01000: A beautiful sight

It was really jarring, listening to the security briefing. The old man in front of us had a long white beard and wore a black military beret with the school’s emblem on it. He marched – as it seemed – unconsciously from the left to the right side of the stage as he flipped through the slides of his presentation. There were many bad upscaled images that seemed to consist entirely out of compression artifacts, watermarks from stock imagery and very, VERY authentically smiling people. The longer his performance lasted, the more I wondered where the sounds of marching drums were coming from.

After the ship had left the harbor, we were asked into a big room to listen to a few people. The guy who turned out to be a former general of the Japanese navy was now the director of security at Ineigaikan. He told us about the measures that were taken to protect the school. The Japanese secret service had a whole division just for the school and worked out a whole masterplan about how information leaks were prevented. He also went into much detail about how we were supposed to keep juicy facts a secret to friends and family. The gist of it was to shut your mouth and pretend to visit a ‘normal’ IT high school in Yokohama so nobody would ask further.

The guy had been talking for what felt like hours. At least that was what I guessed. My watch had been taken from them, so I could only gauge the actual time. I had noticed that the catamaran had sped up after we left the bay of Tokyo. By now we must already be several kilometers away from the coast.

Finally, the guy thanked the audience and left the stage. The applause was rather reserved but started to swell as the next speaker came into view. It was a girl that had been sitting behind the teachers at the side. She wore a school uniform consisting of a black blazer with a white shirt underneath. The folded edges around her collar were set off in a light neon green, her ribbon was blue. The blazer had the school emblem attached to one side and was tightly cut around the hips in a way that accentuated her slender figure. Her pleated skirt featured a tartan pattern with black, grey and the same neon green as in the jacket. Long, brunette hair.

A murmuring went mainly through the male part of the audience. I smiled. She looked even more beautiful in her uniform. With graceful steps she walked up to the lectern and placed a tablet on it, arranged it with her small hands. I remembered when she pushed them on my mouth, preventing me to say the name of the school.

“My name is Rukami Arano. I am the student council president of Ineigaikan.” Her red eyes shot up at the audience. Still sharp enough to cut through steel. Fujinami-kun never said that she had such an important role inside the school. I assumed that this had probably been classified as well. “As a representative for the student body, I also want to welcome all of you at our school and provide you with some handy information about the campus and our Ineigaikan App. Please do not hesitate to talk to me if you have any questions.”

Her eyes wandered through the crowd in front of her as she reeled off her speech. It did not take her long to meet eyes with me – apparently one of the advantages of my red hair. However, she instantly looked down at the tablet when I slightly nodded in greeting. After that she desperately evaded my view, probably to not get off track.

Her speech took only a fraction of the time relative to the one before but earned ten times as much applause. After this had also been done, we received the school devices. Everyone got a smartphone with the mentioned app installed on it and a laptop. I put the phone back into the right pocket of my pants and threw the strap of the laptop bag over my shoulder, as I looked for Arano-san – well Arano-senpai from now on I supposed. I should at least exchange a few words with her. When I finally sighted her surrounded by a whole crowd of guys and girls, I quickly scraped the thought. She seemed to struggle with them enough already. I didn’t want to bother her right now. At a later point there would probably be enough time to chat a bit.

I walked into the direction of the upper deck again. Most students were still in the room below, conversing with one another. Out here it was empty. I slowly walked along the side corridor and up the stairs to the front. As I made my way up, I could already see the sky. The clouds had scattered, and the early noon sun was reflecting in the wavy surface of the sea. There were hues of azure to turquoise blue I didn’t even know existed. My jaw dropped when I made the last step onto the ship’s front. A gust of wind blew right at me and brought the salty scent of the sea with it. We were already close enough to recognize the island in much detail. It was bigger than I had expected.

I rushed to the railing at the front of the boat, clenching my hands around it as I watched the sight in awe. There were bright, sandy beaches that trailed along the rocky coast. They led far out into the sea to a few underwater sandbanks, that made the water appear in a lighter shade underneath. The ocean waves crashed on the sand and washed white foam onto the shores, where they lost their way between several huge boulders and smaller rocks.

A cliff face grew upwards and led into a dense forest that featured several vibrant nuances of lush green trees and other greenery. Above all this rested a mountain in the back of the island. It was not that high for a mountain, had a big plateau at its top, a building with a huge satellite dish and a radio mast.

The school’s other buildings had been speckled throughout the lower parts of the green panorama. They looked modern with a lot of concrete and glass incorporated but there were also many wooden elements. The boat headed for the left side of the island. Behind a lighthouse the harbor of the island appeared. I could see it over an elongated peninsula which reached out of the water like an arm that wanted to protect the vast inner bay.

Three piers and a square with a bulk of big buildings and parks slowly came into view as the boat passed along the peninsula. They were naturally embedded into the landscape and hid behind several layers of trees. A few bigger structures raised out of the forest at the side. If anything, this looked like a huge holiday village.

I felt joy spark up in my chest. This beautiful place would be my home for the next three years. Here I would learn, make friends and maybe I could even meet the girl I once lost.

“That look reminds me a bit of myself. There is nothing like seeing Ineigaikan for the first time.”

I turned around. It was Arano-senpai. There was a … smile on her face, as she took in the view. I hadn’t noticed how she and a lot of the other students had appeared behind me. All of them gauged at the beautiful sight. I smiled. “Hey! It’s great, seeing you again,” I said.

