Chapter 1
A/N: Woo-hoo. For the first time in my life I actually wrote a chapter of more than 500 words. Ah well. I hope you'll enjoy this lil' fanfic-o'-mine.
Friendly reminder to the fact English is not my native language, so please don't be rude about my grammar. Thank you. :) Please review.
"Guys..." Chet hopped around on his crab legs nervously, while keeping his eye focused on Johnny. "Is this legit?"
"Of course it is," Johnny said with that trademark grin of his. "Everyone is allowed to leave the campus at night. Absolutely, completely legit."
Not capable of understanding any kind of sarcasm, Chet turned around to look at the gate of the university to see if anyone else did the same, which was, obviously, not the case. When he turned around again, he saw his fellow ROR members were far ahead of him. He scuttled after them through the dark lane.
"Please explain why we're leaving once more?", he asked no one in particular.
Reggie suddenly seemed to loose his temper and turned around to face Chet.
"Don't you understand?" he snapped, "No, you don't, of course! You never do! All we want is to be the popular guys, the cool guys! And guess what? We don't live up to that anymore after the Scare Games! We don't even come close! We-" He turned around, obviously bottling up his anger.
"Look, Chet." Johnny lowered his pace and walked next to. "Losing the Scare games is like losing your face. People just... Never mind, that was a bad comparison. But we'll have to come up with something to regain popularity, so that other monsters don't see us as bad losers or anything. Understand that?"
Chet nodded. "But why do we go to the River's forest then? It's creepy there." Even the thought of entering the dark forest made him shiver. He had been straining to find an excuse to stay in the fraternity house, without any results.
Johnny sighed, keeping his annoyance hidden. "It's just... Nobody will be checking that area. It is a safe place to trade booze. Otherwise we'll never get that much before next week."
"Oh yeah," Chet said with a wide grin, showing off his few teeth, "the party! The big fat party!" He practically started jumping up and down at the thought and his fraternity brothers were happy nobody else was around.
The notorious forest was on a 30 minute's walk from the university campus, and it kind of separated the center of Monstropolis from the suburbs. It occupied about five square miles and it was totally consisting of tall evergreens, which blocked the sunlight during the day and the moonlight during the night, and that was exactly the reason why it had been a popular location for parties that were, well, too rough to be hosted by one of the fraternities or sororities at their houses. Those 'parties' often got out of hand, ending up with tons of punch-ups and monsters getting wasted. About a decade or so ago it had gone totally wrong; a campfire had caused a huge wildfire which had burnt about fourty per cent of the forest.
Ever since, any student gatherings, parties or not, had been forbidden by the local authorities, but they were unable to check whether this really happened. Still it only scarcely occured that a group of students would enter the forest, mainly because the still damaged forest was a real lugubrious place to be, especially at night.
The member of the ROR franterniry were everything except cowards, but even they had to admit you didn't walk through the forest in a happy mood, it just had something gloomy, something depressing about it. Nevertheless they went to it. They were giving a big party at their fraternity house next week, because they wanted some of their reputation back after losing the scare games. Nobody wanted to talk about those. It had been a month ago, and in that month they had lost a lot of their popularity. A whole lot. And an unwritten rule in college was 'parties aren't good unless they have a lot of booze'. They couldn't possibly buy enough before next week, that would be too expensive, so they had to make a deal with students from another university, Fear Tech. Johnny knew a couple of guys there, and they were more than happy to trade their drinks, as long as the ROR guys would pay. It would be a whole lot less than buying it in a store of course, but at both universties alcoholic beverages were forbidden, so they decided to meet here. Johnny just had to rely on the fact they would show up.
They had entered the forest. The moon seemed to play hide-and-seek behind the clouds, it shone for a few seconds, casting weird shadows between the trees, then disappeared behind thick layers of clouds, being hidden for a few minutes. Chet had to scuttle fast to keep up with the other guys. Johnny, holding a flashlight, kept a fast pace at the front, behind him walked Javier and Reggie, arguing about the football competitions. Chip kind of walked behind them, looking back to Chet every now and then, to make sure he wasn't left behind. Randall sped up, slowed down, disappeared, sped up again and made sure to remember which way they went. He was really nervous, but he didn't show it.
Chet, however, couldn't stop biting his lower lip and giggling. "H-how do we know the police aren't checking today? I mean, they never do, but..."
Johnny stopped, slightly looking over his shoulder. "We don't, that's how." He continued walking. The others followed hesitantly and were silent. Even the argument between Reggie and Javier had stopped.
Suddenly on their right the sound of quick footsteps over the ground sounded, somewhat muted by the fallen evergreen needles.
"What was that?" Chet asked in a tiny voice.
"Must've been Randall," Johnny said with a confident gesture into the direction of where the sound came from.
"What?" Randal appeared behind the group. "I was here all the time. Not kidding."
Chip swallowed thickly and Chet felt like peeing himself.
Johnny took advantage of the situation.
"Hey guys," he said, putting the flashlight under his face in the scary-storytelling way, "have you ever heard of the ghost of monstropolis?" The guys snickered a bit, but Chet didn't seem to catch it was just a joke. Reggie gave Javier a wink, then pointed at Chet.
"Yes, yes, I have," he shouted, and with a mean look on Chet he continued: "It loves to eat crabs, especially one-eyed crabs with a maroon exoskeleton. He will first stalk them and then-"
"WRAAH!" Exactly at that moment, Javier showed up behind Chet and roared.
Chet fainted.
The others laughed a bit forced, but Reggie and Javier really lost it. Chip helped Chet to get up. After a couple of minutes they had recovered from their laughter and the group decided to move on.
The further they walked, the more Randall felt like something was watching them. It was an uncomfortable experience and he tried to stay in thew middle of the group as much as possible.
