Vex Buster ran toward the door to the parking garage. He bit his tongue so as not to curse loudly. The amount of bad luck that had conspired against him was unbelievable. Any other criminal couldn’t have dreamed of escaping him, but even with his powers, his mishaps almost made him lose his target.
He opened the door and found a deserted parking garage. Only cars and concrete greeted him. No passerby, far and wide, Vex couldn’t ask for directions to keep up his pursuit. Something caught Vex’s attention to his left.
Blue scrubs lay on the floor near a pillar. “No.” He muttered as he rounded, half in a trance, the pillar hoping to find the suspect behind the pillar with his pants down. The spot, however, was empty.
“Are you KIDDING me!?” Agent Buster yelled, running to the edge of the garage and searching the street below for the blonde-haired man.
The rails under his hands bend under his clenching fingers. He was just about ready to take a bite from them; such was his frustration.
He picked up the scrubs and vaulted over the edge to return to the hospital. There was no time to waste when Becca and other operatives were still on location.
Vex arrived at the hospital, nervous about what he would find. To his surprise, the situation appeared under control. The police at the main entrance let him through after they saw his credentials, and a nurse pointed him to a room full of his colleagues, other officers, and four doctors sorting through bags full of papers.
As he stood in the door, the other agents looked up, and one of them spoke up, staring at the blue scrubs in Vex’s hands. “They got away from you too?! Got damn it, the director will have our asses for breakfast!”
Vex made a face at the graphic image forced upon him. While he got busy stuffing the blue scrubs into an evidence bag, a police officer rushed into the room.
“They found a man tied up with nurse clothes in one of the empty rooms. One of your agents is questioning him right now.”
And just after he said that, the man rushed off to the next station to relay messages between the improvised catastrophe control center and the situations everybody was busy fixing or at least mending.
Once the scrubs were sealed inside a bag, Vex turned to leave.
“I am going to the third floor. Tell me when something important comes up, alright?” He said to the full room, yet nobody in particular.
He walked slowly up the stairs, deep in thought. The situation on the ground floor had assured him that Becca, too, had left. As for the other operatives, the blonde maniac had hinted at. There would be a thorough background check for all staff.
The thought of taking all the patients to a more secure facility came to Vex naturally. There was a base commander outside Pliada City that he had served with during the war. If he called him and made a call to Washington, they could move the patients tonight if the doctors permitted them to move all of them again at once. At least the army base promised a layer of security necessary to protect these people.
‘Sprout and bloom, he called it.’ Vex mused. The way the man talked, Vex couldn’t tell which part of his talk was bluster and what part of it was true.
Vex only had the certainty that the man knew about the patients’ abilities. There was a slight possibility that he or Becca knew why it happened.
Entering the third floor, he was greeted by multiple police officers standing guard around the staircase door.
They relaxed once they recognized him.
“Where’s Agent Levistra?” Vex asked them.
The man shrugged, and he adjusted his expectations before rephrasing. “Good-looking woman in a suit yelling orders at the other agents.”
“Oh, Agent Levistra.” One of the men feigned, remembering her name. “Yes, she’s near the station desk, keeping an eye on the hallway with all the…uh, new arrivals.”
Vex nodded and made his way to the wing with all their charges.
Turning the corner, he spotted Levistra pacing to and from the nurses’ desk.
“Levistra.” He softly called out to her.
His fiancee turned abruptly, and their eyes met. Vex hadn’t seen that expression since the war had ended.
Seeing her eyes get wet with tears while she tried to look like nothing got to her upset him.
“That was reckless of you!” Levistra scolded him in place of making her put her worry into words. “What if that man hadn’t been just as durable as you? You could have killed somebody!” She said while patting him down, ensuring everything was still attached as per their last meeting, and checking his hands and fingers.
He thought he had misheard for a moment. “Are you blaming me for seeing a man blocking your gun and acting on that view?”
Levistra poked him with her fingers. “Yes! He was not threatening me, just blocking the gun. I was just about to work him for some information. So you acted with full force without knowing that he could survive that. You could have killed him, Vex. And you’re not at war anymore. They would have put you before a judge for it.”
Vex took a deep breath inwardly, agreed with her scolding, and moved on. “What did he tell you before I got him?”
