When Akiyoshi came down the stairs and noticed me walking down the hall, she signaled to me with her eyes. As she reached the floor I was on, she said a farewell to the older woman she was walking with. She turned her back on the woman, who was heading farther down to a different floor, planted herself before me, and said, “Yo! Heya, Kaede. Surprised to see you around here.”
“Hey. I had to give a report in one of the classrooms above here.”
“Oh, I gotcha. Headed to another class now?”
“Nah, I’m done for the day. You?”
“Done with classes now, but I’ve got to meet up with someone. Oh, hey, you wanna go grab something to eat?”
“Well, this is sudden.”
It was rare, I thought, to see Akiyoshi actually having fun with someone, to hear about her meeting up with someone. I didn’t get why she’d be asking me out to eat if she had someone to meet up with, though.
“So actually, I’m going to be meeting with someone who’s interested in joining Moai. You saw that person I was with earlier? She’s one of my professors, but when I was talking to her about Moai earlier, another girl in my class seemed to be pretty interested. Oh, but no worries if you’re busy, or you just don’t feel like it.”
I, in fact, was not busy, and while meeting new people was not my favorite thing in the world, I did not outright hate it. I was just a little concerned.
“Is this some kind of initiation test? For our secret society.”
“It’s nothing that outrageous. We’re not looking for ‘special individuals.’ We aren’t Freemasons or something.” She chuckled at her own joke. Even if it wasn’t something that outrageous, this still seemed like it was probably some sort of interview.
What she said next confirmed my suspicions.
“But yeah, if she happens to say she wants to join, it’d suck if she was someone you don’t like. There aren’t many girls that I dislike, personally. My shyness sensors are kind of broken.”
“Broken? I don’t think you had any installed to begin with.”
“What does that mean?!” she laughed, slapping my shoulder and adding, “I guess that is kind of a specialized skill.”
Naturally, at that time, neither of us had any idea what the future had in store for us. Neither those who would vanish, those who would become corrupt, nor those who would take up the fight knew what would lie ahead.
Back then, Moai was still about nothing more than our ideals.
That day, at Akiyoshi’s invitation, I headed to a nearby diner and met with this potential recruit. My initial impression, after talking to her for a short while, was that she was a different type. Given that she had interest in joining Moai, I had assumed I was about to have another person just as vexing as Akiyoshi on my hands, but this girl turned out to be a completely different type of person.
Her name was Tazunoki Mia. Half-Italian on her mother’s side apparently, she had monolid eyes, thin lips, and a cold air about her. I could tell just by her looks that she was not the sort of person whose feelings you could tell right from their expression, like Akiyoshi was. What they did share was a conviction in the futures they saw before them—only she would be taking a different path to get there.
“Currently, I’m studying religions and economics. I want to know more about the structures that make the world work and the types of people that make that happen,” Tazunoki confidently, quietly explained to us over a cup of coffee. Put simply, she was the sort of person who sought logical answers to things. Logic to her was what ideals were to Akiyoshi. Akiyoshi listened to what she had to say, this girl so different from her, with deep interest. It was not long after that Tazunoki became the third member of Moai.
Then, it was like the dam had broken, though in reality, the opposite was true. Nevertheless, now that the gates were open, there was no way that the surge of the no longer two-person Moai could be contained. Three members became four, four became five, and soon we were able to apply to the university as an official organization.
Akiyoshi seemed pleased about this, but it was around that time that we shared the following conversation.
“Since this was my idea, I went ahead and applied. However, this group is all of ours, and yours, Kaede. If you think I’m doing something wrong here, I want you to say so. I want this to be done with both our consent.”
That was the shape of Akiyoshi’s ideals. None of us ever believed that those ideals could ever be tarnished, that one day there would be no one left to strive towards them.
This was roughly two and a half years before Tousuke attended that meet-up.