"This how-to stuff isn't in any history book."
-The Narrator, Fight Club
"What the hell." Light murmured, sticking his hand into his bag once more, searching around, just in case he'd missed it the last eighty times he'd checked. But no, the result remained the same. It still wasn't there.
He'd left the Death Note at home.
He allowed himself one more curse, muttered under his breath so the teacher couldn't hear (even though he'd said it in English so it wouldn't really have mattered if people heard it anyway), and instead pulled out his school notebook, trying not to go over the innumerable disasters that might happen should the Note be discovered.
Awhile ago, Ryuk was making fun of him for being too paranoid when he installed the 'security system' around the Note, and almost convinced Light of that as well. Now he felt that the extra measures that he'd taken weren't for naught.
At the very least, he could rub it in Ryuk's face that he wasn't just being a paranoid schizo about it.
Light sighed and composed himself, taking another glance to see that the teacher was now prattling on about the next test on the American Civil War or something. How boring. Without the Note to pass the time, this was going to be a very long day. He drummed his fingers on the table with one hand, resting his chin in the other.
Just keep talking, he said to himself. This shit isn't useful to us, anyway. Why don't we teach kids about the Note instead? Ulysses has got nothing on Death.
One thing he did have in replacement for the Note, though, was a random list of scrawled names that he would have written down officially in the Note today, had he, you know, actually had the stupid thing with him. On the corner of the paper, a blossom of a coffee stain obscured part of the first name, and Light sighed internally. The guy was only a petty criminal somewhere in Denmark or Sweden or wherever- not a huge loss in the grand scheme of things for now, but he was a chance finding on some foreign website, and would take an eternity to find again. Who knew what he would be able to get up to in that amount of time (however long that may be)?
The only letter that wasn't smeared to oblivion was the capital letter 'K', followed by what could have been an 'a.'
For no reason at all, Light was reminded of the Swedish kid detective, Kalle Blomkvist. Of course, that was probably a coincidence. There couldn't be too many Kalles out there.
So obviously, this prologue doesn't really have a whole lot to do with the story as a whole and is rather boring. I just wanted to start somewhere where people knew what was going on- you know, Light, Death Note, high school, etc- before suddenly throwing a whole new made up plot in all your faces, and I guess I wanted to see if anybody liked my third-person writing style (yeah, confession: any fanfiction or otherwise I've ever written before has been in first person- and always from the POV of the somehow-mandatory OC. Hey, I was 12. I lacked judgment).
Uhm... the best way to describe this story would be a multi-chaptered, serial murder mystery taking many cues from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Psych, Sherlock, and Radiohead. If you couldn't already tell from the title of the story, yeah, this was based around the Radiohead album Hail To The Thief because I lack original ideas for titles of stories. This doesn't at all mean you have to listen to Radiohead to understand/like the story, but it does offer an explanation for the murders if you know what all the respective songs are about.