“He introduced himself, and he already knew my name. We didn’t get much further before the elevator doors opened.” His fiancee stated. “Michael Menace is his name.”
“That prick gave himself some jokester name, huh?" Vex gritted his teeth. ‘I should have killed him when I had my hands on his neck.’
“He seemed the talkative type. Did he tell you anything?” Levistra tried to gloss over what she had told him and move on from the unpleasant revelation.
Vex nodded. “Yes, yes, he said a lot of things.”
*Two Days later*
Agent Buster stared at the blue scrubs in the evidence bag on the conference desk.
Vex’s finger tapped the marbled wood of the desk. Levistra sat beside him with two other agents, trying to ignore the restless man’s persistent rhythmic table tapping.
The director took his sweet time, and Vex was just about done sitting around waiting for the man to get over the fact that Vex had made a few calls above his head.
Levistra straightened up, about to tell him to stop projecting his nervousness on the entire room, when the door opened, and Director Row waddled in. The man was in stark contrast to all his agents. Not fit at all. A similar-looking bureaucrat from the CIA followed him, though that man looked at least as though he had the wits to run his organization.
Vex never liked the man, but this slow-to-act attitude was exactly the bureaucratic tardiness he couldn’t abide by; that was why he had called the base commander of Fort Danton and President Ikoba Swan.
“Alright, agents, this is Director Smith. He’s with the CIA, as many of you already heard. It’s time we start this meeting and put this matter behind us.” The FBI Director started the meeting with a sigh.
“Director Smith, please do enlighten us. Are there any connections you can confirm?” Director Row pushed off the responsibility of directing the meeting onto Smith.
“Thank you, Director Row. We can’t connect the two individuals your agents encountered to any state. We conclude that they are either unaffiliated and hired for this job through channels unknown to us or a group of operatives that had been kept under wraps by the Communists till now.”
Levistra spoke up as Director Smith put up the drawing of Becca and the newspaper photo of the man calling himself Michael Menace. “So, you’re telling us you got nothing on these two?”
“Nothing. As far as we know, they do not exist. Nobody even heard about them in any of our organizations before the incident with the Mafia, which is strange seeing as this “Michael” seems to enjoy the attention.”
“Surely he appeared somewhere before that day?” Another agent chimed in. “Are we supposed to believe he just popped up out of nowhere going toe to toe with our biggest gun?”
Director Smith shrugged. “Not outside the country. But feel free to search all the files across the country for any hint of him. You’re the inside-the-border guys, after all.”
Vex and Levistra exchanged looks. Levitra gave him a nod, and he spoke up for the first time in the meeting. “Well, I’d like to take the lead on the task force to bring these people in, Director Row.”
That earned him a sweet and sour expression from the peeved bureaucrat. “I disagree. You already took charge of the patients and Troy Han. Until further notice, those will be your main focus.”
His fiancee had expected this pettiness and jumped in. “Then I’d like to volunteer to take on the task and pick things up in Pliada City. Sir, I’m sure I can further our investigation and bring some light to these chaotic developments.”
Director Row put the tips of his finger together before his mouth, contemplating putting Levistra on this case.
Vex could read the man’s mind. If Levistra solved the case or at least got enough lead to make his office look good, things would be fine and dandy, but if she came up with nothing helpful, he had something to stall out the rising star inside his office. He didn’t like Director Row for many reasons. Among them, his obvious opportunistic thinking was way up there.
“You know that is a splendid idea. I’ll give you some people, and you can settle in the Pliada City office.”
Director Smith picked up one of the pencils on the desk and walked to the board with the two pictures of the suspects.
“After analyzing testimony taken from your agents on the scene and the police officers, we would like to pose the following theory for temporary assessment. While Michael seems quite public and spectacular in this situation, there is almost zero testimony to how Becca got away.” Using the pencil as a pointing stick, he pointed to the photo of the doctor Michael had robbed of his clothes. “Somehow, somewhere, during luring Doctor Littim into the room and knocking him out, Becca used her nurse clothes to tie him up, split with Michael, and got out of the hospital undetected. If I didn’t know getting caught by Agent Delemere wasn’t in his plan, much less coming to blows with Agent Buster, I would be suspicious of Michael acting simply as a distraction.”
