“Well, if you don’t mind, we’re going to follow the course we’ve set up.”

“Is there a tour direction?”

“Indeed, you may not have noticed, but there is a sign at the entrance with the course map, our famous Manga Full Course”

“Hum~”

“Maybe Sugawara-kun has already put away the entrance equipment and you haven’t had a chance to see her.”

“I think so because currently there’s only one table in front of the door.”

“Okay, I need to tell him to at least leave the information displays, the day is almost over but we still have a good little hour of opening time left before it ends.”

Watanabe calls out to a boy on her right.

“Takigawa-kun, could you join Sugawara-kun and help him please? We should set up the displays again. We’ll come and help you put everything away later.”

“No problem senpai, I’ll go.”

“Thank you very much. Alright, where were we?”

“The Full Course.”

“Yes, so I was saying that this course is perfect to follow the complete path of creating our manga projects.”

Rina rubs her chin in confusion.

“I thought the anime and manga club were more spectators and readers than creators.”

“Haha, indeed it may have been the case when it was created, but we have evolved well since the first generation. This is not a book club or a discussion club, here we aim to study and then create our own manga.”

“It’s…ambitious. Much more than I could have imagined.”

“It’s true that even in the literature club we have workshops on writing essays or poems. Some of my senpais have even published their own novels.”

“Kumiai greatly encourages originally passive clubs to become more productive and create things in addition to their core activities.”

“I guess it was to keep cultural clubs from becoming a kind of safe house for people who wanted to lounge around. It’s more complicated to do that when you’re in a sports club or with physical activities.”

“It’s possible, although club membership is not at all mandatory. Look, I was lounging around pretty good last year since I wasn’t in any clubs.”

“I’m not sure that’s something you can brag about Rina-chan.”

“Mostly to end up all alone in the end.”

“You are cruel Aya…”

“Haha, in any case, the main reason for this turnaround in cultural clubs comes mainly from the school’s promise to provide budget and materials available if the clubs were able to produce value.”

“A capitalist system?”

“More like a merit-based system. Performance is greatly rewarded. That’s why our school’s sports clubs are some of the best in the country.”

“So for the manga and anime club, this translates into creating manga?”

“In part, yes. As you already know, some former club members are already established mangakas. You could say that it was the redesign of the club that allowed their rise, or at least a faster rise.”

“You mean that the original place of creation of Green Boy, Cyborgs in Hell et I was reincarnated as an otter in a world of swords and magic, it is…”

“Exactly, the first boards were drawn right here.”

“So this place is truly a holy shrine!”

“Haha, short of being a shrine, we can still say that this is the cradle of Kumiai’s manga creativity.”

“It brings tears to my eyes…”

“Wait until after the tour before you collapse Rina.”

“My motivation is through the roof.”

“So let’s start right at the beginning, the Pitch & Synopsis workshop.”

With a round table with piles of very different mangas, art books, and sheets in all directions, the workshop seems a bit messy, right?

“The concept of the workshop? We all gather around a round table, symbolically all ideas are equal and deserve to be heard. The organized mess we set up allows us to stimulate our imagination by subconsciously making connections between everything we see on the table.”

“It is well thought out.”

“Of course, imagination is a living thing, it needs resources to manifest itself to its full potential.”

“And that box in the middle, senpai?”

“This is the next step in the workshop, pick a paper from the box.”

Sophie, being the closest to it, plunges her hand to recover a folded piece of paper.

“Read it out loud.”

“Main theme, space opera. And secondary theme, impossible love.”

“Interesting, promises a dramatic and rocky story.”

“If I’m guessing right, we’re going to have to create a scenario with these two randomly chosen themes.”

“Exactly Sakai-san. Of course, I’m not going to ask you to create a complete story but just a short synopsis. The most important thing in this workshop is to put words to an idea.”

“We also have workshops like this one in the literature club, I think it’s really fun.”

“It’s a really fun exercise in creation and imagination to do. In fact, it was as a result of this game that Cyborgs in Hell was born.”

“REALLY ?!”

“A story with cyborgs who end up in hell… It’s not necessarily the most logical combo we could create, right?”

“It’s true that when it came out the first reviews were mixed as to the credibility of the script.”

“But in the end, PekkoMekko-sensei nailed them all with his perfect script. Anyway, knowing that a great manga like this came into being with this simple game, motivates you!”

Rina’s hair might rise to the sky like a super warrior if she increases her hype that much.

However, it seems that one of the girls is not very comfortable with the idea of participating in this exercise.

“Hmm? Are you okay Aya-chan?”

“It is…”

?

“I’m not really good with that kind of thing.”

“No stress Sakai-san, around the round table, all ideas are equal.”

“It is that…”

“Um?”

“What is Space Opera?”

“Ah…”