As it turned out, the walk from his thinking bench back to the dorm was far too long for Yuuhei to be able to keep his mind off the topic he had just resolved to put on the back burner. But come on, could you really blame him? His juniors at the newspaper club were handling the welcoming fluff pieces for the first issue - which they had sworn was because they wanted the experience rather than their lack of trust in him to take it seriously - and it wasn’t like there were any other particularly juicy stories cropping up just yet. So what was a guy to do other than focus his abundant reserves of energy on the current puzzle in front of him?
With a deep intake of the brisk April air to collect himself, Yuuhei once again flipped open his notebook straight to the page containing his notes on
Yellow Plague. One line in particular stuck out to him more than others, as its wording had been painstakingly explicit whenever it had come up in his initial investigation. He walked briskly through the spring soaked school grounds with his face all but buried in the small bundle of papers, his head cocking from side to side in an all too literal effort to look at the scrap of information from different angles.
But no matter how he looked at it, it just seemed all too out of place to Yuuhei. In just about any other scenario, writing it off as nonsense born from small-town syndrome seemed like the only logical conclusion. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to do just that due to the fact that the exact wording for it had been used in multiple tellings of the rumor. But even with his barely above middling grades, Yuuhei couldn’t figure out how, much less why, a disease would care about how virtuous its victim was.
His free hand reached for the handle to the dorms unconsciously, as him wandering through the school on auto-pilot while his mind was tied up elsewhere had become second nature. Yuuhei’s sharp brown eyes peeked over the top of his notebook, which he had taken to rotating every which way to mirror whichever position he had cocked his head, only to land on the group of male students that he instantly realized was where he should have been a good five minutes ago.
It was hard to tell if Yamada-sensei had noticed him stumble upon the group, as the young teacher was busy handing out keys to the assembled crowd, so with all the grace of a breaching whale Yuuhei plopped down on one of the newly vacated couches. Next to him was Laki Hirata, who he instantly recognized despite having never met before due to the guy’s foreign features and relatively monstrous physique. Now while Yuuhei was constantly drawing from a nearly bottomless well of confidence, even he couldn’t help but feel tiny next to him. But seeing as how he hadn’t gotten up with the rest of the students, Yuuhei figured that the guy was in the same boat as him and had moved in earlier. And thus, the perfect person to question.
“So did I miss anything good or was it just business as usual?” he easily asked the big guy with an equally easygoing grin. Yuuhei didn’t have much on Hirata, as he wasn’t part of any clubs and hadn't stirred up any real trouble, but his gut was already feeling like he fell more on the gentle giant side of things. And he was proud to say that his instincts when it came to people's nature were right about twenty percent of the time on a good day.
“Ah, right, manners." And for the first time in a while, Yuuhei actually sounded a bit sheepish. But that was part of the problem with keeping up with so many different people, as sometimes it became difficult to keep track of who you have and have not gotten around to introducing yourself to.
I’m Seiho Yuuhei by the way.”@stone