Chapter Rain

[The following chapter contains strong language. Reader caution is advised.]

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Tuesday 15th September 1998

 

 

Now that I’m a Sixth Form student, I get a certain number of free periods each week – gaps in my school timetable, since I only have four subjects plus a couple of additional one-a-week lessons like Personal Development – meant for studying or doing homework.

 

… I think I mentioned them before. Right? Admittedly, I said a lot about Sixth Form. Ah well, better to remind you.

 

Anyway, they’re meant for studying or doing homework, but you’d be hard-pressed to find somebody who doesn’t spend most of their free periods hanging out in the Sixth Form common room. Which is fine. Socialising is studying, in a way. It’s studying people. And even the couple of times a week where none of my friends old or new were free when I was, I’d mostly sit and listen to others talk and only throw my hat into the ring when I had something of value to add. Or I’d just study or do homework.

 

Honestly, those would be the only free periods where I’d hope to try and do either of those anyway. Kendal and I shared a free period on Tuesday afternoons, so even if I’d wanted to try and get any work done, it wouldn’t have been easy. All the same, the thought did occur to me as the conversation about the difference between geese and swans came to an end.

 

“How often do you actually do homework or anything during a free period?” I asked my friend, more inquisitively than casually despite my intentions.

 

“Homework? Never,” she pouted. “I’ll study Friday second period but otherwise I’ve always got at least one of you guys around, so I’d rather just chat!”

 

“Same, more or less.”

It wasn’t what I’d been anticipating, either. Three months ago, I wouldn’t have expected to have made friends with her, or Bao or Zahid, never mind having a brand-new friend (and crush) in Dakota. It could’ve been Russell or nothing, but my free periods have turned out really lively, on the whole.

“Sometimes I’ll do a bit of homework, especially if I can use the library to look something up. But…”

 

“But you know Dakota’s gonna enforce a group homework session when we get back to hers, so there’s no point doing too much?” she finished for me.

 

“Exactly,” I smiled. Not at the thought of the homework sessions, I had a low-level yet pervading sense of dread when it came to those; but it was amusing that we were riding the same train of thought.

“It would suck to have everything done already while everybody else is doing theirs.”

 

“Yeah, you’d have to just sit there twiddling your thumbs or something,” she considered, tapping her pen as she did.

 

“Or play the Game Boy with headphones in,” I proposed, and then for a moment, contemplative silence settled on the two of us.

 

“Hey, y’know what else we should do?” Kendal broke the silence.

 

“Wait, we might actually do the Game Boy thing…?” I checked with her, because the way she phrased that sure made it sound that way.

 

Her response was to smile wider as she continued:

“The four of us should all do our homework in free periods one day. Then Dakota’s mind would explode!”

 

“She’d be thrown, for sure,” I chuckled with the image of a miffed, slightly-agitated Dakota emerging in my mind.

 

After a few seconds of mischievous laughter, Kendal sighed and I couldn’t tell if it was contended or wistful.

“I’ve got this essay to write, all about different types of respiration and how they work, and it’s so daunting and uuugh…”

 

“You’ve got an essay already? We’ve barely been back two weeks…”

 

“It’s not, like, a 10-page essay or anything,” she conceded, “but I have to go into detail on everything we’ve learnt so far…”

 

“That sucks…” I told her sincerely, and still felt like I should have more to say.

 

“It’s not due until next Monday but I know Dakota will make me do the whole thing today…”

She reclined back in her chair, a groan croaking up from her throat.

 

“Maybe you should’ve done some of it now and then you would’ve had less to do at Dakota’s…?” I mentioned, even as I looked at the time and saw we only had a little less than ten minutes left of the school day.

 

“Maybe. I guess I’m putting it off. But then it’s even worse because I know Dakota’s not gonna give me a choice.”

 

“Talk to her, she might give you some leniency… she’s not a monster,” I suggested, honestly a little surprised by the way she was talking about our friend.

 

“I know she’s not a monster. We fight-”

She remembered our surroundings, and brought her volume down to a hush.

“We fight monsters. But she’s scarier than any of them when homework’s involved.”

 

“Seriously, I can’t see her forcing you to do it all in one go if you’re not up to it.”

