Burning Bright

Lighthouse

{ December 1st, Day 59 }

"... Eh!? A man-made mountain...!?" Kurusu-sensei said. 'That giant mountain was...!? No... No way...!' "I... I don't believe it. That mountain was made by people's hands... What does that mean, Yarai-kun!?"

"..." Yarai looked at them. "... Do any of you know how a mountain is made in the first place...?"

"Yes," Torako said.

"Anyone other than Fukui?" Yarai asked, suppressing a small smile when she pouted a little. "There are essentially two ways that mountains are made. Mountain ranges come from either an erupted volcano's magma that has cooled and hardened, or from two tectonic plates clashing against each other and protruding up out of the ground. That's why the dirt and rocks on a mountain are more or less the same as the magma underground or whatever was on the surface of the plates... understand?"

"Of course!" Segawa said, crossing her arms.

"... Then isn't it strange?" he asked them. "Look... there are way too many different types of rocks!!"

"... Ah...!" Segawa gasped as she and everyone but Torako looked closer again.

"It... It's true...!!" Kurusu-sensei said. "B... But that doesn't necessarily mean it was man-made..."

"Did you see the clear pieces?" Torako asked.

"Eh?" Kurusu-sensei said.

"... Look carefully, see how there are a few clear bits mixed in?" Yarai said.

"Ye... Yeah..." Kurusu-sensei and Segawa said.

"This isn't a mineral... It's plastic, melted down after being scorched with fire," Yarai said, holding up one of the bigger pieces of it. "They look similar to 'PET flakes' you get from smashing bottles made from PET. It costs money to recycle PET bottles, it seems like even the government is overflowing with this stuff."

"So you mean they buried the trash...?" Kurusu-sensei asked. "But someone might have just thrown away their bottle."

"At first, I thought so too... but after looking carefully, it was scattered everywhere on the mountain," Yarai said. "It's just not normal to have so much trash everywhere on the ground, is it?"

'Oh, so that's what he was doing...' Torako thought, recalling how he had been squatting down looking at the ground here and there when she woke up after sleeping off the bad trip from the fruit.

"B-But a man-made mountain... I've never even heard of something like that..." Kurusu-sensei said.

"That's not true!" Yarai said. "Man-made mountains are called 'artificial mountains', and even exist in various places around Japan."

"Right. Like Mt. Hakone in Shinjuku city or Mt. Moere in Sapporo," Torako said.

"There's even a plan in Germany to build a 1000m tall mountain," Yarai added. "Isn't this mountain even bigger than that...?"

"..." Kurusu-sensei and Segawa and her friends stared at him, amazed.

"Even so, making a man-made mountain that size... would require an enormous amount of money..." Torako said, holding her chin, voicing Yarai's own thoughts.

'Who would do something like this, and for what purpose...?' Yarai thought. 'This island... the more we investigate, the more mysterious things we find...' He looked at Torako and then their teacher. "...?" Was it just him or did their teacher look a little dazed. "You can't daydream forever, Sensei! ... Don't tell me you didn't notice anything!"

"Th... That's..." Kurusu-sensei said.

"Hey, hey... you did graduate from university, right...?" Yarai asked.