Savannah

Hi everyone! Sorry about the wait I'm an awfully slow writer, and its stupidly hot in England right now. I hope you enjoy the chapter and if you would be so kind I'd love to read your comments or maybe even a review! Enjoy!

I yawn and stretch as I push my sheets up the bed. I check the time on the tablet. Six in the morning and its still dark outside. To some it would be depressing, getting up only to find the day hasn’t really started yet. I found it kind of cool though, everyone leaving and watching the sun come up as they’d commute. I carefully extracted myself from the bed and went to get some food for Colin, picking up his water bowl whilst I was there. He was unsurprisingly underneath the heat lamp, as not even the building’s central heating wasn’t good enough to keep the temperature at a normal level.

I picked up some carrots I chopped up the previous night and filled his bowl from the tap, making sure not to overfill. I’d made that mistake too many times and ended up spilling it all over myself. It was now Christmas break, and I had two weeks with no lessons at all, and I had decided that I wanted to help out putting up all the Christmas decorations in the dormitory. The Principal had quite quickly enlisted the help of Erina to do the tree in the main hall, so she’d be busy doing that all day. We were to get up early and get a nice head start on the decorations today, so we could have as many days free to enjoy ourselves.

I place the bowl down in the middle of the enclosure and place the carrots in front of Colin, who slowly smells the sweet aroma of the food and wakes up, taking a peck at them. I leave him to chow down, and step into the bathroom to shower. Even zombies need to be clean! Probably even more than most people.

After getting showed and getting dressed I quickly grabbed my tablet and my bag and left the room, making my way down to the lobby area. The dorms were unsurprisingly deathly quiet at this time in the morning, so I tried to be as quiet with my steps as possible. At the lift however…

“Sylvie?” A vaguely familiar person was there already, waiting for the lift to arrive. Their lyrical scottish voice graced my ears like syrup.

“Sammy right?” I hadn’t seen Sammy since the Nurse had introduced them to me. We certainly don’t have classes in common and they never went to the party.

“You remembered! I’m happy” She says clapping her hands together quickly and silently.

“How has it been?”

“Oh I’ve been kind of inundated with work, I’m taking three subjects” The elevator dings and we walk inside. I hit the button for the ground floor, which Sammy seems perfectly happy with as well. “I do Maths and two sciences, Physics and Biology. So I’m kept pretty busy most of the time” she jokingly rubs her brow like a builder in the sun. “I have some free time now its the holidays though so I volunteered to help put up the decorations”

“Me too, So you’re a?”

“Oh right. I’m a Selkie. I guess its not immediately obvious what type of monsterfolk I am, unlike you and Erina I suppose” she giggles “Yes, I can become a Seal whenever I like. Not the most useful ability in the world but at least it makes me a great swimmer. I actually have my own small water pool in my room, as the college doesn’t yet have a full size pool for me to use”

“Oh, Apologies I haven’t actually been around all that long. I didn’t recognise that, or really knew much about their existence. Tell me more” A selkie, a person that can change into a seal. Thats really interesting.

“I’m Scottish in origin, although I have some Icelandic relations. And other than some small details like spotting on my skin and these whiskers” she rustles a set of gray whiskers that poke out of her cheeks. These match her long-ish grey hair.that is tied up in twin tails. She’s wearing a blight blue blouse with a patterned collar underneath a white sweater, as well as a set of grey jogging bottoms. She looks me up and down. “Are you not underdressed for the temperature?” The lift stops and a girl and a guy steps in.

“Morning!” they both say.

“Morning! And Sammy I don’t feel the cold. Or the warm, or anything like that”

“You’d be a great search and rescue person then” she giggles. 

“If I didn’t fall apart at a slight provocation maybe haha” That wouldn’t be my ideal job, I’m not the fittest zombie in the world...or I might be..actually.

The lift doors open with a ding as we finally reach the bottom floor and we step out into the lobby where one or two people were already waiting, light rain pattering down on the patio blocks outside. The fish lights were dimmed down so you could just about see vague movements within the tank as they swum about. None of the other buildings visible from the dorms yet had lights on in them. 

We walked over to the sofas and plonked ourselves down on them. “Sorry Sylvie but I ah-” she yawns, showing off her sizable canine teeth “I really haven’t had enough sleep. If I do fall asleep properly poke me in the cheek or the eye or something” she leans over in a heap, her legs still seated normally but she twists at the waist in a semi laid down position. It really didn’t look too comfortable. After about ten minutes a few more people had gathered. One of the guys leaning on the end of the sofa points out at the gloom through the sliding doors. “I think the Principal’s here” I twist my body and lean back to look past him at a set of headlights slowly crawling towards the dormitory. The vehicle turns and reverses back towards the entrance of the building gently..

The handbrake creaks noisily as it stops and Principal Rockford gets out and opens the boot, leaving the engine running. The guy who spotted him stands up and swipes his card at the door. “Can some of you help me unload the decorations?” A few of the voices murmured agreements and they piled into the many stacks of boxes, quickly stacking them in the centre of the room. “Right, everyone. Go mad, I’m going to go fetch the next load of boxes for the hall. There should be enough here to keep you occupied for a while. I’ll be back with more later” He wipes his face with a handkerchief and gets back into his estate car, the old vehicle’s suspension creaking slightly.

Sammy pokes me in the ribs gently. “Shall we go decorate our floor?” she asks, looking over the various sizes of boxes that were piled in the centre of the room. I nod and pick up a smaller box, whilst Sammy takes the bigger one underneath. Whilst everyone else began to strip their boxes open and fling baubles and tinsel everywhere, we made our way back to the lift and returned to the top floor. We decided to start with the communal area, placing the boxes on top of the coffee table. I switch on the TV whilst we’re unpacking to have something to listen to.

“So Sammy, do Selkies do anything special for Christmas?”

“I don’t know, we don’t really go to shops and stuff to get each other anything. My parents spent most of their lives hidden, living in the cliffs along the north coast, and it was our connection with the water nymphs that migrate down the coastlines and rivers that persuaded my parents to move closer to civilization, where I got to go to school” The lilt of her voice making this little chunk of her life story sound like a fairytale. “In regards to like, gifts and stuff. They used to make me jewellery, out of things they found in the ocean” 

She pulls up her sleeve on her right arm, revealing small tufts of grey hair and a bracelet that appeared to be made out of a rigid, dark green string. She twists it round, revealing the chunk of gold embedded within a pebble. “This is a seaweed string bracelet, attached to a chunk of stone that contains a tiny trace of gold. My mother calls it the Semphi bracelet. Its a bit cheesy but she told me that the chunk of gold was supposed to represent what I meant to them. I was their sunshine in the stormy north”

“Thats...really precious. Your parents sound wonderful Sammy” 

“Aww shucks, thats enough about me. Lets get decorating!”