 

“Hey…”

Amir, a classmate of mine in Music, stepped up beside me. It seemed as though he’d been waiting for a gap in the conversation; I could only hope he hadn’t heard Kendal’s “monster” talk…

“Could you help me with this second measure stuff? I don’t think I get it properly.”

 

“Sure, it’s pretty simple once you get your head around it – I mean, if I explain it clearly, I might just make you more confused…” I rambled while digging into my bag to get my notes out. I noticed Kendal leaning forward, seeming intent on learning a little about music composition herself.

 

In the end, we never got to continue our conversation about her homework-dread. I was helping Amir until the bell rang to herald in the end of the school day, and Kendal decided to rib me over my initial ham-fisted attempt at explaining second measure all the way to the front gate and in Zahid’s presence.

 

“I’m assuming it was funnier in-person,” he concluded after listening to Kendal’s recap.

 

“If that…” I sighed lightly.

 

“You did well explaining it, though!” Kendal grinned at me. “Even I understand it now! It just took you a few minutes to not use Lego bricks as a comparison…”

That grin turned a bright shade of mischief in an instant.

 

“I’m gonna take the compliment and pretend that’s all you said,” I grumbled, half-jokingly.

 

“Now I know what to get you for your birthday!” she teased, giving me a playful nudge to boot.

 

I looked to Zahid with pleading eyes.

“Don’t let her do that…”

 

“It’s her money lost if she buys you Lego as a joke present,” he shrugged, giving me pause for thought. (I don’t hate Lego, by the way, but I’m not especially into it.)

 

“Hey guys,” Bao greeted us, with Dakota herding him towards us. “I was gonna go look for that cricket I saw earlier but Dakota found me.”

 

“It’s probably not there now, and I don’t like how the sky’s looking,” Dakota countered him, while glancing up at the miserable, overcast sky.

 

“That’s England for you,” I quipped.

 

“Oh, Ireland’s not much different,” she began, “but it wasn’t forecast to be this grey.”

 

“You’d almost think the weather forecast could be wrong,” Zahid grunted, idly enough that I don’t think he really meant anything by it.

 

Adjusting her sweater a little, Dakota looked between the rest of us.

“I’m just hoping it doesn’t start raining before we-”

 

She didn’t finish her sentence, because the moment she said the word “raining”, drops began to descend upon us in a rampant flurry. A look of dismay splashed across her face in an instant.

 

“Wow, that was some next-level jinxing,” Bao commented.

 

“Let’s get going, quick!” Dakota insisted, hurrying us on quickly – we weren’t the only ones to have that idea, a good number of students all rushing away from the gates like insects disturbed by the log they were under being lifted. In due course, the five of us were dashing our usual route back to Dakota’s through coarse rain plummeting down as though the sky itself was crumbling onto us.

 

“Guys?”

 

“What is it, Bao?” Zahid moaned, likely assuming this would be something inane and unimportant.

 

“Is it better to run or walk in the rain?” he asked us with genuine curiosity.

 

“Good point…” I replied mid-dash.

 

“It’s got to be better to run!” Kendal contended from up ahead. “You’re faster so you’re not in the rain as long!”

 

“I was thinking that, but maybe you move through more rain if you run?” Bao mused.

 

“It doesn’t matter, we’re almost there now!” Dakota chimed in as we turned the final corner and sprinted towards our destination. Warmth and comfort were mere moments away… and homework, but still, even that seemed preferable to the torrent we were having to endure.

 

And then… it almost seemed as though we’d gone too far down the road, because Dakota’s place simply wasn’t there. A glance back the way we came… and it did look like we’d made it to the right spot.

 

“Something’s not right…” Dakota summarised, tense, stood almost eerily still.

 

“I don’t think the houses either side are right either…” Bao added.

 

I began looking around, paying closer attention to the houses around me.

“None of these houses are right… did we take a wrong turn somewhere…?”

 

“I don’t think so.”

Zahid strode back down the road, sizing up the houses.

“We went the same way as usual, I’m sure of it.”

 

I agreed with him… sure, we were running, but I was confident we’d taken the same route we always had. And while I didn’t know these particular streets very well, I really didn’t recognise any of these houses.

 

The rest of us followed after him, heading down the street and around the corner at brisk pace, and the road we’d come down before also didn’t really ring any bells.

 

“Maybe it was earlier…?” Kendal pondered. “Did we go the wrong way after the really long road…?”

