After school, the classroom sits empty except for Tsumori Kana, her acoustic guitar, and the notebook lying open beside it. Pale evening light stretches across the desks.
The rehearsal is already underway. Notes fill the room, steady through the earlier verses, but the final verse keeps arriving polished and strangely untouched.
Tsumori Kana
The last verse still feels distant from what inspired it.
Beyond the door, footsteps multiply. A cart rattles along the corridor, followed by the muted voices of school staff checking rooms one by one.
The open notebook waits beside the guitar, its final lines exposed. The page holds every carefully chosen word, but none of the feeling seems to rise with them.
A pause settles after another attempt. From nearby, a staff member calls that the building will be closing soon, making the rehearsal's endpoint suddenly concrete.
The corridor grows louder outside the classroom door while the last unfinished verse remains suspended in the quiet, waiting for Kana's next choice.
✓ Quest Accepted
Make the final verse convey Kana's feelings
“Kana thinks again about why she wrote the song.”
SUCCESS (Fair Reasoning, rolled +0)
Kana lets her hands rest on the guitar and studies the final verse without singing. The hallway noise recedes beneath the quieter pressure of remembering its beginning.
Tsumori Kana
I wrote this song to preserve what I could not say plainly, not to make the words sound flawless.
The reason settles into place: the verse is meant to carry that unsaid feeling toward someone else. Its plainness is part of what makes it honest.
Kana reaches for her pencil to mark the page, but the worn wooden body snaps with a sharp crack across the empty classroom.
school staff member
That room too. Please finish up and leave the building.
One broken pencil lies beside the notebook, its graphite point scattered across the final lines. The verse remains imperfect, but its purpose is no longer hidden from her.
“Kana realizes the problem, the song sounds most like poetry and not a song about her feelings. She must balance song flow with everything as well.”
SUCCESS (Superb Music, rolled +2)
Tsumori Kana
The verse follows poetic lines, but the melody needs room for what I feel.
Kana crosses out a few crowded phrases and replaces them with simpler words, keeping the emotional image while loosening each line for breath and melody.
She tests the revised verse on the guitar. The chords continue naturally beneath it, and the plain language gives the final notes somewhere honest to land.
The song now carries both shapes at once: poetry in its images and a singable flow in its rhythm. The feeling no longer sits apart from the music.
school staff member
Thank you. Please remember to take everything with you when you go.
Kana closes the notebook around the marked page and lifts the guitar. Outside, the corridor waits in evening quiet, while the completed verse remains warm in her memory.
Quest Complete
Make the final verse convey Kana's feelings
Attribute Upgrade: Reasoning Fair→Good