Several weeks passed after Ava’s recovery, seemingly without incident. She went through her daily routine, going to school, coming back home, and repeating, with the occasional date with Sam peppered in to spice things up, and barely made a dent in the money she’d earned from the Parasite Tournament in the meantime.
One thing began to stick out to her: it made very little sense that she had this much money, and yet no car, in a city where not having a car generally makes your life what one might describe as “a massive pain in the ass.” There were plenty of people, after all, at Roberts High who didn’t have nearly ten million dollars lying around, and who still somehow managed to have cars in spite of that.
So, on a Friday afternoon, after school, she sent Sam a text telling him to come over to her apartment. It took about five minutes before she heard his telltale knock on her front door; Lydia was passed out on the couch, snoring, so Ava went and got it herself.
“Hey,” she said, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek.
“Hey, what’s up?” Sam asked. “You, uh… you needed anything?”
“You’ve got your learner’s permit, right?” Ava asked.
“…yeah? Why?” Sam asked, walking into the apartment and taking in the sight of Lydia’s drunken, unconscious form on the couch. “Does… does your mom ever wake up?”
“Yeah, don’t worry, she’s just drunk,” Ava said, not seeming to notice the oddity of this. “But, yeah, if we’ve both got our permits, and we’ve both got a fuck-ton of money, we need to get our licenses and get some goddamn wheels.”
Sam stroked his chin for a second. It was at this point that Ava noticed his shirt: it appeared to be a long-sleeve purple shirt that seemed to be stuck nearly skin-tight to his torso, with a neon yellow T-shirt over it that read “POST BOY” in purple lettering across his chest. She burst out laughing involuntarily.
“What… what in God’s name is going on with your shirt!?” she asked, trying desperately to stifle her laughter. Sam awkwardly scratched the back of his neck in response, blushing with embarrassment.
“I, uh… I got this at a thrift store a couple years ago,” Sam said. “Just kinda felt right for today.”
“Jesus, my advice would be donate it back,” Ava said. “Or maybe burn it. But, yeah. Wanna look at cars and see what we can get?”
“Sure,” Sam said, and followed Ava into her bedroom.
“Huh, I just realized you’ve never been in here before,” Ava said. “So, uh, yeah, this is my room.” Sam looked around, noting the grey walls and almost total lack of furniture or decoration; she had her desk slash vanity (which now bore several makeup kits from Sephora in addition to her laptop), her bed, and her TV stand, and that was about it. The only real markers of any individuality in the room were her Hello Kitty bong, and the Gunpla model kits (a red Zaku II and a Qubeley) that sat next to it; outside of those things, the room could’ve belonged to just about anyone.
“Seems… a little empty,” he said.
“Yeah, I know,” Ava said. “I just, uh… I don’t really get decoration, I guess.”
“Maybe I should help you with that sometime? Get some cool posters up, maybe go to IKEA and get you a little more furniture,” Sam suggested. Ava looked back and smiled at him.
“That’d be nice, actually,” she said, grabbing her laptop and sitting on the bed, making the mattress bounce slightly as she did so. “Wanna smoke, by the way?” she asked, gesturing at the bong.
“Shit, you have anything?” Sam asked, a little surprised.
“Dude, I’m still working through the shit I brought back from the tournament,” Ava said, chuckling slightly. “I stuck the bag with all the other stuff in the closet, so Mom wouldn’t steal any of it, if you wanna load a bowl.” Sam shrugged, went to the closet, and quickly found the black bag, on the floor under a few pairs of dirty underwear.
“Just so we’re clear, you’re not gonna freak out at me touching all this, right?” Sam asked, looking over his shoulder at Ava.
“Touching all of wha buh?” Ava asked, looking up.
“You’ve got a bunch of underwear down here that I’m guessing is not clean,” Sam said, unable to hide his embarrassment. The realization hit Ava, and she turned beet red.
