Children of the First

So here's chapter ten! It's a long one.
(Hiatus still in effect: I got a job and might have the housing settled, but I still have some scheduling to iron out and some site design work I'd like to get done before I officially end the hiatus and set a schedule)
Thanks to the wealthy benefactor who donated the full $15 to reach the bonus story goal! That's awesome!
I have an idea to do another myth installment, but suggestions are always welcome!

I’d gotten up early Monday morning so I could hit the bookstore before my first class; I still had to get all my textbooks, plus I wanted to get a scram player’s guide for Retis.

I flipped through the KSA’s Official Rules while I was waiting in line; the afterword had something about “everything is a lesson,” which made me think of what Pebbles had said yesterday—I think it was something like, “Everything is a lesson.”

I couldn’t see how a jolt to the face really taught you anything—other than “it’s a bad idea to get hit in the face with jolts.” Then again, I thought, that’s a pretty important lesson.

“Next in line,” someone called.

I guess Pebbles might have been right, I thought. She would know better than I would—Gaia, the way she moved—”

“Hellooo? Next in line,” someone called again.

I looked up to see what the hold-up was, and all thoughts of scram and Pebbles and lessons were pushed out by the copper-skinned girl waving from the end of the check-out counter. As she waved her arms, her dark brown hair bounced off her cheeks and chin like a sexy koosh ball.

…sexy koosh ball? What the hell?

“Next in line,” she sang. “Next in line, next in line, next in liiiine!”

She stopped singing and looked at me; her big green eyes— Wait, why was she looking at me?

Oh shit, I thought. I’m next in line.

I felt my cheeks get hot, and hurried over to her with an apologetic smile.

“Welcome back to the plane of the living,” she teased. “Find everything you needed?”

“Where?” I asked. “In the bookstore or during my recent extra-dimensional outing?”

She laughed, “Both, of course. Though I doubt I’d be much help finding things in The Void; Khaos never shelves anything in the right place.” She looked over her shoulder, then whispered, “I heard he doesn’t even use the Dewey Decimal System.”

I shook my head in dismay, “It’s true, he doesn’t. But that’s why he’s Khaos, Lord of The Void and not Alphabeticos, Lord of the Cosmic Card Catalogue.”

“Nice.” She nodded approvingly, “Triple alliteration bonus and everything.”

She scanned the scram guide and picked up my Intro to Magic Theory textbook. “Ah, ‘Fundamentals of Magic,’” she mused. “So you’re a freshman then?”

I had thought that her hair had been styled to hang in strands—like dreadlocks or something—but now that I was closer, I could see they were actually more like quills. Each hair was a little thicker than pencil lead and tapered to a fine point, though—judging from the way they bounced and jiggled when she moved her head (which was constantly)—I doubt they were actually sharp.

“Oh shit,” she laughed. “No way.” A smile spread across her full brown lips and she held up the massive leather-bound copy of the Khartan Bestiary. “You’re not in Professor Lenis’ Fantastic Creatures class, are you?”

“Yep. Today at ten, why?”

“Because I’m in your class!” she exclaimed a little too loudly. “How awesome is that?”

My stomach lurched. “Very awesome,” I said, but I was thinking, I have a class with a really hot girl who actually gets my jokes—if I fuck this up I’ll kill me.

I managed to not make a fool of myself while she finished ringing me up, so I got to live another day (but I’m watching me). I turned to head for the exit, but she grabbed my wrist before I could go anywhere. “Hang on there, Freckles” she protested. “What’s your name?”

“Oh, it’s Shawn. What’s yours?”

She tapped her nametag, “Fallon. How May I Help You Today?”

“Right,” I chuckled. “See you in twenty minutes, Fallon HowmayIhelpyoutoday.”

She winked and shot me the finger gun, “You got it, Chief.”

I rolled my eyes and walked away. I waited until my back was to her before I started grinning like an idiot.

“Next in liiine.”

Fantastic Creatures of Khartan was held in the Lab Complex, which was pretty much the only academic building built in the last two hundred years, so it wasn’t too tough to find.

Fantastic Creatures, like most upper-level Zoo classes, was held in one of the handling rooms: specialized labs with rows of heavy tables facing a containment circle—called ‘the kennel’—etched into the floor at the front of the room.

I took a seat in the second row and dropped my bag on the ground—I’d left most of my books off at my room, but that Bestiary was Gai-damn heavy. Professor Lenis wasn’t there yet, but there were three cages covered with heavy blankets in the containment circle.

Fallon showed up a few minutes late, with Professor Lenis coming in right on her heels.

“Find a seat quickly please, Ms. Plainview,” he said. “I’m glad to see you again, but we’re already running later than I’d like.” The aging wood elf’s tone was impatient, but not unfriendly as he brushed past Fallon and strode to the front of the room.

“Have something special today, do you?” Fallon quipped, but did as she was asked, taking the seat next to mine.

“Hey,” she half-whispered.

“Glad you made it,” I whispered back.

“Always do.”

