My day started with the usual routine. Me and Lollie got up and both went for a jog along the beach, followed by a healthy breakfast and our favourite hangout, Guru. Then we raced back to our dorms to shower and dress and then it was off to school. Lessons went as usual, and I might have even learnt something if Reubs hadn't kept distracting me by playfully tugging at my hair the whole time.
After school, I went down to the nursery school to help out Mrs. Dove. It was Wednesday, which meant private study time. We didn't actually study anything, but we did our own personal thing to connect us to everything in the universe. Lollie goes to the beach to sing, and Reubs works on his martial arts. I work with the little tots at the pre-school, who are unimaginably wise for such young angels.
Recently, going to the pre-school has been making me a little depressed. Not so long ago, I went on a mission to deliver a baby Buddha to some monks in India. But the little Buddha wasn't just some random kid; he was my favourite little pre-schooler. Obi and I shared a special connection that I didn't have with any of the other little ones. Now that he was gone, there didn't seem much point going back to the pre-school.
I still went though, and I'm glad I did. Mrs Dove quickly worked out there was something up, and knew it was about Obi. She planned for all the pre-schoolers to each give me a hug and special attention.
"Obi isn't really gone," Millie told me brightly. "We're still connected to him through the Link!"
I felt so silly. Pre-school angels know more than I do. I hadn't really lost Obi, we were still divinely connected and we always would be. Knowing this made me feel heaps better.
After helping out at the pre-school, I planned to go home and have a mad study session with Lollie before putting on our dancing shoes and heading over to the Babylon. Unfortunately, before I could even reach my dorm, I heard the familiar beeping of my pager.
By the time I got to the Agency, Reubs and Lollie were already there. It seemed that we were going to be going on the same mission. We saw Michael in on the other side of departures, making big gestures while talking to his assistant, Sam. Since the room was so crowded with people, we couldn't hear what he was saying, but it was obvious he was upset. Lollie gave me a confused look, like, What's all this about now? I gave her a look like, I don't know. I'd never seen Michael this worked up. He was usually very clam and serene, like everything was under control.
When Michael spotted us, he swiftly walked over to us, a serious but concerned look in his eyes. "I'm glad you could all come. We've a got bit of a situation on our hands here."
"What kind of situation?" Lollie asked curiously.
"A… complicated one." Michael looked around the departures, and then back at us. "Come with me."
Michael led us across the room, through the masses of angels waiting to be sent to the troubled areas on earth, to a small door I hadn't seen before. We stepped inside to find 3 other angels sitting at a small conference like desk. Michael motioned for us to have a seat.
The angels across from us looked much older and more experienced, actual agents and not trainees. The two males glanced at us before turning to address Michael, but the third and only girl in the group continued to stare at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. I looked at Michael and tried to ignore her.
Michael picked up a remote and pressed a button. Suddenly, a sepia image of a girl floated above the desk, like a hologram. She had long, dark brown hair that curled a little at the bottom, and large eyes that almost looked like they sparkled. There wasn't anything about her that stood out, but the girl herself seemed to have something special about her that set her apart from everyone else.
"This is Octavia," Michael said, like he was introducing us to her.
"That's a nice name," Lola whispered.
"She's 16 and is in grade 11," Michael continued.
"Was," The older girl angel interrupted. I looked at her.
"What do you mean, was?" I asked. Michael sighed.
"A few days ago, she committed suicide." I heard Reuben catch his breath.
"Why?" he asked.
"That's the complicated part," The girl across the table said. I felt annoyed at the girls attitude.
"Who are you?" I asked, frustrated.
"Sorry, I didn't think to introduce anyone." Michael pointed to the angels across from us. "This is Peter, Richard and Tammy. They've already been told about you, and they think you might be able to help."
I wasn't all that surprised that they knew about me, what with me constantly embarrassing myself and making huge mistakes on missions, I'd be surprised to find someone who hadn't heard about me!
"How can we help?" Lollie asked.
"First I think we need a little background information." Michael slid a disk into a DVD player, and an image of Octavia popped up on the screen. She was on a bus, in her school uniform, reading. Michael began narrating.
"Octavia lived in Adelaide, Australia. She went to a private school and seemed to do well there. She has made quite a few friends, despite her strange personality." As it turned out, we were just about to see a snippet of this personality. As the bus pulled into a posh-looking school, Octavia packed her reading material away and jumped off. One of her friends that had just come off a different bus was waiting for her.
"Hi!" Octavia said, quite loudly.
"Hey," The other girl said.
"What's up, Nat?" Octavia asked while doing a little funny walk.
"Not much. You?"
"Same old, same old." Even though these words weren't awfully interesting, Octavia said them like they were the most exciting thing on earth.
"Oh well," Nat said, looking at the ground. Octavia laughed loudly. "What?"
"You're always saying that! 'Oh well.' You do it without even thinking!" They both had a little laugh about that, which Nat ended by saying "Oh well," without meaning to, which started them off again. The girls walked away, chatting.
"She looks happy," Reuben said. "Why did she kill herself?"
"Octavia is incredibly thoughtful," Richard said, as thought it were obvious. "Some might even say she thinks too much. She might appear shallow and silly, and sometimes downright stupid at times, but she's actually really sad."
"Why?" I asked. I mean, who got sad just by thinking?
"She thinks about things that most people ignore. She thinks about all the people who are suffering, and she blames herself for some of it. She's a very deep thinker, so she knows there's more to life than meets the eye, and she knows that everyone has a purpose on earth. But she doesn't understand why she's there, and she feels like she's only ever making a negative influence."
"She's been a suicide risk for a long time," Michael said with a sigh. "Which is why we assigned her 3 guardian angels." I looked at the angels across the desk, and it suddenly occurred to me that these were Octavia's GA's. "The thing is, we never thought she'd do it. She was always torturing herself with the amount of pain she caused others, and she always believed that killing herself would just make people hurt more."
"There were nights she would stay up crying, asking why she was alive, why we let so many people suffer. She asked so many questions we just couldn't answer." Richard sounded like he was suffering himself.
"At one point, a point where she was at her lowest, she sent us away," Peter said, sounding ashamed. I stared at him, gobsmacked.
"She sent you away?" I asked. "How?"
"She knew we were there," Tammy stated in a bored voice. "She said we would be of better use helping someone who needed us more."
I was amazed. This girl actually sensed her angels. She had spoken to them!
"Turns out leaving her was the worst thing we could have done." Peter sounded achingly close to tears. "As soon as we left, the Opposition got to her. They put the thought into her head that she would only continue hurting people the longer she stayed here. They made her believe that she would hurt more people if she kept living, and that killing herself was the only way to stop it." Peter put his head in his hands, and Richard patted his back. I turned to Michael.
"She was important, wasn't she?" I asked. "I mean, the Agency had something big planned for her, and the opposition knew, didn't they? I mean, they wouldn't just target her for no reason, right?"
"We did have big plans for her, which was why she required so much cosmic attention." Michael looked towards the screen, where Octavia was now sitting in a group of her friends, laughing her loud laugh. "She was a gifted writer. She had so many stories to tell, stories that would help people. Stories that would make people believe in themselves again."
"Stories with the ability to wake up humans," Reuben added. Michael nodded.
"Why didn't you just stay with her?" Lollie asked. Richard shook his head.
"It's not that easy. You can't mess with a person's free-will. And she wasn't going to let up, either. She kept asking us to leave, and we couldn't stay. We thought we would only make it worse if we stayed, that we'd make her feel more guilty."
"So," I cleared my throat. "What are we going to do now?"