“Oh, fuck, I am so sorry, dude,” she said loudly, jumping up from the bed and tossing her laptop to the side. “Shit, yeah, I need to do some laundry. Fuck, dude, I’m sorry,” she added, picking up the underwear and throwing it to the very back of the closet to make it less visible. Sam was trying not to laugh.
“No, it’s totally cool, I just…” Sam started. “I dunno, I didn’t want you to think I was a perv or something?”
Ava rolled her eyes slightly.
“Dude, you really don’t need to worry about stuff like that,” Ava said. “I mean, one, you’re my boyfriend, you’re like the one person other than me who does get to handle those, and two, it’s not like you went rummaging around in there without permission, I straight up told you to go in the closet. You’re fine. It’s my bad for leaving that shit there in the first place.” Sam breathed a slight sigh of relief, as Ava picked up the bag herself and retreated to her position sitting at the foot of the bed, where Sam followed her.
Sam rummaged around in the bag, producing a grinder that was already full of flower, and loading some of it into the Hello Kitty bong as Ava opened up her laptop.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“So what kinda car were you thinking of?” Sam asked.
“I mean, I’m loaded, so I was kinda thinking of getting a classic,” Ava said. “What about you?”
“Shit, I was honestly thinking just a Honda Civic or something,” Sam said. “But, hey, if you’re doing a classic, I might as well get one too.” Ava did a quick Google search, and found a classic car dealership downtown with their inventory online.
The two teens poked around the site’s inventory for a couple of hours, passing the bong back and forth and debating the merits of various classic and obscure cars. Eventually, Ava settled on a JDM-import 1986 Toyota Sprinter Trueno in white, which cost fifty-five thousand dollars (“the Takumi tax,” as Ava lamented to Sam), and Sam settled on a 1977 Corvette Stingray that cost a comparatively paltry twenty thousand.
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The process of buying the cars was long, annoying, and uninteresting, but after another two weeks of waiting, both Ava and Sam had their cars; this meant that the next item on the agenda was their driving test.
They made appointments for the same day at the same Department of Public Safety office; Ava pulled up in her Toyota wearing a button-up red blouse with a white T-shirt under it, whereas Sam was wearing the same “POST BOY” shirt, this time coupled with a trucker hat that read “GOKUU” on the front.
“Jesus Murphy, I thought you were going to burn that fucking thing,” Ava said, marveling at Sam’s absurd clothing. Sam shrugged. “And what’s with the hat!?” she added.
“Just felt right, for some reason,” Sam said.
“God, if we go out and do anything to celebrate after this, you’re going home and changing your clothes first,” Ava said, walking into the DPS office.
After a brief check-in process, both had a driving instructor in their passenger’s seats. Ava’s was an elderly man, who seemed to have difficulty opening the passenger door; meanwhile, Sam got a red-haired woman who seemed to have the overall demeanor of a preschool teacher. Neither were terribly enthused about this as they got into their cars and turned the ignition over.
Ava’s instructor, for his part, was… seemingly terrified of just about anything Ava did. Driving the speed limit was too fast; she was expected to go five under. She was expected to make a full stop before every turn and use her blinkers, even when the “turn” was simply a curve in the road with no intersection. Frankly, the instructor seemed to be expecting her to drive so safely that it looped back around to becoming unsafe, by the simple fact that nobody else on the road, in their right mind, would be expecting her to drive like this.
Meanwhile, Sam’s instructor took the opposite tack, expecting him to become a demon on wheels. The speed limit was to be taken as a speed suggestion. Stop signs and lights were to be treated as polite suggestions, and indications that he should try to clear the intersection as fast as possible. If he didn’t swing the car into a fish-tail drift on every turn, his instructor got visibly and noticeably angry with him. To put it simply and bluntly, both were extremely unhappy with their assigned instructors.
Things got interesting, however, when Sam passed directly by Ava, flying at eighty miles per hour on a forty-per-hour-limit road. Ava blinked for a second, then looked at the instructor and smiled.
