Displaying an intense disposition, Squall sat hunched over his desk, laboriously working on his term paper. Using his issued 'Term Quill' he carefully copied his rough draft onto the piece of multi-glass. With a loud fizz, quite like the sound of a burning match being thrust into cold water, his term quill ran out of toner.
"Shit!" Squall screamed as he slammed the quill onto the desk. Trying to keep his calm, Squall began searching around his room for an extra cartridge.
His room was a proverbial mess. A sheer disgrace to the former ranks of SeeD. As Squall rummaged through his desk wondering all the while if he'd pass his room inspection is he slipped the Head Inspector fifty gil, he came across something else he'd been looking for; his Griever necklace.
"Well I'll be goddamned." Squall sat back, hitting a two-day old glass of orange juice in the process.
"Shit!" he screamed in anger.
Fingering the necklace, Squall quickly placed it around his neck and grabbed an old towel off his dresser. With a small 'clunk' a new toner cartridge fell off the dresser from its previously concealed position.
"There we go." Squall stepped back and bent down to retrieve the cartridge only to have his foot hit the puddle of old orange juice. Immediately, an expression of 'oh shit' turning rapidly into an angered 'fuck' flashed across Squall's face. In what seemed like an eternity Squall became extremely aware of the ceiling growing distant as he slammed onto the ground back first, cartridge in hand. Squall laid there for a moment, letting his senses come back to him.
(I will never procrastinate again, please just let me get through this fucking night.)
He did deserve this he noted. He knew good and well the he had a term paper due but had decided against doing it. The training room beckoned after all…..
Squall sat up and looked at his watch. One-thirty in the morning and he had to be in class by six; term paper due by 6:05 on the dot.
(Damn Quistis pisses me off sometimes! Can't even give me a fucking extension!)
With the old towel Squall wiped the puddle off the ground, as well as his black leather pants and threw it in the corner. He walked back to his dresser grabbing a crumpled white t-shirt off the top of it and gave it a sniff.
(Clean enough.)
He pulled the shirt over his head, liking the way it conformed to his body, hugging his muscles with a tenacious grip. Running his hand through his hair, he walked back to his desk and grabbed his term quill. With a barely audible 'click' he opened the toner chamber and placed the new cartridge inside, snapping it shut.
(I seriously need to clean this room. This paper is killing me.)
Squall sat back down and twirled the quill in his fingers. His 'friend' Cyan, an engineering student at Garden had designed it. The 'term quill' as Cyan had denoted it was a small text-writing implement which had been adopted by Garden as the term paper writing tool of choice. It worked by spraying a strong blast of toner onto the multi-layer glass palate. Using voice recognition, all a student had to do was wave the pen across the glass and speak what they wanted to write. When the user got to the end of the layer of glass they turned the dial on the quill and the quill would shoot out a softer spray of toner so that the student could write on the next higher layer of the multi-glass. To view the text, all the instructor had to do was place it in a Multi-glass Receiver and view the different layers of glass through a connected monitor. All-in-all, the process of writing to viewing was supposed to take les time than any other way of transmitting information. In effect, this allowed students more time to sleep, which in turn allowed overall moral to rise. Squall hated the damn thing. For one, the tone cartridge's ran out of toner way too fast and the voice recognition system was hokey at best. Squall also noted he lost more sleep than he gained.
(Maybe I use it wrong…maybe I need to kick Cyan's ass tomorrow.)
Squall threw the quill down and longed for the time when he could use a simple keyboard to write. He buried his head in his hands.
(Whatever.)
With a low beating noise, quite like a heart, but more metallic, Squall's griever necklace began to glow.
* * * *
Metallic sounds of resonating beauty filled the creature's ears, awakening its other senses. Someone was calling. Someone foreign.
I must go.
Slowly the creature began to wake from its indefinite sleep. Blackness turned to gray then to a whitish hue as it opened it's eyes.
"Help me," it heard someone call. "I need you."
The calling felt instinctful. Although foreign, it sounded as if it belonged. Everything seemed a daze, a watery morass of wanton desire and absolute pleasure. Deep down in the dark recesses of sentient desire, the creature felt an incredible force rising. The need to be free, the need to unleash the power of its very soul.
Be free…escape…
"I must go!" it thought. "Awake, and deliver the soul!"
With a blinding flash of light, the creature was ripped from it's metallic home and unleashed unto the world of the living.