Disclaimer and warnings from Chapter One still stand.


Chapter Two


Garet pondered the text before him. The black ink, in turn, pondered right back at him. How was it Felix had oh so eloquently worded it yesterday?

"The Hell am I reading?"

Yeah. That.

Isaac deflated where he sat. "You hate it."

"You gave Ivan a staff!" Garet skimmed the page again with a look of gross uncertainty. "And I don't mean that in the innuendo way…"

Isaac rolled his eyes with an added shake of the head. "You're hopeless."

"The Shaman's Rod? Please tell me it's only compensating for his height."

"Garet!"

So yeah, Ivan had been inserted into Isaac's story as a new character. The name change wasn't very creative, having only switched out the "v" for a "w" to make him "Iwan," but whatever. Isaac got up to pour himself another coffee refill while Garet finished reading.

"How many cups is that?" Garet asked, distracted and not looking up from the papers.

Isaac shrugged. "Heck if I know. Lost count sometime back around sunrise."

"You're going to have a killer of a migraine by the time vacation rolls around."

He couldn't exactly disagree there. "You are such a mother hen."

"Cluck, cluck."

The unenthused clucking was followed by an extended pause. "I take it back," Isaac amended. "You're just a snarky ass."

It spoke volumes, how little that assessment affected Garet. "Damn straight. Here, you made a typo in this line."

The story had progressed another chapter's worth overnight. Robin and Gerald had safely arrived in Vault, the first village the duo was to visit outside of their home. There they met Iwan, a merchant's apprentice who had been tasked with the recovery of a stolen item. The two heroes helped Iwan in his investigation, in the process revealing a trio of bandits responsible for a mass robbery spree. After defeating the bandits and recovering the stolen goods, Iwan departed to locate his master, and Robin and Gerald continued on their merrily urgent way.

"Did I really say this stuff yesterday?" Isaac looked away from the corrections on his laptop to Garet's expression of pained embarrassment. "Evil never prevails? Stealing is wrong?"

"You were pretty enthusiastic, yeah." Isaac chuckled. "Don't worry, I don't think Ivan will rat you out for the corny hero you apparently are."

Garet grumbled what was probably supposed to be some snarky comeback. "What's with the village name this time?" he asked sometime later, meanwhile turning to the final page.

"Descriptive name," Isaac answered as though it were obvious. "It has a surrounding cliff wall and an actual prison in the underground."

Garet rotated the page and tilted his head to read at odd angles, all the while pulling a face as though the words were insulting his… well… face. "'Vault' just sounds… I dunno. It's a little too active for such a boring village; like they're about to vault over some hurdle or something. You should try another language again."

Isaac did a double-take at the small stack of books Garet had stood to grab from the top of his bookcase. "Would you stop stealing Felix's dictionaries?!"

"Excuse me?" Garet looked offended and genuinely hurt. "What makes you think these were Felix's to start with? Don't jump to conclusions, Isaac. It's not nice."

Isaac snatched away one of the books and held it up to present the inside of the paperback cover. The name "Felix" was plain to see, right across from the large print stating the title, English-Spanish Dictionary.

"He was done with it."

The French dictionary was much the same.

"Thought I'd brush up on my France-ay."

The German dictionary included a last name.

"Borrowed."

The Japanese dictionary featured a flip-book animation of stick figures in the bottom corners.

"Konnichiwa."

"Okay, look," Isaac slapped the book down with the rest of them on the windowsill beside him. He'd ask Jenna later as to why she'd drawn stick figures chasing each other one direction on foot, and then back across by car. "You gotta stop swiping these things. Either he's going to end up having a stroke about it, or you're going to end up mysteriously disappearing. Either way, he's going to be complaining about it to me."

The redhead looked genuinely confused. "How is Felix complaining worse than me disappearing?"

"I mean it, Garet."

Garet gave a drawn out, overly dramatic, exasperated sigh. "Fiiiine! I'll put them back in his bag at lunch today."

That was pretty much as good as it was going to get, at least as far as Garet-survives-another-day scenarios went. Isaac nodded his approval of the compromise.

That was when a new voice chimed in. "At least he wouldn't make you help with hiding the body."

Both boys froze. With a sense of shocked dread, their heads turned in unison toward what was supposed to be a closed and locked door. Surely, that wasn't the voice of—

"JENNA!?"

If ever there was an innocently wicked grin, it was the grin proudly being displayed on Jenna's face in that moment. As if that wasn't enough, Jenna's face happened to be leaning in through the space that most definitely was not a closed and locked door. "Good morning!"

Garet and Isaac alike spluttered and floundered like a couple of deep ocean fish out of water.

"What the Hell, woman?!"

"We could have been getting dressed!"

Jenna's grin increased tenfold at Isaac's particular outburst. "Then it would have been a very good morning."

Isaac may have turned beet red at that, but Jenna was too busy dodging a pillow from Garet to know for sure. Pillow cleared, she bolted in and tackled Garet as he was grappling for more of the overstuffed ammo. Of course, that was also when Ivan decided to show up.

