The school gym had never looked more chaotic. Random props—plastic swords, mismatched costumes, and an inflatable pirate ship—littered the floor. Haruto stood in the middle of it all, clutching his script like a lifeline. Yuki was already wearing her alien princess costume, a tiara slightly crooked on her head, while Taro fussed over the “samurai portal” prop, which looked suspiciously like a cardboard box covered in glitter.

Haruto sighed. “Alright, team, let’s try to get through the first scene without any... accidents.”

Daichi flipped lazily through the script. “Good luck with that,” he muttered, clearly not thrilled about playing the pirate. “I can’t believe I have to say, ‘Arrr, hand over your tax forms.’”

Yuki, dramatically sweeping her cape, grinned. “Oh, come on! This is going to be epic.”

The rehearsal began, and within minutes, it was already going downhill. Taro kept forgetting his lines, Yuki was adding random dramatic pauses where they didn’t belong, and Daichi’s pirate accent sounded more like a British professor than anything remotely nautical. Haruto could feel his grip on reality slipping with every line that was butchered.

As Yuki insisted on adding yet another dramatic flourish to her lines, Haruto found himself slipping into a flashback of Yuki’s past drama club escapades. Back then, she had been the undeniable queen of theatrics. He vividly recalled watching her storm the stage during a middle school production of Romeo and Juliet, where she somehow turned Juliet’s death scene into a five-minute soliloquy about the futility of life.

“Are you even paying attention, Haruto?” Yuki’s voice dragged him back to the present.

“I—uh, yeah. Totally.”

The rest of the rehearsal was nothing short of a disaster. Taro, clutching his script, stared at the page in confusion. “Wait, am I the samurai or the alien now?”

Haruto groaned. “You’re both. You’re a samurai from another dimension who fell in love with an alien detective. How is this so hard?”

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Taro scratched his head. “Right, right, got it. And the portal… where’s the portal again?”

Daichi, who had given up on trying to memorize his lines, stood in the corner muttering about the absurdity of his pirate character’s tax problems. “No self-respecting pirate would worry about taxes.”

Yuki, meanwhile, had managed to ad-lib an entire page of dialogue that wasn’t in the script, and Haruto was too exhausted to correct her.

In the middle of this delightful chaos, the gym doors creaked open, and in walked Principal Tanaka, his ever-present smile glued to his face. He strolled in as if he hadn’t noticed the complete and utter disarray around him.

“Well, well! How’s the film coming along, Mr. Kurokawa?” he asked cheerfully, dodging a stray plastic sword that Taro had accidentally flung across the gym.

Haruto froze, his face pale. “Uh… fine! Everything’s… fine.”

Principal Tanaka clapped his hands together. “That’s the spirit! Remember, we’re all about teamwork and creativity here at Shimizu High! Keep it up!” With that, he wandered off, oblivious to the glitter-covered chaos behind him.

As soon as he left, Haruto let out a long, defeated sigh. “How did I get myself into this?”

Just when Haruto thought things couldn’t get worse, the sound of applause drifted through the walls from the classroom next door. Misaki’s group was performing their flawless script rehearsal, every line delivered with precision, every prop in perfect place.

Yuki scowled. “They’re just showing off.”

Haruto peeked through the door to see Misaki’s group, polished and professional. It only added to the pressure hanging over him like a storm cloud.

Back in their gym, the rehearsal continued with a renewed sense of urgency—until the inevitable happened. Taro, in an attempt to demonstrate the samurai’s dramatic entrance, accidentally knocked over the cardboard “portal,” sending it crashing into Yuki’s tiara, which in turn caused her to knock into Daichi. Before anyone could stop it, the entire set came crashing down in a chain reaction of slapstick chaos.

Haruto’s eyes widened in horror. “That wasn’t supposed to happen…”

Yuki, brushing off glitter from her costume, sighed dramatically. “We’ll call it method acting.”

As the group scrambled to put the set back together, Haruto found himself lost in thought, retreating into another flashback. He remembered being a kid, daydreaming about making epic movies—films where the hero always triumphed, the villain was pure evil, and everything made sense.

Now, here he was, directing a chaotic disaster with a script that barely held together. “Maybe I’m just not cut out for this,” he thought to himself, watching as Daichi and Taro argued over the best way to reassemble the props.

But somewhere deep down, that childhood dream still flickered. It wasn’t perfect, but maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe the chaos was part of the fun.

By the end of the rehearsal, the gym looked like a battlefield, but somehow, amidst the chaos, something shifted. The group, exhausted and glitter-covered, sat in a circle on the gym floor, laughing about the day’s disasters.

“Well,” Daichi said, “at least we’re not as bad as Taro’s pirate conspiracy theory.”

Taro grinned, unphased. “Hey, you’ll all be thanking me when the cafeteria turns out to be a spy headquarters.”

Yuki, still wiping glitter out of her hair, smiled. “We’ll get it together. Somehow.”

Haruto, despite everything, couldn’t help but laugh. They were a disaster, sure, but they were *his* disaster. And maybe, just maybe, that was enough.

As they left the gym, Haruto looked back at the mess they’d made and thought, “Tomorrow can’t possibly be worse… right?”

Fate, of course, would have other plans.