250 Chapter four, 2017, dark and bitter: 9 (1/2)

Nakagawa Akio, Principal of Himekaizen Academy tapped closed the phone-call. From what the Matsumoto kid had said the sudden surge of skipping classes had a reason.

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'Damn! So they won this one.' He hadn't expected Ageruman-san to buckle under the pressure, but then again that pressure had been absurd.

Any other two and Nakagawa would have shrugged it away, but with those two things immediately became more complicated, or complex as Hamarugen-san would have said. A few weeks earlier Sato-san told him she'd been ordered to break the couple up, and Nakagawa refused flat out. And since then there were factions within their own faction.

'But I couldn't do that. They're not teens. It's like forcing a divorce.' And that was the reason he refused, unlike the first time, earlier the last autumn, when they were asked to create a distance between the arrivals.

'Fine, Wakayama-san, you win.' The thought of calling the former imperial officer scared him, but he'd do that anyway. This once Nakagawa would side entirely with the Wakayamas. 'But he has real blood on his hands. I doubt the Wakayama's are old enough to understand.'

He hesitated, held his phone in his hand and stared at it as if some bakemono would suddenly creep out of it and bite his face. In the end he could hesitate no more. With a sigh Nakagawa sat down in his chair and punched up a number to a former student of his, one that he had hoped he wouldn't need to meet again.

”Yes, this is Principal Nakagawa,” he said after the other side took the call. ”Is Sano Mitsuo there?”

With some luck the arrival who once befriended the Wakayamas wouldn't be, but Nakagawa was to have no such luck.

”Sano, speaking.”

”Nakagawa. I'm the principal...”

”I know, get to the point.”

That was surprisingly rude for a Japanese, or for anyone with a decent upbringing. ”Would it be possible for the two of us to meet? We had an incident with a student here.”

”Incident?”

”Yes, it concerns one Ageruman Kuritina, if you're familiar with the name?”

There was no response, just as Nakagawa had known. She was Sano-san's granddaughter after all. After an eternity the phone came alive again. ”Where?”

”Nagoya. I can be there in three hours,” Nakagawa said, because this wasn't the kind of planning you wanted done over the phone. Especially not over a phone-connection he didn't trust wasn't wire-tapped, or whatever it was called when cell phones were involved.

After a short silence he had his response. ”Four, I need four hours. Seven o'clock?”

That would be enough for him to book a hotel room. ”Yes, seven will be fine,” Nakagawa said, and they closed the call.

***

'Damn you, Natsumi!' Sano Mitsuo sat at a table in a café waiting for an old man who was younger by far than he. Leaving one world at seventy and arriving in another at fourteen did strange things to your conception of age.

'Ah, there he is.' They had met last August, and of course almost daily when Mitsuo was a student at Himekaizen a quarter of a century earlier. The news of two new arrivals, the first in a decade, had him remembering the years when there was an arrival almost every year. He had been one.

”Sano-san.”

”Nakagawa-san.”

They bowed. Two men with more memories from days gone past than the spinning world that was today.