"And so you see class, the key to understanding the reasoning behind the decision to close the country to foreign contact by the Tokugawa Shogunate..."

Yui looked up from her notes. A soft whirring sound, almost imperceptible, had been going for several minutes now, and it was driving her nuts. It didn't take her long to find the culprit. Toshino Kyouko was leaning back at her desk, one hand on her cheek, the other holding some sort of small device. Her gaze was locked on the spinning gadget.

"Kyouko." Yui tried to whisper to her friend, but it was no use. Kyouko seemed to be transfixed by the device.

"Mmn." Yui made a sound of annoyance and turned back to her notes. She tried to focus on the teacher again, but the humming of whatever it was that Kyouko had was all she could hear now. The characters in her notebook devolved into haphazard scratches.

Luckily for Yui, school ended for the day only ten minutes later. Yui packed up her supplies and followed Kyouko to the club room. Kyouko skipped inside and threw down her bag.

“Careful,” Yui said in a chiding tone. “You’ll break your things.”

Kyouko plopped down in front of the table and stretched her arms above her head.

"Hello everybody!" Akari said chipperly as she and Chinatsu entered the club room.

"China-chuuuu,” Kyouko said, making a face. She patted the floor next to her.

Chinatsu sat down beside Yui.

The door to the club room clattered open. Kyouko looked up, expecting a certain purple-head, but instead found a kindred blonde.

"Toshino Kyouko!" Sakurako yelled. She pointed accusingly at Kyouko. “Where is that wondrous device you have?"

"Eh?"

“The spinny thing! I saw you playing with it before class!”

Yui spoke up. “Is that what you were doing instead of paying attention in class today?”

“Boo-hoo, you’re so mean, Yui-chan,” Kyouko said. She reached for her bag and dug around in it.

“BEHOLD, ladies and… ladies… the greatest invention by anyone, ever.” Kyouko pulled a silver fidget spinner from her bag. “It’s called a fijeto supinna. That means ‘fidget spinner’ in English. I read online that these things are huge in America right now.”

Chinatsu looked at it with disdain. “What does it do?”

Kyouko pinched the center of the spinner between her thumb and index finger, then lightly flicked it with the index finger of her other hand. She held the spinner up as it spun rapidly.

“Is that it? Boring.” Chinatsu stopped paying attention to Kyouko, deciding to stare dreamily at Yui instead.

“AMAZING!” Sakurako lunged forward, shoving Akari aside as she moved in to get a better look at the device.

“Let me see that.” Sakurako snatched the spinner from Kyouko’s hand. She flicked it and then held it up in front of her face. Her eyes went flat as she stared deeply in the blur of the spinning arms.

“Kyouko-sempai, where’d you buy this?”

“On Amazon. They’re only a few hundred yen.”

“Awww man.” Sakurako pouted. “My big sis won’t let me use a computer unsupervised anymore after… um… nothing embarrassing happened at all…”

“That’s too bad then,” Kyouko said, plucking the spinner back out of Sakurako’s grasp. She started it spinning again. “These things sure are fun.”

Sakurako gazed longingly at the toy’s gyrations. Her face settled into a look of steely determination. She would get her hands on a fidget spinner, no matter the cost!

“My darling, wonderful, beautiful, really smart, o-imouto-sama…“

“I’m not giving you the password to the computer, Sakurako,” Hanako said.

Sakurako peeked up at Hanako from her position kowtowing on the floor. Hanako hadn’t even bothered to look up from her book.

“Pretty-pretty-pwetty-pwweeeeese?”

“What are you doing?” Nadeshiko cast a long shadow across Sakurako’s kneeling form.

“She wants the password to the computer.” Hanako said.

“Absolutely not. Not after what happened last time.”

“Geez, sis, I told you I didn’t mean to do it. I just wanna do one thing.” Sakurako rose to her knees.

“And what would that be?”

“Kyouko-sempai—“

“I’ve heard enough. The answer is no.” Nadeshiko turned away and walked off.

“Injustice! Oppression! Cruelty!” Sakurako bawled, banging a fist against the floor. She rolled over and sat up. “Well, I’m going to Himawari’s place to… study. Yep, lot’s of studying to do, so little time, heh heh heh…”

“Whatever.” Hanako went back to reading her book. If Sakurako wanted to do something stupid, at least she could do it somewhere else.

Sakurako stood up and headed out the door. The walk over to Himawari's home was a well-worn groove in Sakurako's brain. She could make the trip practically on auto-pilot, so much so that she almost got run over by a truck crossing the street.

"Hi Sakurako. Need help with your homework again?" If Himawari had seen Sakurako's brush with truck-kun, she didn't mention it.

"For your information, I can do my own homework," Sakurako said. "But my rotten sister won't let my use the computer. Can I borrow yours?"

"If Hanako—"

"Nadeshiko, it's Nadeshiko!"

"Right. If Nadeshiko-san won't let you use the computer, it's probably for a good reason."

