ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN: The Chainer, III
by ******
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Pandora Anthropodrome
February 23, 2037
09:17 PM
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Lute was trying to do his homework in the most isolated spot of the most isolated pavilion at one of the most ridiculous family parties he’d ever been to when the guest of honor found him.
He was in a cream colored morning suit with a matching top hat. For some unfathomable reason, all male family members had also been ordered to carry decorative walking sticks. His stick was lying on the ground in front of the white folding chair he was sitting in. He tried to ignore the patter of clay on the pavilion roof. It was a strange kind of rain, created by men and women running faster than horses could have dreamed around the massive earthen track.
The clay rain was supposed to be part of the experience somehow, but it was just worrying him because what if the transparent barriers between them and the track edge gave out? What if some Brute speedster lost control of their powers and smashed through the tent, killing themselves and some of the people here?
On top of that, his homework sucked. He was memorizing the human morality clauses. Because they were in middle school, and it was time for them to prepare for the day when they would all be Avowed.
A lot of his classes were now Avowed-focused in a way that they hadn’t been before.
Imagine you are a speedster running to catch the train. Your top safe speed with your skills fully activated and your spell impressions aiding you is 198 km/hr. You are nineteen standard F-city blocks away. If the train is approaching the station at 50 km/hr and is only one block away…
Now Lute was slouching in his seat beside the crumbs of a sticky toffee pudding that had been decorated with an unappetizing amount of gold leaf, and here came the birthday girl.
It was garbage on top of garbage on top of a perfectly rotten day.
Quiet. If I’m just quiet and polite, it’ll be fine.
Biting his tongue had been working at school so far. Just the other day, someone had…sniffed him. In the hallway. One of the new kids who’d started attending this year so that they could have the pre-selection Avowed prep experience at a fancier middle school.
There were so many students like that, and he was much funnier to them than he was to the people he’d spent the past few years growing up with. And the fact that they found him so funny seemed to be making it more all right for some of the ones he had grown up with to…
Anyway, Lute knew what the sniffing joke was, but he’d pretended not to. So only a couple of people had laughed, and then it had died out. It was fine.
“There you are!” said Hazel. She was being trailed by a couple of her friendish people and a few of the weak cousins who were too far from Aulia’s graces to be bitter about her position in the way the more talented family members were.
The boys were in their top hats and morning suits. The girls were all in dresses and big hats. There was a lot of lace and ribbons going on.
Why on Earth would they come over here to bother me? Lute wondered. There is a live band. There are Avowed running around in circles to watch. She’s got a fireworks launch every fifteen minutes. I can’t even be in the top twenty most interesting things here.
“Hello, Hazel,” he said. “Happy birthday.”
“You too!” she said brightly. Turning to the others, she added, “Lute’s birthday was last month. He turned twelve. He didn’t have a party.”
“I didn’t want a party,” Lute muttered.
Then he berated himself because that wasn’t being quiet. That was arguing. He wouldn’t do it again.
If I’m just quiet, she’ll get bored.
Her friends were already bored. Hazel had led them here, but for three or four minutes, it seemed like she was just chatting with Lute. Or at Lute. And he couldn’t imagine what she was getting out of it.
For a moment, he actually had to entertain the fact that she might be trying to be nice to him. She was declaring to the world that she would be coming of age this year, which was just absurd. But maybe she was trying to be adult by coming to visit him in his lonely corner and make amends?
Then Hazel suddenly said, “Even though Lute didn’t have a party, he wanted Libra all to himself for his birthday. Aunt Jessica begged Grandmother to give it to him, so my family had to leave even though we were vacationing on it last month. I’ve been so busy on the Triplanets with our family’s friends that I needed a rest. But I didn’t mind giving up the yacht at all of course. Not to you Lute.”
Lute stared at her. “You got thrown off the yacht?”
For me?
Nobody had told him that. His mother had said they’d have his little get-together of favored adults at the apartment if Libra wasn’t available. He’d just assumed it had been available.
Lute’s birthday was January 22nd. Hazel said Libra was supposed to be her family’s for the month…had Jessica really gotten them kicked off a whole week early? Hugh, Cady, Corin, Orpheus, Hazel…all of them?
Well, maybe not Orpheus. He drifted around. There was no guarantee he was with the rest of them.
“We left,” Hazel said tightly. “For you. Because we understand you don’t have friends other than the crew and you have difficulties.”
They got kicked off. For me.
He smiled. Just a little.
