Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 1.04

004

“It’s funny, you see.”

“Funny.”

“It’s strange.”

“Strange.”

“In other words─it’s abnormal.”

“Abnormal. And─”

Errant.

Ogi Oshino pointed to a sketch in the notebook sitting open on top of my desk─and spoke in an unconcerned tone. I recalled facing Miss Gaen and doing something similar in August, but we used a tablet in that meeting, not a notebook. It’s not unusual for high schoolers to be using tablets these days, but maybe analog technology suited her better, as you might expect from Oshino’s niece.

There in the notebook was a structural layout of Naoetsu High. I could see why she’d show it to someone she’d only met for the first time; it was impressive, so good it made me wonder if she’d used professional tools to draw it. You could take it and post it by the entrance of the building if you wanted.

“It’s funny, you see,” Ogi repeated, still pointing to a specific part of the layout.

“…”

As we spoke, I split my time about evenly between looking at the diagram and at her─at her eyes. Those eyes that seemed like they could suck me in.

It reminded me of how Miss Gaen once called herself “Mèmè Oshino’s little sister.” While at the time I wondered why it was little and not big sister─and thought that she said the most arbitrary things─I suppose there was at least someone real she was hinting at with that title. Come to think of it, of course Miss Gaen wouldn’t say anything arbitrary.

Still, why was that expert’s niece transferring into my school after he left our town in June? Kanbaru probably dismissed it with nothing more than a fate brings people together in the strangest ways, but as someone who’d experienced what happened with Hachikuji…

“Uh, are you listening to me?”

“Er, um…” I quickly gathered myself when she noticed how distracted I was. “Wh-Why don’t you sit down, Ogi-chan? I was just thinking it must be hard for you to explain all this when you’re standing. The chairs around there belong to kids who’re on the athletic grounds, and they probably won’t be coming back until the bell.”

I tried this excuse because I did feel guilty about sitting there and forcing an underclassman I was meeting for the first time to stand, but Ogi declined. Kanbaru never ended up sitting either, but the way Ogi declined was what amazed me.

“Sorry, but I’m afraid I’m a germophobe. I don’t want to sit in a chair when I don’t know who’s been using it.”

“…Is that so.”

A germophobe. Well, I thought, guess she’d never be able to live in that abandoned, no longer existent cram school the way her uncle had.

“I wouldn’t mind sitting on your lap, though.”

“Stop it.”

“Ooh, I bet you were thinking something naughty just now!”

Ogi clapped with glee. She was just goofing off like any high school freshman, but that wasn’t enough to do away with the unfathomable impression she gave off.

“You’re the one who said something naughty. You can stand there as punishment.”

“Man, you’re so strict.”

“And, what were we talking about? What’s funny again?”

“The bone on your arm that makes it numb if you hit it─nah, I don’t mean funny in a humerus way… Well, okay, I’m a transfer student, right? I’ve had to transfer schools a lot thanks to what you’d call family issues, or maybe personal issues. So often that I don’t even remember how many schools I’ve transferred into.”

“Huh… That must be tough. Now that I think about it, I guess Kanbaru transferred schools when she was in elementary, too…”

Kanbaru was now gone, by the way. She’d run off somewhere just as soon as she’d introduced me to Ogi. A busy young lady─or maybe she didn’t think she should listen to the details of this conversation?

“Yeah, transferring really must be tough. The entire environment around you changes.”

“True. But I’ve grown used to it. Anyway, every time I transfer into a new school, there’s something I do right away. What do you think that is?”

“What do I think… Say hello to the teachers?”

“I don’t always.”

“Wait, you don’t?”

“Well─I make diagrams like these.”

Ogi flipped through the pages of the notebook. I could tell it was new, but a lot of its pages had been filled with diagrams of the school’s buildings. She’d depicted Naoetsu High in a fairly detailed way. There weren’t just flat layouts, but three-dimensional ones, too─how had she drawn a bird’s-eye view of the whole school? It almost looked like aerial photography.

