Yeah
The teacher of Nicholas's ninth grade English was Miss Staddlemeyer, a young teacher with long, brown hair. She was a new teacher, and, even now in her second year of teaching, did not seem to have a secure handle on her class. She was not very organized. Papers resided on her desk in a natural order which Nicholas likened to the configuration of shedding dog hair. At the beginning of the year, she had some form of organization, but gradually, conforming to the laws of entropy, her folders began to diverge. Her attendance files began to wander about like druid nomads. Her curriculum was like water that fell from her person. One often could find her by following the stream of fallen papers.
She cleared her throat. "Are you having trouble, Nicholas?" she asked, reluctantly breaking the crystalline silence of her small classroom. The students did not, however, look up to see what was the matter. They kept to their silent scribbling on improperly-printed grammatical exercise worksheets.
Nicholas stopped fiddling with the ionizer module box and sighed. "No ma'am."
She looked at him quizzically. "Have you got something on your shoulder?"
Nicholas thought for a moment. He took his left hand off of the ionizer. Did she not see it? Was it invisible to other people? Did they assume it was some sort of apparel?
So what would happen if he said no? Would she believe him? "Ah…no ma'am."
It took her a few seconds to register that the box on his shoulder was, in fact, not in existence. "Alright. Please continue your work."
"Yes ma'am."
The school's bell, which was not a bell at all, but rather a timed alarm which sounded out three tones over the intercom system when it was time to switch classes. Nicholas's next class was gym. Most people called it PE, for physical education, but Nicholas had yet to be educated in that class. It is not as if his class would actually teach him how to run a mile, nor what a push-up is. He had been privy to this information prior to his high school experience.
The classes spewed forth their students into the dim-lit halls as sponges squeezed of their liquid contents. Nicholas walked down A hall, through the science hall, crossed the cafeteria, and entered the gymnasium.
"Hey, Nick," said a voice he knew as he entered the double-doors. It was Dirk Lanning. Dirk was "militarily inclined," as Nicholas once described him. He knew all about guns and tanks and army terms, a certain future-ROTC candidate.
"Nicholas. How's it going, Dirk?"
"Okay. It's Thursday, Nick-you know what that means."
"Weightroom day?"
"You got it. Gonna hit for triple digits this time?"
Nicholas thought about it. He wondered if Coach Pidget would let him use the mechanical arm enhancement he could ionize from his shoulder module for bench-press. "Hmm. I need to talk to Coach." The two went into the locker room to change out.
"Changing out" was the term used to refer to altering one's clothing before committing to an hour of exercise in order to keep one from smelling strongly the rest of the day. Nicholas observed that this was a pointless process, as he shared third period history class with a gym classmate, and could even detect locker room odor in his sixth period algebra class.
He noticed the speed and vigor with which all of these athletic young men removed their clothing. Nicholas was not a homophobe, but he did wonder why they all were so excited to strip down. Status? Possibly. Nicholas was a skinny white boy, and there was no changing that. He was not afraid to remove his clothes and reveal himself, but there was a level of derision aimed at his body type from the larger students.
Unfortunately, the only clothes that he had to perform exercise in were plaid shorts and a t-shirt that was his father's from his gym class. It read across the front in big red letters, "Scottish, please!" Nicholas had no idea what that meant. All he knew was that it was an awful juxtaposition with his plaid pants, but often, no one in gym class made that connection.
"Nice shorts," said Dirk, tying his shoes.
Nicholas rolled his eyes. He had left the atomic ionizer module on. He found the coach standing in front of the bleachers, where the changed-out people came to sit for role-call. Coach Pidget didn't exactly take role. It meant something different to him. If it meant calling out names of students and listening for a response and then checking off that name to some teachers, to Coach it meant simply putting some sort of mark with the pencil by the green squares with the names or something. Nicholas knew he would not be interrupting anything important, besides a focused, logical train of thought in Coach's mind. He felt little regret for this; snapping Coach's attention instantly from concentration would cause him to be in a sort of dazed state for a moment due to the focus alteration in his mind. He wouldn't yell anything at Nicholas, at least for the first few moments. If Nicholas could keep the conversation under thirty seconds, he would be able to get "yeah" to every question he asked.
"Coach?" He looked up from his clipboard, blinking.
"Yeah?"
"Is it okay if I use a technological limb-enhancement to facilitate my weight-lifting today?"
There was a pause. Was he surfacing from his confusion so early? Nicholas knew that if Coach had been ready for conversation, he would have already be yelling at him for his "dad-gum big words," like usual. He may have already incurred Coach's wrath.
"Yeah." Nicholas breathed a quick sigh of relief, and took his seat beside Dirk in the bleachers.
A couple of seconds later, Coach returned to normal. "Auuright! Weight-room!" he yelled. The eager ones jumped up, some of then football players. The crowd rose and like a tide washed down the bleachers, funneling into the aisles and down to the gym floor. Their current lead them to the weight room.
"Sko, sko!" shouted Coach, swinging around his stopwatch. He always carried that thing, and a whistle around his neck. He didn't like to talk in organized phrases, really. He made sure that all of his vowels were heard, but seemed to hold some superiority complex above consonants. They just weren't important enough to pronounce. Maybe he just didn't like them.
