Nil Illigitemi Descendum
*Ring*
*Ring*
*Ring*
Washuu blinked.
Time and life are
the toys of the gods, or, at least, so it is said.
In myth, the sun or
moon almost always is the designator of time. By
the Jewish calendar, the rising and setting of the
sun designated the zero of the clock, as per
Elohym's rules. According to Greek mythology, the
rising and setting of the sun designated the zero
of the clock, as per Apollo's designation.
Generally, it is
assumed, the sun seemed to matter a fair bit when
there was a god shoving it around. Gods, it seemed,
held a lot of clout as far as timekeeping went.
Therefore, it's not
surprising that for Washuu worked to her own clock,
her patterns of wakefulness and sleep to only grant
a nod and a wink at the commonly accepted solar
patterns, if only to annoy those same gods. Whether
or not the gods _existed_ wasn't the issue at hand
- it was the principle of the thing. It was, in
fact, downright weird to have her comply to a
'normal' day-to-day lifestyle pattern for more than
the shortest of time periods.
For example, Washuu
did not so much have 'meals' as irregular raids of
the refrigerator for food.
However, not
everyone knew this.
Washuu glanced
around the side of the fridge door to see just what
it was she was dealing with, and that possibly the
phone had _not_ rung at six AM. A Shou'ou
impersonating the phone would be more likely than a
genuine phonecall from someone else in CAPOW.
Shrugging, she
placed the celery back in the crisper and strode
over to the phone, kicking the door shut behind
her.
"Heloooo? Hakubi
residence!" Washuu asked, perkily. If it was a
telemarketer, there'd be heck to pay and then some.
"Er... hello...
Hakubi-san. Is Falora-chan awake yet?"
Washuu blinked.
Much younger voice than she'd been expecting.
Washuu glanced
upstairs, towards where Falora, Jo, and Anne would
be sleeping. The absolute absence of any noise at
all confirmed her hypothesis that they'd not wake
up until told to.
"I'm afraid not.
May I ask who's calling?"
"Um, this is
Ayaui... from school."
Washuu nodded, as
the facts became clear. "I'm sorry, Falora's still
in bed. But I can take a message for her."
"Thank you,
Hakubi-san. Can you ask her if she could fill in
for me today as iincho[1]... I can't go to school
today."
Washuu nodded, and
scribbled the note down on the paper near the
phone. "Okay."
"Thank you,
Hakubi-san! Bai bai!"
Washuu snickered a
bit. "Okay, okay. Bye."
*click*
There are some who may object towards the
pointlessness of the above incident. Or of the
general pointlessness of this opening. The prose is
overrought, the examples thin on the ground, and the
incident itself is of so little note that there is no
emotion. Questions are left unanswered. Do we know
_why_ Ayaui cannot attend school? Do we find out just
what Washuu was eating? When _does_ Falora wake up?
Is it a refrigerator or a fridge?
If you do indeed
desire answers, please send $50US, a return address,
and the fare for travel from Australia to PO Box
120033, Locked Bag, NSW, so the author can travel to
your home and beat you senseless with a length of
wood.
If you don't, it's
clear you're obviously getting sick of this padding
of the story, and the author will begin
reconstructing the fourth wall.
It was a day. Not a notably good one, though, as far
as days usually went, it was hardly old enough to be
considered a bad one. A few early birds had had
remarkably good days thus far, and in stark contrast,
a good few worms had had days that were not only
quite bad, but quite short. The worms could take
small comfort in the thought that they would never
have bad days ever again.
However, there are
some people, to whom, any day is a good day to
perceive as a good day. These people are usually
termed "Cheerful", or "enthusiastic." They are
occasionally referred to as "Sociopaths." These days
are called "Good Hair Days".
Sakura Kizama was
such a person. A teacher blessed with a cheerful
disposition and a joyful heart, she was also
marginally less blessed with a name that was as
common as dirt and a face to match. This did not
diminsh her joyful attitude, however, and it did not
keep her from humming a brisk little tune as she
readied herself for another day. She was going to
have, she was sure, a Good Hair Day.
One wonders how a
junior high school teacher could maintain such a
suffocating aura of happiness. One wonders how a
junior high school teacher could manage to maintain
anything other than a comparatively[2] ordered
classroom, and even then such a feat would be
considered striking.
But no, Kizama-sensei
was a staunch believer in positive thoughts and
happiness. And she kept thinking positive thoughts
and cheery tones even while packing her bags and
casually hopping the train to the school, even as she
passed the casual salarymen, even as she walked up
the stairs, even as she walked into the staffroom,
and even as she made her first-morning coffee.
And every last one of
them careened to a halt as she reached to the small
fridge for the cream.
She was always the
first in. Teaching history and culture to children
barely old enough to discern the difference between
last year's baseball finals and the Edo Era on the
scale of importance made on prepare a great deal. But
this morning, she had been beaten in to work. This
didn't phase her in the slightest - she was not a
competitive person.
