“Well, whatever. Any costumes that are weird or too pervy will be rejected, but treat it like a costume parade and we should be okay. Okay, let’s go with that,” Kaname announced decisively. “Cosplay café! I’m gonna bang out a proposal about that and send it to the culture festival executive committee. Is that acceptable? Any objections?!”
“No objections!” the entirety of class 2-4 threw in, clearly finding the long debate too tiresome to argue about it any longer.
Two weeks later, in the student council room...
“Why did you reject Class 4’s proposal?!” Kaname asked angrily, slapping the sheaf of documents onto the table. She glared breathlessly at the culture festival executive committee chairman, who remained nonplussed in the faith of her rage.
“I don’t know where to start,” said the chairman, Tomita, while scratching his chin. He was a large second-year student wearing small, round spectacles. “I mean, a cosplay café? There’re so many issues with a proposal like that. Remember that we’re staging mock businesses in a school, after all. We can’t permit exhibits with a sexual connotation.”
“It’s just a normal café with the wait staff in costumes,” Kaname objected. “How is that sexual?!”
“I don’t think it is, obviously, but the teachers and parents might disagree,” Tomita told her. “If someone gets the wrong idea and complains, heads will surely roll. You get it?”
“B-But—”
“Your proposal was rejected, and that’s the last word. Sorry and all, but this isn’t my decision alone. The executive committee made the decision together, and it can’t be overturned. Isn’t that right, Hayashimizu-senpai?” asked Tomita, turning to Hayashimizu Atsunobu for confirmation.
Student Council President Hayashimizu was working at his desk. Upon being addressed, he continued paging through his papers silently for a few moments, then at last said, quietly, “If it’s been decided by the executive committee, then Tomita-kun is correct.”
“Senpai?!” Kaname screamed.
Tomita snorted smugly.
“Tomita-kun. Would you mind leaving the room for a moment? Chidori-kun, come here,” Hayashimizu said, his eyes still on his documents.
Tomita shrugged and took his leave.
Kaname strode up to Hayashimizu, anger on full display. “Senpai, what’s going on here? You can’t really be siding with him!”
“He’s right, Chidori-kun. I must respect the judgment of the culture festival executive committee as much as possible.”
“But—”
“If I were to say, ‘Chidori-kun is right, take it back and reconsider,’ what would the committee’s members think? They’d think the student council president was undermining their authority,” Hayashimizu pointed out. “They’d be unhappy. It would deplete morale. It would sow distrust in the two of us, and have a negative impact on the culture festival as a whole.”
“And so, we just have to let them be completely unreasonable?”
Hayashimizu looked up at Kaname with sympathetic eyes. “Were the complaints from anyone but you, I could have taken Tomita to task for it. But as you are the student council vice president, I’m afraid my hands are tied.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” muttered Kaname.
“You’re right,” he agreed, “it’s not fair. Authority is more constraining than most people assume.”
“Okay, but...” Kaname’s irritation died down, and she lost the will to argue any further. Hayashimizu did have a point, after all. She wasn’t exactly happy about conceding the issue, but... he seemed to have his own principles of noblesse oblige. “What am I supposed to tell my class?” she asked next.
“You can make me the villain if you wish,” Hayashimizu offered. “I’m fully accustomed to such defamation. And more importantly, you should choose a new idea.”
“A new idea, huh?” said Kaname, folding her arms.
After using an overtime homeroom period for discussion, Class 2-4 decided to go forward with a normal café. Sousuke persisted in insisting on a mortar safety course, but Kaname denied him again with a sumo ketaguri move.
Tomita, the executive committee president, looked unhappy about it, but took her proposal readily enough. The next day, they received word that their proposal had been accepted. Now they could rest easy... Or so they thought, until a few days later, when they received the printout containing all the class proposals. When the students of Class 4 saw it, they hit the roof.
Class 2-4 would get to do their café, but...
Class 2-7: Costume Café
That’s what the print-out said. Class 2-7 happened to be the class to which the executive committee chairman, Tomita, belonged.
“What the hell?!”
“How is cosplay different from costume?!”
“We gotta fight this! We deserve an apology and compensation, so that this tragedy never repeats itself...”
