ToastedBeans

  POV: Ensemble (Cssmates)

  The thing about Minase Sora, Nakamura had decided somewhere around the fourth week of first year, was that she was not actually difficult to talk to.

  She was just precise.

  Most people mistook these for the same thing. Nakamura had made this mistake himself initially, in the first two weeks when he had attempted standard conversational approaches and received responses that were accurate and complete and somehow left him feeling like he had asked a slightly different question than he intended. It had taken him a while to understand that the problem was not Sora's responses but his questions, which had been imprecise in ways he had not noticed until she answered exactly what he asked rather than what he meant.

  Once he understood this he adjusted.

  He started asking more precise questions. The responses improved dramatically. He considered this a personal growth experience.

  He was expining this to Yoshida, who sat behind him and had been watching Sora with the cautious expression of someone trying to determine whether an interesting animal was also a dangerous one.

  "She answered my question," Nakamura said. "Three lines. Completely correct. I'd been stuck on that problem for twenty minutes."

  Yoshida looked at the folded piece of paper he was holding. "She wrote this in like thirty seconds."

  "Yeah."

  "While reading something else."

  "She does that."

  Yoshida unfolded it and looked at the methodology again with the expression of someone revising an assessment. "Okay," he said slowly. "Okay I see it."

  Nakamura nodded. He had seen it in week four. He considered himself an early adopter.

  Across the room Sora was reading her paper, pen moving in her left hand without her looking at it, making notes in a shorthand that Nakamura had once tried to decode and had abandoned after determining it was either a system she had invented herself or a nguage he did not speak. Probably both.

  "She tutored Emi st semester," said Tanaka from the seat in front of Yoshida, turning around with the air of someone who had been listening and had relevant information to contribute. "For the physics exam. Emi said she expined the entire electromagnetic spectrum in twelve minutes and it made more sense than the whole unit had."

  "Did Emi pass?" Nakamura asked.

  "Ninety one."

  A small respectful silence settled over their corner of the room.

  "She's kind of terrifying," Yoshida said.

  "She's not though," Nakamura said. "That's the thing. She's just" he searched for the word. "Exact."

  Yoshida considered this. "Is there a difference?"

  "Ask her a precise question and see what happens."

  Yoshida looked at Sora. Sora turned a page without looking up. Yoshida looked back at Nakamura. "Maybe ter," he said.

  The phenomenon, as Nakamura had come to think of it, had a secondary component that he had identified around the sixth week of first year and had been quietly observing ever since.

  The secondary component was Fujiwara Hana.

  Not Hana alone, which was its own observable phenomenon and had its own dedicated observers among the student body, mostly council reted. The secondary component was specifically Minase Sora in proximity to Fujiwara Hana, which produced results that were measurably different from Minase Sora in any other context.

  It was not dramatic. That was the thing that made it interesting rather than obvious.

  It was not the kind of difference you would necessarily notice if you were not already paying attention to Sora's baseline, which Nakamura was, because he sat two seats away from her and had been studying her operational parameters for over a year now in the interest of more effective communication. Against that baseline the difference was clear.

  Sora was slightly less still when Hana was in the room.

  Not more animated, exactly. Not louder or more demonstrably engaged. Just less still, in the way a room that has been very quiet becomes slightly less quiet when something with a low consistent hum is turned on. Not a dramatic change. A frequency change.

  He had pointed this out to Yoshida at some point and Yoshida had looked at him with the expression of someone not sure if their friend was very perceptive or very strange, and Nakamura had accepted both possibilities as potentially accurate.

  The current evidence was the window.

  Free period. Nakamura had looked up from his own work and looked out the window mostly because the afternoon had reached the stage where looking out the window was more interesting than the page in front of him, and had happened to see Hana crossing the courtyard. He had pointed this out to Sora not with any particur intention but because it seemed like information she might want to have.

  Sora had looked.

  It was a short look. Three seconds, maybe four. Long enough to register and then return to her notes.

  But Nakamura had been watching.

  And the thing about those three or four seconds was that Sora's expression during them was not her reading expression or her problem solving expression or her listening to someone expnation expression or any of the other expressions he had catalogued in over a year of adjacent observation. It was something quieter than any of those. Something that did not have a clear category in his existing taxonomy.

  He had said Hana was something else.

  Sora had said yes.

  One word. Ft delivery. Immediate return to work.

  Nakamura had written nothing down because he did not keep notes on people the way Sora kept notes on data. But he sat with it for the rest of the period in the background of his other thinking, the small observation sitting there being quietly interesting.

