Gakuen Alice manga recap/log part 1

I started reading this at 11/24/2015, before I started watching the anime while high.

Hotaru, Mikan's best friend, suddenly went away and transferred to Alice Academy in order to help out her home town/school's funding... she has a very useful power (called an "Alice") that allows her to instantly manifest inventions of thinks she is interested in. Mikan is miserable about this and eventually decides to try to get into Alice Academy herself to be with Hotaru.

Mikan meets a a very weird teacher, Mr. Narumi, who has the pheremone alice... he realizes right away that Mikan has a unique Alice because his power of attraction doesn't work on her...

Natsume, the fire conjurer is a bad kid who is rumored to have murdered people.. and when Mikan gets involved with him, he finds out that she can block his powers, and that makes him start to become tsundere about her... he also takes her panties off the first time they meet.

Luca, Natsume's friend who is secretly an animal lover, seems to be very loyal to Natsume out of empathy for his situation or something, but isn't really a bad guy.

I'm really loving the character personalities in this...

Got to the end of chapter 16... I'm still finding a lot of stuff is coming back to me. Mikan got assigned as a "no-star" rank by a jerk teacher who just hates the fact that she has the nullification alice. Then Mikan meets the students in her own alice class (the special leftover class that doesn't have a theme) who are a lot more laid back and rebellious...

There's this big plot where Natsume gets kidnapped by a celebrity who visits the school.. Mikan and that girl who Mikan calls "Curly Perm", who's the biggest Natsume/Luca fan, both see the kidnapping but the teachers don't believe them, so they escape school to try to rescue him themselves. It's revealed that Perm's alice lets her grow whiskers and gain the abilities of a cat and a dog. The kidnappers find out about Mikan's alice, and they conclude that she must be related to "that woman", and it seems like she's as important to them as Natsume... but they manage to escape by Natsume threatening to blow everyone up, and then Mikan comes back and tries to stop Natsume from killing himself, and later Mikan wakes up in the hospital and Narumi awards her with a 1-star rank upgrade.

12/04/2015

At chapter 25 now... by the time of the Alice festival, Mikan got her special class's attraction popular, and Mikan is getting a lot more liked by everyone, and even starts getting along better with Natsume after she finds out he's a secret operative working for the school... and Luca seems to have a crush on Mikan...

At the end of the Alice festival, Natsume actually opens up to Mikan a bit, and addresses her by her name for the first time, and tells her "A naive girl like you should stay in the light and stay out of the dark."

12/12/2015

Now at chapter 34... that older masked guy is threatening Natsume to stay away from Mikan... now Mikan is confused about why Natsume has gone back to being cold and distant..

Next there's a plot about this anti-Alice group who is stealing people's Alices... the class president gets his Alice stolen, and the faculty are looking into his memories to try and find the culprit... somehow the bad guys get into the school, and attack Mikan, and Hotaru jumps in front of the poison bullet and gets hit instead.

Mikan finds out about the rumored wormhole that exists somewhere in the school, and that this is probably what the bad guys are using to infiltrate the school.. Mikan wants to go and look for the wormhole and force the bad guys to give them the antidote to save Hotaru, but everyone else is against it and thinks Mikan would only be causing trouble for the school again... but the Luca and Natsume both speak up saying they'll help Mikan.

12/13/2015

Now at chapter 40... during their journey to find the hideout of the bad guys who stole Iinchou's alice and shot Hotaru, Luca and Mikan have some sort of romantic exchange where they promise to make Alice stones for each other in the future. Later, Natsume explains to Mikan that promising to exchange Alice stones usually means engagement with that person, and that you can only make one Alice stone in your lifetime... Mikan seems to have some conflict and thought she'd be able to make Alice stones for Luca, Hotaru, and Natsume...

Later, Mikan falls into a trap and separates from the group, and gets caught in some illusions with a skeleton... the woman who steals Alices then sees Mikan and shows up before her.. it shows some of this woman's backstory, how she was conflicted over having this alice and someone told her she was meant to use it for good...

1/10/2016

Somehow Mikan and the others make it out of that situation... Mikan tries to grab the antidote for Hotaru, and the penguin sacrifices his life to save Mikan... Hotaru recovers, and everything becomes peaceful again (but they couldn't manage to retrieve Inchou's alice)...

There was a little side chapter where Narumi meets this woman, and it seems like Mikan is secretly their daughter? The plot isn't conveyed very well at all here... the woman leaves Narumi with some Alice stones...

Now it's some boring stuff about everyone giving Natsumi presents for his birthday... then there's the Christmas Ball, where everyone wears masks and dances... Ruka and some other guy both kissed Mikan on the cheek, and she got really flustered by this... then Ruka convinced Natsumi to dance with Mikan, and they tripped and accidentally teeth-kissed each other... then later that night Natsumi is alone with Mikan and he kisses her for real... Mikan makes a huge deal out of this while Natsumi thinks it's no big deal at all.

