MCSKSG twenty point two
You know, for supposedly being an archeology buff, Guido sure doesn't talk about it much. 2,449 words.
I got to school about halfway through lunch period - and yeah, Mom made me drive my car again. She went inside to talk to Para, and I went off to find Chris and hopefully Lacy.
I didn't have to look very far. I found Lacy at her locker. She closed it and turned away, stopping when she caught sight of me.
I could challenge an undefeated rival to a fight, defeat her, and then intimidate her with threats of what my mother did for a living, but I somehow could not muster up the courage to give Lacy so much as a simple, "Hi."
"What do you want?"
Her hostility caught me off-guard. "...To talk?" I suggested.
"Okay." She folded her arms, leaning her shoulder against the locker. "Then let's start with why you decided to get in a fight with my best friend."
I stared at her, floundering for an answer with that would actually make sense to her.
"No? Then I guess there's nothing to--"
"No, wait," I interrupted. I had this feeling that if I let her walk away, I wasn't going to get another chance. "Let's...start somewhere else."
"Fine." She gave me a hard look and waited.
Guess it was my pick, then. I took a deep breath and decided to start with the lie Esperanza hadn't seen fit to rescind yet. "I didn't just leave you there, okay?" I started. "I didn't even let you leave my sight when we were trapped together on the storage floor, how could you believe I'd ditch you on the sidewalk?"
I think that got through to her, because even though she didn't say anything, her eyebrows furrowed and she shifted uncomfortably against the lockers.
"And I wasn't even friends with you back then. You really think I'd abandon you now?"
The question hung in the air while she considered her response. She had that look like she wanted to stay angry but was finding it harder to justify. "Then what did happen?" she asked.
Couldn't implicate Kafra, couldn't talk about the Seductionists, didn't know just how much she remembered before getting knocked out but it apparently wasn't enough to remember being dragged off by a bird monster in the first place... Anything I told her was going to sound ridiculous and unbelievable. Even the closest analogue, that a mugger knocked her out and I tried to save her, was going to get an eyeroll at best for trying to make myself look like a hero.
"I went for help," I said, which was about as close to the truth as I could get without sounding absurd.
"Then why was Esper the one who--"
"I don't know," I shot back, "maybe you should ask Esperanza. She chased me off and I left you with her because she's your friend and I thought she'd take care of you. I didn't realize she'd lie to make you hate me."
She matched my indignation with her own. "You're being ridiculous. Why would she do that?"
"No, you are." Smooth, Guido, way to sound like a first-grader. I immediately regretted it and hastily tried to make up for it. "I know she's your friend, but would you just listen to me for a minute?"
"I am listening, Guido! But all you're telling me is that my best friend is a liar."
"Because she is." I stopped and took a deep breath, closing my eyes and holding up my hands to signal a break. I was not handling this very well. I wasn't prepared to have to fight Lacy first thing, and it didn't help that the whole argument came down to he-said-she-said, my word against Esperanza's.
It was upsetting that Esperanza hadn't taken my warning to heart and had left me to deal with all the fallout. I was going to have to do something about her. It was more upsetting that I felt like the only way to get Lacy to understand what was going on was to tell her what, exactly, was going on between Esperanza and myself, but I knew that villifying Esperanza would probably make Lacy less likely to believe me.
I suddenly felt completely hopeless.
I let out a sigh, lowering my hands and looking down at the ground. "Never mind," I said. "Believe her if you want. I don't care anymore." I turned to leave.
She grabbed my arm. I shouldn't even need to say where. She let go immediately and I stumbled away from her, one hand over my wound with a guilty look in her direction.
Lacy was surprised enough to forget that she was supposed to be mad at me. "Are you okay?"
I straightened, looking away.
"...You really did fight her last night," she realized. "Didn't you?"
"...She brought a sword," I answered, barely audible.
For a second, she didn't say anything. When she finally did, it was a combination of shocked and incredulous. "She's a ninja!"
