I woke up with a groan. My senses came back like waves breaking on a shore.
And no, I’m not just using that analogy randomly. Something wet and sloppy had hit my face, which up until then had been pressed against the rough gravel. As my hearing returned, I caught the sound of off-note humming coming from somewhere above me, presumably the source of the wet sloppy stuff.
“Hey, look,” said a girl’s soft voice, the same that had spoken earlier about stuff being worth nothing in the long run. “He’s not dead, yet.”
Yet?
“Seems that way. I just have to apply two more bandages,” said another voice, this one scratchier, like a preteen whose voice was not all there. I was hit again, another wet, sloppy thing wrapping itself around my midriff, before somebody lifted me up and brought the bandage around. It burned like bloody Tartarus when it rubbed up against one of my bruises.
“Mister, are you sure he needs more bandages?” the girl asked again. “He already has quite a few, and in the long run, wasting material like that could be bad for the environment. Though in a world with finite resources....”
Something grabbed my thigh, and I almost gasped as fingers wrapped themselves around my leg. At that point I was really, really hoping that the bandager was a really hot tomboy who had a thing for wanna-be heroes. “I can’t just leave him with B poultices. B is an uneven number. This city works on a duodecimal system, or base twelve. Hence, I shall give him ten balms,” the scratchy voice said.
Okay, so a tomboy that likes wanna-be heroes and is really into weird math?
“What about the plaster on his forehead? Won’t that complete your count?” Soft Voice asked. (As I am calling her, until a full name could be extracted.)
“Ah! You’re right! Well, one is a fair number, and the total count is 11, which is perfectly fine since 11 is prime. Prime numbers are always good. Also, thanks to that one, the layout of bandages is somewhat similar to the Fibonacci sequence. Surprising how those brutes really went for his face. Anywho, with that logic complete, it means that I only have to add one more. Brilliant.”
Again I was lifted and a bandage was wrapped around me, seemingly over nothing this time.
I laid a hand against the ground near by my battered head, and pushed, lifting the forward end of my body, while my legs tried to figure out where they were supposed to go. A surprisingly difficult task with the massive thundering headache that moving seemed to have awakened.
A warm body pressed itself against me, helping me. I leaned on it and stood on wobbly legs for a few moments.
“Hey, you’re really alive,” she said, somehow not conveying the enthusiasm I would have hoped for. “That’s good; I really hate funerals. You have to wear black and pretend that you’re sad for the dead person, while knowing full well that everyone else in attendance is going to get their own funeral one day. Lots of wasted potential in dying.” She pressed a palm against my forehead, like a nurse checking for fever. The motions made my head turn, bringing my face within millimetres of her own.
She didn’t pull back or flinch. (Pity points rule!) Instead, her brilliant crimson eyes stared into my own, not betraying any feelings she might have had. “You okay there?”
“No, I’m not okay, I’m Tight.”
What? You expected me to say something smart? After being beaten to a pulp? And while in the company of an attractive person of the opposite sex? You put far too much faith in me.
The soft stroke of a hand touched my side, drawing me away from Pretty Eyes (I changed her fake name based on newly acquired information—get over it), and brought me around to face a tall, lean fellow with leg muscles that did not seem normal. Not normal in the sense that I instantly suspected the use of certain medical drugs that are banned in sporting establishments.
“Hello, how’re you doing? Feeling any better?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m good,” I managed to say, despite my jaw not working quite right. “Did they leave?”
“If, by ‘they,’” Pretty Eyes began, “you mean the group of young hooligans that you vainly attempted to scare away, then yes, ‘they’ left after kicking your ass, hard.” She actually smiled at me, a toothy, lop-sided grin. “Thanks for that, by the way.”
My heart began flopping around inside me, like a stray chipmunk caught inside someone’s kitchen. “But that was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen,” she said next. Someone shot the chipmunk, dead.