“Grandma Aulia is modeling our family after some concepts she likes from Artonan history and culture,” Hazel said, taking off her wide-brimmed white hat and setting it on the table behind Lute. “So it all makes sense to me now. Hold on, let me perform a wordchain.”
Lute didn’t roll his eyes, but it took a lot of effort. “‘Hold on, let me perform a wordchain,’ was practically Hazel’s catchphrase. She whipped them out periodically to show off how many she knew.
She spoke in Artonan. Her hands flicked around. Lute assumed she was doing it correctly because she usually was.
When she was done, she sighed. “There. Much better. That one enhanced my ability to perceive certain things visually. It’s the fourteenth wordchain I’ve cast on my fourteenth birthday. For luck!”
“Wow! Fourteen!” said a guy who had to be three years older than the rest of them.
Hazel smiled at him.
Gross. Is he her boyfriend?
She looked back at Lute. “As I was saying, it all makes sense now. Why Grandma keeps you and Aunt Jessica with her all the time and why she does favors for you that she wouldn’t do for most of the family members… it’s because you’re the assistants.”
“My mom’s her assistant,” Lute said. “I’m just her grandson.”
Hazel was staring at his face with her somehow-enhanced eyes. “No, I mean, you’re like a wizard’s assistants. Both of you. The wizard class is supposed to protect the non-wizard class, and they take especially good care of their assistants. They give them a home to live in. And clothes to wear. And they give them gifts all the time.”
I have to argue after all.
“Hazel, that’s what families do, too. Grandma gives you clothes to wear and a yacht to live on, and she gives you gifts all the time. I don’t know everything about Artonan culture, but I’ve lived on Earth for a while. Sharing things with your relatives is normal.”
He was glad her attempt to get back at him for the yacht ousting was so pitiful.
“Yes, of course it is,” Hazel said. “But you’re different. Want to see?”
Suddenly, Lute sensed danger. Hazel did stupid things sometimes because she had no sense of… something important most people had. A sense of consequence maybe?
But she wasn’t stupid.
And she’d brought over witnesses. She was confident that she was right about this insane Artonan assistant thing. She thought Lute had gotten something that was supposed to be hers because of an alien version of…what was that phrase he’d heard his grandmother say a couple of times?
Beatnik? No, that wasn’t it. That was just a random memory of Aulia resurfacing.
Noblesse oblige, he thought. That one.
“Hazel, I’m doing my homework.”
He tried not to let his nerves show. They must have anyway.
“Never mind.” The corners of Hazel’s lips turned up. “I can tell you don’t want to hear this. The last time I told you the truth about what people said about you, you cried. That was wrong of me. Assistants are supposed to be protected from painful information.”
Lute stood.
“You’re cracked,” he spat. “Why can’t you leave me alone!? Roman barely notices I exist! Miyo asked me if I still played piano at Christmas! None of the important cousins care about me at all. You know who bothers me at school? It’s mostly not the future S-ranks, Hazel! You act like an F.”
This was an insult based entirely on Lute’s lived experience. Hazel probably didn’t even understand it, but it was true. Lexi Roberts had actually implied it over a year ago, when he doubted Kon’s assertion that Lute would be able to get along with the low ranks.
Lute was at the very bottom, and the people who were most aware of that were not the members of his class who were aiming for Apex. They’d already left him so far behind that he’d have had to scream in their faces to remind them he was still alive.
It was painful. But with the exception of those high rank children who had a specific grievance with his family, the kids who saw him and snickered about him and sniffed the whiff, were the ones who felt like they were being left behind, too.
Just like the cousins. Exactly like them.
The cousins who were always the most eager to start speaking languages he didn’t know and talking about things he’d never be able to do were the people who were hoping they’d end up as C’s and B’s.
Hazel was the Chosen One. She had no business being so obsessed with Lute’s business.
“You’re pathetic!” he said. “You’re so used to getting first you can’t stand to come in second for a single moment! The only reason you care about me at all is because I live with Grandma and you’re afraid that means she might take three seconds out of her month to look at me instead of you!”
“I’m pathetic!” Hazel scoffed. She looked around at her friends for support. “Me? I spend hours every day with Grandma Aulia. I spend days on the Triplanets every month. I don’t need to worry about you. I just pity you.”
“Your birthday party is the stupidest thing ever! The theme is weird. Morning suits are for daytime! You’ve got Brutes instead of horses. And you’re fourteen! Coming of Age parties are at fifteen. Were you soooo busy doing mysterious things on the Triplanets you forgot how to count or did you just want us all to lick your feet a few extra times?”
