Student Council (1)
Student Council (1)
The game's main story never showed every detail of the characters' daily lives.
That didn't mean the game lacked a daily-life component, of course. There were sections where you attended class, went to the library to study, or walked around campus talking to other students. Some quests even had you running errands for teachers.
And depending on how you spoke to which characters during those moments, your Bond Gauge with them increased, and based on that Bond Gauge, you could experience specific events with that character at specific times. A date, a chance encounter somewhere... even a kiss at the very end.
On a First Playthrough, a setting called "time is limited" made it impossible to talk to everyone, but on a Second Playthrough, that restriction was lifted and you could talk to people without limit. Eventually, at the end, you could just pick whichever heroine, or one of the male characters, you wanted.
Choosing a male character didn't unlock some kind of BL Route or anything... it just ended with something like a Friendship Ending. Though certain players did enthusiastically squeeze content out of that anyway.
To be honest, the story's ending itself was fixed, so events in which you became someone's lover or closest friend were depicted only to that extent. If you asked whether it was critically important content, it wasn't. You could simply call it a service provided by the developers, an opportunity to romance the heroine you liked.
In the sequel, if you carried over your save data from the previous game, the story continued under the premise that you were dating that game's heroine. If you had no save file, the game asked you at the start whom you had ended up with. And since the game's story really had little to do with romance, the plot played out similarly no matter whom you chose. The romance even fizzled out during the story progression, and by the end, you could switch to a different character.
But... being able to let romance fizzle out like that within the story was ultimately just a game's indulgence. Here, it would be different. In the first place, you couldn't simply stop dating someone and instantly transition into being ordinary conversing friends. It would also be strange if there were no friction between the female characters.
On top of that, the relationships among the cast had already shifted dramatically because of my presence alone.
... Was this even going to follow the original anymore? Hadn't everything already gone off the rails? I wasn't sure whether knowing the original content would even help now.
"Sylvia."
I was sitting at my desk, preparing for class and lost in a daze of thought, when Alice, seated beside me, spoke up.
"Yes."
"What are you going to do about the student council?"
The moment I answered, Alice didn't bother waiting and immediately asked that.
... Right.
The student council existed too.
Alice was on the student council in the original, after all.
The student council was chosen entirely on the president's recommendation. Only the president, a single person, was elected purely by vote. Naturally, the president was often someone with broad popularity, wide connections, or both.
In other words, it was impossible for a commoner to become student council president. And naturally, there were no commoners on the student council.
In a sense, this wasn't so different from the country's political arena. Most commoners didn't even have the time to go vote because they were working. Even if they did go, they had no idea who anyone was. Since the emperor was the head of the executive branch, most appointed ministers were nobles, and the only people with the funds and time to run for parliament and campaign were nobles. The number of nobles was overwhelmingly smaller than the number of commoners, yet noble voter turnout was overwhelming. That same political reality carried over into the academy attended by their children.
Even if the commoner students tried to elect a commoner as president... the commoner households that could send children here had a high probability of already being connected to a noble family anyway. They had already been filtered twice to get in: "in the first place," once before the exam, and once after.
In any case, because that was how the student council operated, it was customary for the president to recommend a student from a high-ranking family for a council officer position upon their admission. That didn't mean it was a mere courtesy recommendation out of convention, either. If you said you wanted to do it, they really let you do it. But they also didn't force anyone who didn't want to.
In Alice's case, she'd receive the same recommendation here as she had in the original.
"I haven't considered it yet."
I answered while pulling the first-period textbook from my bag.
In the original, you could either join the student council or not. However, joining gave you the minor advantage of a bonus to Alice's Bond Gauge. There were also events and items you could only experience through the student council, and, more than anything, completing the character card entries absolutely required you to join.
Furthermore, joining the student council itself was treated as a type of hidden quest, so membership was mandatory if you wanted the silver medal for clearing every quest. Plus, the small advantage of raising Alice's Affection Level extra meant you also gained additional action points on a first playthrough, which you could use to raise other characters' affection. The quest rewards were moderately helpful on a first playthrough as well.
To put it another way, all you gained by joining the student council was a handful of additional events during the daily-life portion and access to a location called the student council room. That was why, on a Second Playthrough, you typically didn't bother joining. In a second playthrough with infinite action points, you could max out Alice's Bond Gauge solely through the Bond Events interspersed among the main events.
And I had no reason to chase a platinum medal here. This reality wasn't a game.
"Really? Then should I go ahead and put your name down too?"
"......."
But Alice apparently didn't see it that way.
I stopped moving and turned my head to look directly at Alice. She looked back at me as if to ask what my problem was and said,
"What, you don't want to?"
Alice asked, staring at me as though the idea was strange.
Hm.......
I didn't particularly want to, honestly.
If you heard the explanation, you understood why: this academy's student council existed to demonstrate just how powerfully entrenched the nobility was, both inside and outside the game.
When Leo joined, there were occasional events where he was slighted in various ways because he was from a barony. Of course, Alice did send them packing, asking, "How dare you, against a noble title personally bestowed by the emperor?"