But what she was was
a paranoid person. Anything Suspicious would arouse
her almost instantly, making it utter hell for her
students if they were so foolish as to produce any
notes that didn't directly resemble the subject at
hand. One hapless girl had once had to recite the
note from her parents detailing her chicken pox when
Kizama-sensei was feeling particularly enthusiastic.
And Suspicious stood
four inches from her without her having noticed him
all morning.
He was, of first
note, tall. Tall for an asian, and tall even for a
gaijin. As she looked up at his six foot three frame,
the next note to come to mind was that he was _ugly_.
Even a plain woman like herself could notice that
this man, silently standing where he was, was no oil
painting.
Notes three through
nine vanished as he looked at her like he'd just seen
her, snorted, and shouldered past her from his
position in the corner of the teacher's lounge.
Observation changed
to supposition and then to suspicion, and Sakura, as
soon as she figured this man was suitably far away,
stepped from the lounge, observed the direction in
which he was parting, and ran like all heck the
opposite way, looking for the janitor or security
guard - whichever came first.
The man nodded. Well, he'd looked around the school,
and he'd become familiar enough to navigate without
help. Content that he'd gotten that under his belt -
before the teachers arrived no less - he removed
himself from the school grounds. After all, since he
didn't actually have the position there for another
twenty-four hours, there was no need to hang around,
was there?
Kizama-sensei had to
have the day off, to the joy of her students.
Apparently, this, combined, with the absence of a new
English teacher gave them a significant bout of free
time.
"Joyful joyful, we adore the-"*CRACK*
Shimaru Shinsei was
one of those polar opposites to Sakura Kizama. Of the
most important note, he was male. He was also stuck
in a permanent Bad Day. In Shimaru's case, it would
be a Bad Hair Day, but for the remarkable absence of
hair. So, Shimaru was having a Bad Day. It was barely
fifteen minutes past six, and he was already having a
bad day.
Aside from having put
the fear of god into an apparently overparanoid
teacher, Shimaru had had nothing but bad things to
say about this day in particular. He'd woken up on
the wrong side of the bed - and fallen out to land on
something painfully cornered. He'd found the washing
machine broken and his only clean clothes to be
beaten leathers from his days spent beating around
tombs in Israel. He'd found all the milk in his
fridge was expired. He'd found that he had no coffee
left. He'd found a remarkable absence of tea in his
cupboards. He'd found he had woken up excruciatingly
early. He'd found no water whatsoever when he tried
to turn on his taps in what he laughingly referred to
as his home, condemning him to either a day without a
bath or a trip to the public baths - both hells
beyond contemplation.
And his car radio,
tape deck and CD Player, regardless of any kind of
actual input that would influence its conventional
output, was not going to stop playing anything but
Christian Music.
In the past, Shimaru
had nothing against Christians. Some of his best
friends had been nominally Christian - a few of the
Caesers, at least - and his family had never really
denied its faintly European bent and blood, producing
its tall offspring. But Shimaru now held a grudge
against Christianity on the most primal level; in the
big street of life, God had chosen to fling a brick
through his window. A big brick. A big brick with a
wasp's nest attached.
And so every joyous
exultation from his speakers was punctuated by an
incredibly hefty thump directly into the electronic
face of the expensive equipment. In defiance with
common laws of physics, where a person of Shimaru's
strength could put his fist clean through the device,
the device remained producing high-fidelity praises
and hymns.
"Fricking... hell..."
Shimaru muttered as he took a roundabout, his free
hand mercilessly hammering away at the radio. "Six
billion people on the face of the frickin' planet and
it has to be me with a baptist in my radio."
The refrain abruptly
changed to horns and swing as Shimaru checked the
streetsigns, his irritation fading as a ska beat
began to pick up his spirits[3] and his mind began to
occupy itself with the task of locating his future
employment.
Smirking nastily to
himself, Shimaru found the street name, and merrily
rode down it, muttering angrily as the early morning
hordes of pedestrians began to filter across
crossings and impede his progress. Just as his mood
began to blacken, he tried to at least keep himself
from trying to throttle his steering wheel by turning
up the music.
The tune, he
admitted, was foreign, an English one. No, American.
Ah, good ska was a rare beast in Japan - one had to
turn to the west for such things. Yes, this was...
Five Iron Frenzy, if he wasn't mistaken.
He wasn't.
Just as his mind
began to absorb itself in the identification of the
style, and possibly... ENJOY himself... Shimaru's
brief hiatus from bastardly grouchiness was cut short
by acknowledging the lyrics.
"Praise God From Whom
All Blessings Flow-"
*WHACK*
Shimaru grumbled as
he parked the car and swore nastily as he gathered
his accoutremonts to go face the day.
The Bad Day.
He rocked back in his chair as the students filed
in. Heh. They hadn't expected _that_, he bet. To have
the teacher turn up first, especially given how early
the students usually arrived, would have been a tad
jarring. Ah well, they're just elementary kids.
