Touga sat across from a man with thick glasses and a bad haircut. The man peered at Touga and scribbled something on the pad of lined paper in his lap. If someone else, in his place, had been coerced, forced even, into the same situation, they might have sat sullenly, refusing to cooperate. But Touga knew better. He smiled charmingly and greeted the man pleasantly.
"Mister Kyruu," the man said, checking the top of his paper, "to begin with, I would like you to tell me why you're here."
Touga flicked a finger in annoyance. "Don't you already know that?"
"It would be best if you could put it in your own words."
"Saionji brought me here." He leaned back, crossing his legs and running a hand through the full length of his hair. "Who knows? Maybe he got tired of having me hanging around. He takes everything too seriously."
"What do you think your friend might have been worried about?"
"Well, there's been some trouble with my career. My family owns a large company, and I had started working for them, but then I ended up in a position back at the Academy where I went to school."
"And that bothered you?"
"It's not as if I had a rebellious youth, but you could say things got a little out of hand my senior year."
The man kept scribbling on the pad, writing things that Touga couldn't see, and now he flipped the top page over to continue on the other side. "How so?" he asked.
"There was a… contest a few of us had, at the behest of the Chairman. A sort of dueling game."
Touga gave a cursory explanation of the duels, leaving out anything about miracles or floating castles or The Power to Revolutionize the World.
"I suppose it was really an insignificant thing, but at the end of the year, we all left the school. Saionji and I graduated, but the others left, too. They must have all transferred."
"Did something happen to make them leave?"
"One of the duelists, Tenjou Utena, had a disagreement with the Chairman. She challenged him to a duel, even. And then she left, or was thrown out, it was never really clear, and the duels were over."
"And how does this relate to your career?"
"It was just a bit of an incident, not something you'd want to go back to once it was over. And the Chairman's still there, he was involved in everything."
The man glanced down at his notes. "In baseball, a coach will always start with their strongest pitcher first. But even if that pitcher can last an entire game, that isn't really what defines their strength as a team. To really understand what a team is like, you have to look at their full line-up. People are the same way. Do you understand?"
"You mean... you want to know what I'll be like once you've worn me down?"
The man with the bad haircut frowned. "That is one way of looking at it. But I want to reassure you that what you say here is only for your benefit. It stays between us."
"Of course." Touga shifted his gaze to a spot somewhere over the man's right shoulder.
"You act as if you don't believe me."
Touga fixed him with a cold stare. "Of course not."
The man did not pursue this, but made copious notes on the pad and scheduled to meet again the next day.
Touga showed himself out to the waiting area, where Saionji met him with a defensive glare. Touga refrained from any public display of animosity, but neither said a word the whole way home.