Vetta Mindal staggered back up the hill with a scrap of paper in her hand, dishevelled hair sprinkled with feathers, and a glazed look in her deep blue eyes that told of horrors endured and still being relived in some frightened little corner of her mind.
She entered Dorm Wonder to the sound of sleepy chatter and the snores of Dolly Bloomen who could only be woken by thunderous explosions, severally repeated. No one noticed her, which was no unusual thing for Vetta was a quiet, inoffensive body prone to going about doing her own thing in as quiet and inoffensive a way as possible. However the distress her mind radiated by a medium as yet not understood attracted the notice of one who drifted halfway between sleep and wakefulness and so was terribly receptive to this broadcast distress.
Esper sat up suddenly. She panicked a little before remembering she was wearing a face mask, and then having swiped it off she blinked around the room with puzzled scrutiny.
"Vetta, whatever have you been doing?" she said, noticing the dishevelled figure with bits of feather sticking out of her fluffy blonde hair.
"Feeding," Vetta gasped as she put her coat away, "the pigeons."
"Were you feeding them into some shredding machine perhaps?" Esper pursued.
"I think they were very hungry. It is early winter and possibly they are having difficulty finding food." There was a gulp. It was in Vetta's nature to help the needy, and admitting the feathered fiends of recent memory might be starving meant she had visions of repeating the process the next morning. Esper felt this rising terror and smiled.
"A curious thing that," she said.
Sentimentalia Placidia Rosala, or Esper for short, was one of those beings whom one might describe as a sensitive. She had such a telepathic empathy for the thoughts and feelings of others it was almost like reading minds. Not quite, but so similar she unsettled not a few of her fellow pupils with the insightful way she addressed their concerns. Exam day was going to be a big issue with her in the near future and lottery organisers eyed her with suspicion.
As Vetta Mindal stood there, red marks upon her hands and one leg trembling a little, Esper felt with admiration the way the Poldorama girl overcame her feelings of fear to do what she knew was the right thing. To feed the pigeons again the next morning before lessons.
"I think," Esper said, climbing out of bed and going over to the trembling girl to pluck a pale feather from her hair, "I would not mind helping out now and again. Perhaps we could do a little food run together?" she suggested before disappearing into the bathroom.
"Mm," Vetta replied as the other girl disappeared. She wanted to thank her friend and dorm mate but was too overcome by conflicting emotions to make a coherent response. After what she had experienced, the thought of Esper being exposed to beak and claw was an unwished for outcome of her charitable action of the morning. It was only when she pondered body armour and a more discreet method of dispersing the offered food that her nerves settled enough to allow her to concentrate on the school day ahead.
"Why are you wearing battle uniform?" Esper asked with a laugh the following morning as she wrapped a scarf around her neck and inspected the scraps retrieved from the kitchen. "Have you been picked by some violent contact sports team?" She knew the answer of course and laughed again more merrily still as Vetta Mindal lumbered down the steps at the school entrance and crushed gravel to dust with her heavy footwear.
"Precautions," the girl replied through a face grille and gum shield.
"You'll never make it to Orangey Park in that get up, unless we hire a truck to convey you there. It will be like transporting an armoured vehicle to the theatre of war. We would need a police escort and flashing lights." Further teasing comments like this persuaded the nervous girl to relinquish the protective gear and appear in a hat and thick coat, sunglasses and leather gloves. She now looked like a detective seriously determined to crack the toughest of cases so that Esper laughed merrily again.
In spite of the few pedestrians on the road that led to Cherryball Flats there was enough interest in the curious figure of Vetta in her sunglasses and hat to generate a celebrity spotting spike in on-grid messaging. Before long two young boys came up to her and asked for an autograph.
"I'm just me," the girl protested in painful honesty but they would not be denied. Thus she wrote her name on some notepaper and gave it to the boys, one signature to each, and they squinted at the writing with excitement wavering on confusion. One glanced at Esper who stood to the side smiling and she shook her head.
"I'm just her nameless secret service bodyguard," she declared dismissively. "Nobody really."
The boys raced off but Vetta's incognito progress was interrupted a few more times before they made it to the comparative safety of the park. A girl even screamed and fainted when Vetta took off a glove to shake her hand.
"You were wicked to encourage them," she accused her companion, her big blue eyes staring at the unabashed Esper as she sniggered. The gloves and glasses too were abandoned, the hat discarded, so that face recognition spotters flared out that the little blonde creature sauntering into a public park was actually a complete nobody. That same face recognition software would have highlighted she might be a fugitive from justice, wanted for crimes committed some sixty odd years previously, but nothing happened of course because the Frangea social media database had only a fame time stamp of around twenty minutes into the past and no deeper. The announcement of her irrelevance infuriated a film crew who had been scrambled from a local news streamer so that their van screeched to a halt half way to an exclusive interview, turned round on two of its four wheels and sought some other fare to fill grid screens with. If they had paid greater attention to Frangea history they might have changed their minds. It would not be long though before some keen researcher dug up obscurity from well earned oblivion and ripples that had died out long ago begin again to lap against the shores of public awareness.
Amid all this media turmoil Vetta and Esper approached the scene of yesterday's epic tussle and the sound of gurgling coos and cries from beyond some bushes made at least one of the girls falter in her progress.
"Ha!" Esper shouted and there was a sudden cloud of rising shadows amid the trees.
"You've scared them off," Vetta protested faintly.
"They'll be back. In the mean time let's scatter this food on the grass over there and then sit and watch on that bench a discreet distance away."
"It sounds so simple when you explain it," Vetta said gratefully and carried out matters as instructed. More than once she watched the feathered cloud circling in the air above the trees, guided by some unknown master mind among their number as they chose to swoop this way and that amid a pleasant whirring sound that rose and fell.
"Now we wait," Esper said as Vetta settled upon the wooden slats of the bench and concentrated on the slowly moving patches of sunlight that picked out tiny details in the laid brickwork, where a few ants were discussing what to do with a twig twenty times bigger than themselves. When one took matters into his own pincers and walked off with it Vetta was so impressed with such a show of decisive action she totally forgot herself until a Wobbly Pigeon suddenly landed at her feet and made her jump.
"Now that is curious," she heard Esper whisper as the pigeon pecked around on the ground, ignoring the food scattered in bright particles on the green grass. Other pigeons joined the first but it was not until a larger number had descended that they began gobbling up the food provided for them.
"I'm so glad," Vetta sighed, seeing her good deed was more successful in that she suffered no traumatic injury.
Esper however did not reply. Instead she was staring fixedly at the pigeons as if hypnotised. Only when the other girl shook her friend did she return to the land of the living.
"I've been a journey," she said. "Far far away," and there was a look of surprise in her eyes. Both glanced down then in response to a cooing sound at Esper's feet. One of the pigeons had separated from the flock and was doing a curious little dance in front of her, fanning out tail feathers provocatively.
To Vetta's surprise she saw her friend blush.
