Mitakihara Middle School is a modern marvel - enormous, enough for every middle grade student in the crowded town, and constructed entirely of steel and glass. Classrooms come equipped with all the latest technologies, and the school has a good reputation.
Akemi Homura has been assigned to one of the homerooms on a higher floor, a large room - walled with transparent glass like all the others - already mostly full of students.
There are a lot of students.
She can see an empty desk. Maybe if she walks towards it very deliberately the teacher will forget to introduce her and nobody will say anything.
The teacher does not forget to introduce her! Would she like to tell the class her name and something about herself? (People are whispering about her.)
"My name is Akemi Homura. I am new to this school. Nice to meet you."
Is that sufficient. She doesn't know what else anyone might need to know about her.
... what does that mean. What else would she say.
"I was in the hospital. But now I am not."
That's very interesting! The teacher hopes she's feeling better.
(And triggers a lot of muttering in the class.)
She can go sit down, now, if she'd like!
She would like, yes.
Homura sits down at the empty desk she saw earlier. She takes out her notebook and her three pens and sets them out very, very neatly on her desk. She is ready to execute some very thorough note-taking, which will be infinitely more enjoyable than introducing herself.
This teacher... Seems pretty easily distracted. Apparently her boyfriend broke up with her. (The two girls sitting directly behind and behind and to the left of Homura are whispering about her.)
How unprofessional. Is there at least anything interesting written on the board that Homura can take notes on?
Yes! The current lesson appears to be math, if you read the board.
Well, she likes math. She will take notes on the math on the board. If the teacher decides to say anything informative, she will take notes on that as well.
She does not care about that at all! So far Homura is pretty disappointed; she was expecting Real School to be more vigorous than studying over textbooks by herself and not less.
Maybe the teacher will care more about other subjects and it will not all be like this.
She finishes taking down everything on the board and is left with nothing to do. Eventually she turns to a new page in her notebook and starts neatly transcribing as many math formulas as she can from memory, since those might be useful when the teacher remembers to actually teach them.
The teacher does not remember to do more than sporadic teaching before class changes and it's gym time.
She was not able to catch up in gym class the way she did for all her other subjects, and she is still not healthy enough to be very athletic, so Homura is not looking forward to this very much.
What do they have to do?
She keeps pushing herself for a while after she gets out of breath and her chest starts to hurt, but she still has to stop before the rest of the class.
Homura apologizes to the gym teacher; she can bring a doctor's note tomorrow.
The teacher is a bit concerned; does she want to go to the nurse?
That sounds better than sitting around in the sun being feeble for all her classmates to see.
Also the nurse will have medicine that she is technically take today. Homura was hoping she could get away with just... not. But she has been thwarted by the existence of gym class.
She does not know the way.
The gym teacher calls out to another student - apparently they have a nurse's assistant.
Other student bounces over and waves to Homura! "Hi!" she chirps. "I'm Karigane Madoka! I'm the nurse's assistant for our class."
Oh no. A pretty girl and someone she needs to interact with at the same time. Oh No.
"Hi."
Why is she smiling like that. Homura feels attacked, she will Look Away. "Yes."
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