Director Smith looked directly at Vex before continuing. “In your estimation, how do the two match up against you?”
Vex thought back for a moment. “I don’t know how strong Becca is, but she was fast enough not to get caught by me. That in itself is a feat. As for Michael, I think we’re about equally matched strength-wise, but I am sure he wouldn’t be able to outlast me if we had to fight till only one stands—courtesy of my blessing.”
Director Smith rubbed his chin. “You know, I once served in the army. I saw what you could do in the field. Hearing you say that you’re evenly matched sounds like bad news.”
Director Row coughed, trying to steer the topic away from their shared veteran status since he had nothing to show on that front. “Speaking of news,” He said, pulling a stack of newspapers from his brown briefcase and throwing them on the desk with an audible smack. “Here we have some prominent papers writing about the incident. Despite our best efforts, parts of the patient files made it to the plague of all law enforcement. Wild speculations are already ongoing. But after making some calls with the editors of these,” Director Row paused, stopping himself from calling them something unflattering. ”reputable institutions, none of them got any page one or page two material from the files either.”
Levistra made a sound. “That makes it official, then? They got the first two pages of every file?”
Director Row furrowed his brows, not liking the interruption of his long-winded way of stating the obvious. “Yes, all of them. Even the five patients that were already in the hospital.”
There was a sign of resignation spreading in the room. This all but confirmed that there were more than just the two they had seen involved.
Vex was convinced that caring for Troy and the other patients and steering them on the right path if their powers proved significant should be his priority for the near future.
“There is also the fact that Michael mentioned that there were already some patients or, more precisely, new Supers we weren’t even aware of yet.” Another agent chimed in. “What do we do about that?”
Director Row puffed up. “What are you, a ten-year-old? Don’t call them Supers! We aren’t in some comic book.”
Vex tried not to smirk at this man, taking offense at the suggestion that he was normal and others were Supers.
The meeting went on for a bit longer, and they devised some strategies to detect more cases of Supers.
President Swan sat in the Blue Room. The president’s office was an immaculate place. The desk is a witness of history. The portraits on the wall are a silent reminder of the duty he carried out in the place of bigger and better men.
His eyes were fixed on the portrait of the man whose death had put him in this chair and at the forefront of history at the late end of the Second World War. He often mused if he’d look favorably upon his time in office. The uncertainties that they had faced together had secured the man’s portrait a place in his office. He wouldn’t want his predecessors to miss a moment of his carrying of the torch.
No, he valued the reassurance of having him in the room at all times far too much.
Pushing a button on his desk, he said with an even voice.
“Send them in.”
He leaned back in the most important chair of the free world and studied the ceiling. Many hadn’t expected him to hold this office for a second term. Still, his performance had convinced the people calling him a bookkeeper and paper pusher that their assessment of him was critically mistaken.
He had summoned the ambassadors of four big nations. Major Vex Buster had called his office and informed him of developments within his country that demanded his attention. People with extraordinary abilities appeared around Pliada City, and some unknown player was making moves on them. Either to eliminate them or to recruit them to their side.
He looked down at the papers on his desk and picked up his pen. His brows furrowed as he went through the papers, writing notes in his usual meticulous efficiency.
The door opened, and his secret service entered together with the ambassadors and a secretary silently sitting down to document the meeting. She had been here long before him or even his predecessor, and President Swan hoped she’d be here long after he was out of office.
“Gentlemen.” He greeted the ambassadors, motioning for them to take a seat. Before returning his attention back to the notes he had prepared, “It has come to my attention that operatives of extraordinary abilities are actively undertaking missions.”
He looked up, and his first gaze fell upon the representative of the CCAC. The Communist Block was the primary suspect for such occasions. If anyone had the capabilities to artificially create superpowered humans, President Swan suspected it would be them.
The man held his gaze with a neutral expression. “Mr. President, I assure you, my nation has no knowledge of such operatives.”
President Swan nodded along graciously as the other diplomats joined the denial of any such agents being in their service.
“It soothes my heart to hear all of you say that. I called you to inform you of a change in our policy. Should any such operatives be caught inside US Army, Navy, or Air Force facilities, they will not be arrested. Instead, they will be treated as a declaration of war. So, should they turn out to be citizens of your countries, we will presume them to be part of active measures.”