“Test’s over. We’re doing this my way now,” she said, before looking directly forwards and hammering on the gas with the full force of her foot, sending the Hachiroku’s front side into the air slightly in a wheelie as the car went from a grandparent-friendly speed to full throttle and the instructor shrieked in fear.
It didn’t take long for Ava’s smaller and lighter car to catch up with Sam, and she turned on her blinker to appease the instructor and gently tapped the wheel to the left, causing the car to smoothly glide into the empty oncoming lane.
Meanwhile, in Sam’s car, the instructor had noticed the race beginning, and instructed him to go full-throttle himself. He did, sending the Corvette hurtling down the road at north of a hundred miles per hour as Ava’s Sprinter Trueno did its best to try and keep up.
Eventually, it became clear that, on the straight road, Sam’s Corvette held the raw power advantage. However, the turn back to the DPS office was coming soon, and Sam would have to slow down; Ava, however, had gotten the car she did for almost this exact purpose, and as the turn approached, she let off the gas, cut the wheel to the left, and pulled the handbrake, causing the tires to squeal as she fishtailed into the parking lot.
The shit-eating grin on her face when Sam pulled up a moment later, to find her standing outside her Toyota with her elderly instructor (who, at this point, was a trembling wreck), was priceless.
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Inside the building, both teens had their test forms stamped and approved as passing, regardless of the fact that neither teen reasonably should have passed. Sam’s instructor took his participation in the race with Ava as a show of backbone, even though he had lost, and passed him through; meanwhile, Ava’s instructor was simply too terrified of the devil-woman who had walked into his office to do anything but pass her, for fear that she might hunt him down and crash her car through his bedroom window otherwise. Temporary licenses were printed onto paper for both, and they took off happily in their expensive classic cars.
Meanwhile, in a luxury apartment building in the Montrose district, a pale-skinned, gaunt man with dark grey hair sat on a leather couch, drinking a glass of 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild from a jeroboam that had cost him several hundred thousand dollars. He wore a suit that appeared to be made in the manner of military dress, with large buttons running up the top and a subtle cape extending from the shoulders; a matching officer’s cap sat on a hat rack near his door. His hands bore white leather gloves, the backs of the hands inscribed with occult sigils and Germanic runes. This man was Wulf Gerber, a fifty-six-year-old, wealthy man who most would describe as an eccentric; as far as the public knew, he had inherited a fortune from his family, but never done anything of note for himself.
What the public did not know, however, was that Herr Gerber was the grandson of Dietrich Gerber, the primary researcher involved with SS Projekt 761, “Parasitkampf.” The fortune he had inherited was through no legitimate industry, but the enslavement and extermination of human beings and the theft of their property, and Wulf felt no guilt whatsoever for this.
Wulf, in fact, was quite the dyed-in-the-wool believer in Hitler’s cause, a cause that most would have assumed died in a bunker with the man himself in 1945. In the Parasitkampf project, he saw an opportunity that had gone astray; in the military-industrial complex’s adoption and takeover of the project, he saw an opportunity. The Western military-industrial complex had created exactly what his grandfather attempted to: a legion of potential super-soldiers.
A servant, ghostly pale himself, walked into the room.
“Herr Gerber, we’ve found the winner of the tournament,” the servant said.
“Oh? You mean the… impure girl?” Wulf asked in return.
“Yes,” the servant said. “She isn’t of Aryan stock, but I believe her powers may be useful to our cause, if she can be convinced properly.”
Wulf stroked his chin for a moment.
“Does she have anyone we could use as… leverage?” he asked.
“A mother, and a romantic partner,” the servant said. “The romantic partner of hers is… how should I put this delicately…”
“Is he, too, impure?” Wulf asked.
“African stock, I would say,” the servant said. “About as impure as it gets.”
“Find them both and take them,” Wulf said. “The Jewish influence in her blood makes her fundamentally untrustworthy, but with a knife at her loved ones’ throats, she’ll fall in line.”