This is part of a very very old unfinished manuscript, dating back to college creative writing classes, lol. The writing is atrocious, so please forgive that. ;) Posted instead of your regularly scheduled story due to Thanksgiving holiday business. Enjoy! :)
I drift to wakefullness to the sound of the alarm clock. The beeping stops when I flail at the snooze button.
I roll back over, wrapped in blankets. Comfortable. Fuzzy with sleep. But as I drift back into slumber, that one tiny corner of my brain that is awake realizes that I have been hitting snooze for nearly an hour. I sit up, fumble my glasses from the night stand, and slide them on.
I am definitely not a morning person.
Before I have time to collapse back to the pillow, I push back the blankets, swing my legs out of the futon, and stand. The hardwood floor is cold under my bare feet, and my nightgown has ridden up and twisted all around while I slept. I guess it cannot cope with my gradually slowing metabolism and increasing hip circumfrence. I hike it mostly back where it is supposed to be and lurch to the bathroom. The mirror shows frizzy morning hair and dark sleep rings under my eyes. Nnngh. I'll shower later. First, coffee. Cigarette.
I set course through the bedroom door and pass into the kitchen, all white walls and unpainted cabinets. The counter is bare as usual, except for the coffee pot and rice cooker. Mismatched dirty dishes fill one side of the sink.
Motoko sits in meditation atop the kitchen table, legs pulled under her and hands folded in her lap. Across her knees lies her plain wakazashi, the unpolished wooden hilt lacking a hand guard, the blade sheathed in a likewise unpolished wooden scabbard lacking any adornment other than a dark blue silken ribbon wrapped and tied around the center. Her knee-length black hair cascades over her shoulders and meanders about her ankles on the tabletop. Despite the length of her hair, it never seems to get in her way, though I do not understand how. I keep mine bobbed to about the bottom of my ears.
Motoko, unlike myself, is a morning person. I always find that fact somewhat irritating until I have woken up enough to realize that I am being stupid.
I paw through the cupboard looking for a coffee filter, find one, then immediately drop it into the sink, fortunately into the side without dirty dishes. Too early for motor skills. I stare into the sink for a few moments watching the beads of water dripping from the faucet. They soak into the otherwise pristine filter before I have the presence of mind to pick it up. My response to this is, "Nnngh. Dammit." Ahh yes, my monosyllabic pre-caffeine vocabulary limitation.
This mild expletitive has apparently disturbed Motoko's meditation. She watches me for a moment with a vaguely amused look, which irritates me even though it should not. She sketches a mock bow and winks. "Gaki-sama!"
Humor. It is still too early for me to appreciate it.
"Bleh," I respond.
Motoko gracefully slides from the table. "Gomennasi, Rizu-san."
"Urngh?" I ask.
"I would have made the coffee, but lost track of the time," she says in Japanese. She holds out a hand. "The filter, please."
"Urnnngh." I hand the coffee filter to her and flop down on a chair at the table.
Motoko quickly sets a pot brewing. It is a strange thing; the coffee always seems better when she makes it. She takes the chair next to mine and pulls her legs beneath her.
She says, again in Japanese, "I hope you had better luck tracking the Oni than I. I was out most of the night, and found nothing."
I take out a cigarette, then put it away without lighting it and rub my eyes.
"S'partment," I slur in English. Our mode of conversation drives our friends crazy. Maybe that's why we don't have many. She speaks perfectly good English, but for some reason conversation seems easier for both of us when we just use our native languages. Probably something about understanding the complicated things from context while listening and not having to stop to think about unusual words while speaking.
She raises her brows. "Hmm?"
I rise and cross to the counter, pull out the coffee pot before it has finished brewing and pour three-quarters of a cup of that nasty, bitter half-brew, top it off with water to cool it, and toss it down. Wince.
Sometimes Motoko talks about the Buddha and enlightenment and other things that I don't really understand. But I think enlightenment must be very much like the first cup of coffee in the morning. I sit for a moment savoring the feeling of my powers of cognition finally warming up. I push away the thought that it must be the placebo effect, as there is no way caffeine could be absorbed into the bloodstream that fast, short of intravenously. I remember a friend of mine, a nurse, telling me jokingly that he could get me a caffeine drip from the hospital. Hmm...