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
"Why did you--! If you know, why'd you fight her, you idiot?!"
"Because I had to, okay?"
"No you didn't!"
"Yes." I turned to her, serious and grim, which was getting to be a more and more common thing with me. "I did."
Setting her hands on her hips, she heaved a sigh, exasperated, but there was concern on her face. "Why?"
I turned away again. "You wouldn't understand."
"Well maybe I would if you'd explain it."
"Fine," I said. She wouldn't like it, but at this point I didn't really care how she reacted. I was tired of this and I just wanted to get away from the conversation. "That anonymous rival I told you about? It turned out she was Esperanza. That's why."
I could see the gears turning in her head, reflected on her face. Confusion, realization, shock, uncertainty, concern. She shook her head, obviously uncomfortable. "She wouldn't--..."
"Well she did." Her reaction made me find my anger again. "And I wish she would stop trying to turn my friends against me and just leave me alone."
I was done with this. It wasn't going anywhere, and it wasn't going to. I turned and walked off, and this time Lacy let me.
* * *
Another notice to go to Para's classroom after school. This day just kept getting better.
I went straight there, because even if I didn't feel like dealing with Para, I felt less like dealing with other people, friends included. She was still packing up to leave when I got there, which didn't surprise me.
She looked up and greeted me with a smile. I returned it half-heartedly.
"Alicia took my car home," she said, "so you're my ride."
I stared at her.
"Don't give me that look!" She laughed, holding up her hands. "You know how your mother is."
"I don't even know where you live," I said.
"Alicia wanted me over for dinner, so I'm not going to my house. Here, catch." She dug a set of keys out of her pocket and tossed them to me.
I missed, of course. Mostly because I didn't even try. She sighed while I stooped to retrieve my keys from the floor.
"Give me a couple minutes," she said.
I shrugged, because it was the best response I could muster up, and picked a desk to sit at while I waited.
She didn't take long getting her things together. It really was only a couple minutes before she walked past and beckoned me from the door. I followed with a sigh.
When we got out to the lot, I noticed that Mom had moved my car, and now it was parked very close to the school. Which was convenient for me, I guess. I led Para over to it and threw my backpack in.
She stopped to marvel at it. "Oooh, so this is the car."
"Yeah," I said, because what else was there to say?
"Alicia's got good taste."
"And money to waste, I guess."
"Come on, don't pretend you don't like it." She grinned at me across the hood. "You feel like a badass driving this thing, don't you?"
I opened my mouth to respond and closed it right back up because that was just about the last thing I'd expected her to say.
She laughed and pulled open the passenger's side door to climb in.
Another surprise came in the form of Orion Black sauntering over with a couple of his flunkies. He lifted his mirrored shades and looked at the car and then at me. "So the Nightmare's yours," he said.
It took me a minute to realize I was supposed to be responding. "I, um. ...Yeah."
He let the shades drop back down over his eyes. "Nice." He caught sight of Para and turned to her. "Ms. K. You know Barcardi?"
I was Barcardi now? Acknowledged by name? By surname? Orion Black must have been confused, because that was the sort of address cool kids got.
She smiled. "Close personal friend of his mother's." That was one way to put it.
Just hearing her admit in front of the coolest guy in school that a teacher had ties to my mother was mortifying.
"Solid," he replied. He turned slightly, nudging his companions toward the sidewalk, and then faced me again. "See you 'round, Barcardi. Rock that Nightmare." He left, with one of those suave cool kid waves that was supposed to look like a combination of a salute and a tip of the hat.
I was left stunned, staring after him and his friends as they walked off.
"Guido, it's okay!" My gaze snapped to Para. "You survived the wolves of Tristram High."
Why was Para in such a good mood? It was seriously annoying. I shot her a glare and climbed into the driver's seat.
