The Villain Academy- Chapter Seven: The Skeleton in the Closet is Named George
Hi, everyone!
I'm back with Chapter Seven of "The Villain Academy!" It's been about a jillion years since I last posted a chapter, December 6, to be exact. But I'm back!
Before you check out Chapter Seven, which is quite random and wanders as much as Tori does within it, check out Chapter Six so you don't get all confused. Seven is very long and also is quite important plot-wise.
7. The Skeleton in the Closet is Named George
Tori adjusted her bag, which had slipped from its position on her hip during her conversation. She took one last glance for any spiders which may have crawled on her when she was distracted. She found none, and with a satisfied smile she swung open the closet door.
She peered out cautiously, making sure no one was around to see her emerge. She saw no one, stepped out, and shut the door behind her as quietly as she could. She glared at the mop, which was still lying on the floor. Her head was still throbbing. She felt like she was inside a drum set at a rock concert.
She stomped on the mop with all the force she could muster, but it hardly made a dent and twisted her ankle a bit. Tori growled angrily. These stupid ugly combat boots are good for nothing, not even snapping a fricking mop!
“I really ought to break you, you stupid mop,” she informed it through gritted teeth.
The throbbing bruise on her head agreed with this assessment and encouraged her. Tori picked up the mop, swung it around for one three-sixty degree rotation, and snapped it over her knee. She kicked the splintered pieces into the corner, not allowing the shards to give her a splinter in a final act of defiant vengeance, and continued on her way.
She truly had no idea where to go, where she was supposed to go, where she was allowed to go, or what to do. So her first day at the Villain Academy would be spent as a tourist from Ohio in New York City. She would go around and gawk; only she would try her hardest not to look like a tourist. Some odd gut feeling told her the others would find this rather suspicious.
The school looked like it had been pieced together from parts of many different old buildings. It was like a Frankenstein of a building, Tori decided. She traveled down the corridors and hallways, peering into deserted rooms and investigating.
Tori opened a classroom door with a creak, and one of the hinges snapped as she did so. “Ooh,” she muttered to herself, glancing around nervously. “No one saw that,” she said to herself. She entered the room.
The wooden floorboards creaked ominously as she stepped in. The two small windows in the room had been broken, and shards of glass rested on the floor and on a bookcase underneath one window.
Tori walked over to the bookcase. “I wonder what villains read…” she asked herself, moving the books from side to side. Some of the titles were quite odd.
“Hmm…Your Giant Mutant Electric Squid and You…How to Build a Laser and 1,001 More Fun Projects for Rainy Days…Werewolves Are People Too…Tales of Chemical Romances: Why Love Sucks…NaNoWriMo: An Experiment in Torture…” Tori stopped and pulled out the last book on the shelf.
“What the heck is NaNoWriMo?” she asked herself, flipping the book over in her hand. The cover depicted a young girl slumped over an old-fashioned typewriter, evidently dead, with a villain laughing evilly behind her.
“Looks awful,” she said to herself. She began to read the inside flap out loud to the dusty old room. “NaNoWriMo is perhaps the most grueling torture ever imagined. Only a truly diabolical, cruel, merciless villain could have imagined such unimaginable torture. Unfortunately, the name of NaNoWriMo’s creator has been lost to history, but their work lives on in infamy. NaNoWriMo is a torture device more painful than any laser or giant mutant electric cephalopod. The worst part is victims voluntarily agree to participate…what the heck?!” Tori said, horrified and yet fascinated. She kept reading. “NaNoWriMo is the impossible challenge. The goal is to write a fifty thousand word novel in only one month, the month of November. Thanks to NaNoWriMo, November has been forever tainted as a month of misery and pain. So many sign up to take part in this stressful, social-life-destroying plot, and so many fall along the way.”
Tori stuck the book back in the shelf, extremely frightened. “Who in their right minds would volunteer to do that?!” she wondered incredulously.
The force of her shoving the book back into the shelf was apparently too much for the tiny old bookcase, and with a massive shudder it collapsed. The shelf splintered with a crack like a gunshot, and the books fell to the floor with a heavy thud and the tinkling of shattering glass. Tori gasped and leapt back as a lazy dust cloud arose from the wreckage.
“Smooth,” she commented. No wonder no one ever came to class. The rooms were a wreck and a hazard to just be in.
Despite this, Tori continued to explore the room, knowing only boredom awaited her outside. The dust cloud caught up to her and she coughed.
Behind her was a scratched-up old teacher’s desk, with empty spaces where drawers should have gone. Several exploded pens and solidified puddles of ink littered the top of the desk, which was in a state of utter disrepair. The spinning chair that stood behind it was terribly broken beyond all hope of repair, with the backing completely ripped off and missing. Tori wondered where it had gone and what the hell anyone would want it for.
The blackboard was chipped in places. It had burn marks, scratches, and Tori swore residue from a grenade explosion graffitied the board as well. What was left of the board was either blank or had swear words written on in chalk, or scratched on, or left in barely-legible burn marks.