 

“Don’t you think one of us would’ve noticed if we went the wrong way?” Zahid growled, nostrils flaring.

 

“This might be like the jungle in the park that time…”

I looked between my rain-soaked friends, judging their reactions: mostly various mixes of surprise and dread, though Zahid had his hand to his face in dismay.

 

“Well…” Bao spoke, then turned to the nearest house and walked up to its front door, ringing the doorbell and stepping back. The rest of us waited from the pavement, a few tantalising seconds to see what may or may not happen.

 

The door finally opened, unveiling a figure made entirely of water.

 

“Oh, err, hi…!”

Bao waved eagerly at the water-person.

“I dooooon’t suppose you know the way to Fairbrook Avenue…?”

 

“Do you really think you’re gonna get a straight answer out of it?” Kendal called out to him.

 

“Or any answer?” I added.

 

Of course, the entity said nothing, standing in the doorway looking at Bao (as much as something without eyes can look at anything).

 

“Welp, sorry for bothering you, have a nice day!” Bao chimed, giving another wave and then scurrying back to us.

 

“This is definitely a monster situation…” Dakota asserted, summoning her Lokon spear.

 

“Does that mean we attack the watery guy?” Kendal asked her as the rest of us teleported our weapons to-hand.

 

“I’m not sure… I don’t think we should just yet,” Dakota decided, looking at the water-person who remained where Bao had left them.

 

“Then what’s the plan?” I turned to her.

 

“We’ll try to get back to school first…”

With a blast of green, she donned her Painter gear, and the rest of us followed suit.

“If we can make it there, maybe we can work our way to mine…”

 

She began dashing through the heavy rain, retracing our steps; Bao, Kendal, Zahid and I ran after her, letting her lead us on the reverse route, the twists and turns she walked to school every day.

 

“Wait, guys guys guys guys-!”

I heard Bao splashing to a halt a few feet behind me, and did my best to stop too, turning to him. Zahid had stopped as well, and the lack of footsteps told me the girls had similarly halted.

“Look…”

He nonchalantly raised one of his Lokon blades up, and generated a glowing yellow umbrella over his head.

 

“… okay, that’s actually a good idea…” Zahid muttered, genuinely impressed.

 

It shouldn’t surprise you that we made the rest of our journey with Lokon-construct umbrellas over our heads.

 

After a few minutes of running through unfamiliar streets, we found ourselves… at another regular suburban road, with no sign of our school. The layout of the road wasn’t even very similar, to boot.

 

“Now what do we do…?” Kendal asked, her volume raised a little to speak over the sound of the tropical rainfall we were now enduring.

 

“I don’t know…”

Dakota shut her eyes tight, trying to think.

 

“Alex said this is like the jungle from before,” Bao spoke up, “so maybe there’s… like… a big house we have to find, like the big tree there?”

 

“You really want to spend hours wandering around this massive maze when it’s pissing it down?” Zahid scowled at him.

 

“I don’t want to, but I don’t think we have a choice…”

 

“What if it’s not a big house, though?” I brought up. “We don’t even know what to look for. We could miss it and spend days just walking around.”

 

“I’m gonna try something…”

Kendal dispelled her umbrella, and charged up a thick arrow in her bow, pointing it to the puddle-strewn ground. A pedal popped out on either side of the arrow, and she placed a foot on one of them, while pulling back the string of the bow.

 

“Is… that a pogo stick…?” I asked, and got my answer when she proceeded to fire herself some 50 feet into the air, the pogo stick-arrow remaining in the ground all the while.

 

“‘Kendal died on the way back to her home planet’,” Bao joked dryly as we watched her hang momentarily in mid-air. She managed to revolve almost 360 degrees before descending back down, launching another arrow which unfurled into some kind of inflatable crash mat for her to land on.

 

“So was that just an attempt at doing something rad, or…?” Zahid trailed off while she got back to her feet.

 

“A little, but I wanted to try and see the area,” she smiled gently. “It’s literally just streets all around. No landmarks or anything I could recognise.”

While she said that, she generated a new umbrella for herself, the pogo arrow and crash mat dissipating.

 

“Great…” I huffed.

 

Dakota stepped forward, grimacing a little but visibly fully in leader mode.

