Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item2 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 1===

It was August 6.

The weather lady had a shocking report that morning.

“The large and powerful Typhoon 11 has finally made landfall in Tokyo!! Current windspeeds have surpassed 40m/s and we’re measuring around 250mm of rain every hour. Ugh, as you can see, Academy City is already experiencing plenty of rain with winds so powerful I need to hold onto something to stay on my fee- eek!? D-did you see that? Something just flew by. Yikes, a wind turbine’s blades just broke off and went spinning through the air before stabbing into the 3rd story of that building! The typhoon is moving a lot slower than predicted yesterday, so if you don’t have any urgent need, you should stay indoors all day today!!”

“Here, you need to water the morning glories we took in out of the storm. And in the end, you need to use this blacklight. The flower will wilt if you don’t give it UV light to replace the sunlight it needs.”

A lazy mood had set in at the shared living space in the elementary school dorm hallway.

Invincible Big Sis Frenda was helping with the potted morning glories brought in from the storm, but the adorable 7-year-old princess in a beret, a baggy T-shirt dress with a belt around the waist, and red leggings wasn’t listening. Even though those flowers were for her summer homework.

The summer homework was apparently to color a white T-shirt with a dye made from the morning glories. During the 2nd term, her class would then go on a field trip to a lab with too much time on its hands and view the fabric under an electron microscope to see how the dye had changed it.

The ordinary program had been interrupted by an emergency news program on the small screen of her children’s phone (which had been ultra upgraded with surveillance functions courtesy of her dark side big sister). She listened to that while standing up on her tippy-toes to excitedly look out of the tightly shut window.

“Ohh! In the first place, this is so cool… It’s a typhoon! Look, look, Onee-chan, I’ve never seen the wind turbines spin so fast!! Hoorayyyy! The world is coming to an eeeend!!”

“R-right. We need to stay in our rooms all day today. Wow…”

Her friend, a glasses girl named Azumi, was looking out the window next to her.

Frenda wondered why little kids got so excited about typhoons. It was still summer break, so it wasn’t like they would get off school.

The rain was coming down so hard it looked white outside, but since the dorm was located on a hill, there was no concern of flooding. Maybe the city was careful about where it put the dorms for small children.

“In the end, did you feed your rhino beetles today?”

“In the first place, Michelangelo and Geraldine are both doing great! All I have to do is swap out their package of sap every day, so it’s kind of boring.”

The younger sister was relatively fine with bugs. From what Frenda had heard, she had trouble with reptiles instead. She said she hated their slimy skin. Instead of being afraid, she was apparently afraid their skin would burst if she touched it. Even though crocodile skin and snake skin were both so tough.

“Thank you for coming today,” the dorm manager said to Frenda. “I told them to bring the morning glories in yesterday, but a lot of the children put it off and never did it. Honestly, even the security and cleaning robots are being kept inside so they aren’t blown over by a gust of wind, but those kids don’t listen. This should really all be my job, so thank you so much for helping out. I know those clay pots are heavy, so moving so many couldn’t have been easy.”

“In the end, it was nothing.”

Dark side people always felt a little guilty when someone from the light side thanked them.

The dorm manager was a weird woman who wore a miniskirt Santa outfit even though it was August. She was the kind of person who had no problem wearing a Halloween witch costume or a New Year’s furisode any time of year. She said she hated how clothing ended up smelling like mothballs if you only wore it once a year.

“Oh, do you want to take a shower? I can wash and dry your wet clothes while you do.”

“Ah ha ha. In the end, there’s no need.”

Frenda’s phone rang.

She checked the email, and…

“Oh, looks like things are happening now. In the end, I’ve got to go.”

“Oh? But it’s storming outside. Feel free to wait here until it dies down.”

If Frenda took the super-sweet elementary school dorm manager up on that offer, she would find herself ensnared in the inescapable trap that was a dorm manager’s lap pillow. ''Resist. I refuse to become someone who let’s other people feed her instead of picking up her own chopsticks.

“I’ll be fine. In the end, if I chug an energy drink and take off running, I’ll be back in no time. I can’t take up space in this elementary school dorm. And my friends will worry about me if I don’t show up.”

“Oh? Do you live in a District 14 dorm like most of the foreign transfer students? But isn’t that nearly on the other side of the city?”

Frenda smiled ambiguously and didn’t respond.

An umbrella would be meaningless in this storm, so the blonde-haired, blue-eyed big sister pulled her raincoat up over her head and looked back at her little sister.

She pulled the pull tab for her skinny energy drink and spoke with a mischievous smile.

“Root for the typhoon too much and it’ll stay here in Academy City. In the end, then they might cancel the festival.”

“Eh!? I-in the first place, they can’t do that!!”

“Then you’d better start being thankful for the sunny days. Do that and I’ll go to the festival with you. See you later☆”

Frenda smiled and threw herself out into the storm.

The email had been from Item. The next phase was already beginning.