For some reason Tori could easily imagine that Angie had led the revolution that had destroyed this room and she couldn’t help but grin. She could imagine it so perfectly, with Angie standing on a desk with a hat reminiscent of Napoleon Bonaparte, bearing a flame in her hand and leading an attack on education.
The desks that had once stood in six straight rows were now in a disorganized pile on the far side of the room. Behind it was a closet with sliding doors, like a sliding glass door on someone’s porch, only this door had no glass. The desks were graffitied with swear words, drawings in pen and pencil, and one even had had the chair completely ripped off of it.
Tori stepped lightly past the mountain of broken desks, fearing an avalanche and breaking yet another thing in the less than twenty four hours she had been at the Villain Academy. She slid open the sliding closet door with some trepidation. But it slid open with a groan easily. Tori waited a moment for an avalanche of garbage and assorted trinkets, but none came. Pleasantly surprised, Tori stepped into the closet, which ran the length of the wall.
The inside was empty and dusty at first glance. Tori looked around. It looked like the closet had once held coats; little coat hooks ran along the closet in a pattern. Up, down, up, down, so that none of the coats would get stuck, presumably.
Tori expected there to be something in there. Old pencils, crumpled papers, a left-behind, forgotten coat or something.
“Guess not,” she said to herself.
All of a sudden at the far end of the coat closet (she highly doubted villains called them cubbies as she had as a little girl in elementary school), she saw a skeleton.
Tori couldn’t help but scream. “Oh my God!” she squealed, clapping a hand over her mouth and jumping back.
She took a few deep breaths and sincerely hoped no one had been wandering by at just the wrong moment. After a minute or two, Tori had calmed herself and hesitantly approached the skeleton.
She made a face as she got closer. “Maybe it’s a fake?” she assured herself.
Tori was a curious girl, and so couldn’t just walk away like a sane person at this point. She closed her eyes tight and reached out for the skeleton with much trepidation and an amazing lack of speed.
As soon as she gripped the skeleton’s arm bone, she let out a long breath. It was plastic, like any other model skeleton one would find in a science classroom or a mad scientist’s lab. She opened her eyes, thoroughly relieved.
Tori picked up the skeleton by its skull and moved it from side to side. The plastic bones rattled like chains. The skeleton brought back fond memories of normal, boring elementary school and sleep-inducing science classes. Tori had always wanted to blow something up but never got a chance. Maybe if she had science classes here at the Villain Academy she would get a chance, but no, good villains only go to class when they’re bored. Yes, when terrorizing people in small towns or plotting the demise of all who have wronged you gets a bit dull, villain students break out of their rut and go to class, being snarky and sarcastic to everyone they possibly could along the way.
It took living with a school of villains to make Tori realize how much she truly loathed them.
As she was playing with the skeleton, she noticed writing on its left arm. Curious, Tori set the skeleton down, knelt on the dusty coat closet floor, and flipped the arm over.
“George,” she read. Someone had written George in permanent black marker on the skeleton’s arm.
“I guess that’s your name, then. George,” Tori assumed, letting the plastic arm fall with a clatter. She wondered why whoever had named the skeleton had chosen George as a name. It didn’t seem like something one would think of when naming a skeleton. In boring, average elementary school science classes back home, Tori’s classmates had named their science class skeletons stuff like Bones or Barry D. Live, something scary and reminiscent of decorative grave stones on people’s lawns on Halloween nights. Never anything as boring and normal as George.
“It’s probably an inside joke,” Tori guessed, getting up from her kneeling position and brushing off dust from the knees of her dark jeans.
She clambered out of the coat closet, taking care not to get her disgusting short hair caught in any coat hooks. Losing even more hair would probably reduce her to tears.
She slid the sliding closet door shut behind her, took great care with delicate little steps past the leaning tower of broken desks, and gave the room one last look.
On the wall was a silver, metallic clock. It seemed stuck at 5:22 and eleven seconds. Not at all helpful. Tori doubted she’d killed much time exploring the room anyway.
“This day is going on forever!” she moaned, stomping around the room a bit.
She shook her head, trying to clear her mind and get rid of this nasty headache and sneezed. The dust in the old classroom had caught up to her again.
Tori perched herself on the old teacher’s desk and stared at the broken bookcase for a minute. She began to hear an ominous groan of complaint from the desk and leapt off immediately. She didn’t need to break anything else; she’d broken a week’s stay of things at the Academy in less than a day.
The books on the bookcase were a time-killing option, but the book on the horrible novel-writing torture had frightened her. So with a resigned sigh, Tori crossed the room to the door, swung it open, generating another annoyed crack from the hinges, shut the door behind her, and continued down the hall.
She found another dead end and groaned. “Now what?” she asked herself, irritated.