I am getting sidetracked. I blink at Motoko, grasping at the thread of the conversation.
Then I say, "The Weird followed it to that scummy student apartment complex on the corner of Griffin and Second, but I lost it as soon as it went in."
Motoko rubs her thumb across the smooth wooden hilt of her sword, almost -- hungrily? She's scary like that sometimes.
I take out a cigarette and light it. Motoko arches an eyebrow. "That is not good for you."
"No doubt." I grind the cigarette out in the ashtray among several others which are hardly smoked and take out a fresh one. This one I don't light, though. I just hold it in the corner of my mouth, inhaling through it.
I make a half-smile. "We really should get real jobs."
"As you say, there is no doubt."
I pour another cup of coffee and lean against the counter, sipping it. After a few moments Motoko says, "You teach at nine?"
"Er, damn." I am running late again. "Just a sec."
I hurry back to the bedroom and dig my usual daytime clothing from the closet: turtleneck, knee length skirt, and boots. I don't like trying to coordinate. Practicality over style, since I'm not much of a looker anyway. I clomp back to the kitchen and pour the rest of the coffee into a travel mug. A fourty-ounce travel mug.
Motoko has put her wakazashi inside a cardboard tube, the kind that art students are always carrying around, and is pressing the plastic cap onto the end. I pull my duster from the peg next to the door and shrug my way into it. Motoko opens the door that leads out to the landing. I walk out, she follows and closes the door behind me.
I realize that I have forgotten my purse. "Um, I think I left my keys inside."
"I have mine," Motoko replies. "No worries."
I nod and hurry down the stairs and out to the car. Some people call my car a classic. I call it a cantankerous, rusted out piece of junk. I only drive it because I cannot afford anything better.
The car is unlocked. The lock on the passenger side is broken, so I don't bother locking it anymore. I slide behind the wheel and Motoko takes the passenger seat. She presses her key chain into my hand. She doesn't drive, but I gave her my spare keys last year since I am always misplacing mine.
I pump the throttle a couple of times and turn the key. The engine coughs and sputters, then settles into that lopsided thrum that it makes. We leave. The gears grind a little as I shift through the low speeds.
I drop Motoko off at the campus library and wait, watching her go in. She walks so gracefully, like a breeze or a ripple on a pond.
But damn, why am I sitting here being pseudo-poetical when I'm late? I put the car into gear and pull away, realizing at the same time that I forgot to shower. Double damn.
Then something small, furry, and brownish-orange streaks out of the bushes next to the library and across the road in front of me. I slam on the brakes, causing the coffee to spill all over the seat as the engine to stalls. What the hell? A cat? Too big. Dog? Maybe.
Oh well, whatever. I set the coffee aright, start up the car, drive to the engineering building, park, and head to my class. No doubt my students are anxious to get started.
Or not. One of them is leaning against the railing outside, smoking. I bum a cigarette from him, since I left mine at home. It is a non-filter. Yuck. I smoke it anyway, even though I am running a few minutes late. They can wait, since all I have planned for today is a midterm review.
At this point, O humble reader, I imagine you want some background information, right? There was something mentioned in that composition class I had to take as an undergrad... Something along the lines of, 'too much expositional material is a Bad Thing.' Eh, whatever. I will just give you a quick sketch of Motoko and I.
My name is Roslyn Condottiere, but I go by my middle name, Elizabeth. No, I'm not french, but my great-great-grandfather was. I'm twenty-nine years old, dark brown hair, brown eyes. Average height. Slightly overweight. I completed a master's degree in computer science last spring and landed a job lecturing at the same school. Lucky? It doesn't pay much, but I'll only be here until Motoko's student visa expires. In my spare time, I enjoy reading, playing the piano and flute, and getting sucked into one or another of those stupid online games every few months. I'd play them more, but Motoko tires of them quickly and they're just not as much fun without her.
