"Everyone in! Come on now, come on, we have to go." Prying the children away from the pushy or protective parents was probably the hardest part of any trip, Reina thought, watching the ever slightly terrifying presence of Garon Nohr trying to seem loving to little Elise.
"Bye Daddy!" She hugged him and even Elise, who was quite possibly the most cheerful child in the whole school, pulled away quickly from her father.
Reina counted children onto the coach. She needed forty two, but the possibility that someone was late and/or getting up to inappropriate practises was fairly high. Actually, she'd changed her mind. Getting through the trip while making sure none of her students were complained about for inappropriate conduct amongst each other (or, in some rather unfortunate cases with Laslow, members of the judging panel) was the hardest part of the trip.
By the time everyone in the line was on the bus, she had forty and all the adults were here. Well, that was a start. "Who isn't here?" She called into the bus.
"Me!" Chorused at least five smart arse kids before the whole bus burst out into tittering.
"Um, M-Miss Ārī." Reina smiled at Sakura and nodded at her to continue. The girl had her hand up despite being right at the front of the coach. "Hinoka s-said she would, um, she's helping Setsuna with her bag."
"Thank you, Sakura," she said, checking out of the window to see Hinoka struggling towards the coach with Setsuna trailing behind, not helping her friend at all.
"I see it's two of yours," Gunter said, watching the two girls as well. "I hope your choir doesn't hold us back." His words were tinged with humour, probably already predicting her response.
"You can say that when your lot put their hormones to the side," she said, with the sweetest and hopefully most sarcastic smile she could manage. Just next to her, she could see Sakura pretending not to hear and pretending like she wasn't finding it funny and also very strange to hear teachers talk about their students this way.
Gunter was about to reply when Reina was saved by the arrival of the two girls, now sans an overly heavy bag. "I'm sorry I'm late, Miss Ārī!" Hinoka said, and Setsuna echoed with a slightly less meaningful apology. "I was just helping Setsuna with her bag."
"It's okay, we were just getting ready to leave so you're still on time. No register has been taken."
"Thank you," the girl said, dragging her friend towards the middle of the bus to sit with the rest of her group.
From there, Reina stood up and did a quick headcount, ignoring how someone's head had disappeared behind a jacket and just counting them anyway. Then she took a register of her choir (without event, other than the usual too quiet voice of Sakura and Setsuna not responding) and watched with a smug satisfaction on her face for Gunter to see as the chamber choir dissolved into laughter when Felicia responded with a 'yes, miss'. Poor girl, that one would stick around for the next few hours, which was all that was needed to make the journey more irritating than normal.
Then the bus started to pull away from the school, slowly as always, and a huge cheer was let up from the students. She didn't understand why they felt the need to cheer, all these trips gave them was less time to do their homework in their now significantly shorter holiday. They'd do better cheering at the end of the journey when they could get out of the coach that probably held at least forty people they hated by the end of the journey. Such was the joy of traveling with teenagers. Almost all of them were awful, loud and obnoxious.
It took no less than two minutes for someone (Elise) to start singing 'We All Live In A Yellow Submarine', and while everyone groaned, by the time it had gone round for the third time it had a nice five part harmony going for it.
Two hours into the journey, Reina had planned a stop off at a small shopping centre which she had checked in advance had a large enough number of toilets to accommodate them so they could get going again within quarter of an hour.
"Alright, everyone off!" She called. "No bags, we won't be in there long and Mr Mekanikku is staying on the coach so no one will steal anything." Things were more likely to get stolen if they were taken in anyway, and on top of that she wouldn't be able to stop any of the children buying sweets. And that was just what they needed with four hours to go, of course.
Supervising the bags during the toilet stop off was one of the greatest privileges of the journey and one that Yukimura, Gunter and Reina frequently flipped a coin over to decide who got to do it. This was because the bags couldn't be a pain. However, the students definitely could be.
Reina had heard three people scream so far and she damn hoped that they were all her students just having a water fight in the bathroom or something, because if they were members of the public she might have to draft a formal apology again. She also very much hoped that Niles and Corrin would come out of the bathrooms soon, because they'd gone in first and half the students were now drifting their way back to the coach in the sort of tired way that students who'd gotten up too early walked when they'd been in one place too long. She didn't want to have to send Gunter in to tell them to hurry up for fear of discovering what they could manage to do in a public toilet.
Why oh why did she choose to teach the arts when she could have just been a Maths teacher? What had she done to curse herself with a group of teenagers who couldn't keep their hands to themselves? Questions like these ran through her mind during the ten minutes she spent standing outside the toilets counting students in and out. Thankfully, Corrin and Niles decided to grow up for once and emerged looking only slightly more ruffled than they had before (traveling in a coach covered for those kinds of actions, she supposed) and they even restrained themselves to hand holding while they meandered back to the coach.
Reina sighed in relief as everyone was counted on correctly. No one had gone missing yet. That was a good sign.
Four hours in was when they stopped just outside a park to go and eat the lunches that the children had been told to bring. However, as predicted, and as it happened every time they had one of these trips, some of them had been 'too busy' to pack the lunches, which meant they'd forgotten, their parents had left them with no food in the house (that would have been Beruka, she imagined), or they knew that they'd be allowed to go with a teacher to the nearest shop to buy some crisps and sandwiches. Yukimura had pulled this duty today, and Reina waved him off with a smile as Beruka, Odin (burdened by a great famine) and Scarlet trailed after him to find some lunch.
Of course, staying in the park with thirty nine teenagers between three adults was also not the most forgiving job that Reina had done. She had, for once, dared to hope that she would be able to eat in peace, but that was not the case. For the first part, a handful of the girls had decided to come and sit with her and talk about various things that were obviously picked so she could have a conversation with them too (she appreciated the effort, but watching Laslow was incredibly challenging without distractions), and for the second part she was trying to keep up with a conversation that she couldn't tell was a serious argument or just friendly bickering between the friends not friends, Takumi and Leo (it took a few minutes for her to catch up and realise they were talking about books that had endings they hated).
Thankfully, her students were forgiving and comparatively calm for once. It wasn't uncommon for her to have to yell at them while she was supervising a lunch break, but they were quite tame today. There was very little squabbling between groups, Laslow pretty much kept his hands to himself and there was even minimal kissing (she did have to stop the revoltingly sweet action of Kamui trying to feed Azura some strawberries, but only because she was worried it would devolve into something a little too intimate for the middle of a public park).
Yukimura even informed her that none of the students he'd had to buy lunch with had been a trouble, which was a huge relief, as Odin in particular was known for creating quite a spectacle when the moment seized him. In fact, Reina dared to think, maybe this trip wouldn't be so stressful after all.
Half an hour later she had changed her mind. This was because she had forgotten possibly the most important piece of equipment for this trip: earplugs. While Shura sat to her left with an uneasy feeling of peace, she had to deal with the blend of whatever was playing towards the back of the bus (Gunter said that it was called screamo and Reina told him that no one in her choir had bad taste like Peri's) and the almost equally awful kpop coming from where Subaki and Hinata were sitting.
It was a truly painful hour and a half full of cursing and terrible music that just didn't stop. Within that time she was sure she heard Niles' name being shouted a good thirty times and Laslow was mentioned at least twice as frequently. She also had to break up three separate fights between various students and over half the coach received a warning of some kind.
That was business as usual for the Greater London Fortunae Academy choirs, though, and while Reina would much rather have it in many other ways, she did enjoy these trips when she wasn't stuck in a coach with all these teenagers.