Shimaru didn't see any reason to single any one of
them out for uniquely abusive treatment.
Stretching his
shoulders, Shimaru glared around the room through his
sunglasses and adjusted his cap. There had been one
or two who'd turned up early, and, being right
teacher's pets, had sat attentively as though
expecting him to start some kind of conversation.
Shimaru almost sniggered at the thought of any of
these kids holding a cohesive thought long enough to
hold his interest.
They were milling
around their desks, a handful of kids all dealing
with assorted issues and generally having as much fun
in the last few moments before school began as they
possibly could. And as luck - or at least whatever it
was that determined Shimaru's interactions with the
universe not determined by other people or deities -
would have it, there were a handful of loudmouthed
kids.
Scratching an ear,
Shimaru scanned the kids. Not a _bad_ bunch, per se.
They were wearing their shoes properly, which
indicated that if they thought they were toughies,
they weren't showing it. They were all in school
uniform with very few personal flairs attached. That
sort of shtick didn't really kick in until Junior
year anyway.
Shrugging, Shimaru
glanced up at the bell and then at the clock. And
then counted.
*DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRNNNNG*
Shimaru took in a
breath and counted once more, to ten. The first
encounter with a teacher is always a difficult time.
Those who wish to engage in as exploitative a
relationship as possible have a penchant for pushing
the teacher's limits, in hopes to determine
themselves as some kind of special case that was
beyond redemption. Others attempt to become the
teacher's pet by being as well-behaved as possible.
But the instant the
bell rang, the visiting students suddenly felt the
room temperature drop by a fraction[4], and made
themselves absent as swiftly as possible. Shimaru had
barely counted to six.
But no, three
students continued to prattle away. Two girls and a
boy.
Shimaru shrugged as
he got to ten, the hunk of chalk already between his
fingers. With a practiced arm, he raised it behind
his head and let fly...
Now, projectile warfare between students and
teachers is not an uncommon thing in Japanese
schools. Erasers, chalk, shoes and pens are
frequently used as ammunition in the war of
education, and the most open assaults are on the part
of the teacher. The sternness of the projectiles can
be used to awaken a dozing student, or as a
non-verbal reprimand.
However, this ilk of
hazardous flak is generically constrained to higher
grades with more difficulties in discipline.
Which is why the
more-or-less docile class was not prepared for the
remote possibility that not only would the newest
sensei see fit to throw things around the room, nor
that he'd be at that limit within his first minute of
being on-duty.
With a sort of
delayed prescience, the student glanced up at the
chalk, not spinning drunkenly like a kind of hurled
axe but rather ballistically spinning towards like a
long white bullet. And instinct took over as the body
curled in on itself and the bladder emptied.
The chalk zoomed over
his head, making a faint humming noise until it
struck the lockers on the back wall of the class and
shattered.
"Well." Shimaru
shrugged. "Anyone get the message? In your seats,
pukes."
Were it not that it
would have shown a crack in the unassailable armour
Shimaru had erected around him to provide the effect
of a heartless bastard of a tutor who would trash his
students up to - but not including - the point of
death[5], he would have grinned.
As it was, he just
shrugged.
"Well, I'm sure you
all know," he said, flinging his feet around the side
of his desk and flattening his chair, "Your last
teacher, whatever his name was, buggered off. I can
give you a two-word reason for why, for those of you
to whom it may concern, but since I doubt any of you
is educated enough to know that reason, I'm not going
to waste the effort. Instead, I'm going to make you
embarass yourself by standing up and giving a
poorly-worded, on-the-fly speech, as per custom,
simply because, yes, I'm a sadistic bastard, and
there's nothing you can do about it. And then we'll
conjugate some irregular verbs. So har-de-har."
Shimaru smiled
inwardly. This job could be more fun than he thought.
"Righto." Shimaru
pointed at a girl in the front row. "You. Up here.
And the first person to smirk's up next."
To those interested in temporal physics and their
nomenclature, the shortest amount of time in a
schoolroom setting is the ohnosecond, the time
between a teacher requesting a volunteer and then
running out of patience waiting for said volunteer
and selecting the single student in the least capable
position to accomodate the demands of the task at
hand.
As the last of the
sound waves of Shimaru's first statement had barely
begun to reach the back wall and begin their slow
progress towards their own demise, they encountered
his next word coming in the opposite direction,
causing a real traffic jam for those with sensitive
ears.
And even those
without sensitive ears can barely accomodate the
sheer terror carried in the one word that was
uttered. If speech was silver and silence golden,
this word carried such doom it may has well have been
depleted uranium. It was a word that had a
gravitational field. This word was the word all
students the world over dread. It is a word, in the
end, that has taken more students to their academic
graves than any other three words combined (saving
for "Oh, no.").
"You."
Narrative takes this moment to observe the basic
animal impulses surging through the mind of the
next victim;
Point.
See.
Realise.
Gibber.
And Narrative, having had a good old eavesdrop on
the human psyche, turns to where Shimaru is
speaking to the poor girl out the front...
