Chapter Text
"This is so unfair!" I yelled at the top of my lungs, earning bewildered looks from the people in the school's cafeteria. "So what we only have four members now!? I bet there's a bunch of unused clubrooms, can't they just give us one if we promise to get the fifth member later?"
I vented my frustrations to my senpais while angrily munching on my homemade koppe pan. We - that is me, Yuuki Setsuna, Emma Verde and Konoe Kanata (who was sleeping collapsed on the table and not contributing to our conversation in any way) - were having one of our so-called 'strategy meetings' during a lunch break. Lately however, these meetings mostly involved complaining about the lack of our progress in forming the School Idol Club.
"I'm sorry, Kasumi-san, but I'm afraid rules are rules," replied Setsuna-senpai, sitting next to me. "I tried negotiating with the student council, but they wouldn't budge. And besides, if we aren't capable of recruiting just one more person, then are we really fit to be school idols?"
"She's right, Kasumi-chan," added the transfer student from abroad, Emma-senpai. "Let's just do our best, I'm sure everything will work out just fine."
"Seriously, how come there's no School Idol Club in this school!?" I continued, ignoring those two. "Nijigasaki is supposed to be famous for having, like, hundreds of clubs, so why don't they have the one that actually matters!? This is totally false advertising! We should go ahead and just sue the school!" My plan was perfectly sound, but the two looked at me like I was an idiot. Finally, Setsuna-senpai broke the silence.
"How did you even come up with that idea?" she wondered with a heavy sigh. "The club doesn't exist because nobody formed it yet, the school has nothing to do with it."
"But isn't that weird?" I shot back. "We're supposed to be living in the golden era of school idols - pretty much every school in Japan has them, just not ours!"
As I said that, another great idea came to me.
"Wait, what if we just transfer to another school? That way we can join an existing group instead of trying to form a new one. Hehe, Kasumin is a real genius, isn't she?"
For some reason, my proposition was met with silence. The two senpais were just staring at me with blank faces (while the third one was yet to show any signs of life).
"Please, let's be serious here…" Setsuna-senpai said after letting out another sigh.
"Come on, Kasumi-chan, it's too early to be giving up like this. All things considered, we've made some decent progress. It shouldn't take us too long to find one more person," Emma-senpai offered with a smile.
"I'm not giving up! That was obviously a joke!" I tried defending myself. "Kasumin never gives up," I quietly added, mostly as a reminder to myself.
"That's the spirit!" the foreigner praised me with a smile.
She was right. Finding one more member should have been easy. After all, Nijigaku was a big school with at least a thousand students. That's a thousand potential members, and we only needed to convince one of them to join.
If only things were that simple…
Funnily enough, gathering our existing members had proven to be a surprisingly trivial task. On my first day here after learning that the club I wanted to join didn't even exist, I'd gone to the student council room to start the club myself and learned about Setsuna-senpai, who had similar plans, from the president. After that, the two of us had started working together by making a bunch of recruitment posters and asking random students to join us.
Soon enough, we'd managed to recruit Kanata-senpai, our resident Sleeping Beauty, who'd decided to join us practically on a whim. From the moment we'd met it had been clear that her strange sleep schedule would become a problem for us eventually, but we weren't really in a position to be picky. And in the second week of school, Emma-senpai had arrived all the way from Europe just to become a school idol in Japan. At that point, I'd been fully convinced that forming the club was only a matter of time.
But then a week had passed and we weren't any closer to our objective. I'd tried inviting my classmates and random students alike, but every single one of them had an excuse or two ready for me. Some of them had already joined a club that interested them, some were convinced that they weren't fit to be idols and wouldn't listen to me when I told them they only needed to believe in themselves… There was also the less pleasant kind of students - the ones that would straight up laugh at me for inviting them, saying that idols are 'kinda cringe' or 'soo last decade'. They were obviously pissing me off, but I'd decided not to waste my time worrying about them.
No matter how I looked at our situation, the truth was this: our methods weren't bearing any fruit. So unless we wanted to be stuck at the start line for the rest of the school year, we had no choice but to come up with a better plan. Or more specifically, I had to come up with it since I was supposed to be their leader. Racking my brain looking for another brilliant idea, I suddenly remembered Emma-senpai's words from before, as if I needed some time to fully process them…
It's too early to be giving up.
That's right, that was my problem. I was giving up too quickly. So what if they were already in another club? There was no rule saying you can't join more than one. So what if they weren't interested in school idols or even hated them? I just had to show them how amazing they were.
This was my chance. A chance to prove that Kasumin, the youngest member here, was fit to be the president of our club.
With newfound resolve, I quickly finished my lunch (almost choking on it) and abruptly stood up, surprising the senpais and even waking up the sleeping one, who started looking around, confused.
"The next time I find a girl that would make a great idol, I'll make her join even if it's the last thing I'll do!" I proudly proclaimed my new plan, but my companions didn't seem very enthusiastic about it.
"Um, you can't just force someone to join us, it has to be their choice…" Said Setsuna-senpai, looking at me with an unamused expression.
"It's nice that you're fired up, Kasukasu, but if it really is the last thing you'll do then we'll still be stuck with four members. By the way, did I miss anything important?" Kanata-senpai finally decided to join our conversation just to call me by the name I hated so much.
"I told you to stop calling me that! I'm not Kasukasu, I'm Kasumin! Got it!?" Telling her that was probably pointless at this point, but that didn't mean I would stop trying. I've been stuck with that nickname for a long time now, and if there was even a slim chance of getting rid of it I would keep trying as long as I could.
"Now now, calm down you two, fighting will get us nowhere", Emma-senpai intervened as she often had to do around us. "Kasumi-chan, it's nice that you're motivated, but Setsuna-chan is right."
"I'm not trying to force anyone into anything, okay? I'll just find someone that seems like decent idol material and just convince her to become one, no matter what!" I explained my idea in plain words to clear up that weird misunderstanding, but the senpais still didn't seem convinced.
In the end, whether they agreed with my plan or not was not important. What mattered was getting results, and I wouldn't get any sitting there with them doing nothing. Which is why I, not giving the girls a chance to object again, put my hands on my hips, puffed out my chest with pride and made a very bold declaration.
"I'm going to find our fifth member today or I'm not Kasumin!"
After a moment of stunned silence, Kanata-senpai opened her mouth.
"Does that mean we can all start calling you Kasukasu tomorrow?"
"No you can't! I said I'll find her, so I'm going to find her!"
Looking at their faces, I could tell they were still not taking me seriously, but I just didn't care about that anymore.
"Just you wait, you'll all be praising the cute Kasumin in a couple of hours!" With that said, I grabbed my bag and left the cafeteria in a hurry, not giving them a chance to discourage me any further.
It didn't take me long to remember that I still had afternoon classes and that I'd already been rejected by literally every single one of my classmates. In other words, I didn't have much time - as usual, we would spend around two hours after classes trying to recruit new members and then meet up in the cafeteria again. I briefly considered skipping the classes, but decided it's better to sit through them while ignoring the teachers as much as possible while considering my options.
Where should I look for our new member? What kind of person do we even need? How do I know that they're quality idol material? How do I convince them to join?
I spent most of my time pondering those questions, but I couldn't find an answer to even one of them.