Then something incredibly shocking happened. She leaned into me again, pushing herself onto the tip of her toes to leave a tiny peck of a kiss on my bruised cheek. “Still, a lady must reward chivalry, no matter how vain or stupid it may be.”
The following sounds to come out of me were mostly untranslatable gibberish, so I’ll spare you the details. Suffice to say, the chipmunk was back, and this time he brought his nuts. “It-it’s no problem, Miss, um....”
She gave me that smile again. “My name’s Happy End.”
And damn did I want a happy ending! Crude jokes aside, I then presented myself, my shoulders straightening a little beneath the bandages.
“Here, your shirt,” the tall guy said, handing me a neatly folded piece of cloth that I vaguely recognized as my beige uniform. Interesting how you don’t notice the absence of a shirt in situations like these. “Sorry, I had to remove it to get to the worst of your injuries. Or, at least, to look at them. They might have been big brutes, but they did little more than bruise you, albeit using 16 blows to do so.” He shook his head as if in shame, but probably not at the assault on me so much as the assault on patterned math.
“Oh, well, thanks,” I said, frowning at the shirt until my magic popped, fizzled, and utterly failed to levitate it. I chose to cheat my way out of embarrassment and give them a sheepish smile.
Count of times I’ve made an idiot of myself in front of a pretty girl: three.
“Hah, must’ve knocked a few more screws loose. I’ll just take that....” I gingerly grabbed the shirt and tossed it onto my back. “So, um, thanks for the first aid there. I didn’t catch your name? Mine’s Tight Wedge.”
“Ah, my name’s Omni Disciplinarian.” He made a little bow while my jaw dropped.
This guy, this weird lump of muscle-bound nerdiness, had a long name. I’m not just stating that out in the blue. I mean, that’s a long name. Holy.... He’s got more syllables in his name than principal, titles and all! “N-nice to meet you, um, Omni?”
“Disciplinarian,” he finished for me, as if he were helping a little child along. “Now, if you don’t mind, I think I should be on my way. It’s three thirty-two and sixteen....” He began counting down a series of numbers under his breath, while his eyes glazed over, “point eight seconds. I should be home by four fifty-two at this rate, taking into account rapid goodbyes and a decent pace.”
“Four fifty? You must live across the city or something. I’m sorry, I didn’t think my attempted heroics would ruin anyone’s day,” I said, and I truly did feel sorry. Poor sod bandaged me up and everything. Now, as to why he had bandages on him, I honestly was not in the need to know.
“It’s fine. And it will only take that long because I can’t run, no big problem.”
And then I started feeling really sorry for mister Omni. No, I’m not going to write his full name every time, I have better things to do in life you know. Happy End, who was still somewhere vaguely behind me, awwed.
“That’s terrible, Omni. Life is such a morose, melancholy thing, and to once have the opportunity to move expediently through it, only to lose that chance... that’s terrible.”
The student looked at us both as if we had come from another planet or were actually just the convoluted fictional devices created by some bored architect living in his mother’s home while writing jargon down in the deepest, most pitiful hours of the night for the simple acclaim of a few strangers—or something. “Oh, it’s not just me. No one can run.”
And that’s where we lost him.
“The length of the average human’s legs, the muscle mass, and the speed at which they beat are all far too low to make a person capable of achieving the proper velocity to run. We’re not made of aerogel and, for the most part, weigh much more than the clinically approved weight limit. As such, we cannot run.”
The dropped-jaw looks that Happy End and I were giving Omni were eerily similar. She did look cute while doing it though. He stared back at us, then shrugged. “Well, goodbye to you, Mister Tight Wedge and Miss Happy End. I wish you a wonderful pre-evening." He then stepped around us and walked deeper into the alley.
“Well, he was interesting. In these dark days, it’s rather rare that a strange person will stop to aid another that he doesn’t know. I think you were lucky, Wedgie. Plus, you had me around to scare your bullies away.” Happy End adjusted the collar of her blouse. “I’ll be off then. If, by all the coincidences in this universe we run into each other again, say hi.”