My lack of response didn't do much to deter her. She started talking again as soon as I'd pulled out of the parking space. "Do you know where the Delta Nightmare's name comes from?" she asked.
"Geffen Tower," I replied. I wasn't looking at her, my eyes were on the road.
"Right." She sounded amused, who even knew why. "After the Nightmares that roam the levels of the ancient city underneath it."
"Geffenia," I said.
"Oh? How much do you know about Geffenia?"
It was sort of a weird thing to ask, I felt. She was a history teacher. Why did she need me to tell her about Geffenia? "Um, a lot?" I answered, with the confusion over why she was asking apparent in my voice. "It's a pretty popular topic in archeology. Glast Heim, too."
"Oh, is it?"
"Yeah. Peter Panda wrote a few books about Geffenia."
"A few, huh? What's so interesting about it?"
"Well, it..." Suddenly I felt like I was being put on the spot. Asked to talk about my interests, while I was trying to concentrate on driving, by somebody I didn't feel like talking to. "It...just is," I finished, lamely.
She didn't let that stop her. "What are his thoughts on Doppelganger?"
"Doppelganger's not real, he's just a...a thing, they made up. To explain why the city got destroyed. Dracula, too." There was a lot of controversy about that, but I honestly didn't feel like getting into it. Geffenia's interesting, but it's not my favourite archeological subject.
"That's a very logical position to take," she replied, acknowledging it without revealing her own thoughts on it. "What do you feel about the other big-name monsters in Rune-Midgard, then?"
"What, like... Dark Lord and Baphomet and everything?"
"Sure."
"Um... Well, there's evidence that some of them are real, I guess... Like, there's a lot of documentation about one of Glast Heim's kings who went mad with power - I can't remember his name..."
"King Tyrasis?" she suggested.
"Yeah, him. He was a tyrant, and eventually he got assassinated in the churchyard but they say he was too angry to die and came back as this really powerful demon. That's Dark Lord."
"What makes you think he's real and not Doppelganger?"
"Um. Well. There's, like, written accounts...of King Tyrasis and his rise to power, and there's a record of his assassination - they even found his grave. So he was a real person. And there's other records of strange things happening in the churchyard, and there are monsters there now of course..."
"There are monsters everywhere," she pointed out. "Geffenia, too."
"Yeah, but I mean, there's new monsters there. Like when they went in to start clearing out Glast Heim, the cops who died in there came back as raydrics, so there are old raydrics in plate armour and new raydrics in riot gear."
"And you think the new monsters mean there's some kind of magic still at work there?"
"I guess so?" I didn't want to commit myself to an answer there, because I had the feeling she didn't agree, and I didn't want to look ignorant in front of my history teacher. "I mean, you know, King Tyrasis was supposedly trying to figure out how to raise the dead, so it makes sense."
"But how can he be raising the dead if he's dead himself?"
Yeah, I was starting to feel really stupid, now. "Because...he's Dark Lord."
She paused for a moment. "Alright. If he's Dark Lord and he's the one creating the new monsters by raising them from the dead, then why aren't there any accounts of Dark Lord being spotted in Glast Heim?"
"Well...they...sealed him, didn't they? I mean, on one of the very first Glast Heim expeditions, archeologists found this big carved circle in the middle of the churchyard, and the churchyard had been sealed off completely - they had to get to it from the culverts. So he's still sealed in the churchyard but he's using his power through the seal."
"You know quite a bit about archeology, don't you?"
Which caught me completely off-guard. "Uh... I...I read a lot..."
"That's good," she said. "Stick with that. I've never heard you talk so much about anything else."
I didn't know how to feel about that. I was a little embarrassed for my sudden talkativity and for realizing that I'd just rambled about Dark Lord to my history teacher, but it also felt nice to have her acknowledge my interest in the subject I wanted to study.
And not only that, to encourage me to keep studying it. I had Mom getting all excited about my willingness to fight, and here Para was telling me to follow what I wanted to do. That felt nice.
