Haruhi Suzumiya

Plot

After a long argument, I managed to talk Haruhi out of making us go back into the abandoned school building, and I got to spend my Saturday sleeping in peace at home.

But I didn't find out what had truly happened in the abandoned school building until Monday.

I tried calling Koizumi, Nagato-san, and Asahina-san on Sunday, but I never got a response from any of them. I thought about riding over to Nagato-san's house, but I knew that if they weren't answering the phone, that likely meant they were with their respective higher-ups giving a formal report of our escapades the other night.

I bet being friends with Haruhi requires a lot of paperwork for those three.

During class Monday, Haruhi seemed distracted, and she wasn't in the clubroom when I arrived, which was fine by me because it gave the four sane members of the SOS Brigade time to talk about insane things, namely ghosts.

And as it turns out, it wasn't Haruhi causing the ghosts after all.

You're innocent on this charge, Haruhi. We'll consider this the exception to the rule.

The ghosts were actually Asahina-san's fault, or well, more specifically, the fault of time-travelers.

She sat me down when I arrived in the clubroom and started a very nervous explanation of the whole thing, and judging by the way Nagato-san and Koizumi reacted, they had already heard it all.

"That building we entered was actually a classified information. Um, I mean. . ."

Great, Asahina-san's time-traveler censorship is on. This explanation is likely to leave me more confused than ever.

"It's like a safe-house for bad guys. I noticed it when we first entered."

Safe-house for bad guys? I had no clue where this was going, but it did explain why Asahina-san was acting so strangely when we first arrived for the campout.

"The ghosts you saw were actually members of classified information, um, I mean. . . they're like. . . people who time travel illegally. They can't use a TPDD, so they have to find illegal ways to go back in time, and many of those ways leave imprints on the past."

I stared at her for a moment. I could tell Asahina-san wanted some confirmation that I was following her.

"I don't understand," I said.

She paused for a moment to think, and the sight of her gently tapping her finger on her chin was so cute. Even when she has serious business to deal with, she can't help but do things in an innocent way.

"Ah! Do you remember when I told you time traveling is like adding an extra page into a flip book?"

I nodded. She told me that the day she revealed her true identity to me. I'll never forget that.

"Well, a TPDD takes the page back out when we're through. But people who time travel illegally, it's like they drew themselves into the flip books right on top of the normal pages. When they go to leave, they erase the picture they drew of themselves."

"And sometimes they don't erase all the way?" I asked as I started to put it together.

She nodded enthusiastically. "Yeah!"

"So what we were seeing, what we thought were ghosts. . ."

". . . were just imprints of time travelers who had stayed in that building at some point," she finished.

Now I felt stupid knowing I was running from imprints. At least I felt a little justified when I thought they were ghosts.

"But wait. They reacted to us. Attacked. . . threw things at us."