Location: Outside Ishin Academy, Sapporo
“You know, I hear smoking’s bad for you.”
A voice cracked through the cold, Hokkaido morning as a girl approached the cigarette-smoking girl, with a cup of ramen in her hand.
Hidaka Honoka wasn’t much of one to keep her thoughts in her head. It was a new thing she had been trying ever since she had taken the trip from her village in the deepest part of Hokkaido to Sapporo. In this case, she had failed at that practice, though she didn’t think it’d do much good. She had read manga from the local library in her village, so she was expecting to run into someone like this in the city at some point. A depressed loner smoking outside of the school? It was a pretty common thing as far as she knew.
“You’re too bored to wait in the event hall, too, huh?” Honoka mused, trying to change the topic while the girl blankly stared at her for a few seconds as she leaned back against a tree, moving the noodle-laden chopsticks to her lips. No need to keep the conversation about her health. The girl was dangerous and Honoka didn’t want to seem lame and judgy.
Besides, she knew what it was like feeling anxious about a new place. She had spent more time in Sapporo than she had inside the gates of Ishin.
For Honoka, it had been a lot of practicing and getting used to the city. She was from Hokkaido so if she was going to seem like the cool, approachable city girl and not the lame, weird country girl she was she needed to practice; and with practice came familiarity. She had spent weeks making sure her bumpkin accent didn’t accidentally sneeze outside of her lips. That was hard. The posture and look would come second. Hopefully, the girl in front of her didn’t have some kind of quirk that allowed her to see right through Honoka. That’d blow her cover. If she did... she’d probably cry a little on the inside. And the outside.