It felt nice, but dammit, Para needed to stop making me like her.
I got to school about halfway through lunch period - and yeah, Mom made me drive my car again. She went inside to talk to Para, and I went off to find Chris and hopefully Lacy.
I didn't have to look very far. I found Lacy at her locker. She closed it and turned away, stopping when she caught sight of me.
I could challenge an undefeated rival to a fight, defeat her, and then intimidate her with threats of what my mother did for a living, but I somehow could not muster up the courage to give Lacy so much as a simple, "Hi."
"What do you want?"
Her hostility caught me off-guard. "...To talk?" I suggested.
"Okay." She folded her arms, leaning her shoulder against the locker. "Then let's start with why you decided to get in a fight with my best friend."
I stared at her, floundering for an answer with that would actually make sense to her.
"No? Then I guess there's nothing to--"
"No, wait," I interrupted. I had this feeling that if I let her walk away, I wasn't going to get another chance. "Let's...start somewhere else."
"Fine." She gave me a hard look and waited.
Guess it was my pick, then. I took a deep breath and decided to start with the lie Esperanza hadn't seen fit to rescind yet. "I didn't just leave you there, okay?" I started. "I didn't even let you leave my sight when we were trapped together on the storage floor, how could you believe I'd ditch you on the sidewalk?"
I think that got through to her, because even though she didn't say anything, her eyebrows furrowed and she shifted uncomfortably against the lockers.
"And I wasn't even friends with you back then. You really think I'd abandon you now?"
The question hung in the air while she considered her response. She had that look like she wanted to stay angry but was finding it harder to justify. "Then what did happen?" she asked.
Couldn't implicate Kafra, couldn't talk about the Seductionists, didn't know just how much she remembered before getting knocked out but it apparently wasn't enough to remember being dragged off by a bird monster in the first place... Anything I told her was going to sound ridiculous and unbelievable. Even the closest analogue, that a mugger knocked her out and I tried to save her, was going to get an eyeroll at best for trying to make myself look like a hero.
"I went for help," I said, which was about as close to the truth as I could get without sounding absurd.
"Then why was Esper the one who--"
"I don't know," I shot back, "maybe you should ask Esperanza. She chased me off and I left you with her because she's your friend and I thought she'd take care of you. I didn't realize she'd lie to make you hate me."
She matched my indignation with her own. "You're being ridiculous. Why would she do that?"
"No, you are." Smooth, Guido, way to sound like a first-grader. I immediately regretted it and hastily tried to make up for it. "I know she's your friend, but would you just listen to me for a minute?"
"I am listening, Guido! But all you're telling me is that my best friend is a liar."
"Because she is." I stopped and took a deep breath, closing my eyes and holding up my hands to signal a break. I was not handling this very well. I wasn't prepared to have to fight Lacy first thing, and it didn't help that the whole argument came down to he-said-she-said, my word against Esperanza's.
It was upsetting that Esperanza hadn't taken my warning to heart and had left me to deal with all the fallout. I was going to have to do something about her. It was more upsetting that I felt like the only way to get Lacy to understand what was going on was to tell her what, exactly, was going on between Esperanza and myself, but I knew that villifying Esperanza would probably make Lacy less likely to believe me.
I suddenly felt completely hopeless.
I let out a sigh, lowering my hands and looking down at the ground. "Never mind," I said. "Believe her if you want. I don't care anymore." I turned to leave.
She grabbed my arm. I shouldn't even need to say where. She let go immediately and I stumbled away from her, one hand over my wound with a guilty look in her direction.
Lacy was surprised enough to forget that she was supposed to be mad at me. "Are you okay?"
I straightened, looking away.
"...You really did fight her last night," she realized. "Didn't you?"
"...She brought a sword," I answered, barely audible.
For a second, she didn't say anything. When she finally did, it was a combination of shocked and incredulous. "She's a ninja!"