"So... get on with
it. Recite your name, age, and whatever goddamned
thing I'm supposed to care about right here and
now, oh, and whatever sentai you feel is the
strongest, and then we'll all pretend to care and
talk about you behind your back. It's such a shame
that the class has already had a degree of cohesion
and as such you won't be backstabbed by early
starters on junior high, but there's only so much I
can do, so I will observe this simple social
dynamic watching you squirm. Well? We're
waaaaaaaaaaiiiiting."
And back to the child in their seat, who is
infinitely more interesting...
Worry.
Fret.
Stew.
Urinate.
And Narrative decides to just sod off altogether.
"Geeze. What crawled up his butt?" Anne had managed
to mutter to Joseph before being shuttled off to
her own class.
Joseph was smarter
than that. He was all-but hiding under his desk. He
had nothing against teaching as a rule, and he
certainly didn't think all teachers were evil
incarnate.
However, there was
a walking, talking, steretype out the front
currently humiliating the class one by one.
Joseph just rested
his head on his desk.
By some amazing stroke of luck, Shimaru wearied of
scaring the hell out of his class, and by the time
the clock had ticked to the halfway mark of his
hour-long stint with these students, had stood up,
introduced himself in the most basic of ways -
writing his name in hiragana on the board - and then
began to rattle onto the class about their studies.
"Okay, twerps. Unlike
most new teachers, I am not going to attempt to start
from scratch and therefore fulfill my own neat
shedules; instead, let's find the point at which the
students you're actively weak. So... respond, if you
can."
They handled him as
he belted through his alphabet at lightning speed.
They were not, after all, a dumb class.
As he rocketed
through his state-of-being verbs and action verbs and
the distinctions inbetween, they stayed with him.
A handful of the
class kept up with him as he reeled past articles and
nodded at adverbs.
And a stark silence
fell over them as he resorted to slang.
And boy, did he
exploit it.
Sure, Written English
was one thing. But the colloquialisms Shimaru reeled
off at the room full of elementary children was
terrifyingly fast, and barely a member of the class
caught any of them. That was, until...
"[Your muzzere was an
'amster and-]"
"[Your fazzere smelt
of elderberries!]" Joseph responded.
Shimaru paused.
"[I suppose...]"
Shimaru said, in slightly accented English, "[That I
deserved that one. Well then. You seem to be
well-acquainted with the language. Most of these
children speak it poorly, but you, I suppose, have
the accent of a dairy maid.]"
Joseph hit a crisis
point.
On one hand, he could
exploit an advantage here, an advantage that may
prove a saving grace in this class.
On the other, it
would set him apart and be possibly a nail in a
coffin, as the weirdness around him exploded yet
further into a cloud of improbabilities into which
even fewer would dare stray.
For a moment, Joseph
wavered, his normally quiet impuleses wrestling with
the momentary desire for the spotlight.
And almost as though
a direct result of the boy's penchant to change the
probable to the improbable and the impossible into
the likely, the desire won.
"[That's appropriate.
You have the accent of a cow.]"
Shimaru's eyes
narrowed a slight bit.
"[I've known dogs
better-versed in Eigo than you.]"
Morphic resonance
states that once something has been done, it will be
done again and more easily. And so, it was not as as
surprisign to see Joseph open his mouth for a
response.
"[Did they teach you
everything you know?]"
Shimaru paused.
"Bien." he spoke in a
very, low, quiet voice. For a moment, Joseph wasn't
sure he'd heard him speak at all.
"ANYWAY," Shimaru
turned his back to his class and produced another
chalk, using it to scrawl some terms on the board.
"It seems that the grade average IQ for this
particular turnip field is just as low as I thought
it would be. You're learning English. Why are you
learning it? So you can pepper your speech with
random Japlish? If so, sod off and listen to the pop
radio and spend these two classes bumming cigarettes
off the junior high students that pass by. That's not
why you learn a language."
Shimaru shrugged. "So
your first assignment, due... oh, I'll put it at..."
Shimaru scratched the back of his neck. "Wednesday,
next week, is to write a four-page essay on just why
you're learning a second language."
A groan came up from
the class.
"[In English.
Submissions with so much 'gana, 'kana or kanji as
your own name will be failed automatically.]"
The groan increased.
"Do you want it due
_tomorrow_?"
The groan silenced.
The deadly pause that
followed was only punctuated by the ringing of the
bell, to signal the end of Shimaru's bout with the
students.
"Good. Now. I'm going
to sod off." He shrugged and grinned, and stepped
towards the door.
As he put hand on the
doorknob, he turned back, to face the class, his eye
catching Joseph's for a moment, but nonetheless
staring at space above and beyond Joseph's left ear.
"[As the good things
of day began to droop and drowse...]"
Joseph looked up. For
an instant, he felt words rise unbidden to his
lips... then he silenced them. Shimaru looked
momentarily disappointed, then smirked as if the
universe had just proven him right.