And she left, leaving me there to ponder exactly what she meant by that bit about scaring the bullies away. I watched her fade into the darkness once more, her neon pink hair shining for a few moments. Then I began to walk home, slowly, because things hurt. Lots of things. Notably: my pride.
My plan, from that point on, was rather simple. Get home. Find my bed. Crash into it. Try not to cry in front of my roommate as I relived my day in a terrible nightmare only to awaken in the morning to face the harsh reality of a future in a city that truly doesn't give a pack mule's splintered flank about me.
The alley ended on a street, as they are prone to doing, that led deeper into the outer rim of the pie-like city. Here were the dorms.
Not the big, fancy dorms that were cared for by large crews of workers and that had nice brick façades and little gardens. Nope. These buildings were made of poured cement. Great grey blocks that were only colourful thanks to the marks of scratched-off graffiti accumulating on their walls. They even had their own noise to replace the happy chirping of birds. That is, if dubstep at every hour of the night can be properly compared to birdsong.
There was only one thing in the dorms that kept things in order: Sergeant Howitzer.
Now, if a name based off of an artillery gun and a position in the military that involved a lot of screaming don’t give it away, then I’ll help your imagination along.
Sergeant Howitzer was tall. He was mean. He was lean. He was an ass-kicking, name-taking, detention-giving machine. Once a member of some special military reserve, he had been forcefully retired for suspicious reasons. Also of note, he was the only member of his platoon to survive that particular tour of action. Now, he’s the one that makes sure the curfew is followed.
He does a good job of it.
As I was walking back to my dorm, the sound of his concussion-inducing voice from a few dorms down spurred me on, despite there being a full hour before lights-off.
I jogged into my building, taking the steps three at a time, or, as much of a semblance of jogging that can be done when the great majority of one’s body is throbbing in pain. I found my way to my bedroom’s door, magicked out the keys from my trousers—with my magic actually working this time—and slipped inside.
An enormously fat man sat hunched over a computer interface, his face aglow with the backlight of the screen’s radiance. “Hey, Crosshatch,” I said to him before I began to navigate the maze of discarded paper, wires and week-old clothing that was our room’s floor. And yes, we’d only been there for two weeks. You just wait.
“Hey, bud. How’re you doing?” he asked, never taking his muzzle more than an inch from the screen’s edge.
“I’m dead. Make little noise. I must sleep.”
He barked a laugh, but got the message. His—functional—magic lit up and from beneath the table came a pair of headphones that he slapped onto his noggin. “Might be hard to sleep, mate. The Anti-levels are having a party or some stupid thing like that.”
My face had time to crash into my drool-infested pillow and stay there breathing stale air for a full minute before my curiosity was piqued enough. “The who?”
“Anti-level. Bunch of idiots that got prissy and stuff ‘cause they got low levels. The net’s alive with them whining and calling for more members. I heard that Howitzer’s actively chasing around for them, poor sods.” Crosshatch thumped a hand against the side of his precious machine, as though he could hit those he was muttering against. “What do you have to complain about you ignorant twat?! Damn, most of these idjits are still levels two and three!”
“That’s wild. What level are you at? I mean, did you get tested today? I didn’t notice you.”
“Yeah, all I got was level two. But the testers said that I had a good chance to get to level three before the year’s end. So that’s good. What about you?”
And he had to climb onto a subject that was really not tempting right about then. I mean, even that fatass got two? Damn. “Wh-whatever,” I said, turning around to face the ceiling, the one wall not plastered in our junk. “So, what’s with that Anti-level group, who’s in charge?”
“Eh, some punk called... the Protagonist? But I dug around a little. Turns out Protagonist's real name is Trick Star. Lame story that one....” And so, Crosshatch sank deeper and deeper into the subject, his vajiggle jaggles—those lumpy bits of dangly skin—jiggling around as he gestured wildly and sputtered into his screen. I stopped caring or paying attention.
Soon, I was asleep, ending the first but certainly not the worst day of my college years.
Well....