Surreptitiously Slacking at Seven Stars (Rui/Brittany)

Class was boring. Soooooo boring. Rui did not particularly need a great deal of excitement in life. He didn't need some grand adventure. He could find books, spreadsheets, and even people-watching interesting enough. But this? Nothing was worse than this.

Class at Seven Stars Academy was potentially the most boring thing he had ever done. Well, presumably the recovery from his operation was more boring, but he was thankfully shut down during almost all of it. But this? He had to be entirely conscious during this. Lest he be called on. And this was bad.

Perhaps the material might have been interesting to a normal student. But Rui remembered everything he had once learned in high school. And this? This was the exact same material, albeit considerably easier. He finally understood the idiom, "watching paint dry."

So instead, he checked out a manga from the school library. Or the literature club. One of them. He had joined the literature club before realizing that he was now the only member.

After cutting out an indent in his textbook to hide it in - he surely wasn't ever going to use the textbook for its intended purpose - he could now surreptitiously read manga in class.

So thus here Rui was. Sitting in a corner of the library during the lunch break, reading a melodramatic, sparkly shoujo manga about an unpopular girl in high school being bullied by the entire class, sans her nice childhood friend.

He hadn't apparently made any friends at Seven Stars. Which was no surprise. He had few friends his age or younger even before the operation. This was another step beyond that. Furthermore, he had no need to really eat food. Which besides not having to work, left another gaping chasm in his life (snatching away his only real hobby).

Rui judged that the childhood friend was even-on odds of either being the ultimate love interest, or actually the mastermind of the entire bullying saga. He wasn't sure what kind of manga this was.

Finally, he couldn't judge how melodramatic it was. Was bullying that common in high school? Rui still wasn't quite sure what a "normal" high school life was. In his case, it was a student reading manga alone in the library.

Rui was just getting to the part where the protagonist found all of her slippers torn up by scissors by the evil girl clique when the last thing he expected interrupted him - a disheveled girl in a cheerleader uniform, dripping with sweat.

Rui noticed two things. First, he liked her style. Anything that threw off other people was a plus in his mind. Second, he was fascinated primarily by one thing of hers - sweat. One side effect of the operation was that Rui...did not sweat (or cry) anymore. Not that he often did either (except on command in limited circumstances), but he was wondering if his brain was adapting in strange ways to be automatically interested in things that he couldn't do anymore. Sweat had become a remarkably nostalgic smell. This phenomenon partially reminded him of how people who lose senses sharpen their other four senses. Anyways, this girl was...really sweaty. How fascinating.

Rui turned towards the girl, smiled, and clapped his hands together, while leaning forward far enough to just look slightly up into her chin. "Wow! Really! Super coincidence! Never expected anyone else who also gets the universal allure of Hanako's struggle to find true l-" Oh yes, that was the nostalgic smell of sweat. In contrast, Rui tended to smell all day exactly like what he put on in the morning. Which in this day, would be a mix of strawberries and vanilla. It used to be just vanilla. But vanilla by itself is just weird. So he added a strawberry scent in.

However, Rui's entire upper body then quickly lurched away, as he put up his hands in a faux-kung-fu pose that made it apparent he knew nothing about actual kung-fu, "Oh no! That means I have to defend myself against possible spoilers! Sha-sha-sha!"

Rui quickly dropped his intensely defensive, but not quite serious body language, before putting his fingers in a shushing-motion in front of his lips, "Anyways, no spoilers, okay?" He gave off a wink and head tilt, "I just got to Volume 17, after Kaede jumps off the roof, so shit's getting real lol" Rui in fact did say "lol" in actual face-to-face speech.

Rui gave a smile and flashed her a thumbs-up right when she shared his burning hatred of spoilers. "Exactly! Someone finally gets it! Being surprised is the best part of reading something! I wish I could do it multiple times! I once tried to tap my head until I forgot my favorite show, but that ended uh, pretty badly.

Rui was not exactly joking. Shortly into his test-period at the facility, Rui tried to "manually" delete two of his pre-operation memories - both a very painful memory and the memory of a show he really liked - for two very different reasons. The result was...very bad, and now a system of automatic cloud back-up exists as a result.

His smile morphed into a relatively pensive look, as he seemed a little confused at Britanny's description of the manga plot. "Oh. That's why she jumped? Oh....oh...in retrospect that seems to make more sense. That's uh, simpler, I guess. Hmm..."

He seemed to flip back into an earlier stage of the manga, before looking up again and chirping out his rather long theory, "I always thought Kaede just really hated her uh small rural hometown setting place - and Hiro's anecdotes about his big city band really uh, acted as a vicarious fantasy for her of an perfect. super fashionable world. So when her childhood friend crush shot her down and crushed on Hiro instead, it was like losing both ropes of hope, a double-betrayal of fantasy."

Rui stroked a piece of his hair after a short pause, and continued with a tone far too chipper and fast for the subject matter, "So like yeah, a suicide is terribad PR for the town and its onsens. And it traumatizes both childhood friend and Hiro. So I thought it was like, revenging on everyone at the same time.

Rui coughed a little, "Oh. So yeah. So I guess depression is simpler. Though I guess I'm uh, probably not an expert on what that feels like?" Rui was telling the truth again. He was...probably naturally chipper. He was activated alongside two other chassises, but both of them apparently intentionally destroyed their mainframes shortly after activation. Then again, maybe that was because he was the type to traumatically force himself to forget sad memories.

Rui seemed oddly contemplative. He didn't like to think about most real life issues, especially real life consequences. But that mindset totally fell to the wayside when it came to analyzing the complex dynamics of shoujo manga. And he supposed just complicated human relationships anyways. People were interesting...even if only from a distance. He couldn't lie - he really did like to see people responded to unexpected things.

"Hmm...living without living in a life. Interesting way of putting it... He didn't find that completely unsympathetic either. In many ways, Rui was missing many of the basic elements of life. Duties, obligation, a mission, goals, and of course that's not even delving into the biological thing which set up the potential argument that he wasn't actually living. Also, his current life of course, primarily consisted of screwing around in school and with hapless people without any particular goal in question. Admittedly though, it was pretty fun doing all of this for the first time.

One thing that surprised Rui was her description of male-male-female friend groups. "Hm. I didn't like know that. So like male friends fight a lot?  Huh, didn't know that. Well, I guess at this point, most of my knowledge of male-male relationships comes from yaoi and that can't be right lol." He said "lol" out loud again.

Rui further listened, "Procrastinated suicide? Oh, I get it. lol. But like kinda thinking, life is just procrastinated death. Not really sure what life means anymore... but yeah, I get it!" He clapped his hands.

Finally, he gave a rather inappropriate laugh, more akin to a subtle giggle, at the girl's last description, "Oh, haha, that would be devious writing. Though uh, that sounds actually better to me than a normal rejection. It's more like a 'its not you, it's me thing' instead of a 'booo you suck kill yourself bitch' kinda thing. Yay, categorical rejections?"