“The entire area has been transformed. The stretch we’ve walked has the same route as the journey from school to mine, but all the houses are different. There’s nothing else we recognise, at least that Kendal could see. Weird watery people are in at least one house. We don’t know what the heart of all of this is and there’s no obvious answer.”

 

“Yeah, we’re pretty screwed,” Bao nodded.

 

“We’re gonna look around to try and understand what’s going on better. There has to be some way out, we just need to figure it out.”

She slammed the base of her spear into the ground, spawning a large green spire that towered above us.

“I’ll leave this here so we can find our way back.”

 

“We really are going to wander around this fucking maze?” Zahid sneered.

 

“If you have a better idea, then we’ll do that,” Dakota glared back.

 

“I don’t, but…”

He exhaled heavily, head hanging with a loose shake of defeat.

“Fine. Fuck me…”

 

“Sorry I’m being tense,” our leader continued, “I’m just frustrated by all of this.”

 

“Is this another not-liking-to-lose thing…?” Bao asked while spinning his umbrella slowly.

 

“No…” she pouted a touch. “I don’t want to spend the rest of the day here. We have to eat. And do homework.”

 

“Mhm…” Kendal murmured at that.

 

“Err… guys…?”

There was a certain tension to Bao’s voice when he said that which had me immediately worried.

 

“What now…?” Zahid asked, sounding as concerned as I felt.

 

Bao didn’t have to say anything else. The rest of us all noticed what he’d already seen: the doors of every house on the street had opened, with the liquid occupants stood to attention in their doorways. They didn’t move, but they didn’t have to do anything more than they were doing if their intention was to intimidate us.

 

“Okay. Now we know they’re in more than one house,” Dakota observed. “Let’s go, quickly…”

 

The five of us set off hastily, down the street in the torrential rain, and for an unknown span of time – if I had to guess, it was close to two hours – we made our way around the endless suburbia that we’d found ourselves in. Through every street we crossed, the doors of each house opened up and the water-people within stood and watched us, never doing anything more and somehow seeming all the worse for it. And for every step, the rain kept falling on and on and on, puddles filling and growing and overflowing until the roads were like little rivers, bursting their banks and flooding the pavement too. It was a blessing that our Painter suits didn’t let the water in through our footwear, but the rain still managed to get to us even with our Lokon-generated umbrellas. My trousers were soaked, and I could only imagine how Kendal felt with her bare legs. Our pace slowed as we became wary of slipping in the rainwater.

 

With all of that, there were no signs of anything that could help us out of it all. For as out-of-the-ordinary as everything was, nothing in particular stood out as a clue or an indication of the core, the thing we needed to focus our efforts on to get out. At one point, we had to convince Kendal not to risk another pogo-jump to check our surroundings – we were far enough from the green spire for her to assume she’d be able to see a different view if she did – because we were afraid she’d wind up hurting herself (or worse) in the water.

 

The sky, heavy with grey clouds, was darkening further as the daylight slowly ebbed away behind them. As we trudged down our hundredth identikit street, watched as ever by a silent parade of water-people, Kendal roared out in anguish.

 

“This rain isn’t normal! It’s too much! It has to be part of all of this!”

She turned to us, her hair loosened by the rain and flailing with the movement of her head.

“This feels like the flood in Genesis! Should we be making an ark out of Lokonessence or something?!”

 

“It could just be a storm…” Bao reasoned, already sounding defeated – the thought crossed my mind that he was only playing Devil’s advocate.

 

“They would’ve known if a storm like this was coming!” Kendal cried out. “You can’t miss this! It’s part of the maze! Everything was fine until the rain started falling!”

 

Movement caught my attention from the corner of my eye: the water-people had begun stepping steadily out of their houses, treading slowly but surely down the paths to the pavement.

 

“I think she might be right,” I told my friends, “because the water-people are coming to celebrate…”

 

The others took notice at that point, and umbrellas were abandoned so that weapons could be raised.

 

“Boy, I hope they really do just want to celebrate…” Bao whimpered with blades at the ready.

 

As the liquid figures reached the flooded pavement, their bodies all, at once, collapsed into the water with a resounding splash.

 

“That’s not good…” Zahid spoke through gritted teeth.

 

The next couple of seconds were as tense as could be as we waited for what would come next.

