Finally! I’m free! I head to the boys’ bathroom and unwrap the gauze on my hands to wash my hands and clean out the cuts. I admire my face for a second in the mirror. Perfectly symmetrical and flawless hair. I twirl my fingers in my hair. So soft. I flutter my long lashes in the mirror and giggle at my own complete lack of shame.
Alright. Enough indulging in vanity. I change out of my uniform into my informal clothes and pull up my elbow length striped white-and-pink gloves, spin around, and exit the room.
Elisa is waiting for me, offering me her hand like the devil we both know she is, mirth in her eyes despite her resting bitch face. I graciously accept, internally wincing at the sharp pain as she grasps my hand, and we walk to her black motorcycle in the parking lot.
I ask the question that has been bothering me all day. “Sooo... how’d you get away with highlighting your hair with neon red?”
The corners of her mouth quirk up, practically the equivalent of a full-on grin for her. “I merely convinced Karen that I was trying to help business by mimicking our mascot Jolly Ol’ Fellow. You know how greedy she is.”
My laugh rings out to the cars in the parking lot.
“That’s perfect!” I exclaim.
She sits down on the leather and puts her hands on the handlebars.
*Sigh* and not me. I chuckle.
She looks at me and quirks her eyebrow.
“I know you aren’t even half as innocent as you seem to everybody. What are you thinking?” she orders.
I grin and shake my head. “Nothing, nothing. I promise.” And then I do the incredibly mature thing and blatantly move one of my hands behind my back to ‘hide’ the crossing of my fingers.
She sighs in amusement. “Come on, you pervert.”
“You brought my helmet. See, you do love me, my beloved tsundere!” I finish our inside joke, bending forward to stick my tongue out, then dodging her half-hearted swipe at my precious hair. I abruptly turn around and grab my helmet, which is... well, Elise politely described it as unique. I had expertly painted it to look like a hyper-realistic eye-ball with a vivid pink iris.
I leap onto the motorcycle and pick up the ocular organ-imitating helmet and shout “Forward my steed. Let’s ride on!”
She looks over her shoulder, exasperated.
And of course, I waggle my eyebrows at my last sentence and place my hands around her waist.
Born of a decade of experience, she steadfastly ignores me and guns the engine. Off we go!
“WHOOOO!!!”
Some may call it childish to delight in the wind in my hair, best friend by my side, and hold out my hands while riding a motorcycle like it’s a rollercoaster, but I say they are just boring scaredy-cats. Elisa drives exactly 3 miles below the speed of the fastest car, so she can easily profess ignorance of breaking the speed limit and still squeeze as much speed out of the drive as possible. She has it down to a science. I take a deep breath to savor the air. I smell the rich savory smell of the pizza shops. The sweet gasoline fumes killing the planet. The aroma of brimstone.
I cough quite a bit at that. I wrinkle my nose. Some fiend must have raced by us. Nasty smell, that.
We speed by the businesses and billboards.
On one, a Magical Girl is going out buying sushi, probably only on camera because the reporter invaded her privacy. ”Even Magical Girls Adore Our Sushi Rice. Get it now! Limited time offer: 10%” Her overly straight posture and slightly turned upper body makes it pretty clear she is speed walking to get out of the establishment.
Another insurance firm for property damage. ”J. John Smith Jr, and co. Will make sure you get premium deals every time”
Another scam charity trying to get money. “This boy tried to kill himself and accidentally summoned a rift. Just sign up and donate 5 dollars to our website www.mental-health-save-kids-stop-torments.com and we can prevent Torments from coming.”
A puppy ad... ooohhh, I crane my head to look over at it. Awww, they’re adorable!!!
We reach our destination, our favorite restaurant: The Seoul of the City. They have the best Tteok-bokki and it’s actually affordable for me! So spicy and mmhmm makes your face numb! The rice cakes have the perfect texture, the chili and soy paste add the most wonderful flavor hints, and the veggies are flawlessly cooked. It is the ultimate comfort food, and no one can tell me otherwise. Elisa buys this deep-fried waffle Korean combination. I don’t pretend to understand how it works or why she wants to eat it. It’s purist or bust for me. They lead us to a neat simple wooden table, with the necessary utensils and we each pull up a roughly-hewn monolithic chair.
Although, would it be technically mono-arboreal instead of monolithic since it’s not made of stone and is instead made of wood? Hmmm. With a thoughtful expression on my face, I assume “The Thinker” pose.
Actually, what would a plastic version be?... Hmmmm. These are the dire questions that need to answered.
Elisa looks at me amusedly.
I am brought out of my train of thought as they set down the food, we thank the waiter, and sit down to ravenously tear into the food.
