This Broadcast Is the Last

Prefectural Broadcasting Contest, Live Broadcast Division. Takanoha Academy Broadcasting Club. Rundown (draft)

• Ten minutes to air: two judges enter the control room, and the voice talent straightens her back in front of the mic.
• On air: the opening begins, carried by a voice that only turns talkative on the far side of a microphone.
• Seven minutes in: the feature segment starts, but its script is still in the AD's bag.
• Fifteen minutes: if the show runs live all the way through the ending, it passes the judging.
• Four o'clock: the broadcasting room is locked, and the custodian stands in the hallway with the key.

The one who wrote "pick up the pace" in red pencil in the margin of the rundown was the AD, and you are the only one who can read her handwriting.

Three days before the renovation begins, carry a fifteen-minute live broadcast all the way to the end.
The broadcasting room is locked at four every day, and from next month it will not open for a year.

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🎙 Third Floor of the Second Building, a Room That Closes at Four

Takanoha Academy's broadcasting room is on the third floor of the second building, split into the main studio with the microphones and a control room behind a pane of glass. The second building goes into seismic retrofitting next month, and the broadcasting room will be out of use for a year. As part of the preparations, starting this week the custodian comes to lock the door at four every day, so after-school activities get only one hour. The live broadcast division of the prefectural contest works like this: on the appointed day, the judges visit the school and listen to the in-school broadcast from the control room, and the date has been set for three days before the renovation. You are the only one in the club who can run the mixing console.

🔊 This Side of the Glass and the Other

Yoino Kotoha / first-year, voice talent
She wears her long purple hair down, bangs and all, and face to face her replies end in three words. The instant she takes hold of a microphone her voice brightens a full shade, and she does not stop for fifteen minutes. The students who hear the lunchtime broadcast have no idea the owner of that voice is the small girl they pass in the hallway. Only when you give her a thumbs-up through the control room glass do her sentences grow longer, even face to face.

Shinonome Risa / second-year, AD
Short blonde hair and a stopwatch hanging from her neck; she sets deadlines to the minute and counts her clubmates' lateness in seconds. She blows every deadline for her own scripts and pushes them on you alone: read this today. Her fingers shake during the countdown to air, and she lets only the shadow of the console see it.

Yabe Ko / first-year, aspiring equipment hand
Short black hair, nothing to him but height, and he calls you Boss. He is quick to learn how to coil a cable, keeps wanting to touch the knobs on the console, and gets scolded for it every time. He is also the one who will be handed the broadcasting room after the renovation.

📻 How to Play

Three chapters. In the one hour before four, you decide each time whether to hammer out the show's structure with the AD, sit in on the voice talent's rehearsal, or go over the console and the wiring. Where to cut the script, which segment to leave to the voice talent, what to prioritize on air: all of that is yours to decide, and whether the fifteen minutes run to the end will not be known until the broadcast itself.

Kotoha can talk if there is control room glass between you. Risa breaks deadlines only in front of the person she hands her scripts to. Neither of them can be measured in numbers. The length of the sentence Kotoha manages to finish face to face, and the number of times Risa's fingers go still, become the record that never makes it onto the rundown.