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
"Why did you--! If you know, why'd you fight her, you idiot?!"
"Because I had to, okay?"
"No you didn't!"
"Yes." I turned to her, serious and grim, which was getting to be a more and more common thing with me. "I did."
Setting her hands on her hips, she heaved a sigh, exasperated, but there was concern on her face. "Why?"
I turned away again. "You wouldn't understand."
"Well maybe I would if you'd explain it."
"Fine," I said. She wouldn't like it, but at this point I didn't really care how she reacted. I was tired of this and I just wanted to get away from the conversation. "That anonymous rival I told you about? It turned out she was Esperanza. That's why."
I could see the gears turning in her head, reflected on her face. Confusion, realization, shock, uncertainty, concern. She shook her head, obviously uncomfortable. "She wouldn't--..."
"Well she did." Her reaction made me find my anger again. "And I wish she would stop trying to turn my friends against me and just leave me alone."
I was done with this. It wasn't going anywhere, and it wasn't going to. I turned and walked off, and this time Lacy let me.
* * *
Another notice to go to Para's classroom after school. This day just kept getting better.
I went straight there, because even if I didn't feel like dealing with Para, I felt less like dealing with other people, friends included. She was still packing up to leave when I got there, which didn't surprise me.
She looked up and greeted me with a smile. I returned it half-heartedly.
"Alicia took my car home," she said, "so you're my ride."
I stared at her.
"Don't give me that look!" She laughed, holding up her hands. "You know how your mother is."
"I don't even know where you live," I said.
"Alicia wanted me over for dinner, so I'm not going to my house. Here, catch." She dug a set of keys out of her pocket and tossed them to me.
I missed, of course. Mostly because I didn't even try. She sighed while I stooped to retrieve my keys from the floor.
"Give me a couple minutes," she said.
I shrugged, because it was the best response I could muster up, and picked a desk to sit at while I waited.
She didn't take long getting her things together. It really was only a couple minutes before she walked past and beckoned me from the door. I followed with a sigh.
When we got out to the lot, I noticed that Mom had moved my car, and now it was parked very close to the school. Which was convenient for me, I guess. I led Para over to it and threw my backpack in.
She stopped to marvel at it. "Oooh, so this is the car."
"Yeah," I said, because what else was there to say?
"Alicia's got good taste."
"And money to waste, I guess."
"Come on, don't pretend you don't like it." She grinned at me across the hood. "You feel like a badass driving this thing, don't you?"
I opened my mouth to respond and closed it right back up because that was just about the last thing I'd expected her to say.
She laughed and pulled open the passenger's side door to climb in.
Another surprise came in the form of Orion Black sauntering over with a couple of his flunkies. He lifted his mirrored shades and looked at the car and then at me. "So the Nightmare's yours," he said.
It took me a minute to realize I was supposed to be responding. "I, um. ...Yeah."
He let the shades drop back down over his eyes. "Nice." He caught sight of Para and turned to her. "Ms. K. You know Barcardi?"
I was Barcardi now? Acknowledged by name? By surname? Orion Black must have been confused, because that was the sort of address cool kids got.
She smiled. "Close personal friend of his mother's." That was one way to put it.
Just hearing her admit in front of the coolest guy in school that a teacher had ties to my mother was mortifying.
"Solid," he replied. He turned slightly, nudging his companions toward the sidewalk, and then faced me again. "See you 'round, Barcardi. Rock that Nightmare." He left, with one of those suave cool kid waves that was supposed to look like a combination of a salute and a tip of the hat.
I was left stunned, staring after him and his friends as they walked off.
"Guido, it's okay!" My gaze snapped to Para. "You survived the wolves of Tristram High."
Why was Para in such a good mood? It was seriously annoying. I shot her a glare and climbed into the driver's seat.
My lack of response didn't do much to deter her. She started talking again as soon as I'd pulled out of the parking space. "Do you know where the Delta Nightmare's name comes from?" she asked.