Shimaru swore internally as he closed the door
behind him. He swore internally as he walked to the
teacher's lounge. He swore internally, in fact, all
through the minutes of freedom he had to get himself
together and to the next class. He swore as he downed
his lukewarm water, he swore as he picked up his
books, he swore _quite_ profusely at the other sensei
who'd been such an inconsiderate sod to pilfer his
schedule, and he swore as he stole someone else's,
making the mental alterations to make the schdule fit
his own classes.
Fourteen minutes and
over eight thousand swearwords in fourteen or more
languages later, Shimaru opened the door to his next
class. It was an older class, who had a slightly more
studious and sincere look about them. The majority of
the class were girls. Shimaru had been lead to
understand that the demographic was currently
somewhat skewed towards a higher female population in
the higher grades for a variety of reasons about
which Shimaru didn't care.
Shimaru _did_ care
about one thing - authority. From the moment he
walked in the door, to the moment he sat down, he was
pulling his huge frame in full steam, his narrow
green eyes glaring around the room with the air of an
extremely disgruntled man.
There are those who
will contend that Shimaru had never _been_ gruntled,
but that's not the point.
By the time he was
sitting down, there was a thick atmosphere of terror.
News could travel _fast_. Bad news could travel even
faster, as the beta-testers for the Starship Titanic
could testify.
His eyes swept from
one side of the class to the other. He had arrived
early and the previous teacher had left early,
granting the students a good few minutes in which to
stretch their muscles while waiting for his reign to
officially begin. The clock was ticking down.
Shimaru reached into
his jacket and slowly drew out a long, white piece of
chalk. The sharper-eyed students in the first row may
have noticed the caliber engraved in the base.
Three minutes left.
Shimaru glanced up at
the class. Four or five girls were chattering away,
with, oddly enough, the male students all seated. Two
were classically archetypal geeks - thick glasses,
pencil necks, and poor posture to boot. One was
flicking through what looked from Shimaru's angle to
be a novel of some stripe. A thick, bound novel.
Two minutes left.
The other few male
students were seated and reading through their books.
The girls were still chattering. Shimaru began to
twirl the chalk in his hands angrily.
There was, however, a
detail he'd missed. A girl, in the front row, saw his
sour look, and followed his line of vision. And you'd
need to be a special type of idiot to not see how
Shimaru's eyes were all-but-outlining a target on the
back of the head of the girl whose back was towards
him.
One minute left.
Falora did qualify as
a special type of fool. But in this situation, she
just wasn't special enough. Getting quickly to her
feet, Falora brought herself to talk to the three
girls, her face knit with concern.
Her initial
statements that they should try and sit down or the
sensei'd be mad was drowned out by the ringing of the
bell.
No minutes.
Shimaru's fingers
all-but cracked through the sound barrier as the
chalk took off. Shooting forwards at speeds
quantifiable as a fraction of terminal velocity, the
chalk began to spiral forward just as it had in the
last class. Shimaru's face was set in a cast of
serious disinterest as he drew a second and third
piece of chalk.
The first piece of
chalk hit the spine of the boy's book, and with a
cracking noise, the chalk shattered up and down its
length, into two shards of chalk which both struck
the boys's fingers around the book.
This staggering feat
of ballistics coincided terrifyingly fast with the
bang of the second piece of chalk shattering on the
back lockers, shaking the two dozing students up the
back out of their slumber.
And the third piece
headed on a predetermined course, towards the
chattering girl.
The course in which
Falora had intersposed herself.
Shimaru blinked. Not
that he actually gave a crap, but it wouldn't look as
intimidating. Oh well.
The chalk was buzzing
towards Falora swiftly, powder trailing from it as
the force behind it began its fragmentation...
And it suddenly
underwent a 90 degree turn and burst against the
gyprock roof.
Shimaru boggled.
Not a good way to
intimidate people, but hell, he'd scared the beshit
out of them with the other two pieces of chalk - the
girls were streaking towards their seats at speeds
comparable to the chalk bullets earlier.
But Shimaru was
boggling.
For a moment, he
glanced at Falora, then at the marks on her face -
and then he scowled, shaking his head as a dog in
water clearing its head.
Shimaru leaned back
in his seat, glancing around at the class. History,
he noted, glancing at the notes on his desk. Hmm.
"Alright," Shimaru
began.
"Senseiii!"
Shimaru sighed.
Chirpy. He hated chirpy.
Well, he hated dour,
and glum, and cheerful, and every emotion in the
spectrum 'twixt the two, but chirpy presented itself,
so, why not hate that?
"What?" Shimaru's
tone of voice carried the solid implication that
there were things far safer to do than to interrupt
Shimaru mid-sentence. Such as bobbing for pirahnas.
"Shouldn't the iincho
perform her duties?"
Shimaru glanced at
Falora.
"Yeah. Go nuts.
Whoever it is." Shimaru rolled his eyes.
Falora beamed,
standing and turning to the class.
