Another Like Me - Part I (CoTE x OC) ✔

Chapter 02 - Manabu Horikita

The room was actually really well made. The fact that we were even getting our own rooms was hard to digest. I'd have thought it would be on a roommate basis, but looks like I was wrong. 

I set down my bag in the corner. A normal sized bed, a TV, a study desk and a washroom. Stuff you'd normally expect. But there was a hallway, or a foyer, for each individual room, and a camera and microphone for unexpected visitors. Turning around in the hallway was a small but useful kitchen. Very handy indeed.

I plopped down on my bed and heard the gears in my head turn.

The point system still baffled me. Either it's just too good to be true, or maybe it was actually true. Even if I discount the possibility that it was actually true, I couldn't arrive at a satisfactory answer. The fundamental question of human existence plagued my mind.

Why?

Why would the school not openly speak about it? I was almost 90% sure that they could not afford to give us 100,000 Yen per month per student. Even if this was a government run institution, there's gotta be a limit to how much you spend behind just one student. Students are active 12 months a year. 3 years in the school. It amounted to 3.6 million Yen per student. It was too much.

There probably is a catch.

No, there must be a catch. I was sure of it. I just needed to figure out what it was. My clue was Chabashira-sensei's last sentence.

"There's no point in saving the points . Use them while you can"

Why would sensei intentionally coax us to use up our points? It was almost like she was guiding us towards spending everything beforehand without a care in the world. It didn't seem right. Even if you do get a 100,000 points a month, a faculty member should never try to guide a student the wrong way.

Another fact that bothered me was that on our mobile phones, these points were called 'Private Points'. If every student would anyways receive 100,000 points at the beginning of every month, why name it Private Points? Just Points would have been enough. The word Private seemed to indicate that there was a broader classification, and Private Points were just one of them. What if there were more types of Points? Such as, Discipline Points? Or Academic Points? Athletic Points? There was no proof that such points didn't exist, and were just being kept hidden from students.

I racked my brain a bit harder and thought about all the possible outcomes. The one that seemed most probable was that we would not get 100,000 points next month. Now that I think about it, sensei never said anything about receiving the same amount of points every month. Everything about her homeroom speech was just so...... scripted. Like she was prepared to say just this, no matter the questions that would have been hurled at her by perceptive students.

If my reasoning was correct, then it led me on to another question. What determines the number of points we get every month? If if really does change, there must be factors determining these changes. Maybe behavior? Or academic results? Athletic prowess? These questions all remained unanswered at the back of my mind.

I'd answer them all later. I was sleepy.

________________________________________________________________________________

The next day, I realized the big trouble that our class was in.

No one was taking classes seriously. Half of the students were either chitchatting, on their phones texting, or outright napping in the middle of class. No one except a few serious students, which included Yukimura, Horikita, Hirata, Wang-san and to an extent, Ayanokoji, was taking down notes. 

But what struck me as most odd was that Chabashira-sensei did not say anything. She continued to teach the class as if nothing was wrong. I failed to understand why.