"Geffen Tower," I replied. I wasn't looking at her, my eyes were on the road.
"Right." She sounded amused, who even knew why. "After the Nightmares that roam the levels of the ancient city underneath it."
"Geffenia," I said.
"Oh? How much do you know about Geffenia?"
It was sort of a weird thing to ask, I felt. She was a history teacher. Why did she need me to tell her about Geffenia? "Um, a lot?" I answered, with the confusion over why she was asking apparent in my voice. "It's a pretty popular topic in archeology. Glast Heim, too."
"Oh, is it?"
"Yeah. Peter Panda wrote a few books about Geffenia."
"A few, huh? What's so interesting about it?"
"Well, it..." Suddenly I felt like I was being put on the spot. Asked to talk about my interests, while I was trying to concentrate on driving, by somebody I didn't feel like talking to. "It...just is," I finished, lamely.
She didn't let that stop her. "What are his thoughts on Doppelganger?"
"Doppelganger's not real, he's just a...a thing, they made up. To explain why the city got destroyed. Dracula, too." There was a lot of controversy about that, but I honestly didn't feel like getting into it. Geffenia's interesting, but it's not my favourite archeological subject.
"That's a very logical position to take," she replied, acknowledging it without revealing her own thoughts on it. "What do you feel about the other big-name monsters in Rune-Midgard, then?"
"What, like... Dark Lord and Baphomet and everything?"
"Sure."
"Um... Well, there's evidence that some of them are real, I guess... Like, there's a lot of documentation about one of Glast Heim's kings who went mad with power - I can't remember his name..."
"King Tyrasis?" she suggested.
"Yeah, him. He was a tyrant, and eventually he got assassinated in the churchyard but they say he was too angry to die and came back as this really powerful demon. That's Dark Lord."
"What makes you think he's real and not Doppelganger?"
"Um. Well. There's, like, written accounts...of King Tyrasis and his rise to power, and there's a record of his assassination - they even found his grave. So he was a real person. And there's other records of strange things happening in the churchyard, and there are monsters there now of course..."
"There are monsters everywhere," she pointed out. "Geffenia, too."
"Yeah, but I mean, there's new monsters there. Like when they went in to start clearing out Glast Heim, the cops who died in there came back as raydrics, so there are old raydrics in plate armour and new raydrics in riot gear."
"And you think the new monsters mean there's some kind of magic still at work there?"
"I guess so?" I didn't want to commit myself to an answer there, because I had the feeling she didn't agree, and I didn't want to look ignorant in front of my history teacher. "I mean, you know, King Tyrasis was supposedly trying to figure out how to raise the dead, so it makes sense."
"But how can he be raising the dead if he's dead himself?"
Yeah, I was starting to feel really stupid, now. "Because...he's Dark Lord."
She paused for a moment. "Alright. If he's Dark Lord and he's the one creating the new monsters by raising them from the dead, then why aren't there any accounts of Dark Lord being spotted in Glast Heim?"
"Well...they...sealed him, didn't they? I mean, on one of the very first Glast Heim expeditions, archeologists found this big carved circle in the middle of the churchyard, and the churchyard had been sealed off completely - they had to get to it from the culverts. So he's still sealed in the churchyard but he's using his power through the seal."
"You know quite a bit about archeology, don't you?"
Which caught me completely off-guard. "Uh... I...I read a lot..."
"That's good," she said. "Stick with that. I've never heard you talk so much about anything else."
I didn't know how to feel about that. I was a little embarrassed for my sudden talkativity and for realizing that I'd just rambled about Dark Lord to my history teacher, but it also felt nice to have her acknowledge my interest in the subject I wanted to study.
And not only that, to encourage me to keep studying it. I had Mom getting all excited about my willingness to fight, and here Para was telling me to follow what I wanted to do. That felt nice.
It felt nice, but dammit, Para needed to stop making me like her.