Aww...Sookie, Sookie, Now!

The Rhyme Battle

"Queens! Kings! And our fine cosmic beings! I give you our latest and greatest Rhythm Master, Knockout!"

The entire room exploded with applause and cheers. Marquise smiled and gave a small clap too, but his mind was too preoccupied with what he'd just experienced. The strange shadow was gone now, and Marquise was convinced it was never real at all. But his nerves were still restless. Marquise had to ask himself: If his mind could create so vivid a delusion as that, then just how crazy was he? Imagining dancing shadows was a huge leap from imagining lights no one else could see. Even if the shadow was real, wanting to walk in the middle of Knockout and Queen Dria's battle couldn't have been a good idea. The way that the energy cascaded together as it did, there was no telling what effect it would have on his body or his already fragile mind.

Marquise was so stirred by the gravity of what he felt compelled to do that he continued standing with a stunned expression on his face for some time. Luckily, Jerome and Renée didn't notice, just as Marquise didn't notice Jerome wheeling himself away until Renée elbowed him in the side.

"Boy, can't you keep up? Come on, we're going to the stage."

The stage was a small, metal platform at the furthest edge of the room. It was only a couple square feet in area, so Marquise immediately saw why it wasn't used for the Rhythm Battle. From the look of things, it was big enough for maybe for or five, not the nearly twenty Rhythm Battle participants. Maybe if the large set of turntables and speakers weren't carefully squeezed on the right-hand side of the stage, it might have been able to fit more people.

From his DJ's corner, The Duke of Gentilly hopped on the mic again, excited to get the crowd ready for the second main event, "Aight nah! Queen Dria and Knockout got the vibe already for us. Now let's give Knockout some love as she sets the beat! Go head on, hijabi girl, stomp that beat out."

With a wide smile on her face, Knockout stepped onto the stage and held out a hand. "There was a moment when I was battling Queen Dria, where our souls clashed and made beautiful music. The type of rhythm that doesn't go through your whole body, but your whole generation! But only my real ones heard that!"

Laughs rang out around the room, accompanied by exclamations of "Okay now," "Don't hurt 'em like that," and "Who you telling."

Knockout continued, "Way I see it, the best Rhyme Master can spit bars on anything. So I'll take a second from our battle, just one second, and I'll use that to lay the track."

From her outstretched hand, a blast of orange light shot up into the air. It mixed with the Funk and provided the perfect, sunset hue as the room began to come alive with a warm, buzzing beat. As he bopped his head and swayed his body a bit, Marquise wondered how it was even possible a track this complex came from stretching one second of sound.

"Ya'll heard her now! All you rappers, scatters, and singers, gitcho ass up on this stage!"

Marquise looked over to the left, where the steps to the stage were. To say he was surprised to see Jerome in the long line of competitors wouldn't be entirely true. He'd figured out that the Rap Battle was what Jerome wanted to see all along. Still, he found his jaw threatening to fall the moment he laid sight of him. The tall bodies of older students stood over Jerome's small frame in his only-slightly-larger chair. They weren't like the kids that had lined up for the Rhythm Battle earlier, some of the kids in the line with Jerome looked tougher, harder. In his life, Marquise had met a lot of people--many who'd been through a reality much harsher than his own--who saw rap as their only hope for a decent life. Marquise felt like he was looking at those same people again, multiplied tens of times and all lined up in front of a stage.