Full summary: Seasons change. Flowers wilt and bloom. To the earth, the difference between a land blanketed in white and a world of sweltering heat is little more than the blink of an eye. Timid Mana Satou joins the light music club seeking refuge from this ever-changing world, but it only starts spinning faster...

Welcome, and thanks for clicking! It's the first story I'm submitting here, so I'm a little nervous... But for now, let's just read the story and save all the boring talk for the end! Yay!

Chapter 1: Invitation

Mana Satou started into the sky absently. The sunshine was warm, and the rooftop breeze was sweetly-scented. For what might have been the billionth time that day, he questioned his decision to transfer. Or, rather, he questioned acting on his mother's insistence that he transfer. After receiving a promotion halfway through Mana's freshman year, Natsuki had been fervently researching different high schools nearby enough for her son to attend. Sakuragaoka High School, she found, boasted impressive figures for its rates of college acceptance, and with the school opening its doors to male students for the first time since its founding, it seemed the perfect choice.

Although Mana was not particularly fond of the idea of transferring after only his freshman year, he had not been too forceful in voicing his opposition. Natsuki, he understood, treasured him as a living momento of her late husband, Masato. She worked long hours in an environment Mana knew his mother detested so she could afford the best future possible for her dear son. In focusing too closely on the future, however, Natsuki was inclined to losing sight of the present.

Mana's thoughts were interrupted by a soft voice which he soon recognized as his own. He stopped himself, blushing with worry that someone might have overheard. Upon realizing that he was surely the only person that would hear, he gave himself to song, his words finding the melody of their own volition.

Thoughts of his previous school flooded his mind as he sang. The institution had admitted only male students until a few years prior, and while the school had increased its female enrollment, the number of girls in attendance was modest at best, constituting around one fifth of the school's total population. The difference between the two schools was so stark that it was nearly overwhelming; although Sakuragaoka was eager to receive male applicants, Mana's observation during the welcoming ceremony revealed scarcely more than a dozen pairs of pants among a veritable sea of skirts. His former school had used music to promote itself to its prospective female students, and Mana had participated in the small band due to his prowess with the keyboard. Retrospectively, Mana was immensely glad that Aoi Ookai, with whom he had attended middle school, had forced him to join. It was through those performances that Mana became friends with Yuki Suzuki and had come to know the sanctuary that was the stage.

What should have been a brilliant crescendo trailed off into a whisper as the boy realized his only friends and his only sanctuary had been stolen from him. Suddenly Mana found that the pleasant spring weather did not agree with him, and he turned to return to the school building. He froze, finding his path blocked by a certain obstacle of the female persuasion, short sienna hair and wide bronze eyes constituting her immediately recognizable features. Mana could feel the blood leaving his face. It was a bad idea after all, he decided, to sing anywhere but in his own home. To make matters worse, the girl's expression was unreadable. It was impossible to tell whether or not she had been listening. Mana's heart nearly stopped altogether as she opened her mouth to speak.

"Are you a monster?"

The boy stared, unsure if had understood her words properly. His company must have noticed the confusion on his face, for she repeated herself.

"You're a monster, aren't you?"

Mana's head spun with a thousand thoughts before he was finally able to isolate a sensible reply.

"Why are you asking that?" There it was—a good, normal response, even if the question was anything but. The girl's face contorted in thought, her brow furrowing and a contemplative pout appearing on her lips.

"You were singing just now, right?" she asked. Mana nodded slightly in reply. "Well," the girl continued, "it was painful to listen to. Since it's not normal for a song to make someone's body hurt, then it must be some kind of power, right? And anyone who uses power that hurts others is a monster!" She thrust forward an accusatory index finger, as if doing so would validate her point.

Mana was momentarily rendered unable to as much as think. Though it was true he had never actually demonstrated his singing voice in front of anyone, surely it was not so bad as to cause physical pain. Such logical thoughts, however, escaped him, and his mind was filled only with the instinct to hide. Uttering a brief apology in a quiet voice, he pushed past the girl, who stared after him in a mixture of confusion and distaste, and made his way down the stairs. He walked through the halls slowly, almost staggeringly, and somehow found the school's auditorium. The room was dim and occupied by only a few people; it was not quite the ideal refuge, but the presence of a staged served as a small comfort to Mana. He took a seat in one of the back corners, far from any of the room's other inhabitants, and leaned back, fixing his gaze on the high, dark ceiling.

