go there. Yes, I could. Would it be interesting? Undoubtedly. Would it explain why I time travelled? No. The ROB is probably local, watching me like a rat in a maze. This is really going to make me paranoid.

I eventually found a book on time travel and read it. It was an international novel from a very popular English author named Pratchett, and the book was Night Watch. It was a parody of A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, only with time travel spies, a serial killer, and a detective who resembles Dirty Harry Callahan in plate armor and very poor quality boots. I read it, and considered that this author might know what he was talking about. And that raised the issue.

What if I’m not the only one who time travelled?

The Higgs Boson was successfully created at CERN on July 4th, 2012, officially. That was a year from now. At the time there were protests to prevent its creation because some worried it would destroy the universe. This sounds crazy, but it’s worth noting that the first atomic bomb test suggested there was a chance that splitting the atom might be contagious to surrounding matter and convert the entire Earth and then the universe back into Energy. It wasn’t a trivial risk, either. They blew up the bomb anyway, but some of the scientists were worried. The Higgs Boson had similar concerns. Before I travelled back in time I’d read some articles about it, and Haruno knew quite a bit about the topic and the names of several of the scientists. Haruno was always full of surprises, beyond her sex appeal and flexibility. Damn it. I’m getting off track.

Even in my last life, if I should call it that, I sometimes had the feeling that I was a secondary character in someone else’s story, and it bothered me. That feeling used to creep up on me and I never understood why. It’s paranoid. Or maybe it isn’t. The very nature of consciousness is a single point of view. Anything else is crazy. You can’t know what others are thinking. You can pretend and call it empathy and be admired for your behavior, but it doesn’t change the fact that life is from one point of view. Yours. Full stop. And time travel is impossible. Damn it.

So I should go back to Okami Arts, and get their scholarship by doing really well on the exam and the way to do that is keep reading all these recommended sources, watching the recommended movies with an eye to what I’d been learning in the introduction books, and become a better informed student so I would get a lot more from being there this time around. Without distractions in black lace. Sigh.

I should take more cues from Saki. She was better at being a loner than I was. She was content. She never threw herself under the bus by making Sensei notice her enough to punish her into the service club. And wasn’t THAT a disaster for me, in the end?

The final months of my second year were pretty quiet. I did a few tasks for the service club, but let Yukino take the lead on everything, just participating instead of using reason and logic to solve problems. Yui seemed sad about this, and didn’t push. I think she was a lot more perceptive when she saw I’d given up. I am grateful to her about that. But not grateful enough to date her and ruin our lives. There are no happy endings.

I studied a lot. I read the books. Yukino complained I wasn’t helping her enough. I shrugged. Shizuka counselled me and looked disappointed and angry and helpless, as teachers do. I had seen her like this before, several times.

The holidays produced some events, which I helped deal with in a perfunctory way after nobody stopped the moron who kept waving his hands around instead of doing things. It was a disaster, what Kaihin created, and they tried to spread the blame but I released a video I’d recorded of one of the meetings on WeTube, showing how we tried to get them on track, how we tried to warn them, how we couldn’t stop their useless inertia and the resulting public disaster fell onto them when that was released the day before. Many things went wrong. I could have prevented them, but why bother? I’ve seen this all before. Making it go well was a thankless job.

I wasn’t to blame, and thanks to my video, neither was Yukino or Iroha, the current student council president. I was lucky to just agree to the Service Club helping out. If I’d objected I would have had to deal with her by myself, and that wasn’t drama I wanted. Iroha was like a mini-Haruno, only not sexy. And she was mean. She would do well on WeTube as an “influencer” up until people actually met her and her reputation plummeted, but that wasn’t my problem either.