Oh, and I've been hunting demons since age twelve.
I met my -- friend, Motoko Yamaguchi, a few years ago in a calculus class. We were undergrads at the time, and for some reason I had to take two semesters of a foreign language to graduate. I had decided on Japanese, as it seemed suitably esoteric at the time. After studying math with me for a little while, Motoko offered to tutor me in her language. We became very close. I ended up taking seven semesters of Japanese, just because.
She is currently working on a doctorate in mathematics. She is one year, two months, and eleven days older than I, is quite athletic, and looks typically Japanese except for her unusually tall height and ankle-length hair. I don't know much about her family, other than the fact that they have been running some kind of dojo in Japan since time out of mind.
Motoko also hunts demons, though she calls them Gaki or Oni. I still can't really tell the difference between the two. A demon is a demon, if you ask me.
It is easy for gaki (Or is that gakis? gakii? Japanese doesn't really have any concept of plurality) to feed unnoticed in a college town. There is so much booze and so many drugs going around that the prey, even if they remember being attacked and live through it, chalk it up to drunkenness or hallucination. And the university covers up the worst incidents. It is bad press. Can't have enrollment falling because of some weird rumors, no-sir-ee.
Well, that's enough exposition for now, right? On with the story.
Attendance in my class is very sparse today. Review days are like that. I jump into a review of function pointers since so much of the class botched that question on the last quiz. The students who are still awake after a few minutes wear a look of puzzled boredom. I give up and switch topics, telling them that it will be on the midterm, though I have no intention of really testing them on it. I remember having the same trouble as an undergrad. It's one of those things that you have to learn through experience rather than in a classroom.
Just as I am starting on another subject, the door opens and a late student pads in. I keep talking. We're not supposed to stop class to hassle latecomers. I guess I can see why. It is their money (or their parent's more likely) that they are wasting, so whatever. When I started teaching I thought I could make the material interesting for everyone, or at least tolerable. That was a rude awakening. Abe Lincoln was right.
Another thing I cannot do well is to remember all (or even a few, really) of my student's names, aside from the irritating ones who always try to contest their grades. But I know the latecomer's name: Sarah. She has never tried to contest anything though. In fact, she is very quiet. I have never spoken a word to her. A good student, who gets very good grades. She is, as far as I can recall, the only one who answered the aforementioned quiz question correctly.
But something bothers me about her. Maybe it's that she is too pretty. Very light brown hair, lovely curls, and a perfectly proportioned face and body. Maybe just a touch of eastern Asian descent, but nothing really noticeable unless you look closely. Preternaturally pretty. But no, that is not the bothersome thing. It is that she is always very frightened of something. Terrified. Oh, she hides it quite well, but I can [i]feel[/i] it on the surface of her mind as the Weird wanders the room as I lecture. There is something else there too, but I cannot really describe it. Just a darkish sort of feeling. Not the malice that a gaki would exude. More like an illusory sort of grayness around the edges.
I put some code up on the overhead projector and give the class a few minutes to puzzle out what it is supposed to do. While they are working I watch Sarah through the Weird. Grayness. Fuzzy edges. I send a tendril of the Weird into her grayness. It passes through as if it were nothing but vociferous ether that those 18th and 19th century "scientific" texts talk about. Very bizarre. I try to attach the Weird to the edges of the grey fuzz and pull it away. Probably a bad idea.
Yes, definitely a bad idea.
Sarah's head snaps up and she stares straight at me, eyes wide with now unconcealed terror. I snap the Weird away, but for a split second I see through it. I see yellow behind her eyes, slit pupils hidden behind her irises. Orange flame behind that.
I pretend to glance around, watching the rest of the class. She continues staring at me, her schoolwork forgotten.
I turn to work the problem out on the board. When I turn back she is gone, only her books and papers left behind. But the door is next to me. I didn't see her use it. And the emergency exit in the back would have sounded an alarm.
Dammit. I've never had to hunt one of my students before. It is going to be a really long week, I can feel it already.
