Chapter 6: The Imposter?
Part 1
Class was over for the day. Negi busied himself trying to organize all of his paperwork so that it actually fit in his bag. The stuff seemed to multiply ever day. As he stuffed the last stack into its folder, he looked up to see three of the four Library Club girls waiting patiently by the desk. Haruna was conspicuously absent.
"Can I help you with something?"
"Um..." Nodoka waited a few seconds for the last few girls to make their way out of the room. "We wanted to ask you something about Haruna. We think she might be using her artifact for something bad..."
"What do you mean? She seemed perfectly well-behaved lately."
"That's why we think she's up to something." Yue made a loud slurping noise on her juicebox. "When was the last time that Haruna actually paid any attention in class? She's usually either doodling or bothering me."
Negi thought for a second. When was the last time that Haruna had actually been this well behaved. Telling her to stop talking and pay attention had been practically a daily occurrence ever since he had started teaching. But for the last week or so, she had sat quietly in the back of the room.
Yue started up again.
"I looked over at her papers today, and was taking notes. In all the time I've known Haruna, she's never bothered to write down anything; she just steals the notes from me and Nodoka. Something weird is going on."
"But she hasn't actually done anything..." Negi looked at his students. "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do about it..."
Konoka broke in. "We know that nothing bad has happened yet; that's why we wanted to ask you about it first. We kind of know what she's doing, but we wanted your advice before we actually tested our theory."
"And what is your theory?"
Nodoka answered him. "She's probably using her artifact to make golems of herself so she doesn't actually have to come to class. The duplicate is taking all of her notes and doing all the things she doesn't want to."
"That's also part of the reason we think she's a fake." Yue tossed her juice box into the trash, and extracted another one from her backpack. "She offered to go to the Library Club early to get a head start on alphabetizing the newly acquired books. Haruna hates alphabetizing."
"When it's coming up, she usually says she has to go to the bathroom and just sits in there for an hour or so." Konoka put a finger to her cheek as she glanced at the ceiling. "She claims that it's because of the cafeteria food, but I think she's really j-" Yue elbowed her in the stomach and turned back to Negi.
"Whatever she does in there, the point is that she tries to avoid that kind of work, but today she practically jumped at the opportunity. Either that Haruna is a fake, or she's been stealing magic pills from Evangeline's resort again."
"She stole pills from Eva's resort!" Negi was shocked.
"Oh, right. We just told you that she had the flu..." Nodoka giggled before continuing. "The real reason she missed class is because she was eleven feet tall for a few hours."
"That's not important." Yue paused as she focused on inserting the straw into her new juice box. "Okay then. What we want to do is go back to our room and check if the real Haruna is there."
"Why don't you just check the Haruna over at the library?" Negi asked. "It would be faster."
"Because we don't like alphabetizing either." Konoka grinned. "Might as well let the clone do it."
"If all you're doing is checking back at your room, what do you need me for?"
"Don't you want Haruna to stop stepping out on classes?" Yue pointed at her teacher. "As a teacher, you should do everything in your power to make sure that she attends regularly!" The real reason was that if Negi knew, there was less chance of Haruna doing something horrible to them all in revenge for busting her; now she actually had the means to enact that upside-down whipping fantasy of hers. But if a teacher had figured it out...But there was no reason to explain that to Negi.
"You're right." He finished stuffing his papers in his bag and slung it over his shoulder. "Let's get to the bottom of this."
.
I'm not entirely sure what Konoka thinks Haruna was really up to in the bathroom, but I'm sure that you can come up with something more outrageous than me.
Next chapter: The confrontation!