 

Some forty-odd water-people rose up from the road and pavement in unison, surrounding the five of us.

 

“Okay, now we can attack them,” Dakota assured us.

 

With a flurry of colour, we leapt into action, doing our best not to slip as we moved forward and attacked. As you might expect, the blade of my Lokon sword cut through one, two, three, four monsters without making any real difference. Fill your sink with water and slash at it with a knife, see how much effect it has. (And be careful while using the knife.)

 

“How the hell do you fight water?!” Zahid yelled to the rest of us, past the sounds of watery combat and the ever-present rain.

 

“We don’t!” Kendal hollered back. “I have a better idea!”

 

I couldn’t see what she was doing, too focused on watching my step and trying to find a way to fight off the enemy: I generated a propeller at the end of my sword to try and disturb their forms, but that didn’t really do anything, and an attempt to kick one of them just sent my leg – and then the rest of me – tumbling through it and crashing into the flooded road.

 

The others didn’t seem to be having any more luck. Dakota and Zahid were both as aimless as me with their stabs and slashes, and Bao was aiming at the water-people’s legs in the apparent hopes of disrupting them.

 

Kendal, meanwhile, was manifesting the largest arrow I’d ever seen. Some of the water-people splashed back down into the rainwater and re-emerged around her, arms raised, seemingly looking to stop her.

 

I pointed the tip of my sword into the water and willed a wave forward, which was just enough to splash into the figures’ legs and destabilise them. Catching that, Dakota did the same with her spear, and sent the water-people tumbling down even as they attempted to reform.

 

“Keep Kendal covered!” she instructed us, and while I urged another wave forth, I watched Kendal squint up into the rain, her arrow amassing more and more raw pink. A pair of watery hands grabbed my throat, and I sent a wave backwards to disrupt the owner’s form before they could attempt to throttle me.

 

With the four of us doing our best to keep the water as volatile as possible, Kendal had enough time to charge up her arrow to her satisfaction: she fired it up into the heavens, and I watched it fly higher and higher until it was out of sight. Another couple of moments passed, and then a burst of pink tore its way through the dark clouds, purging the sky in an unstoppable wave that left only a handful of innocuous light clouds in the early-evening blue.

 

“I knew it!” was her victory cry, followed by a fist-pump into the air and a celebratory dance. All the while, the water-people collapsed yet again into the rainwater, which in turn seemed to simmer away at fast-forward speeds.

 

“If only we’d though of that earlier…” Zahid bemoaned, eyebrows lowered.

 

As I got to my feet from the water-free tarmac, I looked around to check if all of the front doors in the street were closed again… they were, and what’s more, they were the front doors to the houses in Dakota’s street.

 

“At least we’re home…” Dakota smiled, looking up at the house we all knew well. She dispelled her Painter gear (and, though I hadn’t looked out for it since everything had returned to normal, presumably the spire), and the rest of us did the same, finding ourselves in bone-dry school uniforms.

 

…

 

Once we’d settled down inside and had some food, Dakota had taken a considerate look at the time.

 

“We can do a little homework today,” she noted. “It’s a shame we lost so much time…”

 

“That’s fine, it’s not like any of us has anything big to do, we’ve only been back a couple of weeks,” Bao shrugged.

 

Kendal and I shared a loaded look, and I tried to urge her to speak up with nothing but my eyes while Dakota said “that’s true, yeah…”

 

“Actually…”

Kendal winced a little before continuing.

“I’ve been given this stupid essay to write…”

 

“Really?” Dakota asked, genuinely surprised.

 

“For Sports Science, yeah… talking about types of respiration…”

 

“Rough,” Zahid reviewed succinctly.

 

Dakota leant forward next to me, looking right at Kendal.

“I think the best thing to do with something like that is work on it bit-by-bit. If you start it now, you’ll have time to figure it out as you go. Work on it each day and you’ll get it done easily.”

 

“You sound like Miss Cranston…” Bao remarked beside her.

 

“Huh.”

A big smile was slowly spreading across Kendal’s face.

“Here I was thinking you were gonna make me do the whole thing today. Great advice, Dakota!”

 

I turned to Dakota to watch her blink in surprise and confusion. I know I’m head over heels for this girl and I only want what’s best for her, but that “what kind of monster do you think I am?” face was a hell of a picture.

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