The Villainess Reika-sama

[78]

This year's excursion was to Kamakura.

A city! It's finally a city! Goodbye, mountain climbing! Or so I thought until I heard that, yep, we were going to be hiking. To think that even Kamakura had hiking...

But well, I guess I was already kinda prepared for that. The real issue was the lunch.

After spending the whole gruelling morning on hiking, next was returning to the reserved hotel banquet hall to have lunch together as a whole grade. I was told that we were going to have seafood. Seafood is great stuff.

The problem comes after. Apparently it's Zui'ran tradition to have the External Students of each class gather together to prepare some kind of skit for the lunch. Like a baptism of sorts for them.

But a skit! And in front of three-hundred odd people! It's a total punishment game.

When the Externals in my class heard about it, all of them went deathly pale. Not like I don't understand though.

After asking around a bit, apparently the previous years were pretty much all choirs and concerts, with the occasional dance or magic trick. A few oddballs apparently banded together to recite Japanese waka poetry or haikus, too.

That day, whenever we had spare time, the Externals would group together and plan for the lunch skit. Mn, for things like this you have to decide what to do first after all.

"Can't we just sing something?"

"But whatever would we sing? And would it be possible to sing loudly enough for a large hall such as this?"

"But that makes it even harder to see a skit."

Hmm~ Looks like they're having trouble.

Satomi-kun and I called out to them.

"How goes it? Have you yet agreed upon anything?"

They all shook their heads at me with troubled expressions.

"Apparently most people just sing or perform on instruments," I added.

"But it'd be difficult to bring instruments..."

"I believe it quite possible to have them loan you at least a piano or a guitar. And the hall is furnished with a screen so with a microphone small magic tricks or juggling should be possible."

"Really!?"

Looks like they had more options now.

"By the way, what's the most popular thing for us to do?"

"From what I hear, some students with particular confidence in their singing voices decided to sing Nessun Dorma. Apparently they were met with quite an applause, and were called the Three Tenors of Zui'ran or somesuch. They were so popular in fact that the popularity of doing mini operas sky-rocketed in the following years, or so the story goes."

"Opera..."

"The Three Tenors...? But if there were only three singers, what was everybody else doing?"

"Lighting and sound, it seems."

"Having it focused around one person might not be a bad idea."

"However, pushing the pressure onto a single classmate is not ideal, so generally things of more equal participation are expected. The exceptions are only when somebody is particularly talented at something."

"Talent..."

They looked at each other. Unfortunately none of them seemed to be superstars of any sort. They all looked a little crestfallen.