Timeline note: Set between Oozma Kappa's field trip and the Don't Scare the Teen event.
Note: I'm back! Sorry for the long absence, everyone, but November and December were difficult in real life. I'll try and answer everything overdue (PMs, review replies, chapters I promised to read, etc.) as soon as possible. Can't say anything definite about Fragments yet; sorry. (Keep an eye on Twitter's UntoldStoriesMU if you wanna stay informed.) Concerning the story you're about to read: I was trying to write something angsty and ended up with this. Not sure yet what my subconscious was trying to tell me.
Sulley did not want to like these guys. He really, really did not. Field trip resolutions aside, they were immature and clueless and embarrassing, and insolent in their insistence to call themselves a fraternity, and…
And damn, he would never have thought of this himself.
"He's gonna be angry!" Squishy breathed, but accepted the stack of folders anyway and watched as the twins snuck back up the stairs to get more and return some that were not needed anymore.
"He does have a sense of humor," Don pointed out amicably, opening one and scanning a couple of pages. "Here, Arthur, I found one of the sketches."
Art shot a quick glance at the page his friend had opened, then went back to drawing. "Ah, so this is how he marks training sites."
Sulley quietly chuckled to himself. He was not exactly being helpful, but for the first time in, er, ever – well, no, the first time since the library challenge a few days ago, really – he had realized that those guys worked quite well as a group, so he just let them do their stuff.
"Still asleep," Terri announced in his usual stage whisper which could probably be heard over at the Frat Row, too, and pushed their little candle away to make room for the final folder.
"Are you sure?" Squishy wailed quietly.
"Well, he shouldn't have taught us all that Stealth stuff," Terry added smugly. "Your mom woke up, though."
Oh. Sulley had temporarily forgotten about Mrs. Squibbles. "Let me guess. She was angry that we're staying up late without permission and is gonna chase us to our rooms with a broomstick in a few moments?"
Terry shrugged his side of the shoulders. "She offered to add a few suggestions, actually, but we told her we've got it. We're almost finished, anyway, right?"
"Then why did we even get that folder…" Terri grumbled to himself, but was largely ignored.
"Right," Art agreed with the older twin, adding a last pencil stroke in a flourish. "Looks just like his, huh?"
Six heads were bent over a stack of neatly written notes that lacked any and all of the scribbly nature that Art's handiwork usually demonstrated.
"Definitely," Sulley concluded.
"Good morning, everyone!" Mike called out over the little front garden as if he wanted to delight the neighbors with their training shenanigans, too, and clapped his hands to emphasize his, um, point. "As we all know, this is a Saturday, so that means less schoolwork and more time for training. I hope you all had a good night's rest."
He was met with three yawns, one Sulley forcing his mouth to stay closed because he was above that, one Squishy who had fallen asleep on Terri's lower shoulder, and one Art cartwheeling across the sidewalk.
"Great!" Mike continued brightly as if that was exactly what he had wanted. Well, at least it was probably what he had expected. They were often like this in the mornings even when they had not burned the midnight oil. To be fair, though, this was still just too new to them.
Mike casually shook Squishy awake in passing as he made for the front steps where he had placed his folder. They had had the sense to put their own, er, enhancements to the training schedule inside one of his folders instead of just exchanging the things.
"We've done a lot of screeches and roars for Don't Scare the Teen," Mike went on as he flipped through the pages, trying to find the current day, "but there's more to it than that. You need to distinguish between kids and teens in an instant, which means it's also about quick reactions, so I was thinking… ah, there it is." Smiling more to himself than to them, he traced "his" notes with his index finger as he read them aloud. "'Reflex enhancement by exposure. Repeated prompts to scare without prior warning whether a Scare is desirable in this context. Squishy will take a kid mask and a teen mask and…'"
He halted, his brow creasing in a slight frown.
Sulley bit his lip. He would not laugh. He would definitely not laugh at the very first thing. This was not even the good stuff yet.
"Something wrong, Mike?" Terry asked innocently, which was convenient because that meant no one else had to do it. He was probably the only one who was capable of not collapsing in a giggling fit at the question.
