Umehito Nekozawa was something of a riddle of a man, and that was just the way he preferred it. From the black wig which masked his Russian ancestry, to the delightfully comforting jet black and violet cloak which swaddled him like a newborn in a pitch-dark manger, he had lived his whole life in darkness. Cut off from those he didn't allow into his inner circle, cut off from normal cultural and societal mores, and deliberately severed from normality. But really, wasn't wanting to be abnormal kind of a normal desire in and of itself? Umehito had often felt that most others, especially most others in the ultra-insular nation that was present-day Japan, wished they could live a life like his. All he had done was act on that most primal of urges. More primeval for a human than the need for food, sex, or the search for meaning, this was the urge to withdraw.
And yet, those who lived in darkness reached for the light. Umehito Nekozawa may have been loathe to admit it, but as much as the black comforted him, it also reminded him that he had not so much chosen to be different as he was different. What would have been ideal to him might have been a medley of both light as well as dark. Not many children are born healthy but completely silent as they emerge from the womb, and it was as of yet a total anomaly that his sight in absolute blackness was if anything sharper than it was in adequate lighting. There were days when he felt he might not have been even human.
But again, that in itself was a very common human sentiment. And who other than a human would feel terrified at a possible fault in their humanity?
The Black Magic clubroom was something of a cross between a reliquary and any given wealthy teenager's bedroom if no one ever cleaned it. Numerous bolts of silk were stacked next to impossibly valuable relics of Persian kings or hung from the walls and ceiling, giving the whole place an ethereal quality sort of like walking through a waking dream. Someone here evidently loved to play with voodoo dolls, as many well-worn examples, their hides riddled with the marks of numerous old pinholes, lay on coffee tables or the arms of couches. The furnishings were of impeccable quality, at least, and the smell of exotic perfumes and something else which was sharper but not altogether unpleasant mixed into a positively alien sort of scent. The area certainly wasn't at a loss for floor coverings; there were so many rugs that the surplus examples had been crammed under chairs or used as improvised reading surfaces. It was a lavishly appointed place to visit, if nothing else. Not that you'd ever want to visit there.
"Has anyone seen a Deathstalker Scorpion crawling around?" a very slim teenage boy looking to be or about eighteen years old asked.
The boy's name was Tairana Itazura, and his hair was his most distinctive feature, dyed white with blond streaks. He was craning his willowy body this way and that, seeming determined to look under every nook and cranny. A nigh-impossible task, if he wanted to finish his search sometime this century.
"No I haven't" another young man, Ippan Hito, responded. He was a little shorter, and evidently hadn't chosen to dye his black hair another colour. "You shouldn't be bending like that, though, with your back problems. Wait, why do you want to know?"
"I…nothing."
Again, you really didn't want to visit there.
"You do realize if the school ever catches you with that, I'm disavowing any affiliation with you?" Takai Tanso asked the club prez, the illustrious Umehito Nekozawa, who was currently reclining on a pile of disused Renaissance tapestries with a bottle of Absolut vodka in hand. Mandarin Orange flavour, to be precise.
"You do realize I don't care?" Nekozawa shot back. "Heh. Heehee-hurrg. Ah-ahem. Yes, but isn't it just a bit messed up?"
"What is?" Tanso sighed in response. The club's fifth member and only apparent female participant Reiko Kanazuki fiddled with her glasses as she put down her copy of The Shadow Out of Time, vaguely annoyed at the bickering she sensed was brewing.
"Yes, I suppose I should really have continued my sentence" the Slavic youth yawned, taking another swig before continuing. "I mean, isn't it weird how all you Japanese kids these days have your ecchi visual novels and such, and you act like that's perfectly normal, but your kind always freak out when I offer a kid a sip of hard liquor?"
"'My kind'? Wait, you've been offering kids alco-"
"It's a classic place of misplaced priorities!" Nekozawa exclaimed, throwing his hands around for emphasis and spraying a fair amount of vodka everywhere in the process. "Like I'm the bad guy or something."
"You are the bad guy" Tanso sneered. "And you're also drunk. Give me that."
"I'm not drunk! If I'm drunk then you're…a jerk. A big jerk."
Once more: you really, really, reallllllllly didn't want to visit the Black Magic clubroom, especially late after school had ended for the day and the members were up to Cthulhu knew what. It wasn't like the cub members were bad people, but even decent folk can be prone to trouble following them. Getting mixed up with the Black Magic Club was only a good idea if you hated normalcy and stability being prime factors in your life.
