Chapter Six

Several of Lee's classmates tickled at his mind, as he got to know them, as being... There was no real way to get around it, they just seemed a lot like anime characters.

Of course, he couldn't point to any one of them in specific and say 'You, you are from this series of this genre, where these things happen'. In part because if they were a good match for an anime character, they were from something that he had just never been interested enough in for it to stick in his mind several years and a reincarnation after the fact. In additional part, of course, because for all that his gut was saying 'aren't these anime characters?', there was also the underlying feeling that they shouldn't be in the same scene.

That being the case, Lee couldn't rule out the possibility that he was feeling that way because of the strongly anime-like world he was in, where it would make perfect sense for people to resemble anime characters. Obviously. Even if they weren't direct carbon copies of specific individuals, general homages to the same sort of character type were common enough that they all... sort of blended together, a little. That couldn't be helped. In the end, a passing sense of deja-vu and inexplicable feelings of familiarity that couldn't be explained or entirely relied upon didn't mean anything in the long term!

All the same, upon review, a part of the reason that Lee had been sent out to a public school had to have been the social aspect of school life. Thus, while it would be good for developing things in his library if Lee just took the time to focus on that while just recording all the lessons... And it didn't matter if that would be called cheating!... but it would pretty much miss the point of 'the school experience, as intended'. If he was supposed to be blending into society for undisclosed ninja purposes, then Lee should blend in to the usual society. The awkward silent loner probably had different connotations in this country's school system, but it could be taken for granted that they still stood out and not in a good way!

So Lee had put forward some effort to socialize.

Naturally, this being a school setting, there were some students that played along with making friends, some that decided immediately that they didn't really like Lee that much and maintained polite distance, and some that decided to respond to friendly overtures with antagonism. It would be best to avoid those when possible, Lee concluded. He wasn't frightened of them, but he had some ninja training backing him even without the library in his brain, and they didn't. Getting in a fight with brats that couldn't fight back wasn't a good look! If he had to dish out some beatings it would be better to wait until everyone involved was a teenager, in which case he could assume the genre involved was some flavor of shonen and the delinquency would be mostly ignored despite everyone in theory being supposed to know better. And on a theoretically equal playing field. Ultimately, it would just come off better if a tooth got punched out of a pompadour-bedecked biker thug than just some kid that was kind of a jerk, so if Lee was lucky, anyone he had to throw hands with would join some kind of street gang before any fighting happened.

He might have to prepare for fighting against multiple opponents, though, if he did wind up fighting gang members. The whole fundamental point of those things was strength in numbers and being able to win by throwing more people against strong ones. Lee would have to make a note to set his library to making something low-key but effective for the occasion. It might come off as a little paranoid or crazy from the outside for him to plan around developing techniques for a fight years in the future that might not happen at all, but his library was not guaranteed to be fast about developing things! If he set things up and then didn't need the results then he was set back a little on wasted effort, but on the other hand, if he waited for the situation to actually become relevant, he probably wouldn't have the time to develop a solution for it. So he overthought because his cheat power needed him to overthink things, or else it could wind up being accidentally useless.

The important question was if developing multiple things at once slowed them all down, like a computer dividing run-time across multiple programs, which was... unclear. Lee'd have to look into that, but he had no real way to be certain one way or the other, there. And it wasn't like this thing came with an instruction manual, either! Putting in requests for solutions to problems that he might have in the future was the best Lee could really do when it came to direct use, so even if it did slow the process of development down... Well, he couldn't really be perfectly certain of what he would need, and being more selective meant there was a chance he'd picked wrong.

Well, if it came down to it he could still put some of the developing things on hold to focus on others when they seemed more likely to be needed, and even if they were flawed or incomplete some of them seemed like he should be able to make partial use of them anyway... if with complications. There was that, at least.

For the time being, Lee was getting a lot out of some simple study meditation, letting him develop his spirit while taking in lecture materials... actually, it could be considered as being similar to hypnotizing himself to internalize the lessons, too? He'd have to be careful about not brainwashing himself, but it was better than just zoning out during the lectures. His grades would thank him, anyway... And the calm peacefulness made it easier to deal with actual typical children of his age, even if Lee wound up being first pick for chores and offloading the teacher's responsibility of herding the class because of the visible maturity it implied.

Lee could do without that, but with the makings of a 'class president', a role that he didn't really understand but seemed to boil down to 'teacher's gofer'... well, it didn't change much. Those who were predisposed to like him liked him a little more, and the same in the other direction for those who disliked him instantly.

As for the classmates... there were some that Lee got along with better than others.

Ryobi and Ryona were fraternal twins, sisters that were being raised by their older sister Ryoki in their parents' absence. There was certainly a theme to that naming, but it wasn't exactly uncommon to repeat use of a character in selecting family names here... In any case, Lee's nose was frankly all but twitching with the urge to sniff out the background details of that, to try and figure out what sort of plot they were involved in and why nobody was blinking at a teen raising her siblings in the absence of adult supervision, but at the same time... it wasn't really the done thing to just ask someone why their parents were dead, and they were all young enough that it had to be a very sore spot for them. Perhaps especially the big sister Ryoki, who might take umbrage at some brat in her sisters' class stirring shit up. Better to leave it lie.

Between the two of them, Ryobi had brown hair and was... mean might not be the right word, since she didn't exactly go out of her way to find and hurt people, but she was certainly cutting. Snippy, pointed... Lee didn't really hesitate to slap her with the label of 'class Tsundere' in his mind, even if he would never speak it out loud because of how she would almost certainly Tsun all over him in response. In social settings it seemed to be a struggle for her to not insult the people she was talking to, but not to the degree of it being a syndrome as far as Lee could tell. She was just snippy and short-tempered.

