Once he was out of the bath, Sora began rewriting the script from scratch, swearing to himself that this was the last time.
Before, he had been writing on the assumption that Kaede would take the main role, the rest of the cast propping her up, and that he needed to keep the sets as simple and bare as possible. But now he abandoned all of that, defiantly writing whatever came to his mind.
It’s not like I have the ability to craft a good story like my parents. Let’s just forget about writing well at all, create the biggest piece of crap I can, and make Kaede conclude that she was barking up the wrong tree.
The script was an ensemble piece starring the students of a fantasy-realm magic school. It mainly focused on five wizards of varying ages and genders, along with a few other important characters. Being set in a magic school, it called for the creation of a wide set of props, small and large. He was sure Kaede would say, “there’s no way we can produce this,” turn it down, and then he’d be free of this work.
But:
“Yeah, this is good! I like it.”
When he had Kaede read the finished script three days later, she gave him a broad smile back.
“I’m gonna show this to the other club members right now.”
“Huh? You mean you’ll accept it?”
“Yeah.” Kaede nodded at the flummoxed Sora like nothing was amiss.
“No, um, but are you sure this is okay? Because I think it’ll be pretty tough to pull off.”
“I’ll have to discuss it with everyone first. If something’s just impossible to pull off, we might have to ask you for some adjustments, but I’d like to get this on the stage as-is as much as possible.”
“But it’s not even worth going through all that trouble for—”
“Sure it is,” Kaede said, interrupting him. “With the scripts you wrote before, you always seemed to be forcing yourself, kind of, or maybe trying to consider us in the drama club too much. But the characters here all feel really alive, the story makes some bold moves, and I’d like to get this produced with the rest of the drama club.”
“…!”
Sora had to fight off the rush of emotion inside of him. “Umm,” he said, trying to stay cool about it, “not to sound mean, but based on your play last year, I’m not sure the drama club’s up to the challenge.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so, either,” Kaede freely admitted with a nod. “But that’s why I think this is worth stretching out and striving for.”
“But why are you so insistent about having an original script for your play?” Sora asked. “I’m sure if you went online, you could find lots of plays better than mine, in terms of…like, being better written, or having characters that match the cast better, or being easier to produce in terms of sets and stuff.”
“Because I want to work with our drama club to try plays that nobody’s ever seen before. And this’ll be our last chance, too.”
“Huh? Last chance how…?”
“Anyway,” Kaede quickly responded, “we’ll go with this script. Thank you very much for writing such a wonderful story for us. I’ll have the rest of the club read it right away, so can you come to our clubroom with me, Sora?”
She pulled him away, accepting no further objections. The feeling of her hand made his mind soar, and his face reddened as he meekly followed her to the drama club. It would be a little while longer before he found what she meant by “our last chance.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Cast rehearsals were generally held on the stage in one side of the school’s gymnasium. Sets and costumes were stored in a multipurpose space close to the clubroom, and the clubroom itself was mostly a storage shed.
In the past few days since the script was completed, Sora had been working with the cast to revise the flows of certain scenes, along with bits of dialogue that were easy to stumble over. Between that and helping out with set creation, he had been busily running between the gym and the club space quite a bit lately.
“We’ve both become part of the drama club, huh?” griped Yuu, busy helping Sora stitch some costumes together. He hadn’t asked her for help, but considering Yuu’s sewing skills, her assistance was appreciated.
“A lot of the production staff have a lot of work to do thanks to my script,” Sora flatly stated. “It wouldn’t be right if I didn’t help at all.”
Yuu frowned. “You act like you’re doing it just because you’re obliged to, but you look like you’re having a lot of fun.”
“Not really. This was just how it turned out, is all.”
Then the smartwatch on Sora’s wrist vibrated. Checking it, he saw a message from Kaede asking him to come to the gym for a full run-through of the script.
“They’re asking for me over at the gym right now, so can I let you handle this outfit?”
“…Sure.”
“Thanks.”
Ignoring the dissatisfied look on Yuu’s face, Sora stood up and jogged off to the gym. “…He’s just like a puppy,” Yuu bitterly said, feeling a bit lonely as she watched him run off.
✦ ✦ ✦
…Kaede Mitahora really is a talented actor.
Ten minutes into the full rehearsal, Sora was thinking to himself as he watched the proceedings from a chair in front of the stage.
Kaede was playing one of the main characters, a young magic school student with androgynous looks. She was wearing sweats instead of an actual costume, but her long bangs were tied back as she put in a bold, delicate performance with her emotion-laden voice. She shone like she was someone completely different now.
That being said, having a standout star in the cast wasn’t necessarily a plus. The rest of the actors had improved since last year’s Run, Melos! (SF Edition), but they were still inferior to Kaede. This was an ensemble cast, so most of the characters appeared an equal amount of the time. This created noticeable gaps between scenes with and without Kaede, which made the play seem lower quality as a whole than it actually was.
Watching the run-through to the end, Sora gave his honest feelings to the cast. They accepted it, but they didn’t look too happy about it.
“Well, we’re trying our best. If you’re comparing us to Kaede, there’s not much we can do about that.”
“Besides, she was always our leading cast member, but now we’re doing this ensemble piece out of nowhere… We have first-year students here, too.”
“Don’t you think we’d be better off switching to something with a single protagonist?”
Kaede flatly denied that request.
“Then maybe Kaede can turn it down a little bit…? Then it wouldn’t be so jarring.”
“Yeah…” “Maybe we’ll have to.” “That’d be for the better.”
“No, wait, wait!” Sora scrambled to butt in. “If the higher-level people have to cut it down for the lower-level ones, that’s just weird, you know? Haven’t you ever thought about trying to catch up to Kaede’s level?”
Sora’s world was filled with people far more amazing than him, such as his father Itsuki and Yoshihiro Kiso—but even with all that talent, they never gave up struggling to achieve more. To him, the cast’s response to this problem was unthinkable. He hated the idea of the “protagonist” being something to look up to, but that “protagonist” character had already become an integral part of his core.
“If we could do that, we would have a long time ago.”
“You don’t act, Hashima, so you don’t get it.”
And Sora had no response to that. He wasn’t part of the drama club.
He turned toward Kaede. Her bangs were back down over her eyes again as she watched Sora and her fellow club members, looking a bit distressed. She was clearly a superior actor, but she didn’t seem quite so good at being a leader and uniting a team.
“…By the way, do you guys have a teacher advisor or anything?”
“We do,” someone replied, “but he’s not worth much to us.”
As he put it, the current advisor took over after the previous one left. He was assigned the role solely because he wasn’t advising any other clubs at the time; he knew nothing about drama or staging plays, he wasn’t particularly interested in learning about them, and overall he just let the club do their own thing.
“Oh…”
So there was no leader. That, it seemed to Sora, was the most fatal flaw to this club. There wasn’t that much time before the competition—certainly not enough for that advisor or Sora to learn all about stage production.
It’d be nice if we had some kind of super assistant who could improve everyone in a short time, but no way there’s anyone that handy around…
“…Oh? Maybe there is, actually…”
“Sora?”
Kaede peered into his eyes as he fell silent, face thoughtful.
“Whoa!” He took a step back, blushing. “…Do you mind if I try talking to someone I know to see if he’d be interested in coaching us?”
The drama club gave each other curious looks.