There was some irritated shuffling, and the ambassador or the CCAC spoke up. “Are you suggesting that all nations have full control over their citizens at all times?”
“I only seek to inform you that such a change in policy happened. If you have people with special abilities entering the Unified States, the best policy would be to inform us before there is an issue. Better yet, do not seek to deploy them inside my nation.”
The Indian man stroked his chin and frowned. “This is a very sudden announcement, Mr. President. I will convey this to my government immediately.”
The ambassador of Egypt and Mauretania exchanged looks. “I shall convey your sentiment to our homeland.”
“As shall I.” The Mauretanian ambassador agreed.
“Thank you, Ambassador Rhan, Ambassador Seth, and Ambassador Loir.”
That left the ambassador of the Unified Kingdom or Yoruba and Dahomey as the sole holdout. President Swan saw in the man’s eyes that he had questions.
“Well, then, gentlemen, I wouldn’t want to keep you. On your way out, you’ll be given the official statement of our government. Ambassador Rhan, Ambassador Seth, and Ambassador Loir, as always, it’s been my genuine pleasure. Have a pleasant evening.”
His secret service ushered them to the door, not without Ambassador Loir protesting enthusiastically at the thought of not remaining with the other principal ally in the room.
President Swan found his pedantic protest exhausting.
Once the others were gone, his attention returned to Oloron of Lokoja, the Duke of Lokoja and trusted friend of the Prime Minister of the Unified Kingdom.
‘How to proceed with our closest ally?’ President Swan pondered how to go about this dilemma.
Oloron took the initiative. “I had the distinct impression that this wasn’t exactly a targeted event. I also seem to distinctly remember our two nations being good allies in the last two World Wars and still being allies against the Communists. So, how about you afford our Prime Minister slightly more detail on whatever it is you had the displeasure of dealing with?”
President Swan took a deep breath before he pulled out a small briefing map.
“We’re currently dealing with a new phenomenon, and some individuals, be they new players or pieces moved by other hands, chose to investigate these new phenomena themselves through infiltration, theft, assault, and espionage.” He took out the two pictures of the culprits. “These two right here; if your government has any information on them, it would be highly appreciated.”
Oloron stood up and approached President Swan, who still sat behind his desk. The man reached into his suit jacket, and it spoke volumes to the trust the US government had in him that the secret service agents in the room didn’t even turn to look. Oloron of Lokoja was beyond reproach, even by the standards of the secret service.
The ambassador pulled out the case, holding his thin reading glasses. He didn’t like to wear them in public, not purely out of vanity. His press at home tended to take issue with everything and anything a public figure close to the King did, wore, or, at times, ate for breakfast.
“Michael Menace? Really, who gave him that name? Your papers? And Becca…” Oloron studied the faces for a bit. “That is not a lot to work with. Even if I assert that our intelligence service will do their utmost to leave no stone unturned, I have doubts that anything would come of it.”
“I’ve prepared a separate folder just for your government's convenience regarding what we do know about them. The name was given by the man himself to one of our federal agents. You might remember him fondly, formerly known as Major Buster. If your embassy gets the most recent issues of the Tribute, you can read what the public knows about this Michael Menace and what we know based on Agent Buster’s eyewitness testimony.”
The ambassador frowned. “They met? And both escaped? Those aren’t just special abilities. Those are extraordinary abilities. You were selling them short to the others.”
President Swan made a playfully surprised noise. “Oh, did I? How very careless of me. We wouldn’t want the CCAC to get any wrong ideas, would we? Oh well, I suppose what’s done is done. Wouldn’t want to bother the good ambassador by calling him back in at this late hour.”
Oloron chuckled. “Good heavens, that’s the last thing any of us would want. But I suppose I have to agree. It seems improper to call our dear friend back in. It’s quite late indeed, and we wouldn’t want to miss lunch on a Friday.”
The two men nodded in agreement. President Swan pulled out the folder he promised Oloron and handed it over. “Please, make sure that his majesty’s government handles this intel with great care. It might not be much, but it is more than the others have. Make sure they take note of the trust we put in our ally.”
Oloron of Lokoja smiled warmly. “I will make sure to handle these myself. Rest assured, Mr. President.”
*Friday in the early morning hours*
Laena lay on her bed, counting silently.
