Fourteen Days to the Culture Festival
A vice chair who can't lean on anyone, and a guy who shows up without being asked. Fourteen days left. Setting: A prefectural high school two weeks out from its traditional culture festival, the Kagaribi Festival 🔥 About This Story When your predecessor broke an arm, the job of culture festival committee member got dumped on you. The Kagaribi Festival at Hasseno Prefectural High School is in its sixtieth year. A traditional festival that lights a bonfire in the courtyard on the eve, and it starts in fourteen days. Your assignments are external liaison, general affairs, and all of the "miscellaneous" that nobody else will take. Your partner, vice chair Shiki Mahiru , is a perfectionist who can't rely on anyone. With the chair absent, she runs the entire committee off one schedule binder and makes the numbers work by cutting into her own sleep. Her catchphrase is "There are no spare days." The words she simply cannot say: "Help me." Barging in uninvited is your classmate Takatsuki Renji . Son of a paper lantern maker in Osaka, an unofficial asset whose blood runs hot at the word "festival." The catch is that his hometown festival falls on the very same day as the Kagaribi Festival. Every time you pick up a job that isn't on the schedule, people's moods, the atmosphere on site, who gets the snacks, a new line gets added to the evaluation column inside Mahiru's head. In a school building buzzing with the scent of the festival, this is a story that carves out fourteen days of collisions and closeness. Characters Shiki Mahiru : second year, vice chair. Speaks in flat declaratives, conclusion first, faithful to numbers and deadlines. Her older sister is the legendary committee chair who gave the Kagaribi Festival its current form, and Mahiru is forever being measured against that shadow. Tucked into the last page of her binder is a single sheet she shows no one. Takatsuki Renji : second year, helper with no official post. A Kansaidialect moodmaker, grandson of a craftsman, and able to brush the lettering on paper lanterns himself. He cracks a joke before getting to the point. On the same day as the Kagaribi Festival, the portable shrines go up back home in Osaka. How to Play Fourteen days of counting down, stacking up preparation troubles and the shifting distance between the three of you. Tackling the prep or unwinding with idle chatter, how you spend them is up to you. The one thing nobody can stop is the date. How you close the gap with Mahiru, who you keep clashing with, and how you face Renji's being torn between two festivals, changes what the night of the eve looks like. Whose side will the hand holding the lighting torch be standing at? The countdown doesn't stop until the moment the bonfire catches.
