Chapter 11: Arc 1, Ch.11: The instability

I wasted a minute orienting myself before finding back to the usual courtyard, then sprinted up the stairs.

Risa’s figure entered my eyes in passing - she was standing with her girl-friends, chatting with a lively smile. She wasn’t the type to get along with everyone like Daichi or Haru, but she was well-liked by most people and had her circles of closer and looser friends.

I slowed my sprint just a bit and in time for her to notice me and glance over, just a second longer than you would look at someone you don’t know.
Not enough for anyone to notice, but enough for me to take it as a greeting.

I smiled lightly in response, then immediately wiped it off my face to not look overly weird while running up the stairs.

By the time I reached the classroom, my phone vibrated with her message.

‘Whens Taizou coming again?’

I frowned a bit at her message and sent three quick ones in response.
‘Dunno’
‘He’ll write’
‘Why’

‘Cause I wanna be home????’

I could see her roll her eyes at me, quite the amusing image. She was so much smaller than me - I was tall for a boy and she small for a girl, so the difference in height was rather large.

Of course I wouldn’t want to deny her the joy of just seeing Taizou.

‘Ill tell you but dont you have your own good looking tutor to stare at?’
The guy you’ve got a crush on, hmmm? (Let’s ignore for a second that I had quite liked looking at him, too.)

She pointedly switched the topic right back to Taizou, giving me some information I had missed out on due to not listening for gossip recently.

‘Btw everyones already starting to talk bout Taizou rejecting everyone who wants to study with him’

No real surprise there.
With a slow exhale, I placed my phone back into my bag and readied myself for class.

---

I knocked my head on the table and groaned. Spending time with Taizou was enjoyable, math wasn’t.

It was our fourth lesson and I could see my target crush warming up to me continuously. He was lounging on the seat, not sitting straight as he had done the first time, and leaning on his hand as he watched me complain. The lesson today was much looser, so I was being a bit whiny.

My points with him were at 54 and I was considered a good, steady friend now. Even if I got off track sometimes, he didn’t mind as much.
Being friends with Taizou was a bit different than being friends with other people: Where you usually go from 'we spend time around each other' to 'we actively do things together because it's fun', with Taizou it's more a becoming tolerated as someone around him.

“Break?”, he asked softly, his voice slightly amused.
“Yesh pleash”, I mumbled with my squashed cheek. “Am I getting better at all?”

Midterm exams were approaching and I was getting nervous. I was quite happy with my private tutor, though.

“You are.”

Well, that was a good start. 
Smacking my lips, I took a second to grab my glass from the table.

Since I was leaning back and chugging water, Taizou took a moment to look at his own notes with a slight frown on his face. I hesitated and the system intervened.

[(Please choose whether you wish to say something.)

• (Don't say anything)
• “Can I help you somehow?”
• “Want to study, too?”]

I tapped my finger on the table to make him look up and then pointed at his notes.

“Want to study, too? I mean, maybe it’s less boring to study together. You don’t need to teach me all the time.” I habitually got quieter the more I spoke and pulled my head between my shoulders with an awkward, crooked smile.

Taizou looked at me for a while, thinking, then actually nodded. “Hmm.”

My smile became a bit easier on my face. “I’ll ask my mother for some snacks then. Let’s stop with math today.”

He didn’t reject the offer so I walked out of my room and downstairs. I gathered some food and more to drink, then balanced it all upstairs.

For the first time, or maybe because I had left the room, I saw Taizou actively looking around my room. He turned to face me when he heard my steps and pursed his lips. “You like games?”

I guess I was once again openly showing my surprise at being asked a private question by him. The guy who never talks about anything concerning hobbies or daily life. I’ve been considered a friend since lesson number three and this was the first one.

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Taizou awkwardly tilted his head down and looked at his things. With the help of the system’s notes, I had figured another thing out:
It wasn’t only that he didn’t like extended conversations and conversations about unnecessary things. It was also that he disliked them for such a long time that he didn’t even know how to hold them anymore. Asking personal questions was obviously a weird concept for him and I had a feeling he was unsure whether his question was too private.

It wasn’t, of course. I happily supplied him with some info about myself.

“Hm. It’s pretty much one of my only hobbies. I often play together with my friends, online.” I had no idea how much he knew about games, so I was slightly wondering if I should give more detail.

He hesitated for another while, then actually tried to keep the conversation going. I was delighted, the smile on my face widening.

“What kind of games?”
“MMORPGs, mostly. They’re games where you create a character and play in, mostly, fantasy worlds, connected to the internet. You’ve got quests and a main storyline, different jobs for the characters and stuff like that.”

He frowned and I pulled out my phone to show him one of the games’ homepages. I plopped down next to him and held it so that he could look.

“See, you can choose to be human, dwarf, elf… That’s for character customization. And here’s the jobs or classes, for example mage or assassin. Those are the classics.”

He reached out to tilt my phone and scroll through the page, curiously reading, while I-

Completely froze.

I was way too close. I hadn’t noticed in the first moment because I was distracted by the page, but now that he was looking by himself, I realized I was sitting close enough for our arms to touch.
When I looked down at him I could see his eyelashes, almost close enough to count, quivering between his blinks. I had stopped breathing, too fascinated with the movement of his eyelashes and the pitch black hair falling into his face.

Beautiful, he really was beautiful.

“Interesting”, he muttered, pulling back. I twitched, then crawled back to my own pillow, taking a deep breath to get my lungs running again.

That distance wasn’t weird for friends for a short period of time. I had been sitting all squashed together with my friends more than once. But that was the point. Friends.

I felt a bit guilty.

“I never played something like that before”, Taizou said, looking at my consoles and computer again. I was a bit out of it from the moment just now, so my brain was stuck. The system popped into my sight with a bright light.

[(Please choose what to say.)

• (Don't say anything)
• “I can show you sometime, if you want to.”
• “Are you interested?”]

I chose the second option - thank the system for supplying me actual, logical things to say. The decision was immediate; I just really wanted to ask him. It’s a natural thing to want to share the things you like with the people you like.

Taizou frowned, then nodded, then pulled out his notes.

“Let’s get back to studying.”
“Sure.” I was plenty satisfied, opening the menu while organizing my things.

[59/100. Considers the host as one of the few friends he has. Doesn’t know how to interact with the host as he sees other friends do, but doesn’t want the relationship to suffer under his stiff behaviour.]

I hid my probably unnatural grin behind my hand and looked through the notes that confirmed my suspicions.

[Is not sure he can follow the host in playing online-games, but wants to try them in hopes of understanding the host’s preferences better.]
I’ll definitely choose an easy one for him then and give him lots of tips! I want him to have fun, of course!

I glanced once more over his info. Some had filled in, stuff like him hating bitter food which I had found out during the last lesson. Those areas hadn’t been locked, I just didn’t have that info yet and the system didn’t want to give it to me for free.

My eyes scanned over the rest until I noticed the oddity about the points. Behind the points under the bar… was a question mark?
‘Instability detected’ said the popup.

My philosophy notes were a great cover for the confusion in my eyes. That hadn’t happened with anyone before. What was it?

The dialogue choices and prompts always appeared to help me. As long as our conversation was going fine it would stay away and just appear when I got stuck. The notes were always around after I had made a choice, the current hint updated only if there was a change in relationship that would suggest I needed help.

But this instability, why would that appear? Were the numbers unstable? Couldn’t the system assign numbers to something not numerical anyway? What made that more complicated this exact moment, causing it to be confused?

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