“It is really rude to ignore someone you know.” She crossed her arms, not devoting me a glance.

“I didn’t want to interrupt your conversations with all the others,” I explained and also looked back at how the ship slowly drifted into the enclosed harbor.

She puffed. “More like you didn’t want to save me from their attempts at hitting on me.”

“I was not intending to get murdered by some jealous schoolmates at the very first day. Also don’t be mad at them. You look absolutely gorgeous in your uniform.”

She looked at me with slight surprise in her voice. “Not you as well …!”

I laughed a bit. “Don’t worry. It’s just an honest compliment, no hitting on you.”

“Good … uhm, by the way: Fujinami-kun told me that he wanted to show you the school grounds.”

I nodded. “Yeah. He said he would wait for me at the harbor.”

“Sadly, something for his club spontaneously came up, so he asked me if I could do it instead. And since I am mostly done with the preparations for this school year, I have nothing to do anyways. Also, I still owe him one so … yeah,” she explained fiddling with her fingers.

That last part sounded pretty rehearsed to me. I sighed inwardly. Seems like I escaped the matchmaking arts of my little sister and fell right into the hands from her male equivalent. I imagined Fujinami-kun laughing with a sinister grin about how his genius plan panned out.

“Oh, you would do that?” I turned towards her and bowed politely. “That is really kind, thank you very much.”

After the ship had docked, we got all checked a second time with all the school’s repertoire had to offer and I received my luggage back. Even Arano-senpai was checked thoroughly despite being the student council president.

A few people also waited at the pier. From what I recognized mostly friends, a few could potentially be siblings and I even saw a couple. I guess that came with the fact that an invitation from a student or member of the staff was mandatory. People knew each other here.

We first headed for the dormitories to bring my luggage into my room.

“What are you interested in seeing?” Arano-senpai asked.

“Uh … the general things would be great. Where I can buy food and where classes are. Plus, I also need a uniform. In the mail they wrote that the only store I can buy them in is on the campus. Would be great if we could also pay that a visit. And then … do you have anything else you can recommend?”

She sighed. “I see. This will be quite a long day.”

“Uh … sorry, I don’t want to be a bother to you. It’s okay if we just keep it with the general things. Maybe you can show me everything on a map.”

“Not happening. I want to be a good hostess.”

On our way to my dorm Arano-senpai told me about the campus in general. They did not have one huge dorm house but rather a whole bunch of smaller buildings of varying sizes that were meant to accommodate not more than 30 students each. It somehow even cemented my hypothesis about this whole school island looking like a holiday village. Some of the dorms were just for girls, others just for boys and there also were a few mixed ones – whatever the students and their parents were comfortable with. I choose to be fine with either option but somehow had a premonition on what type the decision would fall.

“Fujinami-kun somehow got a few wheels turning and convinced the teachers to put you into his quarter.” This guy really seemed to play with people like they were nothing but pieces on a game board.

“Let me guess. His girlfriend is also in the dorm.”

Arano-senpai laughed. “You had the possibility to get to know him closely, as I see.”

The dorm was located at the edge of the school’s campus, at a higher area with quite a nice view over the bay in the distance. A little far from the beaten track, but still in a good shape. The building was one of the smaller dorms we had passed by – housing ten people at most. The entrance assembled a big concrete box with borderless windows at the side in which the staircase could be seen. The rest of it was built like a modern representation of a bigger Japanese styled house.

“Pretty modern,” I said, looking at it, as we went up to the entrance at the back.

We got up to the bell plate. It was made from steel, had a button and a squared symbol that I identified to represent the area for a wireless scanner above.

“Take a look at your campus app,” Arano-senpai requested. She held her arms behind the back.

I put my suitcase next to me and took out the phone. I found the icon right on the home screen. It looked a bit like the one from the business card and on the arcade machine. The one with the three blocks towering into the sky. This one however was a bit more colorful and featured detailed variations of the green shade form Arano-senpai’s school uniform. I looked at her. The same emblem was embroidered onto the side of the uniform. One of the blocks had a black background, the central one grey and the left one white. The green ones and zeroes floated across the blocks.

“The school logo is divided into the three main fractions of hacking: Black hats, white hats and grey hats,” Arano-senpai explained.

I always found this classification a bit odd. It was adapted from old westerns, where the good gunslingers were naturally portrayed with white hats and the bad one with black hats. This also translated the same way. There were the black hat hackers, criminals that tried stealing data, took machines hostage for ransom and normally had bad intents in mind. On the other end there were the white hat or ethical hackers. They tried finding system vulnerabilities to provide insights on how to close them. The grey hats emerged as a mixture of both sides. They hacked into systems without the owner’s consent and presented them a list of vulnerabilities, sometimes demanding payment for it.

“Does this mean, that there are people from each faction at this school?”

Arano-senpai nodded. “Yeah, we have different clubs all over the whole spectrum.” She pointed at the bell sign. “You can open the app and hold your phone at the NFC sensor to unlock it.”

I did as she told me. A LED at the reader lighted up, followed by a beeping sound and an electronic whirring.

“Now you can push it open,” she instructed me further.

I gripped the door handle and pushed. In the next moment we stood inside the Genkan.