I found myself listening to a WeTube download of Portishead, which was the voice behind around half the tracks on Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. My parents had listened to that, apparently. She worked best without backing vocals because she was a quintessential broken hearted loner, only with a band. I bought a used CD of it and slipped it to Shizuka sensei without explanation. If anything she looked even more frustrated and upset than usual after that. Even my attempts to apologize failed. Reverse Midas Touch superpower activate! Now, if I could just turn it off…

End of year saw the graduations of the prior year students we’d barely seen on campus, off to lives after high school. Many to college and fast tracks to corporate ladders and monotonous lives. I’m not jealous. My parents suffer through that. And I grew up barely seeing them. I raised my sister because Mom and Dad had to work. I wanted to be a house husband for more than just avoiding mind breaking work. I wanted to see my kids. But how do you explain that to a woman when she’s been brainwashed into wanting a career by modern feminism and the huge lie that has turned out to be? You don’t. You watch your nation turn old, and listen to the complaints of the people who literally own everything you can see about how kids these days don’t get married anymore, and you look at your take-home pay and the cost of rent and you want to stab them all to death. I think Japan is full of rage, but its dying anyway. We are dying.

The sakura bloomed. I entered third year. I withdrew from Service Club and spent my afternoons cramming decades of international literature and the arts into my brain so I could get that scholarship.

The day of the quake arrived. The ground shook and my efforts to warn people about missing dogs and barking with reference to the Kobe Quake seeing the same warning signs. I posted these days before using bulletin boards and social media accounts attached to the towns under greatest threat, and warnings about shutdown systems at the Fukushima reactors… and it did nothing. Republishing warnings about the height of shore walls and flood gates a week before it was due made no difference. Thousands died, and cities were torn apart by the tsunami. I was not completely helpless.

The school bell rang at 2:45. I sprinted out of class and ran downstairs to Komachi’s classroom, staggering in the door and one minute after the bell, the first pulse rocked Tokyo and Chiba. Komachi grabbed me and held on. I held her while the world surged, bounced, rolled and shook. Komachi does not like earthquakes. Nobody sane does. Taishi and I kept her safe as windows broke and lights shook. We stumbled out of the school. It had shaken for a minute and a half, which feels like forever when the ground and all the buildings are moving around you. Japan knew about earthquakes. We built for it. Usually we built well enough. Eventually it stopped and we staggered outside with all the other students while alarms sounded. I turned on an emergency radio while we waited for the power to be restored and listened to the reports of the tsunami. Komachi cried. So did I. I couldn’t prevent this. Time travel was not helpful against natural disasters.

The national news had a lot of video of the tsunami surging inland up rivers closer to the epicenter off the East coast, in the subduction zone between Japan and the Japan trench. It was a 9.1, very similar to the one that hit Malaysia and Thailand. There were warnings broadcast on emergency radio and TV, and texts to all the cellphones about tsunami but most people didn’t get them in time to matter.

The school was closed a few days while glass was replaced and the building inspected. It was cleared and we returned, though Komachi was very anxious as we suffered aftershocks. I indulged her and Taishi kept her safe and distracted when I wasn’t there. I had to keep up my studies and continued as best I could. I have never studied as hard as I did this time. There were so many classic movies to work through. So much software to learn and I had to upgrade my PC, which required getting a job to pay for it. The loss of study time wasn’t completely ruined since cleaning jobs can be done with headphones so I was getting educated on music while I was tidying up a warehouse with a push broom. I think on reflection, that if everybody else going to Okami Arts put this much effort into it, they might have a better employment statistic.

It was eventually time for the exams. I rested, I went to the testing center in Tokyo and took them. It was exhausting. But at least I wasn’t taking weeks of exams like other students, trying for various schools, each with their own test. The fees were no joke, either.

I returned home reasonably sure I passed, and hoping I’d done well enough for the scholarship. I also applied for some other scholarships, which required essays, which thanks to a career as a writer I aced. So I had some educational money. Days later the exams reported and I passed in the top 3%. I filled out the scholarship paperwork and applied for free tuition and reduced housing. I once again was contacted at the end of summer by the same agent as before, and selected the Share House Kitayama option, because everything seemed to be pointing at that for the ROB.

The year ended with minimal contact with my former friends, all of us quietly drifting apart and preparing for new lives in college.