"I get the feeling I missed something." He edged into the room, sidestepping when necessary to avoid a stray flailing limb.

Isaac could honestly do little more than a literal facepalm. "You could say that."


Mia really was a sweetheart. Anyone who tried to say otherwise needed a brain scan, followed by an impossibly large number of psychological treatments, the majority of which Garet knew he could never begin to pronounce. Mia probably could, though. Speaking in tongues and calling it medical jargon seemed about par for the course for a med student. For now though, only the sound of her breathy laughter danced through the depressingly plain hospital room. The other bed in the small space sat empty, curtains wide open in preparation to welcome its next eventual occupant.

Garet seriously wondered where he came up with half of these odd thoughts.

Mia's merriment settled into soft chuckles, and she leaned into the pillows at her back. "That does sound like something Jenna would do."

Garet chuckled as well. "Yeah, well, Isaac looked about ready to die on the spot. The poor guy's hilarious at being embarrassed."

"I'm sure he is." She used her elbows to brace herself enough to free her hair from behind her. Her black locks draped loosely over her shoulders, and it struck Garet just how bizarre the look was when compared to her usual style.

The redhead shifted uneasily in his seat, causing the cheap plastic chair to creak beneath him. "So when are they letting you out of here again?"

Mia's serene smile dipped into a disappointed frown. "Tonight."

"Uh huh, right. Except that's what the story was yesterday, too."

Mia rolled her eyes. "Just don't go trying to freak Isaac out with it. I really was only supposed to stay the one day."

"I claim full rights to freak him out if you're still here tomorrow."

"Garet…"

"I mean it, Mia." He pointed at her as he said it, leaving no room for argument. "You gotta take care of yourself. And if it takes a freak out from Mr. Hero to make that happen, then a freak out it is. Besides, you have to read this thing he's cooking up for that writing class. He added Ivan to it last night."

"Oh? What did Ivan think of it?"

Garet prepared to dive into what was surely meant to be another one of his humorous tales, when suddenly… he stopped. His eager smile gave way to an uncertain, curious frown. "Actually," he tilted his head in thought, trying to recall the end of that morning's scene at the dorms, "I don't think he even knows about it yet."


"Why am I in this?"

Isaac swiveled his desk chair to face the guest currently perched on the edge of Garet's half-lofted bed.

"You caught that?"

Ivan's feet were swinging almost three feet clear of the carpet as he all too happily explained. "Merchant's apprentice, and only one letter difference in the name. No offense, but it's not the most original disguise."

Isaac let out a defeated sigh. "Yeah, I know."

"Although I'm not sure I'd compare stocks to merchant traders," Ivan added, pondering the page one more time. The ink was surely returning the attention by now.

Isaac chuckled to himself. "Buy low, sell high, right? Felix was questioning the originality, too, though. So far it seems I'm just adding people I know." He swiveled again to face the computer, and started tapping at the keys. When asked what he was doing, his answer was short, simple, and what sounded like the most obvious of statements. "I'm fixing it."

"What?! Wait! No! I didn't say to do that!" Isaac's chair audibly squeaked as he slowly turned, one brow raised in question at the suddenly frantic genius. "I was just pointing out that I caught the reference. I didn't mean you had to take me out of it!"

This was met with a slow blink, followed by the equally slow question, "You didn't?"

"No!" Ivan was practically beside himself over the matter. "I mean—I…" He struggled to find the words, and the duo fell into silence as he trailed off. Ivan's downward face was quickly reddening in his embarrassment.

"I-I think… it's really neat… being included with everyone else." He hesitated as a new thought visibly occurred to him. "Could I… well… Does Iwan really have to leave? Could he… maybe… stay?" During the last part, Ivan worked up enough courage to look right as Isaac, even if he looked half scared out of his wits to be asking for such a thing.

For several long seconds, Isaac was silent, and Isaac considered. With a slow, reassuring, confident smile, he answered. And it was an answer that made Ivan's face light with a smile to match.

"I can fix that."


To be continued...


Jenna drawing in the book may or may not have been inspired by true events, which may or may not have been enacted by my dad and his little sister, and may or may not have involved a first edition novel. Said novel may or may not have also accidentally ended up in a box for Goodwill last year. Obviously, the moral of this story is to draw flip book animations in your sibling's books, so that you may readily entertain yourself with distractions in the event of a zombie apocalypse. (Disclaimer: Yuja is not responsible for the conversion of important reading materials into an alternative media source, nor the subsequent throttling of siblings for such an offense.)

I'd like to say a big THANK YOU to last chapter's reviewers, Daidairo, AliasAlliance, BlueStar Sapphire - ProtoZero, Matthew Terra, and Leontinees. I also want to say THANK YOU to the people behind the faves and follows, and everyone else who is reading along. Even when the previous chapter was done, I debated if it should be shared, or hidden away on my computer as the writer's block fodder it was created to be. It's still writer's block fodder, don't get me wrong, but I'm very happy to share this bit of randomness when I know there are people out there who are happy reading it.

Until next time!