“You could call it a habit of mine. I want to get a grasp on the school that’s going to host me─do you think that’s strange?”

“No, not really…”

To be honest, I did think it was pretty eccentric, but I actually knew two or so people who’d done something similar when they were starting at Naoetsu. I couldn’t call it outright strange. What shocked me more was that those two or so people weren’t the only ones.

I was just meeting Ogi for the first time, and she was the niece of that tricky dude Oshino. I’d been cautious, approaching her from a distance, so to speak, but I found this bit of odd behavior endearing.

“I like mysteries that take place in mansions,” she said. “Just seeing a blueprint at the beginning of a book gets me interested. That’s why every time I start life at a new school, I draw layouts like these─not that I’m expecting anyone to get murdered.” She laughed, but it was hard to take it entirely as a quip because she somehow seemed so mysterious. If she’d told me that she was drawing a map for when a case did occur, I might have believed her.

“Huh… Let me take a look.”

“Hm? At my panties?”

“No, at your notebook…”

It was just the kind of thing that Kanbaru’s protégée would say. The former star’s perverted ways were a bit of a secret thanks to the efforts of those who knew her best, so her influence on Ogi made me think that the two must be close (though given what she just said, Kanbaru instructing her to take off her underwear was just talk). But then, how had Ogi gotten close to Kanbaru in the short time since she’d transferred to our school? Kanbaru did have a habit of making friends with everyone, though─and so I flipped through the notebook from cover to cover. Looking at the school that way, I realized how many of its facilities I knew nothing about despite being a student here for nearly three years. It was like I’d been shown just how halfhearted my time at Naoetsu High had been.

“…By the way, you’re really good at drawing, Ogi. I’m not that good at reading maps, so I’m normally confused by this kind of thing, but your notebook makes me feel like I’m right there walking through the school.”

“I am most humbly honored by your praise. In that case, I’m sure you understand─why I think something’s funny.”

“Hm? Like…” I didn’t understand. I hadn’t meant to flatter her, but now my compliment sounded phony. I forced myself to come up with something like an opinion. “The fact that there’s too many buildings? Given the size of the student body, we could probably do away with one or─”

“That’s not it. What are you, a fool?”

Harsh words, delivered in a polite tone. For a second I thought I’d angered her, but apparently not, as her expression was as beaming as ever─did her unique speech owe to transferring from one school to the next? There are cases where a horrible name to call someone in one place is a regular way to address them in others.

“That’s just because of Japan’s declining population. They must have needed this many in the past. We can infer that the large number of empty classrooms is simply the result of the number of current students being lower compared to when the school came into being. That’s not what I’m talking about─this right here is.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

Ogi took her notebook back, opened it to a different page, and pointed─at the same place she was pointing a few moments earlier. But nothing there struck me as particularly funny.

“The layout here is strange.” Fed up with waiting for an answer from a fool, which is to say from me, Ogi began explaining.

“Strange, or maybe unnatural─just look at the floors right above and below it,” she said, flipping between the adjacent pages. “They have rooms here like they should, right? It’s funny that this one room is missing in between them.”

“Funny…” I looked at the layout once again, this time with these preconceptions and prejudices in mind, but still didn’t see it. “But the third floor does have this room. The AV room…”

“That’s because the layout is wrong. Wrong, or well, I did draw these to reflect reality, but the actual AV room isn’t this long. You must have noticed that it’s drawn about one-and-a-half times longer compared to the surrounding rooms.”

“Hmmm.”

True, maybe it did look that way compared to the classrooms around it─the AV room I’d used a number of times during my time as a student wasn’t this large. It still didn’t seem like an impermissibly large error, though… And it wasn’t as if Ogi had drawn her plans with the kind of serious measuring tools they used on a construction site. She’d probably overlooked a classroom on one of the floors, or got her units wrong, or made some other kind of error that manifested in the AV room getting a little longer.

“What’s that? You’re not doubting me, are you? Oh, that really hurts.”

“I know you don’t like me enough to be wounded by me doubting you.”