Suddenly she noticed a staircase leading down another flight, hidden in shadow. Immediately Tori was intrigued. She took a step towards the metallic staircase.
“Wait,” she stopped herself. “I am in a school for villains, with diabolical technology, weird books on torture, and literal skeletons in the closet. Also I’m a spy and a conspirator. If they find me out I’m done for. So is it really a good idea to go exploring down a hidden staircase?” she reasoned.
Tori stopped a moment, weighing the benefits and consequences. “Eh. What the hell, I’m bored,” she decided, descending the staircase with a shrug.
With every step she took, a small metallic ping alerted whatever was down there to her presence. She wondered where she was going and what awaited her. She was happy to no longer be bored, and let her hand run along the banister as she crept down the stairs as quietly as possible.
The staircase ended on a plain gray floor, and had matching gray walls. Tori felt as though she was in an asylum, the place was so dull.
The place where the stairs ended was only a foyer to the rest of the landing. A stiff, silver archway led to the rest of the basement level. Tori stepped through with some hesitation.
As she did so, she felt a peculiar tingling from her head to her toes. As soon as she was through the archway, the tingling stopped. Tori regarded the archway curiously, titling her head. As far as she could tell, it was a normal, average archway. If anything, dreadfully plain. Yet there was something odd about it; the tingling feeling passed as soon as she passed the archway.
The mystery wasn’t intriguing enough to keep Tori staring at the archway for too long. After a few minutes, she shrugged, turned heel, and continued on her way.
She could hear noises from far away, stuff like buzzing, chatter, machines beeping and whirring. Now this was intriguing. With tentative, near-silent steps, Tori approached a door on the far side of the room where the noise was coming from.
With a start she noticed marks on the walls. Burn marks, chips, unfurling cracks in the wall as though someone had been thrown into it and made quite a dent in doing so. In several places there were huge scratch marks.
Tori approached one of the massive scratches and placed her hand over it. The scratches had come from someone, or something, much, much bigger than she. Far more powerful as well, if it could leave such a deep scratch in the wall. As far as Tori could tell, the wall was solid rock.
Suddenly she heard approaching footsteps behind her. Tori took her hand off the scratch marks and spun around, eyes wide. Someone was coming.
She looked around desperately for something to morph into. There was a random half-broken pole in a corner. Tori ran over to it, as far into the corner as she could fit, and took its form.
Now a multicolored fragment of pole, Tori hoped and prayed no one would notice her. People tend to notice a purple-blue-and-brown-colored pole lying at random in a corner, while all the other poles were a rusty, dull silver like the rest of the room.
“No, I swear I heard someone, Headmaster Truculent,” someone was saying anxiously.
Oh no, Tori thought. The severe headmaster was possibly the last person she wanted to see right now.
“You’re quite sure?” Truculent’s cold, serious voice answered. The two pairs of footsteps came closer and closer. Tori wished she could roll herself away somewhere, but she hadn’t yet learned to manipulate herself to do so.
The footsteps came closer. “You know as well as I this is very serious. Students are not allowed down here. You are hardly allowed down here, Mister Fungible.” Truculent continued, an aggressive edge in his cold voice.
“I-I know, sir,” the man called Fungible replied anxiously, his voice shaking. “But I was s-sure I heard someone!”
The footsteps stopped. “This entire landing is top-secret. I don’t care about just the laboratory. This entire level is where all our secrets are kept. Do you realize the dire consequences we all would suffer if the heroes found this place?” Truculent hissed. Tori could picture him staring the Fungible man down, eyes narrowed to threatening slits.
Then Truculent’s words hit her. This basement level was where all the secret technology of the villains was kept! They’d kept it hidden all this time, and never had the heroes once found it. But now Tori, the spy and conspirator, had! This was exactly what she came here for, exactly what the heroes needed.
I am amazing! In one day I discovered what no one else ever had! I know how to take down the Villain Academy! Tori thought victoriously. But then she realized she was hardly in the most comfortable position to celebrate, both literally and figuratively.
Okay. Step one, get the hell out of here, Tori thought nervously. She’d have to wait for Truculent and Fungible to leave. Probably Truculent would punish the other man first for wasting his time. If Tori hadn’t been a pole at that moment, she would have shuddered.
“Get back to work, you useless buffoon,” Truculent said to Fungible, his voice low and menacing.
Tori would have given a sigh of relief, were she not a pole. She heard Fungible run off as fast as he could, probably thankful he hadn’t been severely injured in the encounter.
But Truculent didn’t leave. She heard his footsteps continuing, coming closer. What was he doing? Why wasn’t he leaving?!
He was investigating for himself; the basement level was apparently that important. His footsteps were slow, steady, and sure. Tori was becoming increasingly terrified with every step he took. Any moment now he would notice the unusually colored pole. Tori wasn’t sure if he knew the details of her powers, but she was positive anyone would notice such a strange pole.