Naturally, as a princess, I wouldn't be disrespected if I joined. Sometimes fantasy-background novels featured things like "a ducal house older than the royal family," but according to this game's lore, the empire's founding was practically a tale from the age of creation, indistinguishable from the Mythic Era. At the very least, in this world, no name was older than Fangriffon.
But even so... it wasn't a place I wanted to go.
Because even though the game expressed it as a simple quest, in reality it was a place with an enormous amount of work.
Moreover, the inside was filled with the children of truly high-ranking noble families, so maintaining a facade through my facial expressions would be difficult too.
"...... You don't like the idea?"
When I simply kept staring at her, Alice looked at me with slightly plaintive eyes and asked.
In the original, Alice had simply been a member of the student council at some point, but well, even in that original, there must have been a moment when she went and actually joined.
And Alice didn't have any noble friends she'd cultivated a close acquaintance with normally.
Well, I supposed it didn't matter.
If it really became untenable, I could simply turn back time.
"Understood. Shall we go together after class, then?"
"Yes, that's more like it. You're going to get an invitation anyway, aren't you?"
That was true. An invitation would come. Maybe it had already arrived, in front of my dormitory door.
"Sylvia!"
And before I could even share that thought with Alice, someone interposed herself between us and spoke.
"Hello?"
Obviously enough, it was Claire.
"......."
What was I supposed to say?
I was ordinarily rather sparing with greetings. The only person I habitually greeted was the emperor, and even those were soulless formalities such as "I trust Your Majesty enjoys peace and health" or "I pay my respects to His Imperial Majesty."
My persona was a factor, and truthfully, there were many situations where I simply had no need to offer a greeting.
My character ignored it outright when Jaden or Lucas kicked up a fuss right beside me. In fact, the emperor's children, Alice included, often just started talking and chattering next to me on their own even if I didn't bother with a morning greeting.
Come to think of it, instead of a real greeting when we first met, I had substituted simply introducing my name.
So trying to offer a greeting now felt incredibly awkward. If nobody else had been around, it might have been different. But with Alice right beside me, who normally watched exactly how I behaved, it was hard to fudge my way through.
"Ah, hello......?"
It was rather admirable of Claire, though, that she refrained from calling me "sister," as if determined to keep the word I'd given her.
"No matter how many times you greet her like that, it won't do any good."
Alice, sitting in the seat next to mine, rested her chin on her hand and said with an amused smile.
"Sylvia doesn't receive greetings well. And she rarely offers one first, either."
Nice, Alice.
That was it. The character I maintained was a cool... beauty type. Well, since I was never going to act "dere," "cool beauty" was definitely more accurate than "cool-dere."
The point where a character like that smiled while accepting a greeting only came after she had learned to treasure her friends.
To be honest, I had already felt a degree of fondness for them before we ever met, and in my own way, I already thought of them as precious. But they didn't know that. So for now, maintaining this persona was important.
Who knew, that sort of day might come eventually.
After the final battle ended, the day might come when I told people who tried to talk to me things like, "At times like this, I don't know what expression I'm supposed to make."
Someone might ask me if I thought I was Ev●ngelion, but honestly, that anime didn't even exist in this place, did it?
"I-it was like that?"
As if she'd been worrying I might dislike her, Claire let out a long sigh upon hearing Alice's words.
"Oh my, that would be a problem, wouldn't it?"
And there was one more person who inserted herself into that exchange.
Even without hearing her voice, merely seeing her speech transcribed on a page would have been enough to identify her immediately. That person was Charlotte.
The motion of Charlotte sitting down beside Alice, her beautiful platinum-blonde hair fluttering with the ends lightly curled up, was truly something out of a painting.
Hanging a student bag, the sort of briefcase-style bag that appeared often in Japanese subculture, on the side of her desk, Charlotte said,
"It's better for a person of imperial rank to have a bright and forthcoming manner with greetings. Even those of lower rank are people worthy of respect, after all."
"Hello, Charlotte."
"Have you been well, Alice?"
Alice offered Charlotte a light greeting, and Charlotte returned it just as lightly.
It was truly a pleasant sight. In the first installment—well, not the very first installment of the whole series, but the first installment in the series set in the Aetherna Empire—up through the early middle part, Alice had always worn a rigid, tense expression.
Evidently, the confidence I had worked hard to instill in her had helped quite a bit.
... Though Charlotte was remarkable in her own right, displaying the exact same attitude toward me even after I'd behaved insolently in front of her father.
"And, right, Sylvia."
After greeting Charlotte, Alice turned her head back toward me and spoke.
"Even Father sometimes greets people first, you know. Especially when meeting a ducal house that was once a royal family, for instance."
Though he never bowed his head, of course.
Besides, all those dukes were on the purge waiting list. Centuries might have passed since their kingdoms became part of the empire, but the people of those regions still possessed their own intense regional identity. They even harbored strong regional antagonism toward people from the imperial capital or the north.
"......I always endeavor to conduct myself courteously."
"No, look, using Polite Speech is not the same as being courteous......"
At my answer, Alice let out a deep sigh.