At this, a couple of her hangers-on did look uncomfortable.
“I might be chosen at fourteen,” Hazel said, running her hands over the sides of her white lace dress. “If I am, this will be my only chance to have a Coming of Age party.”
Lute gave her a blank look.
“He’s a little bit right,” Cousin Uma said unexpectedly. She was wearing a peach dress with a big tulle flower on the hip. “My parents were saying the same thing on the way over here…”
Hazel rounded on her.
“They weren’t saying it mean! Like he just did. With the feet licking…they were just saying that nobody in the family has ever been a pre-fifteen selectee. Orpheus was the earliest, wasn’t he? Fifteen years, fifty-one days.”
“You don’t think I can beat Orpheus? He started dosing himself with potions the second he made it to the Triplanets! He’s going to get fired. Did you even know an Avowed could be fired?”
“You’re not getting picked at fourteen,” said Lute.
“It’s not unlikely I will be,” said Hazel, turning back to him. “Even Grandma says so.”
Her fake smile had dropped. Her confidence at being surrounded by her friends seemed to have faded, too. She looked peeved.
“The System hates making outliers,” Lute said. “That’s why they’re outliers. Only a few people get chosen before fifteen each year and some of them are usually U-types. You can’t count them. Everything about them is strange.”
“Hazel is unique,” the person who might have been a boyfriend said, glaring at Lute. “There’s nobody else like her on all of Anesidora. So there’s no reason to think she won’t be chosen at fourteen. The Gloom was selected at fourteen years, two hundred eighty-seven days. Rime was chosen at fourteen years, three hundred days. Neha—”
Oh he’s one of those, Lute thought as he droned on. He didn’t just have the selection dates of hyperboles memorized; if he was bringing up Neha, he’d gone and memorized all the significant S’s on the island, too.
He wondered how long it would be before his classmates started doing this kind of thing.
“Sonde was picked at thirteen years, three hundred eleven days,” Hazel announced, apparently miffed that the boyfriend hadn’t included her genetic father.
He’s a U, though, thought Lute. And a massive outlier. That was kind of my point.
“He’s a U, though,” said Uma, as if she’s read Lute’s mind. “You can’t be a U, Hazel.”
Hazel’s expression turned even more irritated.
“I just came over here to say hello,” she ground out. “Since Lute didn’t even come greet me on my birthday. I’m done now. Let’s go.”
Amazing, thought Lute as she stalked away with her posse trailing after her. She even forgot to prove her point, whatever it was.
It looked like she was heading for the towering confection of silver and gold boxes that was the gift table. Everyone had been told to stick to certain wrapping guidelines for their presents so that they wouldn’t clash with the decor. Then she suddenly turned around, and leaving her friends behind, she stalked back toward Lute.
He watched her cautiously.
“My hat,” she muttered, reaching over him to grab it. She perched it back on top of her head. “You’re such a spoiled brat. You can’t even let me enjoy my Coming of Age. And you’re so stupid you don’t know anything. I don’t know why I talk to you.”
Lute opened his mouth.
“Aunt Jessica will pick up whatever any other member of the family drops,” Hazel whispered in his ear. “My dad and mom said so, and I watched, and it’s true.”
He could tell she thought she was saying something awful to him, but…
“What does that mean?” he asked in spite of his own better judgment.
“Even when she’s not working. Even if there are servants around. If anyone else in the family makes a mess, she cleans it. Because she knows she’s the assistant. It’s not just her job. It’s what she is.”
Lute was cold all over. Maybe the under-table heaters had stopped working. “You think my mom’s not a family member because she tidies up. That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Watch. You’ll see.” She straightened again. The expression on her face smoothed. “And another thing—I wasn’t going to mention this one because it’s just awful, but…family members? We get slots with a rejuvenator. They’ve all been booked and contracted for the next several years. I asked Grandma Aulia to give my mom one, and she did. Six years from now. Your mom? She hasn’t ever had one. And she’s still not booked for one. Do you know why?”
Wait, thought Lute. Stop talking. Stop.
His head was spinning. He felt like he was going to faint.
“I bet you do. I bet you have noticed. Family members—if they’re even a tiny bit important to Grandma—get to stay young. That’s half the reason other people hate us. Because we take up tons of slots with the Healers who have the rejuve talents.” Hazel exhaled sharply through her nose. “You and Jessica get lots of things for being the family’s assistants. But you don’t get that. Because there’s not enough of it to go around. And…well…it doesn’t really hurt the Velra line, does it? If your mom gets too old to make more kids like you.”