"I could've sworn I'd had Don marked down for…" Mike muttered but trailed off, then quickly cleared his throat and shook his head. "Never mind that. Squishy takes the masks, runs around the garden, and occasionally puts on one of them, and the others follow him. If you see the kid, scare it, but see the teen and you need to find cover."
"I can do that," Squishy acknowledged, then opened his mouth to, presumably, ask a question, but closed it again with a little choking noise, his lips pressed together, his eyes already watering from suppressed laughter.
Mike's frown deepened as he openly stared at their youngest.
"Scott, I thought you said you got rid of that cold," Don came to his rescue in an impressively calm tone.
"Yeah, sorry," Squishy rasped through a bout of fake coughs. "I thought I had."
Mike was still staring, but now it looked more concerned than anything. "We need everyone at the top of their game. Squishy, you're excused, go inside and get warmed u-…"
"It's not that bad!" Squishy blurted out immediately, his eyes wide in sudden dread. "I feel better already!"
Mike raised his brow at him. "Eager, aren't we? Fine, but no running around. Stay on the porch and practice your Scares instead."
Squishy sulked, but he did do as told. At least he would see the fun.
"Don," Mike continued, with the impatient air of someone who felt that too much time had been wasted already, "take the masks and play target."
He turned to the very end of the folder, frowned at it some more, then scrolled back to the first page. Finally, he took the folder by the spine with both hands and shook it violently, clearly hoping for something to fall out.
"Mike?" Art asked, looking a lot more confused than the rest of them. He had probably forgotten what they were doing.
"I put them in the folder!" Mike snapped to no one in particular, threw said folder to the ground in frustration, then picked it up again with no small amount of grumbling and started checking each page individually. After about a minute of this, during which he had, fortunately, not spared any glances at his teammates' facial expressions, he rolled his eye and snapped the folder shut to check the dates he had written onto the spine.
"That's today…" he muttered, and then tore his gaze from the still closed folder altogether. "You know what, we can practice our Scares some more."
Squishy squealed a little in delight and waddled down the steps to the front porch to rejoin the group.
Sulley tried not to look at the others as he recalled his, admittedly, still rather negligible Scaring knowledge. For a while, he feared that Mike would abandon the notes altogether, but their self-designated team captain kept the folder firmly in his hand as he paced in front of them and called out Scares he wanted them to do, only to correct most of them. And indeed, after a string of prompts that felt suspiciously longer than usual, Mike, rarely one for improvisation, was forced to go back to his pre-determined outline. "Right, next thing is… ah, there it is, laps around the blo-… on the quad." He blinked at the folder. "On the quad," he repeated.
"Well, you heard the guy," Terri snickered.
And so they got more than a few eyebrows and equivalent facial features raised by doing their laps on the quad. It probably said a lot about them that they were much more enthusiastic about training than usual today, and neither of those were good things.
Fortunately, Mike had forgotten about Squishy's supposed illness. Sulley would have felt a little guilty about leaving their youngest behind at home while the rest of the group got to watch Mike pause and frown and sputter as their drill inventions got ever more obscure, and to have all the fun they could possibly get out of it.
Or what counted as fun – Sulley could not remember whose idea the target practice with "borrowed" toilet paper rolls had been, although he had a distinct suspicion. But he rather enjoyed fishing abandoned junk out of the trash cans to build traps for random passers-by, as well as sneaking into the cafeteria and stealing several bags of flour to dump into the little stream near the library.
The mischief-makers had not been too organized in their approach, so neither one of them had seen all the exercises, save Art who had turned out the only one capable of imitating Mike's handwriting, which meant that they were surprising themselves as much as Mike sometimes, except that they knew what was going on. Most of what they were doing did not even have all that much to do with what they were practicing for, but then, Mike did have a tendency to be a bit dense, so all was good.
Scratch that. The guy was a blasted idiot at times.