‘100 don’t looks, 101 don’t looks, 102 don’t looks, 103 don’t looks, 104 d-’ Her eyes wandered to the clock on the wall smugly displaying two minutes till 2 a.m., barely a minute since last she looked. ‘damn it! 1 don’t looks, 2 don’t looks, 3 don’t looks, 4 don’t looks, 5 don’t looks…’
Laena kept counting, trying to fall asleep. She made it to ‘10 don’t looks’ before she once again looked at the clock. The teenager sat up, throwing her hands into the air in helpless frustration.
Muttering to the empty dorm room, “This is stupid. Why not meet right after the mission? I hate this waiting around.”
Laena’s frustration was getting her out of bed and pacing around in her room. She wanted to talk to Ramiel about this Michael Menace guy. The papers and radio had no other topic besides Major Buster jumping from the history books and tussling with this new vigilante.
The freaking Supersoldier appeared in her city and fought another man with powers, and Ramiel was nowhere to be seen. She felt distressed that because of a spur-of-the-moment reaction, Michael Menace had taken note of her existence. Cursing herself for sticking around in the park and cursing Ramiel for putting their meeting off till the weekend.
After pacing the dorm room for a few minutes, Laena fell back on her bed, burying her face in the big pillow. Thereafter, turning over instantly, rolling left and right, unable to find a comfortable position to be miserable in. She has been in this state for two days now, and it’s just getting worse. She thought about calling Safora for multiple reasons and decided against it for multiple different reasons. She will be so pissed, but Laena is starting to get paranoid about surveillance and doesn’t dare to tell her the story over the phone. This means she cannot unload it on anybody because, of course, Ramiel is unavailable.
“Ugh.” She complained to the ceiling, the wall, and the empty bed on the other side of the room. “Double ugh.” Laena declared to her inconsiderately absent friend, who got a vacation in Gradjia instead of a headache like Laena.
Laena threw one of her smaller pillows across the room against the wall from which it bounced, falling with an inquisitive ‘Plop?’ onto Safora's bed.
“Agh, you wouldn’t get it.” She declared to the nosy pillow while turning her back to the pillow on Safora’s bed, staring at the wall lying on her side.
……
*BRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!!! WRRRRRT!!!! WHHHHRT!???*
*CLANG CRACK!!!*
Laena’s eyes shot open. She sat up, confused.
‘When did I fall asleep?!’
*BRRTTRRTTRRRTING*
Her alarm clock, now sounding a bit cracked, accusingly proclaimed her tardy.
She tapped the clock with her foot while rubbing her eyes. “Ugh, zip it, you.”
Laena felt horrible, remembering the last time she looked at the clock on the wall. Her head turned sluggishly to the big clock on the wall.
“Huh, 7:55 a.m.” Laena turned to lie back down, already closing her eyes, eager to give in to the force dragging her back to sleep.
Her eyes shot open in realization, and she yelled, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN 7:55!?” She fell off the bed in her struggle to get ready for school.
Running into the bathroom, Laena took her toothbrush and jumped into the shower. She would rather be late than unwashed.
This week was one long trainwreck after another so far, and Laena felt that things would continue like this today as well, but sleeping through her blaring alarm clock for almost two hours hadn’t been on her list.
While she was busying herself doing two to four things at once in the dorm room, stumbling and fumbling things and herself all over the place, ever so slowly, a school-ready Laena began to form.
Once she had her shoes on and bag packed, she looked herself over in the big mirror one last time. Satisfied that she hadn’t put on her shirt backward and was wearing matching socks, she got ready to leave only twenty-seven minutes after waking up.
It would still be too late to make it to the first lesson on time. The thought of taking the fast way down occurred to her, but she refrained, too scared that her bad luck would get her caught and rushed to the hospital like some freak of nature like Beth or Troy.
Making it to the classroom just five minutes late, Laena knocked on the door and entered. To her surprise, the students sat around alone, just relaxing, chatting, and fooling around.
“Teacher is running late, Laena. Probably another of those crazy incidents. Honestly, I thought this was about you since you weren’t here ten minutes before anybody else. Even placed a bet on you having mutated like the other kids.” One of her classmates, Ned, greeted her while throwing a paper ball across the room to his friend. Laena remembered how their homeroom teacher had to split them up early because these two couldn’t function while sitting next to each other.