Had Tori not been a pole, she would have been in a cold sweat by now, probably trembling as well. She would look utterly pathetic when discovered, so she was rather thankful for her hidden form.
He rounded the corner of the room, ever closer to Tori’s hiding place. He spotted her; his footsteps stopped. Tori imagined him looking at her, a strange, out-of-place pole, for a moment curiously; or, more likely, suspiciously. His footsteps started again, on a direct path to Tori. She waited in terrified anxiety for him to discover her.
Suddenly she felt herself being lifted up; she was done for now. Truculent held the Tori-pole in his hand, turning it over and over, throwing it up, and rolling it in his outstretched palm. Tori began to feel nauseous.
At that exact moment, something absolutely crazy happened.
There was a massive crash, like an explosion, that shook the whole room. Truculent cried out and Tori felt herself falling. The Tori-pole crashed to earth, and Tori was sure she’d get a few very ripe bruises by this time tomorrow.
She heard a massive, blood-curdling roar and screaming.
“Who the hell let the Tyrannosaurus Rex out?!” Tori heard Truculent yell over the commotion.
What the hell? Tori wondered. The Academy was possibly the single weirdest place she’d ever had the misfortune of visiting.
“I’m sorry, sir!” she heard Fungible say anxiously.
“You blathering moron!” Truculent yelled furiously. “Get the tranquilizer! Don’t just stand there like the idiot you are!”
The dinosaur roared again, and Tori suddenly realized what had made the scratches on the wall.
All at once there was a sudden spike in the volume of screaming, and Tori heard many smaller roars and animal-like screeches suddenly mixing in with the general noise of chaos in the basement level.
“What the--Fungible, you useless, good-for-nothing nimrod, you let the Velociraptors out too?! Can’t you do anything right?!” Truculent bellowed, sounding increasingly infuriated.
“H-here are the tranquilizers, sir,” she heard Fungible say. She then heard a slapping noise, and Fungible crying out, “Ow!”
“Oh, shut up, you know you deserved it.” Truculent said. There was a click as of a gun and she heard Truculent running off to defeat the dinosaurs.
Tori thought that this would be the best time to get the hell out. Surely no one would notice her in the chaos.
Tori morphed back into her own form to look upon a scene of utter chaos and destruction. A massive Tyrannosaurus Rex was roaring and growling on the far side of the room; the door and parts of the wall had splintered into chunks of cement and metal at its feet. Truculent had a safari hat and about a dozen sterile-looking white tranquilizer guns and was fighting the Tyrannosaurus. The beast was becoming increasingly agitated as it stepped on chucks of debris.
Clustered around the same general area were about six Velociraptors, looking fierce and vicious. While the Tyrannosaurus Rex was a plain, mottled brown, the Velociraptors were a vibrant purple with red stripes down their spines. All of the dinosaurs had huge claws and teeth and an apparent lust for blood.
“What the hell do they want with dinosaurs?” Tori wondered aloud. A chunk of cement flew past her and left a deep gash in the wall behind her, and Tori remembered she had no time to dawdle. She rushed from the place on the floor where Truculent had dropped her to the archway. She passed through with speed she never thought she had and ignored the odd tingling this time around. She rushed up the metallic stairs, as far away from the basement level as possible, and ran down halls and corridors until she was sure she was as far away as possible from the dinosaur violence and the asylum-gray walls of the basement level.
She collapsed to the floor, panting heavily and sweating even heavier. She could feel herself bruising from being dropped to the floor as a pole, and her messenger bag had bruised her hip from repeatedly hitting it as Tori ran, ignoring every cry of protest from her sore, exhausted body.
Tori sat there in the deserted hallway until her breath slowed back to normal and she recovered some of her energy. She was fairly confident no one had seen her, and she was quite sure Truculent wouldn’t remember the pole he’d picked up in the basement level after all the excitement. She’d done it. And now, she had the information that could bring down the Villain Academy. Now all she needed was a plan.
She checked her watch. But before she started planning, she needed some lunch. Tori picked herself up from the floor and headed back to the lunchroom. She was actually fairly confident of its location this time.
The fact that the hallways and corridors were most always deserted really threw Tori for a loop. She always felt as though she wasn’t supposed to be somewhere, wherever she was. She supposed she ought to be thankful for it, because it meant the Villain Academy wasn’t quite as strong as she and the heroes had anticipated. But it still gave Tori the creeps, listening to her lonely footsteps in empty, abandoned hallways in a scary old school where she most definitely didn’t belong.
Tori made her way to the dining room, and the buffet was open this time with soups and sandwiches. Tori grinned. The food at the Academy was excellent.
...Also you may be wondering why I had the whole George the Skeleton deal. Well, for Halloween my family hung up a plastic skeleton on our door, and my brother and I named him George after George Mason from 24, because he died and we were like "Cause Mason's a skeleton by now! OMGLOL!" I want to put George up on our door with a Santa hat for Christmas, but my mom says no. D:
Hope you enjoyed!
