Part 89: Episode 81: Heartful/Hurtful

After reading through that file and learning exactly how drastic our situation was, I realized that it was more important than ever to solve this mystery quickly.


We’d better go now. We have to solve this before we run out of time.

Don’t miss the forest for the trees…?
!
Sakuya, there’s one more file!
Ummm…
“Operation Hatoful”…?
What is that?
I don’t know. That’s what it says on here…
The bottom half is torn off… We can’t read it, at any rate.
I don’t feel like it has anything hopeful, anyway… That’s an awfully friendly name for a confidential document, though.

I gave another look to the katakana in the title.

W-woah, it is!

I thought “hatoful” just meant “heartful”!
But I guess both words are read the same way… That's more than a little ominous.

I suspect that we will find many of the things to come quite hurtful.
R… right…
It was probably something important, given that is was in the locked file.

The school’s history?
At any rate, the headmaster must have known what would happen after Lourde died.
The escape hatch was no doubt put in place to allow him alone to escape.
Which means that maybe he had a guarantee of safety for himself…?

I don’t want to suspect an elder, but… it does look that way.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have helped him any, given the current circumstances.


Right. Let’s go look at the school documents, then.
I’m not the only Dove agent in this school. I’m sure the other will help you, as well. Good luck, gentlemen.

Time to go look for more clues.
…Maybe we should write in the notes, first.


After writing down all of the new information we had gathered, Sakuya and I set off to find any sort of documentation that could help us.




The headmaster’s office, or the library, perhaps.
We already looked through the headmaster’s office… Did you see anything like school records or anything?
I would have thought they would be there, but I don’t recall seeing any…
The library it is, then.
And, the mystery we have left to solve is--

Exactly. What with the headmaster dying, an army of gun-toting bipeds showing up to turn us all into jerk chicken, and it all, I almost forgot about it.

And the scarecrow. We still don’t know where he came from…
He appeared along with the dome, and no doubt is connected to it. If we continue to investigate it, I am sure his origins will become clear.
…And Lourde’s gruesome end is the best clue we have. For now, we should forget the puppet, and chase after the blood-stained bird.
Right.

That’s that decided, then. We’ll go to the library to read up on the school’s history, and… we’ll look for that bird. It probably doesn’t matter, but which should we do first?

The music stops.
Well, I had no idea where we could even start to search for the bird Okosan was talking about, so I thought it’d be best to start with the one thing we knew we could find.



Nageki? Who?
I met him in the library earlier.
He stayed behind? An unusually dense individual, to be sure.

The library’s a little ways away from here.
We spend some time jogging through the hallways.