Professor Lenis cleared his throat. “Welcome to Fantastic Creatures of Khartan,” he proclaimed, though it sounded more like a challenge than a welcome. “I don’t want to spend a lot time on the bookkeeping stuff, so I’m just passing around the syllabus and you can all read it on your own time. I’ll just give you the important bits.

“First off, you don’t need to call me Professor all the time—it doesn’t bother me, but it doesn’t blow pixie dust up my ass either. Of course, pixie dust isn’t even real, but that’s beside the point. You can call me Lenis—or Professor, or Lenis the Profster—I don’t care. But that’s Lenis, not Le-nice, not Leenus, and you’d better be someone special for you to call me Len. Never call me Lenny, or I will feed bite-sized chunks of you to every critter in the Raekos Menagerie.

“As for what you need in class, the answer is, ‘not much.’ You won’t be needing those Bestiaries, for instance; we deal with the flesh and blood here, so you can leave the pictures at home. You will need them, just not in class.”

Great, I thought. Now he tells me.

“All you’ll need,” Lenis continued, “is your field journal, a pencil, and a good night’s sleep. If you must,” he sighed, “you can bring a pair of gloves. You can never really know an animal until you touch it skin-to-skin—and honestly, if you have to wear gloves, you’re probably in the wrong place, but it’s your call.

“Okay, last thing: grades. You will write an entry in your journal after every class. Don’t worry; you’ll always have something new to write, I promise. The journal is a small part of your grade, as is the final exam, but the majority of your grade comes from what you do during class: do you just sit and look at the critter, or do you really try to get to know it? Do you back down when it scares you, or do you learn from it? Do you cry when it bites you or do you bite it back? Basically, if you put in the effort and manage not to completely suck, you’ll be fine. Got it?”

Most of the class nodded or mumbled yes, but Fallon shot out of her chair to stand at attention and salute. “Got it, SIR!” she barked, and whipped her arm back down to her side.

Lenis stifled a laugh. “Excellent,” he nodded.

“Can we see some fucking animals now, sir?”

“Sit your ass down, Plainview. And yes, we can see some animals now.” Lenis was smiling now, his eyes bright and energetic. The ragged, threadbare old man from the beginning of class was gone; in his place stood a seasoned adventurer.

He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but he barely seemed to fit in the room anymore.

He pulled the cloth off the first cage: a glass terrarium filled halfway to the top with sand, and nothing else.

“Alright now, where are the freshmen?” Lenis peered at the class.

“He’s one!” Fallon shouted, pointing at me with both hands.

“Well I’m not gonna pick yours,” he said with a tiny smile. “C’mon now, I know I have at least two more.”

Two kids in the back row nervously raised their hands.

“You two! You think I’m going to make you do something really horrible! Well I’m not!” He laughed, “Relax. Man, you should see your faces. Just answer me this: What’s in this tank?”

Neither one said a word.

“Oh, come on.” Lenis was getting animated now, moving about as he spoke. “Not even a guess? Alright, what about you, Fallon’s puppy?” He meant me, of course.

“Shawn,” I said.

“What?”

“My name’s Shawn.”

“Fine, Shawn, what’s in the tank?”

I looked at the tank: there wasn’t a damn thing in there, so I gave the only answer I could think of.

“Sand,” I said.

“Sand?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.” He scratched his chin and studied me for a few seconds. “I can’t tell if you’re a smartass or just smart. Or both,” he added, walking back into the circle. “In any case, you’re pretty much right.”

You could practically hear the other freshmen’s jaws hit the linoleum.

“Now then,” he sighed as he sat down beside the tank, “let's take a look at the little beauty.

“That’s right, get up off your lazy asses, let’s go” he pressed. “You’ll only see it for a split-second, so everyone has to have a good view. Don’t bump those other cages now, that’s it.”

“There ya go,” he said once we had crowded in around him. He held up a little glass jar with a handful of grasshoppers in it and smiled, “Everyone ready?”

He fished one of the grasshoppers out of the jar and dropped it into the cage. No one made a sound as the oblivious insect inched over the fine white sand.

The sand in one corner of the tank shifted so slightly I wasn’t sure I’d seen it, but it was enough to make the Cat girl and one of the elf-bloods in class gasp, earning them a withering glare from Lenis.

The grasshopper sprang into the air a few seconds later when the sand beneath it started to bulge. Suddenly, the lizard shot out of the other side of the tank, caught the grasshopper in mid air, and disappeared back into the sand without stopping.

It was moving too fast to get a good look at it—all I could tell was that it was rust colored and about a foot long.

“That was awesome,” said one of the other students.

Lenis looked up in surprise. “That? That was nothing. This time, I’m going to try to catch it and we’ll see what happens.

The second grasshopper fell for the exact same trick, but as soon as the lizard was in the air, Lenis darted his hand into the cage and caught it before it hit the ground.

Well, I say he caught it, but the second his closed hand around it, the lizard dissolved into coarse red grit, sifting through Lenis’ fingers to disappear back into the white sand below.

“Now that was awesome,” Lenis said as he brushed his hands off. “That’s a Red Sandy. That grit will sift down into the sand and reform within seconds. For next time, I want to you figure out how it swims in the sand, and how and why it did that trick with the grasshopper.”

