Editing City Series:Volume7 Layer 9 (section)

===Record 9: More of the Usual===
[[Image:TOKYO_133.jpg|thumb]]

'''04/10/1997

'''9:51

After the entrance ceremony, I walked from the gym to the faculty room.

That meant walking through a few unfamiliar school buildings and outdoor walkways to reach the faculty building. My homeroom teacher was waiting in the general faculty room.

She had told me earlier to come see her after the ceremony was complete. She’s pretty young and I recalled her seeming unusually scatterbrained.

I bowed, opened the faculty room door, and took a look around.

But why was I being called here on my very first day at school?

“Probably not for something sexy.”

My comment caused the grownups around me to freeze.

I answered the unexpected attention with a wave and then walked toward the person I was here to see. Sensei was organizing a variety of documents under her desk and she didn’t notice me approach.

The documents were piled up on her chair and on the floor.

She had crawled under the desk with her suit butt sticking out toward me. I scratched my head, wondering what to do, and then checked the documents on the desk.

Were these handwritten notes?

“Lifepath test for incoming freshmen.”

That was too dangerous to let her keep, so I stuck it in my pocket. But what else was there? There was one paper that looked like a poem or song lyrics or something. Reading through it, I had a feeling it was a fairy tale. A European one I had heard at some point. Was she researching it? Maybe she was a better teacher than I had thought.

“Sensei,” I called, causing the butt sticking out from the desk to jump.

“Um, yes!? What do you-”

Before she was done speaking, a dull thud came from the bottom of the desk. The desk briefly tilted and I had to quickly hold down the documents to keep them from sliding off. Sensei emerged holding her head and sat on the floor.

“Ahh, wh-what do you want?” she said, half in tears.

When she saw me, she started to say something, resisted, and actually started crying after finding a lump on her head.

Hey, hold on.

I looked around to see the other teachers staring at me and whispering to each other.

“Wasn’t he just talking about doing ‘something sexy’?”

“And now he attacked the angel of our faculty room.”

“Boss, I say we teach him a lesson.”

At this rate, they would tear me apart without giving it a second thought.

I crouched down to avoid their gazes and tried to figure out what I could do. I could see Sensei had switched from crying to sobbing.

When I noticed her heaving shoulders, I concluded she wasn’t going to make even more of a scene and breathed a sigh of relief just in time for a document to fall from the desk.

It was a copy of my student info. The administrative office must have made it for her because it was handwritten but had digital characters all over it. It included my academic history, but my eyes moved to the family section below.

Something written in red pen really stood out since the rest was a grayscale copy.

A special note in the family section said my parents were away for an extended period of time and that was circled in red with a note to discuss it with me.

That explained it.

She was an idiot, but she had a good heart.

I looked up to see she still had her right hand on the corner of her eyes, but she was holding out her other hand. I handed her the paper and she cleared her throat.

I was afraid she would start crying again if she tried to speak, so I spoke first.

“It’s alright. They’ve been like that forever.”

“They have?” she asked with just her eyes and I nodded. She thought for a bit and nodded.

“Then I suppose I don’t need to go fix meals for you.”

I pondered what she had just said for a moment.

“Sensei, can I take back what I said?”

'''Author Comment:

This is when he met Sensei. Well, it’s the first memory about her that stuck with him.

She makes it pretty clear she’s a new teacher, but she seems to have left a good impression on her colleagues. She still has a lot to learn, but they can tell she’s trying her best.

Most of the teachers were in the Chancellor’s Officers in their day, but Sensei wasn’t and they tend to see her like a little sister or a daughter.