Shimaru's brain was
not a slow organ. It was, in fact, probably the most
well-oiled part of his body, and when one considers
his strength and flexibility, this said something of
worth.
"Rise!"
And one thing Shimaru
_had_ seen before were goddesses. Buttloads of them.
Possibly the only interesting things in the entire
godforsaken hell that was God's Waiting Room. As a
sour note, he noticed that while man looks on the
outwards appearance and god on the heart, Goddesses
were probably even more shallow than man.
"Bow!'
And Shimaru's brief
wariness at the sight of the girl's face clicked into
solid alarm as he realised that if not an actual
Goddess, than he was dealing with at least someone of
a godly alignment.
"Oh _sh-"
"Be seated!"
_THUMP_
"... Sensei?"
Shimaru stood up,
pain obvious on his face. Gritting his teeth in a
rictus of pain mixed with rage, he stalked to the
door and swung it open.
"Class dismissed."
Then, before he could
successfully escape to the lounge, he turned,
pointing the Finger Of Doom at the young, blonde
goddess in front row.
"My. Office.
NOW."
Shimaru got three steps out of the door, managed to
hear it shut behind him, then collapsed on the
ground, nursing his ribs. A moment later, the door of
the classroom behind him opened again, and the timid
steps of Falora could be heard. The students inside
the class barely registered the clicks, having been
given an period entirely to themselves.
Falora was on her
knees next to Shimaru, trying with little success to
move the comparatively massive man off his stomach.
"Sensei? Sensei!? Are
you o-"
"GET YOUR F'CKING
HANDS OFF ME!" Shimaru flipped around in a small
circle, putting his back against the wall. One hand
pointed accusingly at the confused girl. "You're a
goddess, aren't you? One of those goddamned stupid -"
Falora blithely
interrupted Shimaru's rant on the vacuous nature of
goddesses and nodded cheerily. "Un! Falora, Goddess
of Luc-"
"I don't give a damn
about your name, rank, and serial number. Out. Of.
My. Class."
"What?"
Shimaru began to haul
himself to his feet, the strain visible on his face,
the prayer beads around his neck rolling up around
his chin as he bent double.
"Ooooooh. Prayer
beads." Falora bent to look at them more closely.
"Are those the sort that trigger a physiological
reaction whenever a trigger word is uttered? Like
heel, or stay, or -"
"DON'T SAY IT!"
"-sit. What?"
_THUMP_
"Ngrrrggggggggggh."
Shimaru stormed down the hall with Falora in tow,
quietly wondering just what she did wrong. Well, he
stormed as well a man whose feet refuse to respond
and whose shoulders are feeling like they've been
broken in three places can storm.
A goddamn goddess.
Why, oh, why, did he have to have a goddamn FRICKING
goddess in _HIS_ class?
Shimaru paused. What
a silly question.
Because.
God.
Hated.
Him.
Wheeeeeeee.
Shimaru managed to
stagger to the door of the teacher's lounge, Falora
behind him, bemused goodwill evident on her features.
He hadn't told her anything beyond ordering her out
of his class, and she wasn't quite sure on just how
to apply this order, all things considered.
Just as Shimaru
shoved the door open, the strange mist that could be
called smoke rising up out of the opened door, he
whirled and pointed at her.
"You don't go inside.
Sit here, and for the love of god, don't say
_anything_."
"-"
"ANYTHING!" Shimaru
bellowed in her face.
For a moment, some
tiny part of the Shimaru that once was, buried under
the blackened crust of the Shimaru that currently
was, some tiny shard of him grieved at him having
stooped to yell in the face of small children.
The rest of the
Shimaru that currently was, however, dragged this
shard into a dark alley and beat the hell out of
it.
Shimaru flopped into his chair and dropped the
schedule on his desk. Across from him, a scholarly
forehead wrinkled as the owner of said forehead
looked up at him.
"You're back early,
Shinsei-sensei."
"Fuck it, Takenaka,"
Shimaru bent double, letting the suppressed pain
bleed out of his body, trying to overcome it rather
than defy it, pretense gone. "Nobody said anything
about having one of those worthless little goddesses
in my classes, NOBODY AT ALL." Shimaru slammed the
hand that wasn't clutching his chest onto the desk.
Takenaka-sensei
raised an eyebrow. The position of school counsellor
left one privy to rather a lot of information, but
still, he was more used to getting angry statements
like that >from the students than the sensei.
"Uhm," Takenaka
stated intelligently.
"Short, blonde hair,
green marks on her face?"
"Falora? Oh, Falora,
yes, she's a wonderful girl. We have tea
occasionally."
Pause.
"Well, doesn't that
fuckin' figure."
Takenaka winced at
the unnecessary profanity. He'd been placed in the
desk across from Shimaru's by the principal because
the principal believed in ying and yang and feng shui
- and also because there wasn't a sensei patient
enough to put up with Shimaru for more than a day
without complaining about their desk, their missing
wastepaper basket, their broken arm, or something
trivial[6] of the ilk.