Quote of the Day: "I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it."
~June
I'm back with Chapter Seven of "The Villain Academy!" It's been about a jillion years since I last posted a chapter, December 6, to be exact. But I'm back!
Before you check out Chapter Seven, which is quite random and wanders as much as Tori does within it, check out Chapter Six so you don't get all confused. Seven is very long and also is quite important plot-wise.
7. The Skeleton in the Closet is Named George
Tori adjusted her bag, which had slipped from its position on her hip during her conversation. She took one last glance for any spiders which may have crawled on her when she was distracted. She found none, and with a satisfied smile she swung open the closet door.
She peered out cautiously, making sure no one was around to see her emerge. She saw no one, stepped out, and shut the door behind her as quietly as she could. She glared at the mop, which was still lying on the floor. Her head was still throbbing. She felt like she was inside a drum set at a rock concert.
She stomped on the mop with all the force she could muster, but it hardly made a dent and twisted her ankle a bit. Tori growled angrily. These stupid ugly combat boots are good for nothing, not even snapping a fricking mop!
“I really ought to break you, you stupid mop,” she informed it through gritted teeth.
The throbbing bruise on her head agreed with this assessment and encouraged her. Tori picked up the mop, swung it around for one three-sixty degree rotation, and snapped it over her knee. She kicked the splintered pieces into the corner, not allowing the shards to give her a splinter in a final act of defiant vengeance, and continued on her way.
She truly had no idea where to go, where she was supposed to go, where she was allowed to go, or what to do. So her first day at the Villain Academy would be spent as a tourist from Ohio in New York City. She would go around and gawk; only she would try her hardest not to look like a tourist. Some odd gut feeling told her the others would find this rather suspicious.
The school looked like it had been pieced together from parts of many different old buildings. It was like a Frankenstein of a building, Tori decided. She traveled down the corridors and hallways, peering into deserted rooms and investigating.
Tori opened a classroom door with a creak, and one of the hinges snapped as she did so. “Ooh,” she muttered to herself, glancing around nervously. “No one saw that,” she said to herself. She entered the room.
The wooden floorboards creaked ominously as she stepped in. The two small windows in the room had been broken, and shards of glass rested on the floor and on a bookcase underneath one window.
Tori walked over to the bookcase. “I wonder what villains read…” she asked herself, moving the books from side to side. Some of the titles were quite odd.
“Hmm…Your Giant Mutant Electric Squid and You…How to Build a Laser and 1,001 More Fun Projects for Rainy Days…Werewolves Are People Too…Tales of Chemical Romances: Why Love Sucks…NaNoWriMo: An Experiment in Torture…” Tori stopped and pulled out the last book on the shelf.
“What the heck is NaNoWriMo?” she asked herself, flipping the book over in her hand. The cover depicted a young girl slumped over an old-fashioned typewriter, evidently dead, with a villain laughing evilly behind her.
“Looks awful,” she said to herself. She began to read the inside flap out loud to the dusty old room. “NaNoWriMo is perhaps the most grueling torture ever imagined. Only a truly diabolical, cruel, merciless villain could have imagined such unimaginable torture. Unfortunately, the name of NaNoWriMo’s creator has been lost to history, but their work lives on in infamy. NaNoWriMo is a torture device more painful than any laser or giant mutant electric cephalopod. The worst part is victims voluntarily agree to participate…what the heck?!” Tori said, horrified and yet fascinated. She kept reading. “NaNoWriMo is the impossible challenge. The goal is to write a fifty thousand word novel in only one month, the month of November. Thanks to NaNoWriMo, November has been forever tainted as a month of misery and pain. So many sign up to take part in this stressful, social-life-destroying plot, and so many fall along the way.”
Tori stuck the book back in the shelf, extremely frightened. “Who in their right minds would volunteer to do that?!” she wondered incredulously.
The force of her shoving the book back into the shelf was apparently too much for the tiny old bookcase, and with a massive shudder it collapsed. The shelf splintered with a crack like a gunshot, and the books fell to the floor with a heavy thud and the tinkling of shattering glass. Tori gasped and leapt back as a lazy dust cloud arose from the wreckage.
“Smooth,” she commented. No wonder no one ever came to class. The rooms were a wreck and a hazard to just be in.
Despite this, Tori continued to explore the room, knowing only boredom awaited her outside. The dust cloud caught up to her and she coughed.
Behind her was a scratched-up old teacher’s desk, with empty spaces where drawers should have gone. Several exploded pens and solidified puddles of ink littered the top of the desk, which was in a state of utter disrepair. The spinning chair that stood behind it was terribly broken beyond all hope of repair, with the backing completely ripped off and missing. Tori wondered where it had gone and what the hell anyone would want it for.
The blackboard was chipped in places. It had burn marks, scratches, and Tori swore residue from a grenade explosion graffitied the board as well. What was left of the board was either blank or had swear words written on in chalk, or scratched on, or left in barely-legible burn marks.