As I chow down, she props her head up on her interlaced fingers and asks the age-old question “So, what class options are you hoping to get?”
I chuckle. “Again with that question? Just because you will unlock the system in a week doesn’t mean I will. You’ve only asked, oh, every day since half a year ago. One might think you’re nervous,” I tease.
My grin changes into a soft smile, and I whisper “Don’t worry. I’m happy that you will get it so soon. You’ve met all the prerequisites.”
Her parchment-paper yellow skin greens in embarrassment, rallying as she describes her passion. “I just can’t wait though. The idea of making contracts, of getting someone’s souls if they fail to follow the fine print... It’s delightful! Maybe I’ll be able to dupe some asshole like Karen into selling their soul to me.” A manic glint appears in her eyes, and she breathes in and out heavily at the thought. A bunch of people give scathing looks of disgust at her, though she just ignores them. In fact... HAH! That person is practically running away scared for their life.
She continues her passionate rant “I’ll be able to give people terrifying powers that fight against Torments and contrive the most aggravating of loopholes that will take the Department of Eternals months to figure out where they are. Really give taxpayers their money’s worth for funding the department, ya know?”
I agree and just soak her enthusiasm in, enjoying her company and the ambience and chiming in with a few comments on the state of things. Like the pitiful attempts of politicians to get rid of Devil imps, even though the powers they give constitute third of the fighting force against Torments and Demonics (those that are given powers by Devils) and Demonics are the backbone of the U.S. army. The army heavily uses Magitech given by Magical Girls, but they wouldn’t dare control them, after the absolute crippling of North Korea’s military by Magical Girl Hyeogmyeong. Which is why there is only United Korea now.
And I ask what makes a soul delicious or not, which makes her immediately look at one of the nearby table-goers, though nobody else seems to notice the avaricious, hungering shine in her eyes.
The sunlight outside is dimming, we have all polished our meals off, and it’s 7:00 pm. So, as all things must, I need to leave.
“Time for me to go,” I whisper in the way that people do when contented after a good time. We stand up and I brush off my sleek hooded grey dress before we draw circles on each other’s heads with our fingers, mine around her horns and hers where the horns would be on my head. While the rest of my fellow humans seem to think of this as incredibly sexual, it really is just the equivalent of a demonic hug. I know how to hug everyone! Hugs for me, hugs for you, hugs for them, hugs for everyone!
I push open the glass door, the bell chiming in the evening darkness, and she gets on her motorcycle and drives off. I looked on for a second before smiling and starting to walk. One of the great benefits of the restaurant, beyond the food of course, is that it’s close to the hospital.
I jog quickly, soon reaching the dull white building. I make a beeline for the Customer Low-Speed Line and walk in. I check in with Nurse O’Sullivan, who glances around me, finding only glaringly empty spaces beside me, before letting me in with a poorly concealed and stifled sigh. She tries to continue her service smile, but she can’t be as good as I am, failing to make it reach her eyes. Though, it apparently works on most other people. It still surprises me every time someone fails to see through someone’s poker face.
I retrace the path, walking the white tiles, following my way to the Cancer Treatment Center. My heart pumps faster, and I breathe heavier on my way up to floor 3. A terrible foreboding feeling wells up painfully in my chest, like a cold draft from the water of the oceanic trenches. I move as quickly as I can outside of a full-on sprint.
I reach for the fake wooden door of room 331 and push it open slowly and peek in, my breath hitching in my throat. I internally breathe out a sigh of relief, my outward breathing mimicking exactly what a person who has been leisurely walking down the halls would be breathing like.
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Dennis is lying down on the tall bed/gurney, with cheap cotton blankets covering the many tubes injected toxic alchemical reagents into him. I stride smoothly over to him, my footfalls creating a stark contrast between the squeaky-clean tiles and my worn shoes, and sit down next to him.
“Hi big bro.”
I don’t ask how his day is. He hates that question. There is no point. In part because it is the same old, same old i.e., painful. But really though, that is not even half of it. He confided in me that what really bothers him about the question is that he rarely knows how his day was himself. Most of his time is spent not by himself, but rather, by his medical drugs, and the drugs are a big spender at the casino of time.
His blue eyes, one of the few characteristics we still share after the constant chemo, glances around me and then back at me. My face falls flat, emotionless. I shake my head in the negative. His index finger twitches.
I nod at his cue, grasping his hand and start stroking it as I talk about my day, describing everything I did with the utmost care to include the tastes and feelings, the sights and the smells. I know I could easily crush his fingers if I clench my hands too hard, despite him having a Class, and me not having one.