Unfortunately for scholarship student Haruhi Fujioka, she was as of now completely ignorant of that simple truth.
"So many damn libraries, and every one of 'em jammed to capacity with the rich and languid. Honestly. If you don't want to study just go home" Haruhi fumed.
The dumpy-looking student adjusted her cheap wristwatch and sighed. Six o'clock, on the dot. She needed to get some reading in before she went home; unlike many of those here, her grades actually mattered to her. Haruhi hadn't been at Ouran Academy for all that long. She hadn't even joined any clubs, and she certainly didn't know where all the smart rich people did their studying. Assuming smart rich people even existed. However, salvation seemed to appear in the form of a boy and girl chatting aimlessly as they ambled down the hall.
"Excuse me. Do either of you know a quiet place where I can get some reading in?" Haruhi asked of the pair. "I tried the libraries but eh, that doesn't seem feasible."
"Oh, you know the stairwell opposite the end of the hallway facing the old music room?" the boy said as he walked past.
"Yes, yes I do."
"Go down there and take two lefts. It'll be the first door you see."
"Great! Thanks!" Haruhi exclaimed, rushing off to the aforementioned area.
The girl who had been talking with him stopped walking and eyed her conversational partner skeptically.
"Did you really just give that poor boy directions leading him straight to the Black Magic clubroom?" she asked.
"Yes. I believe I did" the young man said with an impish giggle.
"Honestly Hikaru, you are the worst" his feminine compatriot snickered in response.
Haruhi couldn't help but wonder what sort of room she was heading towards as she made the descent down the stairwell. When she finally reached the basement after travelling downwards for what felt like several minutes, it seemed to her that this part of the school seemed pretty ill-kept. As a matter of fact, the material and design of its construction looked a lot older than the rest of the fairly modern institute. Prewar, even. It made her wonder if maybe the basement was part of an older building that had been cannibalized into the layout of Ouran when it was built on top of it. Not that it really mattered, she supposed, just so long as it was a quiet place to read and review.
"Give that here! You've had enough!" a rather chagrined-sounding voice rang out from down the hall, followed by the sound of someone else laughing and a third person saying "Everyone shut up!"
"Huh. This isn't boding well, now is it, Haruhi?" Haruhi ruminated. Still, it was worth finding out what the cause of all the commotion here was. She made her way towards the ebony-wood double doors at the end of the last turn, inhaling deeply before pushing said door open.
"It's a teacher! Shit, hide it somewh-oh. Oh, it's just a…damn. I almost had a heart attack" Nekozawa said as the door swung ajar, revealing a rather befuddled-looking Haruhi. He nonetheless put the cap on the bottle and rolled it behind a nearby couch in two deft motions.
"Um. Uh, er, h-hello" Hito said to the unexpected guest before turning his attention back to the lingerie catalogue in his hands. Reiko looked up at Haruhi and gave the girl a polite nod before focusing back on her comparatively more respectable reading material.
"Yeah, hi. So is this a place I can read or-? Cause I'm guessing it isn't" Haruhi mumbled half to the five who were present and half to herself as she entered the room. "Look, lemme start over from the beginning. I was told this was a good place to hit the books."
"Who told you that?" Nekozawa asked as he craned his body into an upright sitting positon, cocking an eyebrow in skepticism.
"Some weirdo with orange hair."
"Eheh" he sniggered. "Sounds like one of the twins."
"'The twins'?" Haruhi was so confused she felt like she'd wandered into a cross between a Monty Python sketch and a Twilight Zone episode.
"Forget about it" Itazura said to Haruhi with a flippant hand gesture. "Seriously, just ignore him and he'll lose interest."
"Um, okay?" the daughter of the Fujioka clan said back, smiling blankly due to the plain fact that she didn't know how else to respond to all this.
"At any rate, now that you're here, is there anything that the Black Magic Club can do for you?" Nekozawa inquired of her as he finally stood up. Haruhi was impressed by how tall he was, figuring he looked at least six feet.
"Well, what does the Black Magic Club do?" she asked.
Haruhi was quite pragmatically minded; even being a product of the superstitious culture of Japan and most of Asia in general, she had never been one for fortune-telling or horoscopes. Magic simply didn't interest her, for the simple reason that it all looked like a bunch of quite literal smoke and mirrors.
"Oh, what don't we do is the better question" Nekozawa beamed in response. The young man seemed incapable of showing teeth without leering. "Curses, hexes, witchcraft, voodoo, pagan rites, human sacrifi-ahem, anyway, you name it and we can do it."