  After school Tanaka caught up with him at the shoe lockers and said, with the careful casualness of someone raising a topic they had been thinking about for a while, "So Minase and the president."

  Nakamura looked at him.

  "They're childhood friends right," Tanaka said.

  "Since elementary school I think."

  Tanaka nodded slowly. He had the expression of someone completing a calcution. "That expins some things."

  "What things."

  "Just." Tanaka gestured vaguely in the direction of the courtyard, which no longer contained anyone. "Things."

  Nakamura tied his shoes. He thought about three seconds at a window. He thought about the frequency change, the slight lessening of stillness, the expression without a category. He thought about one year of observation and the conclusions that observation was quietly accumuting toward whether he was actively pursuing them or not.

  "Yeah," he said.

  They walked out into the afternoon together and did not say anything else about it, because there was not, at this particur moment, anything else definitive to say. It was the kind of thing that was clearly something without yet being clearly what, and Nakamura had enough scientific instinct, borrowed from two years of sitting near Minase Sora, to know that premature conclusions were worse than patient observation.

  He would wait.

  There was clearly more data coming.

  The thing that Yoshida mentioned the next morning, entirely unprompted, while they were waiting for first period to start, was this:

  "I asked her a precise question."

  Nakamura looked at him. "Yeah?"

  "About the history reading. I asked specifically which argument in the secondary source she thought was weakest and why."

  "What happened?"

  Yoshida had the expression of someone who had experienced something that had shifted a category. "She stopped. Actually stopped reading. And expined it. For like four minutes. With evidence."

  Nakamura nodded. He had known this would happen.

  "And then," Yoshida said, "she asked me what I thought."

  This was new data. Nakamura had not experienced this yet. "What did you say?"

  "I panicked and said I agreed with her."

  "Did you?"

  "I didn't understand enough of it to disagree. But." He paused. "She seemed like she actually wanted to know. Like she was going to listen."

  "She would have," Nakamura said. "That's the thing."

  Yoshida thought about this for a moment. Then he looked at Sora's empty desk, which would be occupied in approximately three minutes when Sora arrived, always exactly on time, always with her notebook already open. He looked at it with the expression of someone updating a prior assessment.

  "Exact," he said.

  "Exact," Nakamura agreed.

  The bell rang. Students filed in. Sora arrived at the fifty eight second mark, notebook open, pen in hand, and sat down and began reviewing whatever she had been working on st night without any particur acknowledgment of the room around her, which was not rudeness and was not coldness and was simply Sora being exactly where she was and not performing anything about it.

  Nakamura opened his own notebook.

  He thought, briefly, about three seconds at a window.

  He thought about the data that was clearly still coming.

  He was a patient observer. He had learned this from sitting near Minase Sora for over a year, the particur value of watching carefully and reaching conclusions only when they were warranted and not one moment before.

  He could wait.

  The st observation of the day came from a direction he had not anticipated, which was Emi, who appeared at his elbow after school with the expression of someone who had made a decision about something.

  "You watch her too," Emi said. Not accusatory. Just identifying.

  Nakamura considered denying this and decided it was not worth the effort. "I sit two seats away."

  "Mm." Emi looked at the school building in the way people looked at things they were thinking about rather than actually seeing. "She tutored me st semester."

  "I heard. Ninety one."

  "She expined everything perfectly. Every question I asked." Emi paused. "And then at the end she asked if I understood or if there were parts that were still unclear, and the way she asked it, it was like." She stopped. Looked for the word. "Like whether I understood actually mattered. Not as a reflection of whether she'd expined well. Just. Whether I understood."

  Nakamura thought about this.

  "And then Fujiwara-san came to get her," Emi continued, "because apparently they walk home together, and Minase-san just." She made a small gesture. "Changed."

  "Changed how."

  Emi considered. "Like a program that was running one process and then the main process came online." She seemed slightly embarrassed by this description. "I don't know. I'm not good at computers."

  "No that's accurate," Nakamura said.

  They stood for a moment in the shared understanding of people who had been watching the same thing from different angles and arrived at approximately the same pce.

  "They've been friends since they were kids," Emi said.

  "Yeah."

  "It's nice," she said. "The way they are." And then, as though she had said more than she intended to, she hitched her bag up and walked off toward the gates with the air of someone concluding a meeting.

  Nakamura stood in the afternoon for another moment.

  The main process, he thought.

  He walked home thinking about frequency changes and three second windows and the particur quality of a program when its main process came online, and he thought that Emi, for someone who was not good at computers, had been extremely accurate.

  He was a patient observer.

  He was going to need to be.