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Kana nodded along to Wakako’s encouragement, and it did take, if just a little. It was the sort of assurance she’d been drip-feeding herself ever since she’d been accepted—[i][color=crimson]You wouldn’t be going if they didn’t think you could cut it.[/color][/i] And it was undeniably true, at least a little bit. Ishin didn’t seem like an institution interested in wasting time, especially not its own time. If there really wasn’t any chance she could make it through this, she wouldn’t have been on that train. 

Still, like most of her thoughts, they didn’t really matter until someone else thought them, too. 

Wakako was probably right about the faculty as well. Nekohara was not at all what Kana had expected of Ishin’s students, and she was upperclassman. Some—perhaps even many—of the teachers would likely be cold and hard and merciless, but Kana held out hope anyway that they might encounter some people of power and influence unjaded by their work. 

The topic shifted. Kana tried to pull an image of Osamu from her memory, but the auditorium was a blur of anxiety to her now. She did recall her seatmates, the gelatinous and polite Nadeshiko, and the awkward yet well-meaning Shun. 

[color=crimson]“A couple,”[/color] Kana said. [color=crimson]“I know there were a few people who didn’t seem to be getting along, but thankfully the people I sat by were nice. One was that boy, outside, who helped Nekohara back up. He…brought a pineapple with him.”[/color]

Slowly, she saw flashes of unfamiliar faces, picked out snippets of conversations she hadn’t really heard but remembered by broken piece-meal after the fact. Blue hair, white hair, sharp words and words of tender arbitration, a foreign girl with a hard face and a girl with hair like a squid. People were thrilled, and anxious, and angry or eager overjoyed to be here, to be something. Kana did not know these people yet, but she felt a sudden connection to them, a sort of pride and also worry, because despite Wakako’s assurances, the Supervisor had seemed intent that not all of them would last.

[color=crimson]“I hope they make it,”[/color] Kana said finally, and though she had excluded the two of them, it was perhaps them she meant most. 
[hr][@Naw]