"Can you conjure up a quiet place for me to study?" she sighed.
"Well, we could certainly form an extradimensional space completely cut off from the ordinary flow of time and the spatial fabric of our current dimension. Of course, getting you out would be quite impossible."
"Can you defeat the evil Lord Voldemort and bring peace to Middle Earth?" Haruhi requested with a wry grin.
"I uh, think you're getting your fantasy works mixed up" he coughed. The rest of the club members had gone back to their business by now, leaving Umehito to deal with the visitor. "But I can infer from your sarcasm that you think we're all just a bunch of charlatans, right?"
"Well now, apparently you can make a correct prediction now and again."
"Ha. Well, are you familiar with the saying 'you shall not put God to the test'?" he asked, putting a forefinger to his lips as if telling himself to hold back a more venomous response.
"Wait. Doesn't that apply to Christianity?"
"It applies to magic too. It doesn't work unless you tell yourself it will work."
"…That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Y'know what, I'm just gonna go now" Haruhi said as she began walking backwards towards the exit.
"Wait, no! Watch out for the-"
"For the-?"
CRASH
"Uh-oh" Haruhi murmured as a cold sweat overtook her.
Not wanting to look behind her but knowing she'd have to eventually, she turned about. Lying on the floor was a now-overturned pedestal (which in an unwise move had been left out in the middle of the floorspace), and nearby was a broken canister which had been housing a piece of paper, now badly torn from the shattering of its rigid container.
"Well now. This just got interesting" Nekozawa fumed. He rubbed his temples in annoyance. "I feel a headache coming on."
"Oh, um. I'm so sorry! How much was-how much do I have to pay to replace that?" Haruhi asked, dreading the possible answer.
"You can't. It's a one-of-a-kind item, and the Unwritten Scroll is priceless."
"Priceless? It can't literally be priceless."
"Yes, well, it would have been worth only eight million yen yesterday to an interested collector, but today we realized it contained a map to the tomb of Kaw-T'ashad in the Tomb of Rotting Kings. So yeah, priceless, like it or not" Itazura said. Itazura seemed more amused than annoyed, though. A classic case of schadenfreude at work.
"Well maybe I could…wait did you say eight million yen…shit, um, I…I have no idea what I'm gonna do to get out of this." The lower-middle-class girl probably wouldn't see that much money in her entire high school career.
"Are you familiar with the Romanji letter 'B', Haruhi?" Nekozawa asked as a proverbial lightbulb lit up over his head. Haruhi didn't like his leer now. As in, more so than usual.
"Yes, I am. I get good grades in English."
"B as in baroque, b as in bleak, b as in bratwurst, and of course, b as in blackmail" he said, throwing his arms wide open before bringing them down gently on Haruhi's shoulders as he looked into her trademark oversized eyes.
"'B as in bratwurst?' she asked, more than a little confused.
"Yes, well, a fifth of vodka and my adroitness at alliteration agonizes" he said drowsily, rocking Haruhi's shoulders back and forward. "At any rate, our membership has been declining lately. No one wants to be a member of the Black Magic Club, it seems. Do you see where I'm going with this?"
"I really wish I didn't…"
"Your debt will be forgiven, Haruhi, if you consent to joining our little social club." He took his hands off the girl's shoulders and brought his palms together with a clap, fully confident in the way one can only be when they know their opposition has been completely backed into a corner.
"I can't help but have the feeling this happened somewhere else" Haruhi said after a moment's pause. The statement did surprise Nekozawa a little, he had to give her that.
"Basic quantum theory dictates that there are an infinite series of universes out there with infinite possibilities to them, Haruhi" he illuminated her. "It's quite possible that in one of them, something like this did indeed happen to you."
"Heh. So another Haruhi is out there suffering with me?"
"Well, yes, if you look at it that way. Makes you feel a little less alone, doesn't it?" Nekozawa smiled. Well, as far as his leers went it was close enough to a smile at least, if you squinted at it a little. "So, do we have a deal, mister-?"
"Yes we do. And my name is Haruhi, Haruhi Fujioka. And I'm a chick, just for the record." Haruhi relayed the information relating to her gender like she was reading the receipt for her weekly groceries.
"Wha-oh. Oh" Nekozawa said, deeply embarrassed and realizing fully that the tables had been turned in regards to who was on the defensive. "Sorry, I, it's just you looked so much like a guy that I um…I'm just digging my own grave here, aren't I."
"Don't worry. It's not the first time that's happened. Heh. Probably won't be the last."