Maria-sama ga Miteru:Volume26 Chapter7 2

Meandering. Part 2

At any rate, nothing progressed during the silence.

In accordance with their plan to come up with new ideas by looking at the past (a renaming of their plan to draw inspiration from history), they decided to start by looking at last year's hiding places — the committee meeting board, the old greenhouse, and the library — and their surrounds.

"Still, putting it in the same place two years in a row . . ." Shimako-san smiled as she placed down her rough sketch of the school building's second floor. After tracing over the staff room and adjacent corridor, she finished her sentence with, "Wouldn't work," just as she reached the committee meeting board.

"Well, it was the first place we thought of, so don't you think it'll be the first place everyone checks? This week's Lillian Kawaraban is doing a retrospective of last year's event, so even the second-years that had forgotten about it and the first-years that weren't here for it would go and check those places. Like how criminals always return to the scene of a crime," Yoshino-san said, although her example seemed a bit off. Or maybe it was fitting, if they themselves were considered to be the criminals, since right now they were revisiting the previous locations.

"The board's only about this big. It doesn't take long to look over it," Yoshino-san said while holding up her hands, indicating the size of the board. "So it wouldn't set them back too long to go and check it right at the start. And if they did find it, it'd be like winning the lottery."

"That's true."

So even if they did want to do a double bluff by hiding one in the same place as last year, it wouldn't be on the committee board. With that, the trio decided to move on to the library.

"If we're going to hide one in there, it'd have to be in the reading room."

The library had numerous other rooms, including meeting rooms and archives, but considering the procedures involved in booking these, or the possibility of damage to old books, it made sense to limit the scope of the treasure hunt to the main room. Plus it would be the most familiar location to the majority of students.

"Are you considering the reading room, Yoshino-san?"

"I wasn't, but it would have an abundance of hiding places."

Yoshino-san tidied away the sketch of the school building's second floor and moved the sketch of the library reading room to the center of the table. The plan for the actual event was to draw up a simple map showing the boundaries of the treasure hunt, but for their strategy meeting they wanted to know as much about the areas as possible, so they'd drawn up detailed interior maps ahead of time.

"Last year, Rei-chan hid her card in the non-borrowing section, didn't she? So that nobody could borrow it before the event, right?"

"Yes," Shimako-san said, and nodded in confirmation.

"But what if it was hidden right before the event? Then it wouldn't have to be in the non-borrowing section."

"That won't work."

"Why not? We could get someone else to hide it if you’re worried about how conspicuous we would be walking around right before the event."

Yoshino-san then suggested they could ask the first-year Newspaper Club members to do this, as they were event staff that could be seen in the reading room without immediately being connected to the cards.

"Of course, we could ask someone else to hide the card for us. But it's not that. Even during the event, there's the risk that someone could borrow the book that it's hidden in — unless we ask the library to close the lending desk that afternoon."

It looked like these sorts of things had been considered last year, when Rei-sama had decided to hide her card in the library. They wanted to avoid a situation where someone unwittingly borrowed the book during the treasure hunt, or the confusion that would arise if the student on the lending desk discovered the card during the borrowing procedure.

"Ah, I see." Yoshino-san accepted this explanation, "So we can't hide it in one of the borrowable books. Even though there's so many of them."

"But it could be hidden in between two books — we don't have to hide it between the pages of a book, like Rei-sama did."

"Right."

Yoshino-san shot up out of her chair. It looked as though she'd had a flash of inspiration during Shimako-san's advice.

"What is it?"

"I just had a great idea."

As expected.

"How about hiding a tree in a forest?"

"Okay, and?"

The kanji for forest (森) was made from the kanji for tree (木) repeated three times. Given that . . .

"Is there a triple-card place?"

"Stupid. That's not what I'm talking about. In the library, there's drawers with lots of cards, right? They're about the size of a student ID card, with a hole in the bottom, and made out of thick cardboard, with the book name and those strange category identifiers."

"Ah, the card catalogs," Shimako-san informed them.

Nowadays the catalogs and loan tracking were all on the computer, so they weren't all that familiar with it, but in the past it was apparently what people used to look up books.

"How knowledgeable of you, Shimako-san."

"I spent some time as a library assistant in middle school."

Incidentally, the Lillian's middle-school and high-school shared the same library reading room.

"The card catalogs, huh. It could be an interesting place to use, but . . ."

Yoshino-san raised an eyebrow slightly at Shimako-san's musings. "But?"

"I'm not sure they're the right size." Shimako-san stood up and walked over to a pile of documents, saying, "I think we have one here."

"Ah, a blue card."

"Right. This one is a sample they made last year."

It was only a year ago, but it still felt kind of nostalgic. Last year's head of the newspaper club and editor-in-chief of the Lillian Kawaraban, Tsukiyama Minako-sama, had held this aloft as she explained the rules. Not only was she Mami-san's onee-sama, she was still active in the Newspaper Club.

"See, it's pretty big."

This was probably Yoshino-san's first time seeing one up close, as she took it in her hands and said, "Hmm."

"Right. Although it probably doesn't seem that big from a distance."

Incidentally, Yumi wasn't all that surprised. She had been there when Sachiko-sama's red card had been retrieved after last year's event. So her reaction was along the lines of, "Yep, that's about the size I remember." Folded in half, it was about the size of a paperback novel.

"Then that won't work, no matter how you look at it."

It didn't matter that the card wasn't exactly the same size as the catalog cards, but if it couldn't fit in the catalog drawer then they couldn't use that as a hiding place. And it probably went without saying that they couldn't fold the card in half again to make it fit.

"We could change the size of the treasure hunt cards," Shimako-san offered, but Yoshino-san flatly rejected this.

"No. There's no way we can do that."

"Why not?"

Why was she so concerned about this?

"Choosing the size of the card to fit the hiding place is absurd, it's putting the cart before the horse. Do you really want to adopt that sort of backwards thinking?"

"I guess not."

Yumi had been thinking, "What's the harm in changing the size of the card?" Wasn't that adapting to the conditions at hand? Would they still be using the same size card decades in the future? Although this was only the second treasure hunt, and they didn't even know if it would be held again next year. Like, even that Robocon that they usually showed on TV over the end-of-year break had a different theme every year. Wouldn't they be better off thinking about it in that light?

"We'll use the same conditions as Rei-chan. I don't want to lose."

"You don't want to lose? To last year's members?"

Yoshino-san would occasionally exhibit some bizarre fixations.

"Retreat is a coward's act," she said, with the face of a samurai.