4.5 Chapter 3.1: Even then, there is danger lurking in daily life (1)

It all began with a sudden incident at 6 o'clock in the evening on a certain day. Since I received a mail on my phone from the school, I decided to check it and when I did, it seems due to problems occurring at the Waterworks Bureau, the entire dormitory has received an alert that it would not have access to water for a while. When I tried turning the tap to test it, indeed no water came out. It seems repair attempts will be taking some time to finish and if it happened to be prolonged, it could take up to early morning to be fixed.

But the school too, is properly looking after the students and in the case that it becomes necessary, more than 2 liters of water at a time will be handed out to students at the cafeteria. And since the cafeteria is expected to be crowded, a warning statement was also released stating as such. And as a prohibited matter, the convenience stores that were expected to be majorly crowded were marked as temporarily unusable.

In addition, free-to-drink mineral water is installed at Keyaki Mall but it is forbidden to bottle that water for ourselves and take it back with us.

That's not my problem though. If there is a problem, it would have to be the toilet. Although there is water in the tank, since it can only be used to flush once caution is necessary.

"As for drinks...there's still a little bit left". The tea in the refrigerator would only last for about a single cup, but that should be enough for today. For dinner, I'll have to endure it by making a dish without using any water. After that, as I began to indifferently make preparations to cook dinner, my phone suddenly rang. But as I moved to answer, the ringing ceased. It lasted for about 2 calls. As I reached my hand out towards my phone to check the caller identity, it turned out to be Horikita Suzune's name.

It's unusual for her to call me. Even if Horikita had business with me, she usually makes do via chat. Since I got slightly curious about the matter, I decided to call back. However, no matter how many times I called, Horikita did not pick up. While feeling it was slightly mysterious I gave up on calling Horikita, placed my phone on top of the table and returned to cooking my dinner. I'll cook fried rice today. It was a simple matter to cook fried rice using the rice I had bought in advance. After adding the eggs, the rest were just the finishing touches. And it was then that the phone rang again. Once I stopped the fire and walked towards the phone, again the ringing stopped. Looking at the phone, it was like before, a call from Horikita.

Once I call back again, as expected, no matter how many times the call rings, Horikita did not answer. I felt slight doubt at this mysterious situation. Perhaps coincidentally, right after the call ended, she's also busy. That was also a possibility but from Horikita's personality that's hard to imagine. She's the type to only call when she's in a calm state of mind. Even if something unexpected had happened, ending the call two times and not answering when I called back was strange. From here the conclusion I had drawn was that Horikita might currently be stuck in an unexpected situation.

"Yeah right".

Exasperated at myself for thinking too deeply about this, I decided to stop cooking for now and answer her through the chat.

"It seems you've called me two times, what's the matter?".

And when I sent that message, without even a time delay, the read notification appeared. But from the message that had been read, a reply did not come. I waited for quite a long time but a reply did not come.

"I'm cooking right now so my response may be late, but if you contact me I will reply".

I sent that to her. Like before, the read notification appeared but no reply came and so I decided to return to my cooking.