Chapter Text
A long gray-blue haired girl hastily awakens in her college dorm. Her room is disastrously messy, having piles of empty chip bags and soda cans on the floor, trash bags with dirty laundry in the corner, and tons of unfinished school work scattered around everywhere, as well as on her bed. Her TV is playing a late episode from a romcom, presumably left on from the night before. She’s made zero progress on her late work again, and she has over-the-break school work to do on top of the former as well.
She rubs her eyes, shot with red from getting very few hours of sleep along with another nightmare, she cannot catch a break despite being on one. An aggressive yawn is let out, knowingly frustrated with her awful sleeping habits and nightmares, as well as the deep depression she’s entered that has ruined large portions of her life. This depression has also caused various coping mechanisms that aren’t exactly the most healthy, like drinking alcohol and overworking herself - even though she’s in no condition to work at all. The habits she’s also developed are odd, like talking to herself.
“Jesus… another nightmare, can’t an idol catch a break…”
While not being able to resume idol activities for circa a year, being the start of her sophomore year at University of Tokyo and striving for a major in Chemistry, she clings onto the title in hopes to return to her activities. While she wanted to pursue her idol dreams full-time, she enjoyed it more as something she does on the side when she wants to instead of full-time with a manager due to the overwhelming nature of the idol industry, so she settled to take theatre classes aside from her core classes.
She gets up from her bed hesitantly, stumbling through her trash on the floor as her stomach growls for some form of meal instead of all the junk she eats during the night. Walking through the hallway, she notices a photograph on the floor, wondering how it got there. After picking it up, she makes her way to the small kitchen and places the photograph on the counter. Surprisingly, she has no dirty dishes due to loving the art of cooking, but she wants something simple right now.
She starts fetching a bowl and spoon, along with searching for her favorite cereal and skim milk. She actually ran out of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, so she instead settled for Fruit Loops. Pouring the cereal and milk into the bowl in the morally correct order, she grabs one of the bananas she had in a fruit bowl next to the fridge and slowly peels off the rubber-like texture to get the banana ready for “skinning”, as she calls it. She grabs a knife, cuts the banana up, and puts the pieces into her bowl, ready to eat.
Now, being able to relax, she starts to eat her cereal and uses her free hand to pick up the photograph and look at what it was. It’s a family photo from when she was a second-year in high school. The setting is at a park, with her mom and dad holding her shoulders while smiling. This was the moment she opened up to her strict parents about the idol activities she participated in, of which her parents accepted her for who she is. The girl smiles for a moment, then flips the photograph over, reading text written on it. “We miss you! Hope to hear from you soon. - The Nakagawas.”
That’s right. Her parents are overseas on vacation currently, which is why she had to get special permissions from the housing services to let her stay in her dorm over break. She had a hard time convincing them that she had too much work to do to go on vacation with them, which isn’t false in retrospect, but it implies she’s doing well in academia… which she’s been burning out of recently. She needs to get back on top of her studies. Quickly. Immediately.
She decided to do something today. Any bit of studying isn’t going to be done in the state her dorm is in currently, so she thinks on where to go. The library is too quiet as well, she’ll lose focus quickly. She settles on the cliche location, a nearby cafe. Looking up cafes in the area on her phone, she finds one where she only needs to walk merely 5 minutes named “LeBlanc”. It’s a new location of a cafe from some “nowhere” city, so it should be a decent place to get coffee and study.
Grabbing her late work and stuffing it all into her school bag, she’s motivated to make her parents proud by working her way out of a school slump and getting her work done.