For some reason Tori could easily imagine that Angie had led the revolution that had destroyed this room and she couldn’t help but grin. She could imagine it so perfectly, with Angie standing on a desk with a hat reminiscent of Napoleon Bonaparte, bearing a flame in her hand and leading an attack on education.
The desks that had once stood in six straight rows were now in a disorganized pile on the far side of the room. Behind it was a closet with sliding doors, like a sliding glass door on someone’s porch, only this door had no glass. The desks were graffitied with swear words, drawings in pen and pencil, and one even had had the chair completely ripped off of it.
Tori stepped lightly past the mountain of broken desks, fearing an avalanche and breaking yet another thing in the less than twenty four hours she had been at the Villain Academy. She slid open the sliding closet door with some trepidation. But it slid open with a groan easily. Tori waited a moment for an avalanche of garbage and assorted trinkets, but none came. Pleasantly surprised, Tori stepped into the closet, which ran the length of the wall.
The inside was empty and dusty at first glance. Tori looked around. It looked like the closet had once held coats; little coat hooks ran along the closet in a pattern. Up, down, up, down, so that none of the coats would get stuck, presumably.
Tori expected there to be something in there. Old pencils, crumpled papers, a left-behind, forgotten coat or something.
“Guess not,” she said to herself.
All of a sudden at the far end of the coat closet (she highly doubted villains called them cubbies as she had as a little girl in elementary school), she saw a skeleton.
Tori couldn’t help but scream. “Oh my God!” she squealed, clapping a hand over her mouth and jumping back.
She took a few deep breaths and sincerely hoped no one had been wandering by at just the wrong moment. After a minute or two, Tori had calmed herself and hesitantly approached the skeleton.
She made a face as she got closer. “Maybe it’s a fake?” she assured herself.
Tori was a curious girl, and so couldn’t just walk away like a sane person at this point. She closed her eyes tight and reached out for the skeleton with much trepidation and an amazing lack of speed.
As soon as she gripped the skeleton’s arm bone, she let out a long breath. It was plastic, like any other model skeleton one would find in a science classroom or a mad scientist’s lab. She opened her eyes, thoroughly relieved.
Tori picked up the skeleton by its skull and moved it from side to side. The plastic bones rattled like chains. The skeleton brought back fond memories of normal, boring elementary school and sleep-inducing science classes. Tori had always wanted to blow something up but never got a chance. Maybe if she had science classes here at the Villain Academy she would get a chance, but no, good villains only go to class when they’re bored. Yes, when terrorizing people in small towns or plotting the demise of all who have wronged you gets a bit dull, villain students break out of their rut and go to class, being snarky and sarcastic to everyone they possibly could along the way.
It took living with a school of villains to make Tori realize how much she truly loathed them.
As she was playing with the skeleton, she noticed writing on its left arm. Curious, Tori set the skeleton down, knelt on the dusty coat closet floor, and flipped the arm over.
“George,” she read. Someone had written George in permanent black marker on the skeleton’s arm.
“I guess that’s your name, then. George,” Tori assumed, letting the plastic arm fall with a clatter. She wondered why whoever had named the skeleton had chosen George as a name. It didn’t seem like something one would think of when naming a skeleton. In boring, average elementary school science classes back home, Tori’s classmates had named their science class skeletons stuff like Bones or Barry D. Live, something scary and reminiscent of decorative grave stones on people’s lawns on Halloween nights. Never anything as boring and normal as George.
“It’s probably an inside joke,” Tori guessed, getting up from her kneeling position and brushing off dust from the knees of her dark jeans.
She clambered out of the coat closet, taking care not to get her disgusting short hair caught in any coat hooks. Losing even more hair would probably reduce her to tears.
She slid the sliding closet door shut behind her, took great care with delicate little steps past the leaning tower of broken desks, and gave the room one last look.
On the wall was a silver, metallic clock. It seemed stuck at 5:22 and eleven seconds. Not at all helpful. Tori doubted she’d killed much time exploring the room anyway.
“This day is going on forever!” she moaned, stomping around the room a bit.
She shook her head, trying to clear her mind and get rid of this nasty headache and sneezed. The dust in the old classroom had caught up to her again.
Tori perched herself on the old teacher’s desk and stared at the broken bookcase for a minute. She began to hear an ominous groan of complaint from the desk and leapt off immediately. She didn’t need to break anything else; she’d broken a week’s stay of things at the Academy in less than a day.
The books on the bookcase were a time-killing option, but the book on the horrible novel-writing torture had frightened her. So with a resigned sigh, Tori crossed the room to the door, swung it open, generating another annoyed crack from the hinges, shut the door behind her, and continued down the hall.
She found another dead end and groaned. “Now what?” she asked herself, irritated.
Suddenly she noticed a staircase leading down another flight, hidden in shadow. Immediately Tori was intrigued. She took a step towards the metallic staircase.