2/06/2016

At chapter 50-55 there's some new year's party shenanigans.. We learn about this middle school principal who is really mysterious and weird.. She has this secret flower garden group that only allows females to enter it. It's like some kind of lesbian harem... and it's rare for elementary students to get invited to it, but Hotaru and Mikan both somehow end up with invitations...

Then soon after that, Mikan and the others eat some experimental mochi that contains ingredients that make the people who ate it become magnetized to each other and are stuck together for a while... Mikan and Natsume happened to both eat the same one and got stuck together... Hotaru got stuck to Luca.

After it wore off for everyone but Hotaru and Luca (I guess they ate more of it than anyone else), Mikan was about to separate from Natsume, but he grabbed Mikan's hand and told her to pretend to stay stuck with him until tomorrow... I'm not sure why... he seemed to be looking suspiciously at Mikan and Narumi-sensei when she was crying in his lap (she thought everyone forgot her birthday, but they were all holding a surprise party for her)... Narumi seems to be in some kind of trouble where his hand is black and warm, and he doesn't talk about it with Mikan... anyway... Natsume forced her to stay stuck with her that whole time, even if it meant they had to go to the bathroom and sleep together... Hotaru didn't mind being stuck to Luca at all and was her usual calm self.. Mikan was panicking because she thought Natsume might ruin her chances of going to the flower garden party... when they slept together, Natsume was in pain and he moved in close to Mikan to help relieve it...

2/07/2016

For some reason Natsume and Luca (and that little kid who's with Luca) all get invited to the Junior High principal's flower garden party too... provided that they agree to dress up as girls. This party takes place in an old style japanese lord's house or something, and the principal is dressed like a goddess/princess.. then later Natsume breaks away from the group in order to investigate something.

There's something really dark and mysterious going on with this principal, but it's being really cryptic and annoying about revealing the plot... something about one of the girls telling Mikan to "stop Natsume" or else something bad will happen... and Natsume's investigation involves something to do with the principal's alice I think?

"The Junior High principal locks the girl she likes deep in a room devoid of light, so that no one can see her, never letting her out... and whoever discovers this secret, can never escape from the darkness of the junior high..."

oh... so because of Natsume's power, he can easily neutralize the principal's darkness with his fire... He's trying to free this person that is trapped there...

3/18/2016

This whole arc is really hard to follow what's going on, mostly because of how everybody looks identical in these flower kimono outfits... Mikan and the others are now searching the flower garden building looking for Natsume, who has gone searching for his sister Aoi who is locked up in this place...

Also, that 3 year old kid suddenly grew a lot bigger and used his alice to battle some junior high student who was trying to capture them for some reason? then Luca shows up, and he explains to Mikan and everyone about how Natsume is trying to save his sister, and that he's really not a bad guy and only cares about protecting people...

then the next few chapters are the backstory of Ruka and Natsume before they became forcefully enrolled in Alice Gakuen... Ruka (nicknamed Ruu-chan) always felt like an outcast because his alice was known to everyone, and his mother was super strict about keeping him safe from kidnappers and had bodyguards accompany him to school and everything... then one day, Natsume transferred into Ruka's school. Natsume revealed his fire alice when he had to use it to save Ruka from a kidnapper, and then Ruka was infatuated with him... He went to meet Natsume's family, who are all alices... including his little sister Aoi, who is really cute and has very high respect for Natsume.. meanwhile Narumi and some other teachers (including that masked guy, Persona), have come to try and reel in Natsume and Ruka to enroll in their school.

4/12/2016

That Natsume/Ruka backstory finally finished, and now Mikan is totally upset and wants to save Natsume and his sister Aoi from the school...

Suddenly, somehow Mikan ends up exactly where Aoi is being held captive. She finds out Aoi is now blind.. and not only that, she lost her memory and doesn't even know what her alice is anymore... she keeps saying Persona is a good person who takes care of her, but Mikan can see that this Aoi is nothing like the smiling Aoi described in the story.. she takes Aoi away from here to try to find Natsume...

and then they find him like literally one page later... Natsume finally has his sister back and now they can escape the school together... they get attacked by some student that is being controlled by Persona.. then they get attacked by Persona himself... Mikan is pissed at this guy and throws herself at him to try and stop him with her nullification alice...

but when she does this, Persona's mask comes off, which unseals his powers, and Mikan gets a bunch of bruises all over her. Persona explains that his alice is some kind of touch of death... he used to be a monster until the academy gave him these things to seal his powers with...

Mikan doesn't stop fighting even though she's injured... someone comes in to save them and gets them away from Persona, and now Mikan is on the verge of death and the only person who might be able to save her is Hotaru's big brother, who might be the only one who was able to survive being hit by Persona's alice.