His Class is Fatal Brain Cancer Patient, the sole intent of which was to keep him alive. In fact, he’d have been a prodigal genius of the system if this was a job or combat Class, already on his fourth Class evolution before today, his 21st birthday. The prior ones being Patient, Cancer Patient, and Brain Cancer Patient. I had thought often and bitterly on the unfairness of it all, and I know that it bothered him as well. He could have received good money from the media that could have paid for better treatment.
“I enjoyed everything. I wouldn’t waste it, I promise.” I whisper, on the verge of crying, but I hold my metaphorical demons back in favor of continuing my story, practically a fantasy for him.
He’s stuck in this self-contained universe; a monotonous white room with slick soap-bubble butterfly stickers and trailing tubes filled with turquoise fluid sticking into him like leeches. In this universe that he owns live vivid shiny helium-filled butterfly balloons that are far too pitiful for what he deserves and the amber-covered prehistoric butterfly I had been saving. I should have done better. At least I’ll avoid foisting any of my problems on him.
He looks at my glove-covered arms and then back at me, managing to look at me pointedly and quizzically at the same time.
Ah. He noticed the discrepancy in my account.
Shoot.
I try to pass it off as only the cuts from the knife. There is no point in me taking the joy from his birthday, but he is having none of it. He glares at me disapprovingly and, most aggravatingly, compassionately. I grab the dictionary beside his bed, and expertly go through it to help him freakin’ lecture me. The lovable idiot is going through so much worse. My pain does not matter. I am coping well. My therapist says I am. He, on the other hand, is dying.
He breathes out huffily.
“What?” I snap, halting in his rant about taking care of myself and the dangers of infection, and yada yada.
He just looks at me patiently. And then he twitches his finger, annoyed that I’m not realizing whatever he is wanting me to.
“T. Talked. W. With. Y. You? Your. T. Theater? Then?”
He squints at me, unimpressed by my dissembling.
I go down to what I knew he really wanted.
“Therapist?”
He blinks twice with heavy emphasis.
“I have!” I say defensively.
His eyebrow moves up infinitesimally.
“Hey! I have!!!” I repeat, offended that he thinks I would lie to him.
He glares at me and then he gets a look of inspiration.
“L. Lack? Liar? Lie. T. To? To. T. Therapist.”
“You-augh. Not quite. I did not lie. I just bent the truth heavily. But I spoke not a word of mistruth” I hold my chin up, squaring my shoulders.
“You know how I feel about lying. I simply led him to the wrong conclusion.”
He looks vindicated at having solved the mystery.
“You know that he just reports everything to Mom and Dad. He just doesn’t care about confidentiality when Mom pleads for information on my mental health for the quote-unquote safety of her child.” I defend.
“Then what happens?” I ask rhetorically, each of us knowing the answer.
“She guilts me until I feel terrible for being depressed.” I growl out. I would have shouted, but most of the patients on this floor are out like a light at 8:30 pm. They, unfortunately, have nothing in the way of a night life.
“He’s a nice guy, I freely admit that, which unfortunately is exactly why he is so easily manipulated by dearest mother’s antics.”
He manages to look pityingly down at me, while attached to the Magitech Lifesaver, to my side, and laying down. The gall...
We went down the list. “G. Get. A. a. N. New. O. One?”
I look at him, analyzing him. He tries to seem innocent, but fails miserably. Not even my brother can hide his emotions well from me. However, that did not mean he can’t pull off meta-shenanigans and manipulate me into feeling bad by being tactful of trying to hide the emotions.
I run my hand through my soft hair.
*sigh*
“Fine. You got me. Even if I could get a new one without leading to Mom interrogating me, I would not tell a new therapist anyway. To heck with trusting anyone. I tried to trust Mom, being open about my true emotions, and look where that got me? Gaslighting. I'm not going to stop.”
“Besides I can’t pay for a new therapist,” omitting the fact that was because Mom and Dad cut off all funding for me except for the therapist and I had been living paycheck to paycheck for the past three years. He didn’t need to know.
He blinks understandingly. We continue talking for a while until he twitches four fingers under my palms. I silently hug him and then stand up.
“You’re right, it’s midnight. Time for me to go. Dream and sleep well, big brother,” Both of us knowing that he will be dreaming a lot longer than just the time he was sleeping.
I blow a kiss at him from the doorway, and he blinks as much as he can to “text” hearts across the air to me. I turn the light off at his request and close the door behind me as quietly as I had opened it earlier. I exit with the big stately hospital behind my back, walking under the purple night with my hand on my mace, skipping by dirty alleys covered in used syringes and miscellaneous and beautiful graffiti shining in the dark.