“I feel like it’s a common euphemism lately, but I’m still mad!”
They really were furious. After all, the executive committee had rejected their own proposal, which was exactly the same other than the title. And the prioritized class just happened to be the one to which the committee chairman belonged...
“Unforgivable!”
“They’ll pay for this!”
“It’s tyranny!”
The whole group shouted in rage.
Obviously, as class representative, it fell to Kaname to calm the chaos. Slap!!! She hit the blackboard with her palm so loudly that it echoed throughout the classroom. The class immediately fell silent.
“Kana-chan?”
“Heh heh heh... That Tomita’s got some nerve,” she snarled, as the rest of the group stared at her, dumbstruck. A shining aura rose off of her figure, and the backlighting it provided cast her whole face pitch black except for her shining eyes and the beaming crescent of her mouth.
Yes... Kaname was the angriest of them all.
“Fighting this won’t get us anywhere,” she announced. “They’ll just give us the runaround, after all.”
“But Chidori...”
“The lesson we teach them will be completely above board, then!” she announced brightly. “We won’t draw customers in with cheap tricks. We’ll just run a better café!”
“Hmm...” The classmates exchanged glances with each other.
Standing before them, Kaname took on the posture of an old dictator from some country or other and proclaimed, “Aromatic coffee! Delicious food! Fabulous decorations! Above-and-beyond service! We will mobilize all of these things to bring in every customer we can! Manipulating the masses is easy! The smallest bit of calculation, when added to a more or less honest presentation, can be shockingly persuasive! To recover from the political defeat of having our cosplay café proposal refused, we must fight back with the spirit of chivalry! It is only in this way that we can teach the uncultured swine of Class 7 a lesson! We must use this feeling of failure to fuel us, and make them accept the obvious superiority of Class 4!”
“That was all grandiose and urgent, but it’s pretty basic strategy...” Onodera Kotaro muttered.
“Who cares if it’s basic?” Kaname demanded. “It’s the best way to make sure they can’t complain when they lose. Well?!”
“Got it.”
“I’m in.”
“No objections!”
Her classmates chimed in one after another.
“Okay! Leave the planning to me! I’ll focus on nothing but this, and see this café through!” Kaname proclaimed proudly.
Tokiwa Kyoko then spoke up hesitantly, “But Kana-chan. Are you sure you want to promise that so easily? You are vice president, and you’ll probably be busy with lots of other stuff, right?”
“Hah! No worries there. It’s July now. The culture festival is in September, so we’ve got plenty of time. Just leave yourselves in my hands!” Kaname cackled, thumping her chest.
When the project list was released, Tomita, head of the executive committee, had a feeling that Class 2-4 would come to confront him, and felt a feeling of anticlimax when they didn’t. “Eh? Maybe they weren’t that enthusiastic about it,” he said, puzzled, as the Class 7 proposal meeting went on around him.
“Either way, there’s no need to show mercy,” one of the Class 7 students told him.
“Yeah, yeah. We need to have our revenge for last year. I can’t believe those Class 4 jerks submitted the same idea as us, just to spite us...” Tomita growled.
“Going to great lengths to make sure you were head of the executive committee was a good call,” his classmates agreed.
Jindai High School didn’t rearrange the compositions of its classes every year; their students stayed the same throughout all three years. Last year at the culture festival, Tomita’s Class 1-7 had done a haunted house. But Kaname’s Class 1-4 submitted a proposal for the same. And this was more than just a haunted house—they’d gone with the bizarre concept of “RPG-like matchmaking maze karaoke haunted house with trading curry.”
“Their proposal was baffling, but in the end, the students swarmed to Class 4...”
“What even is ‘trading curry’?”
“One way or another, Class 7 lost big time as a result. That’s why we decided we’d get them back this year, even if we had to resort to dirty tactics to do it!”
“You get it, Tomita-kun?! You’d better keep putting pressure on their proposal! Got it?”
As his classmates urged him on, Tomita shrugged agreeably.
And so summer vacation arrived.
Classes taking the culture festival seriously needed to start work before August was over, but just as the students of Class 7 had anticipated, Kaname’s class was struggling to get things started.