Still, Takenaka had
had his patience tried by far worse miscreants than
Shimaru, and they had been students. Shimaru had a
lot of potential, and Takenaka believed in releasing
this in kids. So...
"Shimaru... can I
call you Shimaru?"
"Can I call you
fat-ass idiot-head?"
Pause.
"-"
"Before you say it,
I'll note that I'm being both sarcastic and
immature."
"Very well,
Shinsei-sensei... just why... why _are_ you the way
you are?"
Long pause.
It's a unique thing
to see a cracked, pitted, skinless travesty of a face
such as Shimaru's smile. There are no lips to shape
the muscles around the mouth and give them contours,
to form the sight of the mouth as it proceeds along
its way via photons to another's eyes. There are no
cheeks to colour, only brown, hard scar tissue, which
yields no mirth.
All in all, it
resembles very much what would if a rock were to
smile, but without the same predatory nature.
"You really wanna
know, Takenaka?"
Nod from the older
man.
"Really?"
Another nod.
"Good. Yl meth
rosepthe-"
Falora sat outside the door, quietly twiddling her
thumbs and watching the ceiling. Well, she was, for
about four seconds, at which point she got bored and
leaned in to listen in to the somewhat loud
conversation between Takenaka and Shinsei.
And she heard it all.
Up to the point where
Shimaru got weird.
"Really?"
"Good. [The thing
that will crush you, in the end, Takenaka, is the
brutal way in which life will treat you. I have had
God himself come down from on high, grace my life
with a terminal disease, remove from me what few
things I had that were truly mine, my identity and
body, then when I sought out a manner in which I
could kill myself without destroying the one person
in the world for whom I ever cared, he proceeded to
do me another favour and descend from heaven and take
that saving grace away >from me. Then, after
ripping away from me the Angel of Death for which I
so hungered, driving a wedge between myself and my
rest, God turned what little of a world I had left on
end, damning me to stay in the most despicable
squalor that was his office, once in a while, simply
to experience the utter bone-crushing tedium that
only a place where there are no conflicts can
produce. And then what? I get a lecture and get sent
back. No Elysian fields for _ME_, buster, no siree.
Then, when I come to this world again, I wake up on a
cold block and find my wallet and shoes stolen - they
won't even give me the dignity of NOT robbing my
corpse. I wouldn't be surprised to know I've lost my
virginity to some shithead morgue worker with a
necrophilia fetish (and wouldn't you have to be to
work there?). God himself then sent me home, to my
family, to that one person for whom I cared, who then
was revolted at my appearance, disgusted by my
behaviour, and condemned me to live here, in Capow,
where I must live out my days until such time as I
'learn what life is about'. And what of my family? A
brother who believes if it's old enough to bleed it's
old enough to breed, another brother who takes sadism
to a new level, two parents who think I'm still
seventeen, not out of lovingkindness but because they
FORGOT I WAS FUCKING BORN, and one sister. A sister,
my friend, who is life and light and heaven and
angel's wings crushed into their finest and purest
point, reduced to its most simple level, who will
love and can love with all the fibre of her being...
who has rejected me and sent me to the outside of the
world.]"
Shimaru paused.
Falora presumed for breath.
"[What then, I say,
is my problem? Perhaps it is this damnable curse of
immortality. Or these? These beads which confine me
to the word of every two-bit shintoist church-goer
who hasn't spit in an ancestor's miso. Or maybe it's
the fact that, having lost everything I had, those
who could help me, refuse to do so. Or maybe, just
maybe,]" another pause, "[... Maybe, Takenaka, it is
the loneliness. The bone-crushing, soul-wilting
loneliness. I cannot live another day where every
human being upon seeing me does not recoil in utter
horror at the sheer hell that is my face. I cannot
truly live a love. I can never, ever, ever find any
others who will accept me. My blood and bone rejected
me - my very _blood_ _and_ _bone_. And they, of all
people, had reason to accept me. We're not talking
flat-chested tomboys here, Takenaka - I'm hideous, I
know it, and I'm unsociable. The quiet outcast shtick
works if you're actually moderately passable as a
human being. I'm not. So I will live every day of my
life alone, loveless, unloved, and unloving, as every
day brings me closer to the armageddon imposed by the
God who sentenced me to this in the first place.]"
Pause again.
"Well, that's my
understanding of it, at least."
".. mys uluhtc, yog, sototh."
Pause.
"Well, that's my
understanding of it, at least."
Takenaka blinked
owlishly at the suddenly-grim-again Shimaru. For the
past gods-know-how-long, he had been babbling in a
language that Takenaka wasn't even sure should exist.
Some of the words Shimaru had pronounced should have
been impossible without tentacles in one's mouth, a
pseudopodia for a tongue(s), or possibly both.
"... I didn't
understand a word of that, Shimaru."
Shimaru's face went
hard as flint once more. "Well, I guess that's _your_
fucking problem, isn't it?"