I could tell I was going to like this class—even if Lenis could be an old curmudgeon at times, he loved what he taught, and I'd rather have that any day.

“We’re going to move right along here,” Lenis said, and stepped to the next cage, which was much larger than the first, especially in terms of height. “We would normally spend one class on each animal, but I thought I’d try to pack a few in on the first day so you would know what you’re getting yourself into, and what you’d be missing.

“This, ladies and gentleman,” he said, pulling the cover off the cage, “is a Pirouette.”

The tall terrarium was filled with plants and branches, but, once again, I couldn’t see the animal until I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I looked closer and saw what looked like a large mother-of-pearl toothpick peeking out from behind a leaf.

“There there, Bridget, it’s alright,” Lenis cooed to the toothpick as he opened the terrarium’s side door. “You can come out now. Don’t you want to show the students how well you dance?”

She perked up a bit at the word dance, and slowly crept out from behind her leaf. Basically, she looked like a stick figure made out of pearl—except her limbs ended in razor-sharp points instead of hands and feet, and her “head” was just a slightly thicker section of her body.

“Come on now, it’s alright,” Lenis continued. Then he turned to us, “I cannot stress enough how sensitive Bridget is; sudden movements, loud noises, or even a bad attitude could scare her, and we do not want to deal with a frightened Pirouette.”

The timid creature had reached the doorway and was watching Lenis expectantly (at least, I think she was watching him. It’s tough to tell since she didn’t have eyes or a mouth to distinguish her front from her back).

“Oh, I’m sorry, my dear,” Lenis said soothingly. He opened a compartment at the bottom of the cage, took out a thick rubber mat, and held it to the cage door so Bridget could step aboard.

“Now, I know what you’re all thinking,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the delicate creature he was carrying. “You’re thinking that, after all I said about not wearing gloves, for me to use a rubber mat like this is a bit hypocritical, right?”

Most of the students nodded, though some were more discreet than others.

“See, Bridget here is always sharp, she can’t help it and neither can I. They walk by stabbing their limbs into the ground a tiny bit with each step. This means that they can move in fairly incredible ways—which you’ll see in a minute—but it also means that if you pick up a Pirouette, you’re almost guaranteed to get stuck.

“Normally, I support getting bitten, stuck, or stung as a useful way to learn about an animal. Of course, this only applies to classroom and laboratory studies where the danger in minimal, but what better way to understand the workings of an animal’s defenses than to experience them first hand?

“The thing about Pirouettes though, is that they are essentially one big nerve—that’s why they’re so sensitive, and it’s how they see and hear without sense organs; they feel everything, all the time.”

He set the pad down on the corner of one of the tables—outside the containment ring, I noticed—and continued,

“They‘re built to feel that kind of raw sensation. We, on the other hand, are not. When a Pirouette sticks you it forms a direct connection to your nervous system—like adding a cluster of panicky, exposed nerves to the outside of your body. It is the most excruciating pain I’ve ever felt, and it scares the poor Pirouette half to death. And of course, Pirouettes flail their limbs when they’re scared, so you get stuck over and over again. So yes, I use the rubber mat.”

The tiny creature tiptoed (as though she had a choice, not having feet to begin with) off the mat and cart wheeled over the edge of the table. Instead of tumbling to the floor though, she actually continued the cartwheel all the way down the table leg and onto the floor.

She rolled a few feet away from the table, and then turned to spiral around a single spot on the floor. The cartwheel turned into an “actual” pirouette when she reached the center of her spiral, though Bridget didn’t have the restrictions put on most ballerinas, like the need to balance or keep her head facing one direction.

She spun faster and faster until all I saw was a blur, and then she suddenly let her limbs fly out from her body, slowing her rotation and adding in a wobble.

She broke out of the pirouette and danced across the floor, springing, flipping, and spinning in so many different ways I couldn’t explain it all if I tried. Especially because, even though she generally moved as though she had knees and elbows, she could actually bend in any way she chose; I doubt gymnasts even have a name for a handspring in which your shoulders stay stationary while your hips rotate 540 degrees.

“Ah, hell,” Lenis muttered. “We’re out of time. In addition to the question about the Red Sandy for next week, I want you to come up with a practical use for a Pirouette—dead or alive, it’s up to you, but I’ll give you a hint: it cannot be used for nerve transplants of any kind, it just doesn’t work.

“Please stay very calm and quiet as you leave the room; Bridget hasn’t been out yet today and I want to let her get some more exercise before she has to go back in the cage.”

Most of the class grabbed their books and things and headed out the door, but a handful of us, including Fallon, had stayed crouched on the floor with Lenis to watch the acrobatics.

“Professor? I have a question,” a girl said from behind our little group. “It’s about the Bestiary.” She had it open to a particular page and held it out for him to see.

Not half a second after Lenis stood up, the book slipped from the girl’s hands and hit the floor with a deafening CRACK.

Bridget froze mid-twirl and then bolted for the door at the front of the room. I dove after her without even thinking about it—I remember Lenis shouting, “NO YOU IDIOT!”

And then the world started to hurt.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Chapters, CotF Main Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.