"Terry, no!" Mike called to one of the upper floors of a building in a whisper – how was he doing that? – while abusing the folder as some sort of warning flag by waving it around. "Terri! You're trying to open the wrong window; Professor Knight's office is two to your right!"
"Gotcha," the twins chorused and clambered off to the adjacent windowsill.
By now, Sulley was not sure this had been a good idea. For some reason, watching Mike fumble was not quite as rewarding now that they were friendly with each other. Plus, the group had been through all the sensible suggestions by now and their victim had still not caught on to what was going on. Yeah, Mike was dense, but this was ridiculous.
Sulley considered breaking it off when the twins slipped and only avoided breaking their overlong necks by falling into a bed of ferns, but he had to hold that thought when the group had to make a rapid escape to avoid the gardener's wrath.
By the time the sun was setting and the group, minus Mike, were hanging from the Troll Bridge's balustrade near the entrance to the School of Aquatics, trying to not let go until Mike gave the signal, they generally agreed that this had been a bad idea. Sulley could see it in the way they were all throwing each other uncertain looks, all except for Art who had let go early in favor of chasing fish in the river.
"Hold on tight, guys!" Mike, never having lost his chipper mood despite everything, called from his vantage point – namely, the other side of the balustrade. "Every Scarer can use a strong grip!"
Apparently, Don did not have one, for his hands both slipped off their secure hold in a rather dramatic way, the near slow-motion one that was common in movies. In what looked like reflex, he tried sticking his tentacles to the side of the bridge to at least avoid getting wet, but only succeeded in grabbing on to Sulley's tail instead and, because of the sudden jerky motion, making him lose his hold as well. They landed in the river with a mighty splash, Sulley feeling his fur drifting in the current.
"Help me catch the horned, green one!" Art called over when they resurfaced, but as soon as Sulley had spotted the fish in question, unsure of why he even complied, it seemed to decide to make itself scarce when Squishy came sailing down to where they were all already paddling. That only left the twins on the balustrade, but they had four arms, so that was cheating, anyway.
"It's cold!" Squishy whimpered.
Sulley, too, was feeling rather miserable by now, but he dared not be quite as vocal about it. Instead, he grabbed Don's wrist to quickly pull himself out of the way as the twins finally had the decency to join their dripping, freezing teammates in the water so that Oozma Kappa was reunited again.
Well, almost. Mike was still up there. He had hopped onto the balustrade to regard his floating team, letting his feet dangle and loosely holding the folder with both hands. "You might want to think twice about this next time," he calmly called down to them.
Sulley stared. That was not possible.
"Er… about what?" Terri tried timidly.
"About this," Mike clarified, waving the folder with a warm smile, and something suddenly told Sulley that not all the more eyebrow-raising suggestions had come from Art. "Though I must admit that I marveled at the accuracy of the handwriting."
"Thank you!" Art called back up, flashing a toothy grin, and Sulley glared at him. He had known all the ideas! Could he not have warned… oh, wait, it was Art. Never mind.
Mike was still smiling. "It goes without saying that we're working overtime tomorrow to make up for today, right?"
When no one answered, Mike hopped off the balustrade again and turned around on the bridge one last time to wave at them with his free hand. "Have a nice swim, everyone." And with that, he skipped back in the direction of the front gate.
The rest of the Oozmas exchanged befuddled looks at the outcome of their little prank.
"I'd say Mike won that one," Terry deadpanned.
Yeah, he had. Sulley internally grumbled to himself. That little know-it-all had shown him up yet again, and… ah, wait, no, he was not supposed to be thinking like that any longer, he reminded himself. For some reason, that made the humiliation a bit easier to endure.
"Oh, well," Art mused, merrily waving at a nearby fish. "I thought the rubber tuning fork was a nice touch."
Suffice it to say, Mike switched to previously memorized training schedules from that day on. That, and his team had learned, if nothing else, to not mess with his planning. Ever.
Note: No joke – when I started writing this, it was just the first two paragraphs. I had no idea what they were about to do. Have to admit I like the outcome, though. Hope you did, too. Would love to hear if you guessed the ending.