Lute was too overwhelmed to speak. There was no retort.
He watched Hazel leave in a daze. The band was playing a mambo song suddenly. Most of the family, friends, and random Aulia-invited guests were cheering on their favorite Brutes as they lapped the track again.
Clay spattered onto the pavilion roof.
Hazel walked straight over to Cousin Katsuro, one of Aimi’s brothers. He was talking to Jessica and drinking a glass of the imitation champagne that tasted so terrible Lute couldn’t imagine the real stuff was anything like it.
Hazel bumped into his arm. The glass tumbled from his hand into the grass. Maybe he would have bent down to pick it up himself, but before he could, Lute’s mother dove for it. They said something to each other. She patted Katsuro on the arm. She nodded to Hazel. Then she hurried over to the mocktail bar to fetch him another drink.
Hazel turned around, looked back at Lute, and smiled.
“I ran away from the Royal Ascot party,” Lute said casually. “For some reason, I left my homework behind and took two puddings with me instead.”
Once again, Alden had no idea what to say. The remains of the trail mix was spread on the table between them. They’d eaten out all the dark chocolate and nuts, and now there were a bunch of raisins left.
“The sticky toffee ones covered in all that gold leaf,” Lute added. “They were individual serving sizes. I don’t even remember going to pick them up. One minute, I was in my chair watching Hazel smile at me and the next I was on a train, holding two puddings on these little gold plates.”
“I wonder if I wanted to hit her with them?” he mused. “Maybe I grabbed the puddings, planning to smash them into her face in front of two hundred people and a band playing Latin music, but then I just left instead. I ended up at Cyril’s place. I told him I’d brought the pudding for him.
“Of course, she got a second Coming of Age party the next year.”
What was the theme for that one? Alden wondered.
“I can’t believe people memorize exactly how old other Avowed were when they got selected,” he said. “Down to the day.”
“Really? To me it feels like a natural extension of everything else. The soon-to-be-super lunacy that takes people over as their big birthdays approach is something to behold when you think it doesn’t apply to you at all.” Lute crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back. “By seventh grade, I was starting to hate everything about it so much. On this side of it, I can see that I was unreasonable in some ways. A lot of what upset me was just…unavoidable for everyone. But after an entire year of people ignoring me, teasing me, or talking endlessly about all the cool things in their lives and their futures that I thought I couldn’t take part in, I was done with the whole country. I wanted it to vanish like Atlantis.
“I did get an early audition with the youth orchestra in sixth grade, though. I was so tired of waiting, I went and asked, and it turned out they weren’t that serious about the age limit. It was just like, ‘Yeah, sure. Come on. Whatever.’”
He pursed his lips. “Anesidora sucks that way. For someone like I was. Teenagers tend not to have really serious hobbies unrelated to their future dream class. And in a lot of cases, the way people practice for those dream classes is different from how a non-Avowed would practice for the nearest equivalent. So there really wasn’t anything for someone my age who wanted to get to the next level as a musician. I just had to stick with tutors.”
“People who want to be instrument Meisters don’t study music?” Alden asked.
“They study music,” Lute said. “But they’re encouraged to try different types of instrument instead of focusing too much on one. Youth orchestra is really just for them to see if they like playing in a group. The thing is, even if they know what subclass they want, there’s no guarantee that the System will offer something similar, or that their families will be able to get it for them. And musical instrument Meisters aren’t particularly common either. So the teachers and directors try to make sure they’re falling in love with music and the lifestyle of an Avowed musician, but they discourage them from getting too into any one thing. They want them to play around and get ideas for lots of different futures. It makes sense.”
He raised an eyebrow then added, “It also means most of them are kind of terrible before they get chosen. And afterward they don’t…have quite the right mindset in my opinion.”
“You’re saying that instrument Meisters don’t have the right mindset for being musicians.” Alden grinned at him.
“All right. I’m extremely snobby about this,” Lute said. “I admit it. And my snobbishness is actually why I decided I wouldn’t mind being friendly with Lexi around the same time. He was one of the only people in our entire school other than me who had an artistic hobby he was actually devoted to instead of just killing time with.”
“The ballet stuff?”