Maybe she's just crazy, he wondered absently, desperate to bolster his fleeting confidence. Listen to a person singing and call them a monster… Who would do that? Mana inverted his position, folding his arms across his knees and lowering his head. I'm no better, to decide that she's crazy because she called me a monster. The word repeated in his mind endlessly, drowning out all other awareness. Mana failed to notice the increasingly loud drone of conversation that slowly filled the auditorium, and he did not perceive the energetic voice, amplified by a microphone, announcing the beginning of a performance. What finally garnered his attention was the sound of a guitar. His head snapped up as the stage exploded in a burst of light and sound.

Mana stared fixated on the five girls at the front of the auditorium. They played enthusiastically, their eyes bright and their smiles wide. They were all genuinely having fun up on that stage, and it showed both in their dispositions and in their music. Dazedly Mana became aware of his own desire to stand there with them and perform at their side, just as he had with Aoi and Yuki. He listened intently to every note, chord, and word that reached him, and his previous worries fled him as he lost himself to their songs. The audience erupted into applause as the concert came to an end, the noise of the cheers surpassed only by the voice of one of the girls as she seized the microphone and shouted into it.

"The light music club is the best, so join us already!"

It was an invitation on which Mana was eager to act.

Aaaand end! Did you make it all the way down here, I wonder? I'm grateful if you did! Now that you're here, I'd like to say a few things about the story in general...

1.) I understand that this whole "put male characters into the K-ON universe even though Sakuragaoka is an all girls school" angle has been done, but I don't want to let that deter me. I'm doing my best not to copy ideas from those stories, but of course you can't expect me to find and read them all just so I can more preparedly avoid similarities, so if similarities DO appear you can rest assured that it wasn't my intent. Anyway, if you're going to judge me for using this idea, that's fine. I won't stop you. But if everyone purposely avoided using similar premises, a lot of great stories would never be written. So I'mma roll with it.
2.) Yes, Mana is a girl's name. The thing is, before I even conceived this story, the character "Mana" appeared in my dreams on two different occasions, so I thought I'd thank him for giving me such interesting dreams and use him as a character. To be fair, there's actually a reason why he's named Mana even though it's a girl's name. It'll come up eventually, I'm sure.
3.) Yes, Mana is a major wuss. I'm trying really hard to distinguish his personality from Mio's, though, so they shouldn't end up too similar.
4.) Yes, Mana can play keyboard. That doesn't mean he'll be overshadowing Mugi, though. The actual instrument he uses will be kept secret for now but should make its appearance soon enough.
5.) Although I'm doing my best to make everything make sense, one thing I've been unable to resolve is timing. The time frame is such that Yui and friends are second year students and Azusa is a freshman, but somehow Azusa has already been a member for a while even though logically she and Mana entered the school at the same time. I'm really sorry for this one slip, but please just bear with me on this one as starting the story with them as seniors and Azusa as a second year essentially ruins everything I've planned so far. It's a good example of my infamous lack of foresight, let me tell you...
6.) There are probably a lot of things that don't make sense after this chapter. For once, though, I've managed to plan ahead quite a bit, so everything will come together sooner or later.
7.) The length is a little... Hrrmmm. In that past I used to force myself to reach at least 3000 words per chapter, and this clocked in at less than half that. However, writing in a way that feels natural to me without worrying about length will help me to push out new chapters faster, so I hope these short chapters aren't too much of a turn-off! (Of course, I'll never do something like... submit a single paragraph. Each chapter will have at least a satisfying amount of content.)
8.) On the subject of romance, ahhh... I'm not sure at the moment. I might set it up so that there's room for romance later on if I feel so inclined, but it's not really in the plans at the moment.
9.) The plot is character driven, meaning it focuses more on the development of the characters rather than the development of the situations. I feel this type of plot is suitable for a slice-of-life anime like K-ON, but I'll also be working to include interesting subplots in hopes that it doesn't get too boring.

(That list started at only four points long, and then it grew and grew and grew...) Bearing all that in mind, this is the first time I've written anything since tenth grade as well as the first time I've ever written anything for the K-ON universe. So, feedback and critique are greatly appreciated! Thanks again for reading, and I hope you'll read the next chapter as well!

About that next chapter... Back to writing for me...