“Wait,” she stopped herself. “I am in a school for villains, with diabolical technology, weird books on torture, and literal skeletons in the closet. Also I’m a spy and a conspirator. If they find me out I’m done for. So is it really a good idea to go exploring down a hidden staircase?” she reasoned.
Tori stopped a moment, weighing the benefits and consequences. “Eh. What the hell, I’m bored,” she decided, descending the staircase with a shrug.
With every step she took, a small metallic ping alerted whatever was down there to her presence. She wondered where she was going and what awaited her. She was happy to no longer be bored, and let her hand run along the banister as she crept down the stairs as quietly as possible.
The staircase ended on a plain gray floor, and had matching gray walls. Tori felt as though she was in an asylum, the place was so dull.
The place where the stairs ended was only a foyer to the rest of the landing. A stiff, silver archway led to the rest of the basement level. Tori stepped through with some hesitation.
As she did so, she felt a peculiar tingling from her head to her toes. As soon as she was through the archway, the tingling stopped. Tori regarded the archway curiously, titling her head. As far as she could tell, it was a normal, average archway. If anything, dreadfully plain. Yet there was something odd about it; the tingling feeling passed as soon as she passed the archway.
The mystery wasn’t intriguing enough to keep Tori staring at the archway for too long. After a few minutes, she shrugged, turned heel, and continued on her way.
She could hear noises from far away, stuff like buzzing, chatter, machines beeping and whirring. Now this was intriguing. With tentative, near-silent steps, Tori approached a door on the far side of the room where the noise was coming from.
With a start she noticed marks on the walls. Burn marks, chips, unfurling cracks in the wall as though someone had been thrown into it and made quite a dent in doing so. In several places there were huge scratch marks.
Tori approached one of the massive scratches and placed her hand over it. The scratches had come from someone, or something, much, much bigger than she. Far more powerful as well, if it could leave such a deep scratch in the wall. As far as Tori could tell, the wall was solid rock.
Suddenly she heard approaching footsteps behind her. Tori took her hand off the scratch marks and spun around, eyes wide. Someone was coming.
She looked around desperately for something to morph into. There was a random half-broken pole in a corner. Tori ran over to it, as far into the corner as she could fit, and took its form.
Now a multicolored fragment of pole, Tori hoped and prayed no one would notice her. People tend to notice a purple-blue-and-brown-colored pole lying at random in a corner, while all the other poles were a rusty, dull silver like the rest of the room.
“No, I swear I heard someone, Headmaster Truculent,” someone was saying anxiously.
Oh no, Tori thought. The severe headmaster was possibly the last person she wanted to see right now.
“You’re quite sure?” Truculent’s cold, serious voice answered. The two pairs of footsteps came closer and closer. Tori wished she could roll herself away somewhere, but she hadn’t yet learned to manipulate herself to do so.
The footsteps came closer. “You know as well as I this is very serious. Students are not allowed down here. You are hardly allowed down here, Mister Fungible.” Truculent continued, an aggressive edge in his cold voice.
“I-I know, sir,” the man called Fungible replied anxiously, his voice shaking. “But I was s-sure I heard someone!”
The footsteps stopped. “This entire landing is top-secret. I don’t care about just the laboratory. This entire level is where all our secrets are kept. Do you realize the dire consequences we all would suffer if the heroes found this place?” Truculent hissed. Tori could picture him staring the Fungible man down, eyes narrowed to threatening slits.
Then Truculent’s words hit her. This basement level was where all the secret technology of the villains was kept! They’d kept it hidden all this time, and never had the heroes once found it. But now Tori, the spy and conspirator, had! This was exactly what she came here for, exactly what the heroes needed.
I am amazing! In one day I discovered what no one else ever had! I know how to take down the Villain Academy! Tori thought victoriously. But then she realized she was hardly in the most comfortable position to celebrate, both literally and figuratively.
Okay. Step one, get the hell out of here, Tori thought nervously. She’d have to wait for Truculent and Fungible to leave. Probably Truculent would punish the other man first for wasting his time. If Tori hadn’t been a pole at that moment, she would have shuddered.
“Get back to work, you useless buffoon,” Truculent said to Fungible, his voice low and menacing.
Tori would have given a sigh of relief, were she not a pole. She heard Fungible run off as fast as he could, probably thankful he hadn’t been severely injured in the encounter.
But Truculent didn’t leave. She heard his footsteps continuing, coming closer. What was he doing? Why wasn’t he leaving?!
He was investigating for himself; the basement level was apparently that important. His footsteps were slow, steady, and sure. Tori was becoming increasingly terrified with every step he took. Any moment now he would notice the unusually colored pole. Tori wasn’t sure if he knew the details of her powers, but she was positive anyone would notice such a strange pole.
Had Tori not been a pole, she would have been in a cold sweat by now, probably trembling as well. She would look utterly pathetic when discovered, so she was rather thankful for her hidden form.
