Perfecto (Kozume Kenma)

'The Zoo Affect'

Nekoma koko. (Neko means cat in Japanese)It's a strange name to give a high school, or any school in general, really. It may falsely sound like I'm complaining; I'm not(well, maybe a little bit); it's just that upon hearing a name for a high school being 'nekoma', what are you supposed to think? Your first impression of the school probably won't be about the extracurricular activities or how intelligent the student body seems as you're more likely to be looking around with conspiracy theories swirling around in your head trying to relate everybody to cats.

It helps that there's also Fukuroudani (Fukurou means owl in Japanese)here in Tokyo with us, and their name seems even more ironic because some of the students that attend there actually look like and have owl-based names to the point where it's hard to believe that they didn't consider these factors when choosing the school. Now that I think about it, it's kind of amazing that people don't bring it up more, although I wouldn't know as I'm not exactly the most trendy person.

There's also Shiratorizawa (Shiratori means white bird in Japanese) Academy over in the Miyagi prefecture, which is a big deal powerhouse school as far as volleyball goes that supposedly has a Japan Youth rep as their ace (volleyball is the only reason I even know about all of these schools as I wouldn't actually go out of my way to research them if it wasn't mandatory). Although their name is extremely vague and technically isn't that specifically, I can't really help imagining them to be an eagle as I can't think of any other white bird to suit them on the spot.

Also Karasuno(Karasu means crow in Japanese). I'm not sure what exactly is so crow-like about them but I guess crows aren't taken seriously and neither are they as they are often seen as the underdogs. They are also kind of scary, well not in a literal sense, but more like intimidating, what with their pitch black uniforms and players who outright look like they're trying to pick a fight with you all the time.

Having all of these other strangely-named schools around was definitely a good thing, as it made us not stand out as much.

I found myself being forced to think about this during one of the training camps. For those who are reading 'training camp' with a confused expression, our school is part of the 'Fukuroudani Academy group', which is a group of four high school volleyball clubs where between tournaments, we take turns hosting a meet up for a week of practice matches.

I'm not really sure about what I think about it, I mean, it is helpful to have multiple practice matches with other schools, because it means that we will have more experience dealing with multiple types of attack and defence which will greatly help in other matches, and we might also be able to incorporate said techniques into our own team to use against others.

However, it's not like we can't just have other schools come to ours for practice matches, and then we won't have to travel to other places and to play against the same three schools over and over again, but at least those teams will definitely pose a challenge at least each time and are basically experts in specific fields, so most would say that the practice was definitely worth it.

Actually, they might even enjoy it, for the exact same reasons that I dislike it.

While Kuroo and Bokuto(A third year from Fukuroudani) were behaving in their usual manner, namely by Bokuto loudly 'saying'(it can hardly be called that anymore at that volume) the first thing that comes into his mind and Kuroo trying to be equally loud in either his dismissal of the random thing his excitable friend had managed to think up or completely joining in with the stupidity, making for a loud, vexing but somehow incredibly hard to ignore conversation.

This particular conversation that they happened to be having seemed to strike a chord with other people in the gym, including me, to be honest. It is apparently increasingly difficult to get me interested in most things that I am not already so it must be specially interesting, I guess...