By contrast, Ryona was blonde and a gentle girl that seemed to be her sister's enabler, laughing it off every time Ryobi called her names, or pulled her hair, or irritably poked her with something. ... {i]Or[/i] it could be the other way around. If they were a bit older, Lee might have something to say about how the girl eagerly took on the jabs as a sign of sisterly affection, but... well, there might be a seed of something to that. Lee wasn't quite sure what to do about that, and so for the most part he had just elected to ignore it in the finest of local tradition! It was really none of his business and he had no reason to read between those lines, especially at this age!

The most notable feature the twins shared was that they were both heterochromic, with eyes of different colors. Honestly, Lee felt like not commenting on that had probably gotten him a lot more tolerance from the both of them than expected... though of course, kids this age were brats that were all too willing to jump on someone for things like needing glasses, or.... Not hair so much, if only because of the abnormal array of colors that were represented here. One more example of anime setting nonsense, because Lee was pretty sure that there should be a near-uniform sea of black hair around here, and none of these natural fire-hydrant reds, browns, purples, blondes, and all the rest.

They were both cute, so Lee didn't mind hanging around with them. The same could be said of Hakufu, a strawberry blonde... Well, there wasn't a better way to put it, but she was a bit of a ditz.

It was less that Lee had gone out of his way to get to know her and more that she had noticed he was getting good scores and just forced her way into things to get tutoring. She'd offered to show Lee how to do some tea ceremony or martial arts in exchange, but Lee wasn't particularly interested in the former and considering her mother was teaching her the latter... it felt like the sort of family style that could lead to Romantic Comedy Anime complications later in life if there wound up being expectations attached to it. Lee couldn't rule out that being a possibility, and it was just far, far too early in his life to commit to a long-term relationship of that kind. His surname was Kato, not Saotome, after all! ... And he had to make a mental note to look up some things to make sure that this wasn't that anime setting, because in hindsight secret ninja clans not only fit right in they were probably an actual part of the lore and Lee didn't really want to be surprised with a body-guarding contract for someone like the Kunos.

In terms of personality and temperament, she was an active sort of tomboy that Lee wouldn't be surprised to see going into a karate club or joining a delinquent gang later in life, squatting on the side of a convenience mart in an ankle-length skirt while chewing on bubble gum with a bokken balanced on one shoulder.

That being said, Lee was a boy, and so there was pressure to socialize, if not exclusively, then at least more with other boys than with the girls of the class. He didn't really have another option but to go with the flow there, unless he wanted to tempt anime narratives into dressing him up in a miniskirt as 'one of the girls (male)'. It wasn't that Lee had anything against cross-dressers, he just didn't really want to make that his own lifestyle. So he had a small circle of male friends as well.

"Hey guys, check it out. The new issue came out, with the swimsuit models!" Issei bragged, showing off a new but already well-thumbed magazine that had pages of girls in bikinis.

That short exchange was essentially the sum total of Issei's personality. A brown haired young boy that had developed a fascination with the female body early, he kept bringing in this kind of sport magazine, with swimsuits or bloomers, or more furtively, pages from magazines that were advertising female underwear. That was only because at this age there was just shy of no way whatsoever for him to get his hands on actual porn.

He was here at Sainin for classes because his own district had decided to go all-in on an elite elevator school exclusively for girls, and he seldom wasted the chance to wistfully imagine what could have been if there was a way for him to get into that school.

Issei was fairly blatantly the sort of gag side character that anime-makers thought was hilarious. Now, those typically never saw any longer-term comeuppance for their misbehavior than bruises or blacked eyes, but Lee was already bracing for learning at some point in the teen years that Issei had either been put in juvie for sexual misconduct and harassment, possibly locked up to be scared straight out of a peeping or panty-stealing habit, or alternatively that his fixation on girls had developed all the way into wanting to be one and so he was transitioning into what the locals called an 'okama'.

Friendly enough though, even if that seemed like it was changing a bit as he interacted with his friends from the same neighborhood. Lee hadn't met them, but they seemed to already be very 'Normies go die' and 'Explode, Riajuu!' from what he had heard secondhand, and they were apparently doing their best to convert Issei to that mode of thought as well.

"Ah... are you sure we should?" Rito asked.

Similarly brown hair, but with undertones of burned orange, Rito was a shyer boy that typically got dragged along in Issei's wake on this sort of thing. Lee could see that getting him in a lot of trouble in the future, particularly if he didn't grow out of the clumsiness he had now, tripping on his own feet and slipping on motes of dust, once they hit teenage years.

The clutz that stumbles and finds himself buried face-first in a woman's cleavage, knee up between her thighs and hands on her hips! Was there a more prevalent trope? If Rito didn't grow out of that clumsiness then Lee would have to seriously consider him as a candidate for being the high school protagonist.

Then, of course, there was...

Koukin 'humphed' at the byplay as Issei goaded Rito into... appreciating might be the best word, examining the pictures of swimwear and the women wearing them like they were a showing of fine art in a museum somewhere.

Koukin had dark blue hair and wasn't really here because he wanted to be friends. Rather than that, he had showed up because Hakufu had started showing up to wrangle Lee into tutoring. Shortly after that first occasion, Koukin had started showing up to lurk in the background, staring Lee down from a distance, before learning to be a bit more subtle about making sure that Hakufu wasn't getting more attached to someone other than himself.

Well, at this stage, they were all still cute too. Lee couldn't help the urge to kindly bully them a little, for their own good.

"Don't we have homework we should be getting started on?" he asked, smiling cheerfully as he threw himself whole-heartedly into the role of wet blanket and party-pooper.

He was answered with groans.