I am a normal person. Average in every way, including how average I am. I wake up in my boring room, typically due to the over excited and hyperactive nature of my darling little sister, put on my boring school uniform and trudge off on a long boring uphill walk to school.
And then at school the classes are boring. Dull. Repetitive. Normal. I am perfectly alright with this.
What I am less alright with is what happens the rest of the time. Class ends, I feel an irresistible tug on my arm by a verifiable Godlike entity in human form and pulled off towards something that is decidedly not normal by the remotest stretch of the imagination.
Every day I walk through the doors to the literary club - I mean, SOS Brigade - room with a tremendous trepidation. What terrors have our loony leader pieced together this time? What mad plan has she concocted today that will drive me mad, put me in danger, confuse me confound me and force me to insist upon exposition from three certain other club members?
Perhaps that is why I keep coming back here day after day, time after time. Not because Haruhi forces me to, but because some sick part of me enjoys this life. If the technology ever developed to permit me the ability to surgically remove that part of my personality, I would take it up in a heartbeat! Maybe two depending on circumstances but let us not be too pedantic.
It was a rare occasion that I was the very first to arrive in the clubroom. Usually that honour extends to Yuki Nagato, but today somehow I had managed to arrive first. I sigh, put my bag to the side of the room and sit at the desk to wait for the others. I didn’t expect to wait long, until -
And that was when I saw it. A pair of earrings lying on the table. In the very middle assuming my ability to judge distances has not yet started to fail me. Against my better judgement I picked them up and studied them. How curious! I had never seen any of the girls - or for that matter the boys - in the club wearing such a thing. However did it get here? Was it a teacher’s? A member of the cleaning staff? If the latter then they have odd taste in work accessories.
No, the more likely answer was that it was intended as a gift for a club member, in which case who? There were three beauties in the brigade, and it could have logically enough been any of the three of them - though my money was on Asahina. Except, there was no gift card. No box. Merely the earrings and naught more.
Before I could ponder this yet further, the door bustled open and Asahina herself flew into the room. “Ah! Hello Kyon!” she said with a bow. Adorable as ever! Never change, my angel of tomorrow! “Has nobody else arrived yet? Such a shame!”
“No, nobody but us,” I responded. “Pardon me for asking, but is this yours?”
She looked at the earrings while I held them out to her for analysis. For a moment she looked to pick it up, but then cast her eyes away in the most adorable manner and shook her head.
“No, it’s not mine. I thought it was yours?”
“...And why would you think that?” I asked, genuinely confused. Had I ever seemed the type to wear earrings? No, surely not. Hardly my style at all!
“I don’t know,” she shrugged, and picked out her maid uniform from the rack. “It just looks right with you, I guess?”
I opened my mouth to ask for clarification when something quite unusual occurred before my very eyes. Mikuru Asahina had reached for the top button of her uniform, undone it, and then reached for the very next button down without seeming to care for the presence standing just a little to her side. I was admittedly rather stunned by the realisation that she was stripping in front of me which shamefully forced me to stare in rapt appreciation, but then I came to my senses and turned around to face the wall.
“M-Miss Asahina!” I stammered, paralysed by the unusual event. “P-Please do not pick up such habits from Haruhi! You know how bad an influence she can be!”
“Eh?” she said, and I heard the tantalising sound of cloth hitting the floor. Every male instinct I had was screaming the same thing to me. Turn around you fool! You don’t know what you are missing!
Ah, but there was the rub. I had a very good idea of what I was missing. That was exactly why I could not turn around. Never.
It may occur to some people that I should have dashed out of the room as soon as I realised what was going on. There was a problem with this. Namely, that Miss Asahina had, apparently without meaning to backed up slightly and stood against the door. I was functionally trapped in here by a girl that was stripping, who was also the very entity trapping me within the room! The safest approach for me to take was to find something absolutely fascinating outside this window and hope that I could not see anything in the reflection on the glass.
Because if I could, heaven help both of us.
“This isn’t like you,” I said to the ceiling. “Changing your clothes while there is a boy in the room.”
“Hm? It isn’t?” she replied. “I thought it was perfectly normal for you to be in here.”
“This is normal?” I asked, and then I felt something warm up in my hand. To my mild interest one of the earrings appeared to be glowing faintly, which is the exact sort of thing that sets off all manner of alarm bells in my head.
I heard the door open behind me, and winced slightly. “Good morning, Miss Nagato!” Asahina chirped.
“Good morning Mikuru Asahina,” Yuki responded in her usual tone. Without another word she walked right past me then took her place in the corner with a book and started to read.
“Yuki... I -” and then I stopped. How best to approach this? “Have you noticed anything unusual today?”
“A full scan of the school ground is performed every unit of time known as an hour at every level known to humankind and several that are not,” she began. “Atomic. Subatomic. Infrared. Ultraviolet. All manner of radiation is searched for and categorised. Any alteration to reality caused by Miss Suzumiya is particularly given all manner of attention.”
Yuki closed her book and looked up at me with eyes that were - if you knew where to look - sparkling with curiosity. “Do you make this enquiry because you have witnessed something you believe to be unusual?”
“I think so,” I say, scratching my head, and wondering how best to approach this. “When I arrived, these earrings were on the table. One of them started to glow a moment ago, and I was wondering if - Look, here they are.”
I lay my palm holding the earrings flat out in front of her, and Yuki Nagato stared down at them with an unblinking gaze. Well, maybe it was nothing. Maybe there was some mundane explanation for these earrings. Maybe. But somehow it didn’t feel like it would be that easy.
“They are made of a substance referred to as plastic,” Yuki finally said. “They hold no abnormal properties. They are by human standards perfectly normal earrings.”
“There was one other thing,” I said reluctantly. “A little while ago, Miss Asahina took off her school uniform while I was still in the room! I asked her to stop, but she seemed to think nothing of it. She said it was normal for me to be there while she changed.”
“My observations indicate that it is a societal norm for local human males to remain in the vicinity while human females alter their articles of clothing,” Yuki said. “Her behaviour in this regard is not abnormal.”
I was a little stunned because, to put it in simple words <i>no it wasn’t</i>. Since when was it considered normal for girls to strip off when there was a boy in the room? Since when was Asahina able to do such things without breaking down into tears of humiliation?
And since when was Yuki Nagato so completely mistaken about something? I clutched at the earrings in my hand. Normal nothing! There was something odd about these earrings, and I was determined to find out what that something was!
- No time to investigate! Haruhi bursts in with her latest zany idea.
- Kyon tries to discuss it with Koizumi, and gets nowhere because he sees nothing strange.
- Kyon accidentally makes things worse for himself by accidentally using the word "normal" again.
- Something else
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