Lute nodded. “It’s just his personality, I think. He can’t stand to half-ass whatever he starts. If his parents had given him a hockey stick or a paintbrush when he was little, he’d have done those things instead. But they were dancers, so they put him in dance classes, and that’s what he turned all of his perfectionism toward while he was waiting for what came next.”
“Is he talented?”
“I’m a musician, not a dancer. But he was a lot better than the other kids were. I heard he was dancing with a community ballet of adults a little last year…Avowed adults. I’m sure they were way more casual and nothing like his parents’ company, but that still had to be next level.”
“And then he just quit,” said Alden.
“To spend more time with his whip,” Lute agreed. “I mean…of course he did. You can only be a perfectionist in so many different directions at once, and the hero program was always his goal. Is he good with it in gym?”
“I think he is.” It wasn’t easy for Alden to tell because he had no idea how difficult Writher might be to use. When Lexi practiced picking up small objects with it in the apartment, he had a tendency to cut them in half instead of lifting them. “He seems really good at changing its length, phasing it, and slicing. I think he might be having trouble with aiming the tip and controlling its general danger level? But that still seems impressive to me. He’s only had it a few months.”
“I knew he was going to pick Meister, but I still can’t believe he chose to have an Artonan chain whip linked to his brain. That was kind of ballsy. I pictured him with something much more traditional. Like a sword.”
“My class at selection was Meister.”
Lute looked startled. “How did you end up with Chainer, then?”
“I traded into it.”
“Ha!” said Lute. “That means Corin’s office screwed up! They should have been glued to the class trade system. Or it was luckier for you to hand deliver it to them for some reason? Or someone whose family hated mine had it, and they would never have sold it to us. But they didn’t want to force their kid to take it either. In that case, you’d think they would sell it to someone else who hated us, though.”
Alden had thought about Andrzej a bit since coming to Celena North. Lute’s comment just cemented his opinion. “I assume the person who gave it to me was offloading it before their family found out they had been chosen. I think they were afraid they would be forced to take it themselves if someone knew.”
“Ooo…a clan of extreme Velra dislikers then? Those are fun. They came out of the woodwork when I was in seventh grade and all their offspring turned extra monstrous for a while.”
“Why then?”
Lute’s eye shot skyward. “Aulia ran for re-election. You wouldn’t think it would be that bad since she was on the council for ages. You’d think they’d have gotten used to her, right? But no. They dug up old family news and pretended it was just as shocking as the day it happened. About halfway through the year I tried to quit, actually.”
“School?”
“I asked for private instruction, like I’d had when I was little. Like almost all the Velra kids get. It had gotten to the point where I thought I could withstand my relatives better than some of my classmates…total reversal, I know.” He stopped leaning and let the legs of his chair hit the floor with a clack. “Jessica said no. She wanted me to stay in school.”
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Nilama Paragon Academy
July 19, 2038
7:46 AM
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The wind was freezing, and the sky was still dark as Lute climbed the steps up to the front doors of the middle school building.
I can’t believe I’m here. I can’t believe I’m doing this, he thought, as he clutched at his scarf with a gloved hand and stared down at his shoes. I can’t believe I announced I was leaving like some kind of drama lord on Friday. Why didn’t I just stay quiet?
It was in his second science class of the day. Biology. That one went off the rails a lot, and the teacher always let it go too far before he stepped in. He was a brownnose who always wanted to pick the right side, and he could never figure out which of his illustrious young Avowed to suck up to at any given moment.
Things had to explode before he said some tepid thing like, “Now quiet down, everyone. We’re all friends here.”
Why didn’t I just stay quiet? Wasn’t the plan to stay quiet?
The door handle felt icy even through his glove. He pulled it open and headed down the hall, trying to hide behind his scarf.
They’d called his mother a mule.
Declan was a terrible comedian who couldn’t even make his jokes work without a minute-long explanation in follow up, but still…still…
You know how horses and donkeys make mules? And mules are barren? Well maybe if a human and an Artonan make a mule, the mule can’t ever do magic!
The Lutes-mom-is-half-Artonan bullshit had been all over the school since before the election. The votes had been cast now. Aulia had won. Why wasn’t it going away?
We used to be friends. He came to my sleepovers. Mom was nice to him.
Lute didn’t understand what was so enthralling about the half-Artonan rumors anyway. There were other people who had similar features. There were people who begged the System or their surgeons for similar features.
Everyone knew alien-human hybrids weren’t a thing.
We were in a biology classroom surrounded by books and computers that said they weren’t a thing.