"Thanks, Himawari, I knew I could count on you." Sakurako slipped inside and kicked off her shoes.

"And Hanako can't tell me what to do, you know. I'm her big sister."

"Of course."

"That didn't sound like you believe me!"

"No, no, I believe you! What do you want to do anyway?"

"Kyouko-senpai had this amazing little toy at school today." Sakurako grabbed Himawari by the shoulders. "I HAVE TO HAVE ONE!"

It's seven twenty five A.M., Friday morning, at Nanamori middle school. Bright sunlight shines through the windows. Students stand in bunches in the halls, scraping out the last few minutes of conversation before the start of classes.

The doors burst open.

Every head in the building turns on a swivel to face Sakurako as she strides into the building. At first there is silence. As the girl steps inside, furious murmurs sweep through the student body. In each hand, clutched between thumb and middle finger, Sakurako holds whirling fidget spinners. She holds them up, a huge grin on her face. Himawari waits until Sakurako is well clear of the doorway before following her inside.

"Ōmuro-san, what are those?"

"Where did you get them?"

"Are you aware how stupid you looked just now?"

"Shut up, Himawari," Sakurako said. She turned to the other girls.

"This, fine la-days, is a fidget spinner.” She stopped the device's spinning with a finger and held it out for all to see. The other girls let out various oohs and aahs at the device's fine craftsmanship and shiny metal.

"I still can't believe you actually wasted your money on those things," Himawari said scoldingly. Sakurako ignored her.

Throughout the day, Sakurako was the most popular girl in school with her amazing fidget spinners. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, whether in the form of lunch, down time between classes, or even just a particularly boring part of a lesson, Sakurako would break out her spinners. The spinners were enormously annoying to her teachers, but not more annoying than Sakurako usually was, so they didn’t say anything.

Monday morning, they would come to regret that decision.

When the homeroom teacher entered the classroom Monday morning, it was like walking into a beehive. The gentle humming of over fifty fidget spinners—many students had two going at once—reverberated through the room.

“Good morning students. Please rise.”

No one moved.

“Students, please. Put away your things and stand.”

The students all continued staring into their whirling spinners. It would be a long day for the faculty of Nanamori Middle School.

“This meeting of the Nanamori Middle School Student Council has now come to order.” Ayano recited the opening lines to the daily Student Council meeting in a powerful voice suitable for such an occasion. Countless hours practicing it in front of her bathroom mirror were really paying off.

“The first order of business is… Ōmuro-san, are you paying attention?!”

“Huh? What? Did someone say my name?” Sakurako looked up from staring into her fidget spinner. Himawari scoffed.

“Put that thing away, Sakurako,” Ayano said sternly. She would not have her meeting disrupted by Sakurako’s shenanigans for the four hundred and fifty second time.

“Yea, sure,” Sakurako said in a drawl. She continued staring into the spinner.

“Honestly!” Ayano stalked over to Sakurako in a huff. She leaned over Sakurako’s shoulder, then snatched the spinner right out of her hands.

“Give it back!” Sakurako said in a wail, reaching out at Ayano impotently.

“I’ll give it back after the meeting.” Ayano stuffed the device in her pocket. Sakurako seethed in her seat as Ayano stepped back to her place at the head of the table.

“Now, the first order of business. As my beloved kouhai aptly demonstrated just now, the school is beset by a veritable tsunami of these strange fidget spinner devices.” Ayano swept her stern gaze across the assembled student council. Himawari met Ayano’s eyes with her own; the girls shared a fell purpose in the expulsion of the fidget spinners. Sakurako was still salty. Chitose was too busy fantasizing about Ayano punishing Kyouko for bringing the fidget spinners into the school to pay attention to what Ayano was saying.

“Under the power given to me as Student Council Vice President, from this moment onward I am hereby banning the use of fidget spinners in this school. Any student caught using a fidget spinner during school hours will have it confiscated.”

“Umm…” Sakurako raised her hand. She didn’t wait for Ayano to respond before she continued speaking. “Do you even have the power to do that?”

“Of course I do!” Ayano went red in the face.

After the meeting was concluded, Ayano decided to stop by the convenience store on the way home. As she approached the counter with a tasty snack, she beheld a terrible sight; the store had put up a rack of fidget spinners for sale, a rack that was looking pretty thoroughly picked over already. Thinking fast, Ayano grabbed a cloth bag and put it on the counter next to her snack. She would need extra gear to fight back the fidget spinner tide.

The next day on the way to school, Ayano was so caught up glaring at the other students with their fidget spinners that she didn’t pay any attention at all to Chitose. Once she arrived at school grounds, Ayano pulled the cloth bag from her book bag. She broke off from Chitose’s side to make a beeline for a group of kouhai. The girls were laughing hysterically as they played with their fidget spinners.

“Excuse me!” Ayano said crossly. The girls looked at her quizzically.

Ayano jabbed a finger in their direction. “Fidget spinners are banned from school grounds!” She held up her cloth bag. “As the Official Student Council Vice President, I’ll be confiscating those right now!”

