Daria stared at Jake for a second. "Fuck off," she uttered.
Jake laughed a little nervously. "I'm just saying you don't make friends as easily as...uh, some people."
Daria decided to ignore him and, instead, leaned between the two front seats. As Quinn fiddled with the radio and Jake blathered on, Daria uncapped the black permanent marker and wrote 'WHORE' on Quinn's forehead. Quinn acted as if she did not notice.
Jake pulled up to the front of the school and Quinn hopped out of the car. Daria hopped out after her.
"Hi! You're cool. What's your name?" a pig-tailed girl asked. Daria approached the girl from the front and yanked on the pigtails as hard as she could. No reaction.
"Quinn Morgendorffer," her sister replied.
"Cool name," another girl complimented. Daria walked over and full-on punched her in the nose. The three fashion fiends walked together into the school, blood flowing freely down Sandi Griffin's face.
She turned back to see Jake talking to where he expected Daria to be, and shook her head.
XXXX
"Now, Dora, let's see if you can make up a story as vivid as your sister's," Dr. Manson asked.
"My name is Satan," Daria replied. "You will address me as such, mortal."
"I'm sorry...Daria. What do you see in this picture, Dara?"
"I see Ms. Li's severed head being used as a urinal by the football team. I see me running around with a fire axe, driving it into the skull of every child I can find. I see the world on fire. I see death within me."
"Uh, there aren't any ponies. It's two people." Dr. Manson completely ignored Daria. Daria simply remained silent for a moment, then the doctor began talking again. "That's a different test, dear. In this test, they're people, and you tell me what they're discussing."
Daria stuck her hand into her shirt and made armpit farting noises.
XXXX
"Perhaps you feel it's UNFAIR to be asked a question on your first day of class," Mr. DeMartino sneered.
"I feel it's unfair to be stuck in a goddamn time loop where the whole goddamn world except me acting like a goddamned robot, every one of their actions being a result of a pre-programmed script."
"Daria, can you concisely and unemotionally sum up for us the doctrine of Manifest Destiny?"
She sighed and stood up. "Manifest Destiny was a slogan popular in the 1840s, blah blah blah, et cetera and so forth, Viet Cong war." She walked over to Mr. DeMartino, grabbed his head, and pulled it down between her breasts.
"Very good, Daria. Almost...suspiciously good." Which is what he would have said had his face not been muffled by Daria's breasts.
XXXX
"What about you, Daria? How was your first day?" Jake asked.
"I put boogers in all your food," she informed everyone at the table. "Not my boogers, either. I took the boogers right out of your noses and put them in your food. You're eating your own boogers right now."
"That's great"! Jake replied. Daria just walked away from the dinner table as they continued their discussion without her. She took the phone off its base and replaced it with a banana. As sight gags go, it was pretty weak watching Helen answer it, but Daria had pretty much abandoned intelligent humor after her first few lifetimes. After Helen got done extracting the promise of minimal effort on her part from the fruit, she hung up and marched into the kitchen to tell Daria she would be taking a special class blah blah blah it was so damned BORING. So Daria plugged up the drain in the sink, turned the water on full blast, and swiped the keys to the SUV. She felt like being out of the house tonight - and it's not like she would miss anything new.
XXXX
Daria couldn't count the number of times she had sat through Mr. O'Neill's introductory lecture to the self-esteem course. Of course, she hadn't always superglued his mouth shut the night beforehand, so as to mute his drivel. She spent most of the class just staring at Jane. She may have taken her turn as a killer for a great many of her lifetimes (even in this one, Mr. O'Neill would probably starve to death in a few weeks if his mouth didn't become unsealed), but she had never allowed Jane to die.
"I miss you, Jane," she said, hoarse with emotion.
"He doesn't know what it means," she replied to the spot where Daria was supposed to sit. "He's got the speech memorized. Just enjoy the nice man's soothing voice."
Daria couldn't take it any more. She had found, through heavy experimentation, that the fastest way to end her own life and restart the cycle prematurely was to jam her thumbs through her eyeballs and into the brain as fast as she could push her arms. So she did so.
XXXX
She just ignored everything this time around, walking past all the students and teachers going about their normal routine like they did every other lifetime. She realized she was in a funk, and it usually took a few dozen suicides before she snapped out of one. Sometimes, Daria wished she could go incurably insane, but no amount of torment succeeded. Lobotomizing herself (when it didn't outright kill her) only worked until she starved to death and was returned to the start with a new, intact brain; getting infected with a brain-damaging disease like rabies worked the same way.
She decided to spend some more time with Jane, and so headed to Ms. Defoe's classroom (which Jane had this period). She recalled Jane had been painting a picture of an orange with a face, its expression mid-scream as somebody was cutting into it. She entered the room, watched Jane paint an orange with a face screaming as somebody cut into it for all of five minutes, declared "Oh fuck it all" and marched over to Ms. Defoe's desk, where she opened the middle drawer on the left, removed the box cutter inside, and slit her throat open without hesitation.
Something changed.
Jane glanced over at the desk from her easel, and her expression changed into one of horror. "OH MY GOD!" she screamed. "Mrs. Defoe! That girl is bleeding!" She dropped her paintbrush and rushed over to Daria, who was now slumped down in front of the desk.
With the last of her strength, she looked up at Jane's face, and her jaw dropped open in surprise. She lifted one bloody hand up to caress Jane's cheek. "Jane..." she gasped, then fell still.
Tears openly streaming down her face, she turned to see Ms. Defoe...doing nothing at all. She was just going from easel to easel, giving some students a few pointers on their pieces. She rushed over to her teacher, grabbed her arm, and began jerking her to the blood-soaked corpse in front of her desk. "Ms. Defoe! Why aren't you doing anything?" Jane screamed.
The art teacher simply turned to an easel that wasn't there, frowned, and said, "I wish you wouldn't paint such disturbing themes, Jane." And she walked over the corpse like it wasn't even there.
"What's HAPPENING?" Jane shouted to the heavens. She got no response.
XXXXXXXXXX
This was sitting half-finished on my HD for a few weeks before LSauchelli proposed the Time Shift IC, in which Daria gets caught in a time loop dealie from birth until high school graduation, which inspired me to finish this chapter up.
You can already tell the 'rules' are somewhat different from, well, pretty much any time loop fiction I've seen, at least. Here they are, if you're confused:
1. Daria is in a time loop which begins right at the start of the series (Esteemsters) and ends at the end of the series (Is It Fall Yet).
2. Like in Groundhog Day, she can kill herself to go back to the start of the cycle.
3. Everybody's actions are 'scripted', that is, they behave as they normally would, no matter how Daria behaves. (This can be taken to extremes, i.e. Daria could kill a person and other people would still behave as if they were alive and interact/converse with them, etc). The 'actors' will also behave as if the props they interact with are actually there, whether or not they actually are. (If Daria takes a car and parks it somewhere else, its owner will 'get in' to thin air, and 'drive around' while sitting immobile in their driveway).
That last rule is the most obvious divergence from traditional time loop fiction. I do hope it's not too unpalatable. It also is where the name of the fic is derived from - Daria is the only person whose actions are 'unscripted', after all.
To be honest, I've no idea where I'll end up going with this. I could write maybe one more chapter with the material I've got in my head. Maybe I'll leave it open-ended and have other people contribute stuff to it!