A thousand glistening eyes stared down upon this broken, cult-ridden neighborhood. I look back. Do you approve? They wink. I don’t understand why people wish to worship that which they do not understand or that which is above them. For me, my object of worship is the collective of the stars. Perhaps it is vain of me... but I feel kinship with them.
I intend to be a star.
I may not be a suitable candidate for being a Magical Girl – I had that very clearly pointed out to me by a Magical Girl themselves – but I have already achieved a level of attention with the plays I have written and acted in. A few million YouTube views there, a request for an interview from a local media station there... I have already made a few baby steps. I’ll get there.
There are plenty of fellow people of the neighborhood walking by, some flaunting their wares and others flaunting themselves as their wares, while still others flaunt others as their wares. We are powerfully united... in the fact that the other is not worth robbing.
Ooh!
I crouch down to analyze a searing-hot junkie corpse glowing with a gorgeous orange light through the cracks in the body interweaved with strings of flesh. The once living charcoal-skin amalgamation currently melting the asphalt with their body heat makes for a striking image. I pull a flashlight out and nestle it safely in the crook of my neck and shoulder before I pull out my coloring book to make a blazing-fast (get it?) rendering of the body. If you examine it really closely, then you would be able to see the maggot white bone and steamed purplish mush that is the guts. Honestly, it reminds me of a blue bottle jellyfish. The non-demonic kind of course. Don’t know what that would like that.
The gang runic script scrawled o’er the walls and roads that curses non-members, the rotting cadavers of those who take took magical drugs like Magma, the hints of Miasma that still linger from the last Torment... if you take a step back and look at it, it seems really bad. But it’s not like Magical Girls can eliminate it unless they intend to depose the government, and even then, the resulting fallout would be far worse. I promise it has its good parts! And for those trying to cope with it, well, sometimes your coping mechanism is putting on latex gloves and taking a scalpel to the drug-infused body to improve your art and study for maybe becoming a healer someday. I wielded my knife deftly and carefully separated the shoulder from the collarbones without cutting the muscle groups too badly. Boom! Complete arm for drawing. It may be falling apart a bit.
At that thought, meat fell off the forearm like slow-cooked pork.
Ok. It may be falling apart a lot. But I’m prepared with a Ziploc bag! I dumped the medical supplies out of the plastic bag before sticking the more bleed-y part in the bag and fitting the zipper of the backpack around the limp blackened hand. The plastic melts slightly but remains otherwise intact. Accidentally poked a finger into ash in the process, but altogether a rather successful haul.
If Elisa was here, she’d probably take a few bites just for the heck of it, and then I’d have a high imp to deal with. Ahhh, she’s so hot when impulsive like that, and when she shows her true inhumanity, and when she’s doing anything really. We just mesh. Unlike her though, I am human, and no one can convince me to take a bite out of a human.
I glance at the nearest gang marker, grimacing at memories.
I can't remember which gang is in power. They all blend together eventually. I think... Luke’s Pizzeria? Yeah. Those guys. They really know the way to a girl’s heart: free pizza and inclusion.
They'll employ everything as long as they aren't Miasmic, Blood Magic users, Magical Girls, Vengeful Spirits (which are really the only types of spirits now that I think about it), and uh... more. Actually, now that I really think about it, there are a lot of species and magic users they don’t employ. Oh well. Doesn’t matter.
I work well with any gang. I have quite a varied skill set in spite of my age and lack of System access. My capability in handling anyone easily has earned me quite the reputation.
I always make the right choice in social situations with what I have available. Only been wrong once.
Still bugs me.
I paid the protection money for my parents to the wrong gang, and the gang that was actually in control of the area stuffed me in a room with a couple of Vengeful Spirits. The naïve assholes thought that just because we live in “the land of the free,” we don’t need pay for stuff like that. So they purposefully told me the wrong gang to prove a point, believing the unspoken rules of the Neighborhood to be toothless. I should not have trusted them.
Oh well! No use crying over spilt milk, or... spilt ectoplasm. Teeheehee.
When I unlock my System, I will grow above the gangs here and crush them beneath my boot. I won't be subject to anybody's whims but my own. Perhaps I will become a crime lord myself or a vaunted Warrior or Mage fending off against Corrupted animals or monsters from the neighboring dimensions.
Who knows?
Regardless, I will ascend like the star I am.
I know that someday, I will become an Immortal. Even ascend into the very Essence itself and become a god.
For now though, it is time to ascend these stairs!
I walk over to my bed and collapse onto the mattress face-first, groaning.
Today was pretty nice as days go. Looking forward to class!