She never minded him much, but the way he was talking made him fall in her estimation even further. “Stop saying such vile things. They are our classmates. Wasn’t Daren a friend of yours?”
“Sure, he still is. Well, that is if he hasn’t turned into a cloud of smoke by now. I want to know what’s up with all that. You think they’ll tell us?” Ned wondered out loud.
Laena rolled her eyes at Ned and got to her seat. Calling them mutated was even worse than being called altered and made Laena feel extremely uncomfortable and insecure. She had to reassure herself that she was the same person she had always been. Only her abilities had changed; she was just as normal a human as any other teenager in this class, besides her exceptional physical abilities and the comically slow rate at which she perceived the world.
As Laena is sitting and looking around, the morning’s adrenaline starts to fade, which brings along a new problem: boredom. Safora wasn’t there to keep her company. Melle was ignoring her still. Eventually, she’d get over Safora and her quitting their sports teams, but as she knew Melle, it may be an entire year before she decided she was over them quitting the teams and opening up to them again. The worst part is that without adrenaline, the lack of sleep starts to kick in, and Laena has to fight not to lean down on her desk and fall asleep again. To avoid that, she directs her thoughts back to Melle.
Laena always found her to take personal offense if Safora and Laena excluded her from something, and she had witnessed her hold grudges for a long time. She still missed her childhood friend’s company but had no idea how to resolve the problem. The girl was very stubborn, but usually, she didn’t scorn them for half a year. The idea occurred to her to let Melle in on Safora’s and her secret, but Ramiel would probably lose his mind if she even brought up the idea of including people on the whim of friendship and sparkles again. After all, none could tell what Melle would really do if she found out about them. Giving her powers was out of the question after she saw what could happen to people if their alteration was a failure. Who knows if Melle wouldn’t change or hadn’t changed after their game and was keeping her own secret? Laena suddenly felt the gaping rift that had opened between herself and her childhood friend. She wondered how many others had these same feelings and suspicions right now. She was just very lucky, along with Safora, to be alive without visual identifiers like the smell of flowers, or even smoking from the head like a campfire.
She sighed and put her notes on her desk. History wasn’t her favorite subject, but waiting to do nothing was even worse. Her pencil started wiggling in her hand, tapping each end on the papers. Laena kept herself busy, annoying her surrounding classmates with her nervousness.
When their teacher finally showed up, it wasn’t to start their lesson.
Instead, they were all ushered over to the gymnasium, where they got to sit down. Laena got a bit nervous seeing all the students from her district school gather there. Laena had taken one of the front-row seats out of curiosity.
She was expecting to see some government suit like the one Beth had told her about, but it was just their principal and all the teachers gathering the students for a pep-talk.
The principal stepped up to the microphone, looking not too formidable. It seemed he wasn’t too convinced about what he would tell them.
“Students of Buck County, I had you gather here because the last few days have been difficult,” The principal gestured with his hands a lot more than during his usual speeches. “We, the teaching staff and myself, wanted to reassure you that your fellow students are well cared for and healthy. These new sudden changes are, however, a concern. We are asking for your help and assistance here. If one of you has a sudden change that seems out of the ordinary, please contact your teachers or head to the nursery so we can get you checked out and to the hospital for your safety.”
Laena looked around and saw the same reaction on many teenagers’ faces. They’d never snitch to the teacher. At least not on themselves.
She sighed heavily. This day was going to be longer and more boring than she could have previously imagined. Laena caught herself thinking that she would have been better off giving into the allure of her pillow in the morning than having to sit through an entire day of ‘If you see something, say something’ that was explicitly concerning her but yet of so little interest to her.
Looking at the ceiling, Laena was barely listening anymore. She wondered what Safora might be doing right now.
The entire speech of the principal washed over her without leaving an impression other than being the perfect lullaby. She may have even dozed off for a bit and saw other students sleeping during the lecture when she was conscious. Laena couldn’t even fathom why she would reveal herself to be altered.
‘No! To have powers.’ She corrected herself on the inside, angry that Ramiel’s terminology for her abilities had taken root in her thoughts.
When they finally got to leave the gym, they had gotten the rest of the day off with a homework plan for their missed school day.