“What?” The girls looked at Ayano with disbelief. “Since when?”

“I sent out an email to everyone’s school email accounts last night,” Ayano said, tilting her chin up.

“We have school email accounts?” one of the girls whispered conspicuously to her friend.

“Yea, but I never check it.”

Ayano scoffed. “Ignorance of the rules is no excuse for breaking them.” She shook the open bag again. The girls muttered and groaned in disappointment as they deposited their spinners. Ayano had barely returned the cloth bag to her book bag when she spotted more students engaging in fidget spinner shenanigans.

“Stop, stop right now!” Ayano dashed across the school grounds to catch the perpetrators. Every time Ayano confiscated a student’s fidget spinner, a dozen more students would enter her line of sight playing with the obnoxious toy. After over ten minutes of dashing around the school, Ayano collapsed against a nearby wall. Panting heavily, she put her hands on her knees. Her cloth bag was heavy with confiscated fidget spinners. As Ayano caught her breath, a melody of chimes rang through the air.

“I’m late!”

Ayano stumbled into the Student Council room. She staggered, teetering from one side to the other, in the vague direction of her seat, her heavily weighed down bag swinging back and forth. She grappled for a moment with the chair, then crumpled into it. Her bag slid off her shoulder and hit the floor with an enormous crash. The table rattled as Ayano’s head slammed into it.

“Uuuugggghhhhh…” The sound that came out of Ayano’s mouth was enough to make someone feel like they had just run a marathon, sat through a five-hour board meeting, and watched someone else’s misbehaving children. Consecutively.

“Nanamori Student Council.”

“…”

Standing in the doorway was the science teacher Nishigaki-sensei, and her protégée Rise Matsumoto. Nishigaki held a box in her hands.

“Nishigaki-sensei, what are you doing here?” Himawari asked.

Ayano made a sound vaguely like a drowning woman.

“Why, showing off my latest invention!” Nishigaki set the box on the table and opened the top flaps. Digging through layers of thick bubble-wrap, she pulled out a shiny fidget spinner.

“OOhhh!” Sakurako grasped out at the shiny new toy, much as a small child might. Nishigaki held the device up and away from her.

“Ōmuro-san, this device is highly sophisticated, dangerous, and expensive to replace. I can’t simply give it to you to mess with.”

Sakurako deflated in her chair, her cheeks smooshing against the table.

“But I waaaaaant iiiiiiittt…” Sakurako said, whining. Himawari glared at her in frustration, not to mention embarrassment at being associated with such a wretched human being. Ayano felt a deep feeling of dread building in her gut as she watched Sakurako’s pouting. Usually when the girl stooped to this level, she ended up getting what she wanted, no matter what wiser heads may have preferred.

“Oh, I can’t say no to that face,” Nishigaki cooed. “You reminded me of myself when I was your age, filled with curiosity about the world of machines, never letting anybody stand in the way of my thirst for discovery!”

“Hooray!” Sakurako popped up out of her slump in the blink of an eye. Her chair clattered as she leapt up to yank the spinner from Nishigaki’s hands. Sakurako smacked the fidget spinner, sending it twirling at incredible speed. It was going much faster than any of the girls had seen one spin before. As it continued to spin, not only did it not seem to be slowing down, if anything, it seemed to be speeding up.

“Wh–What the…?” Sakurako stammered as the spinner spun faster and faster. The hand holding the spinner started to wave around in the air erratically, and even when Sakurako grabbed on with her other hand the spinner continued to swing around completely out of control.

“Sakurako—!” Himawari stood up as Sakurako began to stumble around the room, swinging the rapidly spinning fidget spinner back and forth as she went. At this point, the spinner was emitting a high pitched hum due to it’s enormous rotational velocity.

“I can’t control it! I can’t — WAAAGH!” Sakurako yelped in shock as she stumbled backwards out the open door into the hallway, then turned to the left.

“Look out!” Sakurako called, her voice getting fainter as the noise of the spinning spinner only got louder.

“AAYYYIIEE!” Several girls in the distance screamed in surprise and terror. The entire building shook as a deafening explosion erupted from down the hall. Thick clouds of smoke began to drift in through the open doorway.

“Umm... Sakurako? Are you okay?” Himawari cautiously stood up from her seat. Only silence came from the open doorway.

One week later

“Good morning everyone!” Akari called as she ran towards the school. Kyouko, Yui and Chinatsu where standing in line in front of the school entrance, where every students was having their bag checked for any rouge fidget spinners by the school faculty and student council.

“Sorry I didn’t meet you guys on the way like normal!” Akari said. “I overslept again!”

“You’re fine, Akari,” Yui gestured to the line. “We’re going nowhere fast. I hope you’ve learned your lesson, Kyouko.”

“Huh?” Kyouko looked up from the Mirakarun mobage she was playing on her phone. “What did you say, Yui?”

“Never mind.”