Synopsis
Tōru Kagemachi always had doubts about the busy city and its hidden edges. On a soggy Tuesday, news spread fast at Kawamura High—A missing teacher. Some say she vanished without a trace, but Tōru’s always wondered if things just seem to disappear or if they’re taken. You ever looked at those dark windows late at night and felt a shadow looked back?
Kana Mori, Tōru’s best friend and the class vice head, tells him there’s a new club. They don’t meet by the school garden or hold games. They whisper beneath the rooftop clock. She presents him with a torn note found inside his desk: ‘The Sun Pulls Strings At Dusk.’ Kana thinks it’s a prank, but Tōru feels it’s an invite.
This story picks up on a normal Friday. Well, normal if you ignore the crows spreading across the roof and half the lights flickering out. Tōru steps out during lunch. Kana follows, her steps nervous. What would drive someone to risk breaking curfew, even on a dare?
After dark, Tōru makes his way to the east stair. Hiro Yukihara finds them on the third floor. Quiet type, keeps to the club quarters most hours, but jumps at odd facts. He winks, hands over a slit red card, and guides Tōru to the roof. Heads count low, but spirits run high in conspirator’s confessionals. ‘You lot talk about missing socks and junk food bans,’ a senior accuses, ‘but what about the clock’s third chime after four?’ Tōru shrugs it off.
Once night falls, something about the air shifts. The clocktower’s dials move backwards at five minutes to midnight, and Kana swears her phone shakes on its own. Is it just nerves? Tōru’s fingers ache. He hears the name ‘Marionette Project’ drift from the lips of Noriko, the history klutz. Some say the project went silent in the 1970’s after an accident down in the city’s cable lines. There’s a hunch that every thirty years something big erupts. Coincidence?
Data from city archives says the clocktower was one of the first things up after the war. One scratching photo from 1951 shows children staring at a bright light. Researchers died young, files often burnt. ‘You don’t touch the Clock Society’s records, unless you’re ready to lose your nights,’ warns Hiro. slaapTech, a shadow group chasing ‘energy beams beneath city skin’, pops up as an expert adversary.
The trio—Tōru, Kana, Hiro—work together. They sneak into headmaster Shio’s room. There’s a diagram tucked behind the wall of honors. Odd, pencil-sketched gears and long dark strands like puppet strings connect to a diagram of the sun. Just a plan? It can’t be real, can it? 
Kana finds a notebook with dozens of clock faces, all set to different times, some upside down. A deep entry: ‘We wind them and they wind us.’ Now, doubts riddle their path. Who’s ‘they’? The city calms by day, groans by night. Radio static gets louder when they’re near the clock base. Light floats differently around it—some scientists think it’s just quartz dust, but Tōru doubts “dust” controls what comes loose after dark.
Are conspiracies only rumors? The only way to beat unease is knowing, right? Kana’s cousin Sawako, big on social sites, gets anonymous emails. The sender calls the group ‘Sons of the Puppet Sun.’ The gang’s now watched—from both inside and out. By the weekend, three students are gone from class lists. Everyone’s scared, staff stays in pairs, and doors lock without warning.
The threat thickens when Hiro wakes to find threads knotted around his toes. Not normal thread either—it sticks, cold and wet as old silk. What would you do if your friends started vanishing? Tōru tries to piece motives together: Are kids caught for knowing, or are they made part of the club against their will?
A key scene swings when they break into the city archive laws. A hidden photograph falls. It’s an old group-shot—teens isolated, ringed by faint puppet strings that seem painted over in haste. One face stands out: their missing teacher, not as she is now, but as a girl their own age. Time breaks rules for the right price.
Still, science kids give them a lead. Devices used to blend quartz resonance values and block clock signals. Are district energy shifts just government projects, or part of some scheme?
An all-nighter brings the three to the top stairs. Kana worries their last move could land the group in danger. For each strange event, a bigger twist hits. City data links each “incident date” to phases of the moon and a spike in electrical static recorded by local towers.
They reach the tower head as ‘dusk’ forms a bizarre aura. Someone’s waiting inside the gear room. Long coat, odd watch, holding a wooden puppet. He clicks the toes and jaws. Anger, fear, then a kind of giddy drop seizes Tōru. The stranger speaks: ‘Your time has not begun. If you recall the codes, you sway the sun.’ The group breaks as police sirens spark below. Power goes out. Only the old clock ticks on, backwards.
At the end, Tōru’s left clutching a string that glows faint violet, one end pointing to the school science lab, and Kana’s voice asking, barely a whisper, ‘Did we pull the sun, or did it pull us?’
The episode ends before answers come. Who controls the clocks? Why do the city and school cover both fact and fiction up? Will the Puppet-Sun ever rise for real?
