She had more information now - information that so far, she and she alone was empowered to act upon - but information still.  Shattering would be able to help her and Aika when the final showdown came, but it would be on the two of them to begin that confrontation, and the only way possible was to find the spirit who had created this trap they were stuck in.  That spirit, though, would only come out of hiding - and even though it was limited, based on the selections of places she had been able to travel to previously, it was still quite a lot of ground - to make contact with the human half of the bargain.  So finding them was important, too...still, even as the morning began for Joy, along with Sen, there was a second person trapped in here, someone who Joy needed to talk to.<br/><br/><hr/><br/>Aika had had a fairly...<em>satisfactory</em>day yesterday.  First, she had managed to avoid filling her Arousal Meter or any direct face to face contact with Souji-sensei.  She'd still encountered him at a distance, which meant her meter was now at a solid<em>8</em>out of 10 - one more encounter of<em>any</em>kind and she would be begging to be taken out back to the athletic storage rooms again - but at least she hadn't opened herself up to him.  More<em>importantly</em>, despite Joy's absence (she had noted the lack of the American Exalted on the attendance records), Aika had managed to gather some more information on the school's student and teacher population.  She'd dug into Ono Saburo - the student she'd wanted to investigate before her Meter had peaked and she'd been pulled into some carnal action by Souji-sensei.<br/><br/>Saburo was a bit of an enigma.  As before, nearly every other student at the school had some sort of qualifier: Sen was one of the Student Council; Kenta was on the baseball team; Minori was a class representative; Joy was the hot American transfer student.  None of those - and nothing like it - applied to Saburo.  He was just...a student.  But, she'd figured out his thing - he was a secret game streamer - the person that all the guys (and some of the girls) watched for play-by-plays of the newest video games, or recorded playthroughs of games at the local arcade.  Saburo was<em>very</em>careful about how he recorded himself, but Aika had managed to learn the secret.  Which, sadly, made him less suspicious now.<br/><br/>That wasn't the whole of her day, though - she had filled out more of the list of missing people, now missing students, they had only three names left on it that remained unaccounted for.  Of those names she'd found yesterday, two of them stood out to here.  First was Sugawara Chiharu - she was part of the school's journalism and photography club.  The girl seemed to be<em>everywhere</em>with her phone, taking pictures with the camera and asking questions while doodling down answers on the notepad app to 'the questions of today!'  (She was fairly insistent on that terminology.)  Being the closest thing this reality had to a press corps put her in the know of a lot of things...or, perhaps more darkly, in the position to be anywhere and ask any question she wanted.<br/><br/>Second of two persons was Kataoka Noriko.  Noriko was the tough and tomboyish daughter of a local family who had run a martial arts dojo for generations.  But<em>aside</em>from that bit of background, and noted skill, there was nothing to her.  She did not belong to any of the school's martial arts clubs, and to her knowledge, she did not work at the school her parents ran in Hisashiro.  She was like Saburo - a mystery.  There had to be<em>something</em>about her beyond her family history, something specific to<em>her</em>- there had been for everyone else thus far.  (Even Saburo.)<br/><br/>Thus, when she was prompted this morning to choose an action for the time block, Aika had chosen to INVESTIGATE KATAOKA NORIKO.  Arriving at the school early, she breathed out a sigh of relief as she stepped into the school with nary a sign of Souji-sensei.  Arriving in the teacher's office, she paused when the morning pre-school meeting began and Souji did indeed arrive...but the entire meeting passed and after he departed, there was nothing to suggest that she had prompted the last unfilled bit of her Arousal Meter to fill.  She had...avoided him entirely!  Yes!  She would get her morning investigation, and she'd get at least her action for the afternoon, too.<br/><br/>Thus, the school day began, and during the morning break, Aika found her investigation into Noriko slightly sidetracked...