Then the bushed on their right hand side moved. Johnny slowly turned his head to the right, then laughed. "Are you guys already scared?" he laughed. "Wait for this!" He turned the flashlight off and the darkness embraced them. The silence was incredibly loud. That sounded weird, Randall thought, but it happened more often. It was the kind of silence when you insulted someone with your friends around, and that person was standing right behind you, and you watched your friends all go silent with blank faces.
"See?" Johnny said, "No big d-"
Something fell out of a tree just in front of his feet and he gasped.
Two red eyes glowed up in the darkness and a loud hissing sounded, a figure seemed to be rising from the ground. Reggie took hold of Javier's legs, Chet felt like fainting again and Chip totally froze. Randall disappeared.
Johnny struggled to turn the flashlight on again, his fingers were shaking heavily, but he managed to push the switch and the white bundle of light blinded them all for a few seconds.
A white monster of medium height was standing there, holding their arms protectively in front of their eyes.
"Ey, ey, please turn that off." A rather high voice, most likely female, with a little growl at the end of the sentence.
"Why would I?" Johnny said, still recovering from this jumpscare and still being angry with himself from being scared.
"You don't want to make me force you, believe it."
Reggie laughed hysterically. "Haha! Yeah, you little scum, you can't even stand light! Show us!"
"As you wish." As she had spoken, she practically dove out of the circle of light with a 'swoosh'-like sound and within a second a figure with glowing red eyes threw itself on Johnny, trying to grab his flashlight.
"What the..." Johnny aimed the bundle of light at her, and she went back to the protective position again.
"Please," she said, though it sounded anything but polite, "I can't stand it."
"What are you doing in the forest?" Johnny asked. "Are you our contact? Do you have the booze?"
She slowly lowered her hands, revealing her face. She had a wide head with things sticking out on the sides like red feathers. Her body was white and somewhat plump, but that was just because she had a weird frame, she looked plump and fragile at the same time. She violently moved her tail over the ground in annoyance.
"Well?" Johnny repeated.
She squinted her red eyes, which were covered in glasses.
"I study. Can I?"
The group burst into hysterical laughter. Well, everyone except Randall, who was still invisible.
"You study at the campus," Chet said. She hissed at him, causing him to flinch. "Have you ever tried studying when your dorm is close to the frat houses with all those parties? Have you?"
"You never attend parties?" Reggie scoffed. "Nerd!"
"You call me a nerd," she said, squinting even more. "Okay, we'll see where you are in ten years!" She looked around nervously as she noticed that the ROR members had gathered around her.
Suddenly Javier grabbed her arms tightly with his four hands and Johnny laughed sadistically. "We'll see where you are after I have finished with you! Randall!"
The purple lizard appeared, awkwardly rubbing his hands together. "Yes?"
"Take this." Johnny handed him the flashlight. "Keep 'er shining at us."
He slowly approached the white monster, who struggled to break free from Javier's iron grip.
"Let me go!" she snarled, and when this didn't work, she started hissing, spitting and snapping, but that didn't help either.
She then focused her eye's on Randall's, who was clearly her last resort.
"Please." Her eyes were wide, her pupils extremely constricted, little dots in the middle of her bloodred iris. "Turn it off."
Randall was strangely fascinated by her, partly because she looked weird, partly because she studied up a tree at midnight.
But he just couldn't turn the flashlight off, he wanted to do it real bad, but he just couldn't. He didn't want to disobey Johnny's orders, risking to be forced to leave the fraternity. He just couldn't do it.
The girl growled as Johnny let his claws trail down her body. "Idiot. Lust-filled idiot."
"What?" He looked up, grinting his teeth in anger. "What did you say, creep?"
"Are you deaf? I said: you are a lust-filled idiot." she said.
Silence.
Randall disappeared in fear, still holding the flashlight. When somebody called Johnny an idiot... Well, he didn't know what would happen then, because nobody even thought of calling Johnny an idiot.
Johnny stepped forward as if he was about to slap her.
She hissed again, showing off her uneven teeth. "Okay, slap me. Just remember one thing, my skin is extremely sensitive and I will be all black and blue tomorrow. I think Dean Hardscrabble will love that."
The grey monster looked like he was about to slap her anyway, but then Chip grabbed his hand.
"C'mon Johnny, easy." he said in a low voice. "Don't do this. You know you won't do this. This is not you. Javier, release her."
The bug hesitated, then released the smaller monster, who attempted to dive into the darkness.
"No- nonono." Chip grabbed her tail. "You stay here. We talk this out."
"Talk this out," Reggie laughed, "have you ever heard something that idi-"
In his laughter, he stepped backwards, on one of Randall's feet (who was still invisible). Randall yelped and dropped the flashlight.
Swoosh. Everything went black and silent.
"You idiot!" Johnny shouted to Chip. "You screwed everything! She's going to bark everything around at campus!"
"She won't," Chip said. He remained very calm while Johnny raged at him.
"How do you know that?" Johnny asked.
Chip shrugged loosely. "She doesn't seem very sociable to me. Probably she has no friends whom she can tell about what happened. She's not in any sorority. Plus, if she tells the Dean, she'll have to explain what she was doing outside of her dorm after curfew. She won't bark around."
"You should've majored in psychology," Johnny snarled, then grabbed the flashlight from the ground.
"We're heading back."
"Wh-what?" Reggie shouted. "What about the booze, and the deal?"
Johnny scowled at him, and Reggie raised his hands as an apology.
The group of students left, allowing the forest to be silent darkness filled up every tiny space between every tree, every branch, every leaf, and the silence seemed to be directly attached to it. The only sounds were some of Reggie's idiotic laughs, far, far away... And the heartbreaking sobbing of a fragile white monster up a tree.