The last words of their homeroom teacher, ‘To just talk to me if you thought that anything seemed out of the ordinary.’ sounded almost like they were trying to convince them to come forward with anything they knew. Laena found it a bit creepy.
Laena walked straight to her new favorite place, planning to borrow the electric guitar to practice the rest of the day. Homework could wait till Sunday, she had decided.
Her steps became more eager, and her mind shook off the grey shadow hanging over her thoughts and mood.
Once she stepped inside the room where the equipment manager sat with the instrument, her high spirit got hamstrung by an empty spot on the wall.
“Oh, Laena, you’re too late. Somebody else had already picked up the guitar for the day.”
‘OH, COME ON!’ She didn’t know how much more irritation she could suffer in one day. As her temper flared, the world slowed down. The expression on the equipment warden’s face was still apologetic, but she could see in his pupils that he had recognized her anger and frustration. She quickly calmed her expression, if not her feelings, and tried to look more disappointed than furious.
“I guess that means I will have to go eat lunch early today. Sorry to have troubled you for nothing, Mr. Ginsy. I’ll be on my way then. Bye.” Laena got out of there quickly. On her way out, she could hear someone play the guitar she usually rented out. They didn’t even bother to take it further into the building so as not to distract others. Whoever took it, Laena hoped a string would snap on them.
Now, all she had left was to do stupid homework, or she could go out to eat some fast food. She wanted some fries.
The frustration eater in her stirred. She could do her stupid homework just as well at Xialong’s. There was no way she’d enjoy doing homework as much as playing the guitar all day, but fries were the silver lining here.
‘That is if the fryers aren’t all defunct or some other misery just waiting to befoul my day.’ Laena self-sabotaged her mood getting better.
“Curses, next time I oversleep, I’ll just stay in bed,” she muttered as she walked towards a seemingly inevitably expanding list of disappointments and catastrophes.
Safora lay in absolute fluffy bliss turning to the side and letting the sunshine on her face. She had no clue nor care in the world for the time her clock might indicate. She didn’t plan to even peek at the clock and just enjoyed the sun tickling her nose.
She pulled her blanket up to her nose and dozed off again.
‘Just five, maybe ten, at most thirty more minutes.’ Safora generously granted herself.
Her mother had other plans for her and walked into the room like her daughter's happy laziness had alerted her.
“Safora Kimolia Pontis, if you take your brother’s hospital visit as an excuse to slack off during his recovery, the least you could do is be conscious and join your family for breakfast.” Her mother declared with dictatorial determination.
Safora’s reaction was predictable to anyone who knew her from the cradle-up. She tugged and rolled herself into her blanket, vanishing beneath its cozy safety.
“Safora! Will you ever grow out of this silliness?” Safora heard her mother approach and let go of the blanket. While holding on was no longer futile, even her sleepy, cozy self knew holding onto it till the fabric tore wasn’t an option. She prepared herself for the cold, harsh world outside her blanket.
When her mother pulled the blanket off her, Safora was, as always, unprepared for being bereft of the happiest place on Earth.
“Nooooo!” Safora protested, rolling into a ball.
Her mother left with her happiness rolled over her arm, leaving behind a ball of misery that would eventually slouch her way to the breakfast table.
The world could be so cruel.
“I bet Laena doesn’t have such a hard time,” Safora grumbled, rubbing her eyes, following the alluring smell of scrambled eggs and pancakes and all things delicious in this world to its source.
Then, she started making plans for the day. A dip in the lake was an absolute must. The temperature was exceptionally warm for March, and she had found that taking a swim in rather cold water didn’t bother her at all. After all, it wasn’t a stolen blanket right during her coziest time. After the lake, she would go drink a milkshake with Markus and sit with him in the park near the lake. She wanted to spend some quality time with him after this incident.
Who knew how many days a person had left in this world, she thought, feeling her heart tighten a little. There is no reliving memories never made, so she wanted to ensure that she’d never prioritize anything other than the people who meant the world to her.
She had to visit Ma Stone later this week to bring something back to school for Laena. Maybe a card? Or, on the day of her inevitable return to school, a pie. Safora hoped it would be one of Ma Stone’s pies, and she hoped even more that Laena would share.