He rounded the corner of the room, ever closer to Tori’s hiding place. He spotted her; his footsteps stopped. Tori imagined him looking at her, a strange, out-of-place pole, for a moment curiously; or, more likely, suspiciously. His footsteps started again, on a direct path to Tori. She waited in terrified anxiety for him to discover her.
Suddenly she felt herself being lifted up; she was done for now. Truculent held the Tori-pole in his hand, turning it over and over, throwing it up, and rolling it in his outstretched palm. Tori began to feel nauseous.
At that exact moment, something absolutely crazy happened.
There was a massive crash, like an explosion, that shook the whole room. Truculent cried out and Tori felt herself falling. The Tori-pole crashed to earth, and Tori was sure she’d get a few very ripe bruises by this time tomorrow.
She heard a massive, blood-curdling roar and screaming.
“Who the hell let the Tyrannosaurus Rex out?!” Tori heard Truculent yell over the commotion.
What the hell? Tori wondered. The Academy was possibly the single weirdest place she’d ever had the misfortune of visiting.
“I’m sorry, sir!” she heard Fungible say anxiously.
“You blathering moron!” Truculent yelled furiously. “Get the tranquilizer! Don’t just stand there like the idiot you are!”
The dinosaur roared again, and Tori suddenly realized what had made the scratches on the wall.
All at once there was a sudden spike in the volume of screaming, and Tori heard many smaller roars and animal-like screeches suddenly mixing in with the general noise of chaos in the basement level.
“What the--Fungible, you useless, good-for-nothing nimrod, you let the Velociraptors out too?! Can’t you do anything right?!” Truculent bellowed, sounding increasingly infuriated.
“H-here are the tranquilizers, sir,” she heard Fungible say. She then heard a slapping noise, and Fungible crying out, “Ow!”
“Oh, shut up, you know you deserved it.” Truculent said. There was a click as of a gun and she heard Truculent running off to defeat the dinosaurs.
Tori thought that this would be the best time to get the hell out. Surely no one would notice her in the chaos.
Tori morphed back into her own form to look upon a scene of utter chaos and destruction. A massive Tyrannosaurus Rex was roaring and growling on the far side of the room; the door and parts of the wall had splintered into chunks of cement and metal at its feet. Truculent had a safari hat and about a dozen sterile-looking white tranquilizer guns and was fighting the Tyrannosaurus. The beast was becoming increasingly agitated as it stepped on chucks of debris.
Clustered around the same general area were about six Velociraptors, looking fierce and vicious. While the Tyrannosaurus Rex was a plain, mottled brown, the Velociraptors were a vibrant purple with red stripes down their spines. All of the dinosaurs had huge claws and teeth and an apparent lust for blood.
“What the hell do they want with dinosaurs?” Tori wondered aloud. A chunk of cement flew past her and left a deep gash in the wall behind her, and Tori remembered she had no time to dawdle. She rushed from the place on the floor where Truculent had dropped her to the archway. She passed through with speed she never thought she had and ignored the odd tingling this time around. She rushed up the metallic stairs, as far away from the basement level as possible, and ran down halls and corridors until she was sure she was as far away as possible from the dinosaur violence and the asylum-gray walls of the basement level.
She collapsed to the floor, panting heavily and sweating even heavier. She could feel herself bruising from being dropped to the floor as a pole, and her messenger bag had bruised her hip from repeatedly hitting it as Tori ran, ignoring every cry of protest from her sore, exhausted body.
Tori sat there in the deserted hallway until her breath slowed back to normal and she recovered some of her energy. She was fairly confident no one had seen her, and she was quite sure Truculent wouldn’t remember the pole he’d picked up in the basement level after all the excitement. She’d done it. And now, she had the information that could bring down the Villain Academy. Now all she needed was a plan.
She checked her watch. But before she started planning, she needed some lunch. Tori picked herself up from the floor and headed back to the lunchroom. She was actually fairly confident of its location this time.
The fact that the hallways and corridors were most always deserted really threw Tori for a loop. She always felt as though she wasn’t supposed to be somewhere, wherever she was. She supposed she ought to be thankful for it, because it meant the Villain Academy wasn’t quite as strong as she and the heroes had anticipated. But it still gave Tori the creeps, listening to her lonely footsteps in empty, abandoned hallways in a scary old school where she most definitely didn’t belong.
Tori made her way to the dining room, and the buffet was open this time with soups and sandwiches. Tori grinned. The food at the Academy was excellent.
...Also you may be wondering why I had the whole George the Skeleton deal. Well, for Halloween my family hung up a plastic skeleton on our door, and my brother and I named him George after George Mason from 24, because he died and we were like "Cause Mason's a skeleton by now! OMGLOL!" I want to put George up on our door with a Santa hat for Christmas, but my mom says no. D:
Hope you enjoyed!
Quote of the Day: "I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it."
~June