“No, I’m quite enamored with you─I have a thing for easily tricked fools.”

Casually calling me a fool again… It’d be one thing if she was contemptuous, the way Senjogahara once was, but given Ogi’s smile, I couldn’t tell if she was being guileless or malicious. It was causing cognitive dissonance.

“I don’t make mistakes. If this is a mistake, I’ll strip down and use my wide-open arms in place of a ruler to remeasure the entire school.”

“Are you always so careless about making promises?”

Me, I’d never promise such a thing, no matter how confident I was.

“It isn’t a mistake…” Ogi paused and chuckled. “If this were a mystery novel, a floor plan not lining up with reality would, in most cases, mean there’s a hidden room. Now, what should we do? What if there was enough space here for an entire room stuffed full of treasure?”

“Hidden treasure at a school? And I doubt it’d become ours just because we found it.”

“You need to dream a little─kids studying for exams turn into such realists.”

“Even if it wasn’t a mistake on your part when you were drawing these, wouldn’t it make sense to assume it’s a mistake on the builders’ part? In other words, it’s dead space just buried in concrete─”

I didn’t recall there being any concrete wall next to the AV room─but if you asked me what it did look like, I couldn’t tell you. All you really need to know as a student is the location of your homeroom.

“Maybe. Of course, that would be best. No, it’d be best if it were stuffed full of treasure, but I’d be fine if it were stuffed full of concrete. But if…” Saying something improper, or imprudent, seemed to excite Ogi so much that she could barely hold herself back. “If this is some kind of aberrational phenomenon─we ought to look into it before anyone gets hurt.”

“…”

My honest impression─was that she was jumping to conclusions. Yes, it was strange that the layout didn’t line up with reality, but you couldn’t go straight from that to an aberrational phenomenon. Even her hidden-room theory was more believable─though maybe you could find an aberration like that if you dug through the literature.

And anyway, Shinobu would notice if there was something like that at our school─in fact, how could Oshino not have caught on as early as spring break? Yeah, he’d definitely say, I don’t like it when people blame everything on aberrations as soon as something strange happens.

I couldn’t dismiss her opinion out of hand, though, precisely because she was Oshino’s niece─and because the two or so people who’d surveyed every inch of Naoetsu High when they entered, namely Tsubasa Hanekawa and Hitagi Senjogahara, hadn’t said a thing about this dead space.

If it really existed─whether it had anything to do with aberrations or not─Ogi had spotted something unusual immediately after transferring in like it was obvious, when not only Tsubasa Hanekawa, who knew everything, and Hitagi Senjogahara, at the height of her desperate self-preservation, hadn’t.

This fact─no, it was only a possibility at this point, but I wasn’t so dry that my curiosity wasn’t piqued by the possibility.

“Even if it’s an aberration, we don’t know that it’s harmful…but I suppose I do agree, we should look into it just in case,” I said, prudently and a little too turgidly. I didn’t want her to think that I was hopping straight onto an underclassman’s proposal; I wanted to keep up the appearances I no longer cared to with Kanbaru.

“Aw, that’s great. I knew I could count on Araragi-senpai. Please come and meet me today after school, then. Visiting a third-year classroom makes me nervous, you know?”

How cute of her, and unlike Kanbaru. She was effectively telling a senior she’d only just met to come to her, which was rude, but I didn’t even notice.

“Okay, I just need to come to your classroom? But this can’t go too late, okay? I might get assassinated if someone mistakenly thinks that I’m off having fun after school with one of my juniors.”

“I won’t keep you long, of course. Maybe fifteen minutes? That should be more than enough time to realize it’s nothing. It’ll only take a minute.”

Or fifteen, Ogi said, looking cheery. Seeing her act this way made me think that all the talk about floor plans and aberrations was nothing more than an excuse. Maybe this girl, at a brand-new school where she didn’t know people, just wanted to get along with an indirect acquaintance like me, I thought conceitedly─of course, the truth was something else.

Fifteen minutes wasn’t anywhere near enough for our investigation─and I still didn’t know how long it would take.