The Colorless Cage

White.

That single word defined everything I was experiencing at this very moment.

The entirety of my surroundings were glaringly white. It wasn’t like a sterile hospital white, but rather a hostile void-like white. An absence of anything and everything.

My mind was much the same, but on a different magnitude. I’d call it pure white.

The only thing that broke the continuity of this colorless nothingness was a single black desk placed in the exact center of the room. I was currently standing right in front of it with a dumbfounded look on my face as I struggled to comprehend just what the hell I did to deserve this.

Naturally, nothing came to mind. After all, it was pure white in there.

Before I go any further though, let me rewind time a little bit so you can appreciate just how many stupid decisions I made in the span of a single evening, each of them leading me closer and closer to this cage of alabaster doom.

It all started after I was dragged into Tsubaki-sensei’s lab.

“Ugh, don’t you ever clean up after yourself?” I wrinkled my nose as I looked around the room. Actually, scratch that. Calling it a room would be too much of a stretch. It was more like an active warzone.

The first casualty that caught my eye was a half-eaten bowl of cup noodles. Normally, this wouldn’t have stood out for someone like Tsubaki-sensei who used her lab as her office.

However, this was Tsubaki-sensei. Everything she did had to stand out in one way or another, and it just so happened that her standards for cleanliness were nonexistent.

Unfortunately for me, she’d left this particular bowl of noodles to fester for what smelled like six months. I swear I could see something inside the bowl that wasn’t a noodle, and that certainly wasn’t a good sign.

As for the second casualty, Ichika was unlucky enough to step on it.

The sound of a sickening crunch accompanied with a spine-chilling squelch immediately filled the room as Ichika’s foot landed on top of an unknown entity.

Naturally, she screamed. I would have laughed if not for the very real possibility that she’d just crushed a rat underneath the graveyard of scrapped research theories that we were treading upon.

“There it is!” Tsubaki-sensei cried out triumphantly as she lifted the very possible corpse from underneath the mountain of papers.

Ichika and I immediately backed up, only to simultaneously heave a sigh of relief as Tsubaki-sensei dangled a half-eaten bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich from her hand. That relief immediately turned into disgust once the sandwich’s odor started wafting through the room.

“Alright, what do you want from me?” I asked, trying to get the hell out of this place as soon as possible.

“Why don’t you take a seat first?” Tsubaki-sensei somehow managed to maneuver herself behind her impossibly cluttered desk, gesturing to the two chairs placed in front of it. They were surprisingly spotless, given the state of the rest of the room.

Regardless of how spotless they were, I didn’t want to remain in this godforsaken no man’s land for longer than I needed to. I quickly declined, earning a shrug from Tsubaki-sensei. Ichika rejected the offer as well, earning that same shrug. I didn’t blame her.

“So... That’s the question, isn’t it? What do I want from you? Well, I’ll admit it’s a tough question to answer. I could ask for a multitude of things, but it’s not like you’d actually listen to me. Well, for starters, how about thinking over that date with Mikasa—”

“Denied. Next.”

“Who’s Mikasa?” Ichika prompted.

“Doesn’t matter.”

Tsubaki-sensei smirked. Honestly, for a teacher that was trying to set her colleague up with a student, she should be a lot less amused and a lot more worried about her job being on the line.

“Fine, fine. I suppose we’ll have to talk about it another day.”

“I think you meant ‘we won’t talk about it at all.’”

“Don’t you want to know why I called the two of you here?”

I immediately shut up.

“It’s simple really. I want you to show Ichika ‘round the school and pick up some documents from the library while you’re at it.”

I instantly balked. It wasn’t as if her request was outlandish or anything. Far from it, actually. Her usual requests generally had me running from one end of the campus to the other trying to find people that I’d never even heard of before.

When she first turned me into her errand boy, I thought that her student hunting methods would undoubtedly fail, but every student that I spoke to was ecstatic to hear that Tsubaki-sensei wanted to meet with them.

Clearly, they just weren’t aware of how much of a slob she really was. I mean, she never actually met them in her lab.

“Is that it...?” I blinked at Tsubaki-sensei, my face an amalgamation of surprise and confusion. “You could have just asked me in the classroom!”

“Of course I could’ve. But where’s the fun in that?” The moment her eyes flickered to Ichika’s face, I knew exactly why she brought us here.

Gaaaah! Damnit!!! My school life isn’t a toy for you to screw around with, you good for nothing teacher! Play matchmaker with someone else!

After resigning myself to my fate, I ended up showing Ichika around the school. It wasn’t as bad as I thought since she was silent for the most part aside from the sporadic question here and there.

Honestly, when she wasn’t talking about destroying the world or claiming me as her “knight” while forcing me to do weird shit, she really was beautiful.

All of her movements seemed to be perfectly calculated to bring out the most of her charm. Even though I had the feeling that she wasn’t putting in the least bit of thought into how she was walking, I couldn’t help but be stunned by her grace.

I guess that’s what they mean when they say “When she walks, she’s a lily.”

But that all changed once we reached the clubrooms.

Immediately, she asked me to take her to the karate club and I obliged. This was my first stupid decision of the evening.

If only it was the last.