"I like consonants," said Nicholas to himself.
"Huh?" asked Dirk, opening the glass weight room door for Nicholas.
"Uh, nothing."
The weight room was designed more for public humiliation of the weak than normal workout centers were. One entire wall was made up of reinforced windows, almost a wall of glass. The window-wall faced the courtyard, so that during lunch once they had started allowing people to eat out there, not only were weight-lifters hungry, but the entire courtyard onlookers could watch.
"I'll spot you," said Dirk, pointing to a poorly padded bench.
"Gimme a sec." Nicholas cracked his knuckles. The other two times he had done this, it was sort of uncomfortable. He stretched out his right arm, swiveled it comfortably in the socket. He pushed the red button.
First there was a weak flash of yellow light, a circular ionization ring generating around Nicholas's shoulder. It formed a metallic-looking ring-plate. Another plate flipped out from that one, and another, until his forearm was covered in an impenetrable armored sleeve. A huge three-fingered gauntlet materialized over his hand and wrist, up to his elbow.
As soon as the materialization was complete, his torso immediately sank to his right. It was very weighty. "Coach say you could use that thing?"
"Yeah," said Nicholas, oblivious the irony of his reply.
"What does it do?"
Nicholas sighed; it would be a long explanation. "Well, it was designed by the Koryunae renegade legions for construction of their underground bases on Magdalo IV. The Deregoi inducted the device for use as capital punishment. You're supposed to use it to squeeze somebody's cranium. Pops like a melon."
"Cool!" said Dirk. A good old, non-firepower-related weapon. "How come you don't get in trouble for having a weapon at school?"
"Well, first off, it's not technically a weapon. The electric chair isn't a weapon. Neither is a guillotine. It's a device of capital punishment. Only thing is that it's portable. There are people who are in dire need of the correction of this appliance."
"I never looked at it that way."
"Yeah."
Nicholas had no problem lifting weights that day. He beat John Gardner's max twofold. At the end of the period, Coach hollered "Sgo!" Which meant, in this case, that it was time to change out. Actually, his verbal communications were all quite similar, and to tell them apart, one needed to observe his hand gestures. This time he waved his hand in a large arc, which translated into the common tongue spoken by Nicholas and Dirk, means literally, "I would appreciate it if you students would proceed to the locker room and revert to your normal apparel at this time." This could be simplified to "Time to change out," or even "Go change clothes" at bare minimum. It continually amazed Nicholas how the man could take what was at one point words of the English language, change it into a laconic one-syllable call, and still make himself understood.
Nicholas and Dirk were putting away a couple of the weights that had been left out by careless students. Nicholas clamped onto them with his SJ60 and set them gently on the rack. He attempted to re-ionize the mechanical arm and retract its contents into the void-generating space-time rift pocket by pressing the red button again.
It clicked and the box squealed a moment, vibrating gently on his arm like a pager. No ionization took place. "What's wrong?" asked Dirk, looking at Nicholas quizzically.
"I think this thing still has a glitch or two."
"Stuck?"
"Yeah." He jiggled it, and the sinking feeling of being trapped in the contraption began to creep over him.
"Want me to pull on it?"
"No, you can't really pull it off. Besides, there might be some kind of anti-theft programming. The Deregoi are very protective of ownership."
"We're gonna be late for class."
There was another high-pitched squeal and vibration from the arm. This time, it caught Coach's attention. "What is that?" he huffed. He approached Nicholas and put his hands on his hips, waiting for an explanation.
"Sorry about the noise, Coach, I'm working on it."
It beeped. Bee-deeeeeeeeeeeep. From Nicholas's microtransceiver around his neck, a distorted, fuzzy version of Asterisk's crisp voice came through. "Mercurius to Agent Evans. Subject acquired, Pidget, Edward Gerard."
"Oh no…." whispered Nicholas to himself.
"Charged with deviation from the Laws of Existence, multiple First Degree Clarity Violations, First Degree Irrationality, and various Second Degree Analytical Passivity. Subject has the right to follow through with Existential discipline without resistance. We read that SJ60 is locked on, carry out execution, over."
"What is that?!" said Dirk.
"They want me to squeeze Coach's head!"
"Why?"
"He broke the Deregoi Laws of Existence." He fingered the transceiver. "Agent Evans to Mercurius. This is my gym coach. Cannot comply, over."
"I copy that, Agent Evans. Overriding control. Just sit back and relax, over."
"No, that's not what-" the arm shot across the weight room, dragging Nicholas along with it. Coach leapt back out of the way and the massive gauntlet pierced one of the walls, shattering a big mirror set there for weight trainers to watch themselves work out. He squinted, covered his face with his hand from the shrapnel.
Coach Pidget swore out loud in his surprise. "Run, Coach!" shouted Nicholas. Coach did. The arm, with Nicholas attached, flew out after him, its wearer struggling to keep his footing.
Dirk ran out after them.
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Log:
This one is about my high school gym days. It's pretty darn close, too. Except for the mechanical arm thingy.
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