Lute had snapped. He’d stood up and told the whole classroom full of his peers not to expect him back on Monday.
So long, you psychos. I hate you all, and I’m looking forward to never seeing a single one of you again.
He’d been one hundred percent confident that his mom would let him quit school if he told her he was being bullied. It wasn’t like they couldn’t afford tutors for him. It wasn’t like he’d get a worse education at home. He’d get a better one.
The classes at Paragon were excellent. For most of the people here. But now that they were older, so much of the day was focused on the Triplanets, the Contract, System theory, superhuman history. At home, with his own program, he could skip all of that pre-Avowed crap and focus on things people learned in the real world. A literature class would be cool. Paragon didn’t even have those.
He’d been so certain, he’d cleaned out his locker. Now he was trudging toward it with a loaded backpack. To fill it back up again.
If Anesidora wasn’t an island, he would already have run away.
He tried not to meet anyone’s eyes as he hastily shoved everything back into the locker.
“Uh…good morning, Lute.”
Konstantin. Two lockers over.
He’d never said a single cruel thing to Lute. He never would. It just wasn’t his personality. He’d even tell people to knock it off, sometimes, if they said something completely awful by his standards. A lot like Vandy. A lot like Tuyet. A lot like a lot of nice people who didn’t want to see something too bad happen right in front of them…
But it ended there.
Kon had friends over all the time. He put together groups to go hang out at Rosa Grove. Sometimes Declan Gao was in those groups.
Lute never was.
“Good morning,” said Lute.
In classes, he was quiet. At lunch, he sat alone.
He made it through another week.
And another.
One more.
They had an ongoing pen pal assignment with students in Canada. Lute’s Canadian was depressed that she was Lute’s Canadian. All the other people in her class got to have video calls and send emails to future Avowed.
The instructor announced that they would start rotating pen pals.
Everyone knew why.
“Honestly,” said Carlotta. “You knew what she wanted to hear. Why didn’t you just lie and say you were one of us? The rest of us were having fun getting to know people and now we have to swap!”
“She doesn’t mean it like that,” said Haoyu. “It might be fun to swap.”
“I did mean it like that,” she said. She stalked away.
“Well,” Haoyu said, sounding uncomfortable. “Her older sister just got D. She’s stressed out.”
“Yes, it must be so stressful for her,” said Lute, loud enough for everyone in the vicinity to hear him. “Just imagine how horrible it must be to get D when you’re expecting C. I think I’d cry my eyes out every day if I wound up as a lowly D, don’t you?”
It wasn’t quite fair. He knew he was being a little bit of an asshole, too.
But he felt less like a ghost after he’d said what was on his mind.
Without meaning to, he kept doing it. A retort here. A waspish remark there. It didn’t feel like he was doing it very often at all.
Every minute of every day, someone was stabbing him. On purpose. Accidentally. And the ones who weren’t stabbing him were ignoring the ones who were ninety percent of the time.
Will the world really come to an end, he wondered, if I just stop trying so hard to stay out of everyone’s way?
He took Angela Aubergine to the school talent show. They each got three minutes. He played his song. The biology teacher was the one who was giving everyone the signal to get off stage. Lute looked at him, and he suddenly realized…that guy will wait ages before he walks out here and actually makes me move.
He kept playing.
There was no grand plan. He had no delusions that anyone would think he was cool for this. They didn’t even like the harp. They thought classical music was dull.
He could’ve played something popular to try to win a few of them over, but he didn’t. Arranging Handel’s Suite in D Minor for himself was his current project. He cared about it. He had to listen to what they cared about every second of every day.
They could listen to him for a change.
I am good at this, he thought as he plucked the strings with more vigor than Handel might have wanted. I have made myself good at this. You’re all so proud of what a magic spell is going to turn you into.
One day, I’m going to be the best harpist in the world. Maybe that’s not as spectacular as what you’ll all be. But at least I’m going to earn it for myself.
The stage lights were getting hot.
Lute Velra was getting angry.
When the biology teacher finally stomped onto the stage and tried to touch Angela, Lute quit. The auditorium was full of people giggling or staring at him with wide eyes.
“This is inappropriate behavior, Lute. You need to apologize to all of us.”
Oh, though Lute. I’ve actually made him mad. He didn’t look that mad when they were torturing me in class the other day.
“Why?” Lute asked.
“I think you know why! You took five times as long as students are allowed—”
“That’s because I’m five times as talented as the rest of them,” said Lute.
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