Falora blinked outside. The majority of the olde
tongue Shimaru had spoken was almost flawless, she
noted. Not, however, that it mattered much to her,
given that most languages were really just messy
things that got in the way of what people were
actually _saying_ - and Shimaru had said a lot.
A _lot_.
An awkward silence
settled over the teacher's lounge as Takenaka first
looked very embarrassed, then excused himself
>from the room, leaving Shimaru to brood. Shimaru
was fine with that; he always had an excellent
memory, and he had a very long list of grievances to
work with.
The door opened, and
a tentative Falora stepped in.
"Shimaru-sensei?"
Now, before we move
on, it is imperative to note for the sake of fairness
that Shimaru is actually not easily moved to anger.
Even before his, ah, unfortunate incident in Israel,
Shimaru had already mostly taken a 'one eye open, one
eye shut' attitude towards life, as it tends to lead
to less stress. However, even while maintaining the
nonchalant exterior, Shimaru was actually stuffing
his ire into some corner of his mind to be examined
more thoroughly later, perhaps when he wanted to yell
at someone and needed to work himself up to the point
that he'd bother to even acknowledge that someone's
exisistence. Meaning that, whenever Shimaru decided
that his patience ran out and blew the top, the
results were quite catastrophic.
So, then, in one
corner, there was Shimaru, who despite of his earlier
tirade still had quite a bit of unhealthy emotions
building in him. In the other corner, there was
Falora, whose youthful exuberance and inexperience
wouldn't let her leave well enough alone.
In short, the
Irresistible Force was about to run headlong into the
Immovable Object.
"What did I say about
not coming in?" Shimaru asked in a dangerously low
tone of voice.
"I-"
"Not another word!"
Shimaru snapped. "I know why you came in: you heard
my little spiel, didn't you?"
Falora nodded
silently.
"I thought so,"
Shimaru growled. "Well, guess what? I don't want your
apology, I don't want your advice, and I definitely
DO NOT want your pity!"
Falora looked like
she would try to speak again, but Shimaru didn't let
her get even a syllable out.
"Do you have a
listening compehension problem? Then let me be
crystal clear."
Shimaru stalked
forward until he was towering over Falora.
"Do. Not. Open. Your.
Mouth." he bit out slowly, deliberately, putting just
enough punch into his words so that each one of them
were an order. This time, Falora didn't so much as
blink.
"Good girl. Now, go
back to your room and stay there so that I don't have
to see you again until tomorrow."
But instead of obeying
right away, Falora lept forward and hugged Shimaru
for all she was worth, wrapping her arms as far as
they would go around his massive back and burying her
face into his stomach. Then, before Shimaru could
formulate any sort of response, she was gone, her
rapid footsteps fading down the hall.
Having finished lunch, Falora began to contemplate
her view from her rooftop perch.
"Feeling homesick?"
Shimaru's voice rang out from behind her.
Falora nearly lost
her balance. Had he followed her up here? Would she
be in trouble for not eating in the designated
cafeteria? While he didn't sound like he was angry at
her any more, he didn't seem to be exactly happy
about seeing her here.
Shimaru crossed his
arms. "I asked you a question."
"A-a little, I
guess," Falora answered hesitantly.
"Thought so. But
that's not a good enough of an excuse to run around
where you're not supposed to and make yourself
potential lawsuit material, Goddess or not." Shimaru
jabbed a thumb at the door. "I don't need to explain
what that thing back there is for, do I?"
"No, sir." Falora got
down slowly and walked past Shimaru. "Are you...still
mad at me?" she asked softly as she put her hand on
the doornob.
Shimaru didn't bother
to look at her. "Give me one good reason why I
shouldn't be."
Lacking a good
answer, Falora blurted out the first thing that came
to mind. "It doesn't suit you?"
Shimaru turned and
arched an eyebrow at her. "Really?" his expression
hardened again. "Wrong answer. Now scram."
[1] If you don't know, the Iincho is the classmember
who does the 'Stand! Bow! Be seated!' ritual. Class
rep, basically. Keiko in Yu Yu Hakusho is an iincho,
Hikari in Evangelion is a iincho, and the third
example of an iincho should go here if I could think
of it. But I can't. Since Falora is only filling in
for one day, she will only have to do the minor
duties that crop up - namely getting the students to
do their jobs on the roster and to instruct the class
to stand, bow, and sit.
[2] Comparative, say,
to the Ethiopan Navy.
[3] For what it's
worth, in his case. Lifting Shimaru's spirits is
comprable to changing decks on the Titanic - lots of
lateral movement, but still sunk.
[4] 19/20ths
[5] This, of course,
was an effect because Shimaru would thrash his
students up to and beyond the point of death, mostly
because it made seating arrangements easier. He was
contemplating removing a desk every week of the
semester and using whichever student was unseated as
an unofficial organ donor and lunchpack for the
remaining students. It would be a good lesson in
English culture, after all, and put the fear of god
into the fat ones.
[6] To
Shimaru.
|
