Disclaimer! All fictional entities featured in this story belong to Kazuki Takahashi, except Sara Scinner and Silpheed, who are mine. Goodness, can you imagine the rental fees I pay to do this? One minor character in particular does not belong to me nor Mr. Takahashi, but…well, she don't belong to me, let's put it at that.

This has been beta-read by ChazzyLuverGurl.

Chazzy and I agreed that though the characters go by dubbed names, and speak perfect English and all, they are all, technically, Japanese; so, the currency we're referring to is yen.

10,000,000,000 yen is precisely 100,679,590.31 dollars.

500 yen is 5.04 dollars.

Act Seven

"Er, beg your pardon?"

Mike must not have heard her. Placing Silpheed on her shoulder, she sailed around the gentlemen, her arms outstretched like wings. "Where do we sign?" she parroted. "You liked us, didn't you?"

Chazz shot a look at the director, who clung to the lapels of his suit as that fluorescent smile ran away from his face. "Oh. Er, well, I…sure, you were great, but, uh…"

Sara stretched out her hand. "So you got a pen, Mikey? 'Cause we don't have one. We carry a camel's pack of props, but no props for writing. Go figure. Also, do I have to sign as Sara Scinner, or as Sonic Sara? And you don't mind if Silpheed squiggles, do you? It's the only way he knows how to write his name—"

"Oh, wow, you picked yourself a stage name, already?" Mike raised an eyebrow. "For someone with so much talent, you don't know a lot about the biz, do you?"

Sara raised both eyebrows. "What's there not to know? We audition some, we make you laugh, you like our performance, and then we sign our names on a piece of paper called a contract. That's what you call it, right? A contract?" So she had gathered from watching all of that T.V. But T.V. never told the whole story, or for that matter, the true story.

Chazz had on a tense expression, as if silently implying that that was, by no means, the way by which he had found himself stuck in an Ojama costume.

Mike, on the other hand, shook his head, and handed them a sympathetic smile. "Sorry to tell you this, sweetie, but it's kind of more complicated than that. Follow me?"

As she tried to compute, she jabbed her tongue into her cheek; the right one, this time, for her left one still felt quite sore. Even so, she couldn't follow. She looked to Silpheed for an answer, but his face was just as blank as hers.

Finally, she conceded: "Sorry, Mike, we don't follow."

Mike placed an arm around her, guiding her into the hallway. "It's like this: the road to stardom is not an easy road to tread, nor is the toll cheap."

There's a toll? Huh, kindergarten didn't teach me that.

"But…I thought you paid for everything; isn't that what managers are for?"

Hooted Mike, "You're a joke a minute, aren't you? Seriously, though, I may wear a gold suit, but I'm not made of gold. And I ain't just talking about monetary value: to be a star, you have to pay with your heart, with your strength—"

"—don't forget your soul, your values and your dignity, not always in that order," muttered Chazz. Not that anyone heard him.

Mike continued: "And about money: I've already spent all I have promoting Ojaman. So I don't think I could hope to support you. Even if I wanted to…"

"Huh?"

"Ah, like I said, I've already got Ojaman. But I don't think you'll have a problem finding someone else to sponsor you."

All of that hope in Sara being started to leak out like air from a balloon. Disappointment was a terrible buzz-kill: rather than pop the balloon, it undid the knot that kept the hope inside it so it drained out painfully slow until she drooped like an empty balloon. She wouldn't let Mike see her deflating, though. What were the odds of running into a nice old T.V. director like they had? What were the odds of bumping into another one?

Math wasn't her strongest point, but she found it safe to assume that the odds were scary slim. On top of that, if Mike had helped to mold Chazz into Ojaman, maybe he could mold her and Silpheed into true comedians? There had to be something they could work out.

Sparing no actual thought about it, she offered, "What if we paid for the expenses?"

Everyone stopped dead in their tracks. Mike's eyes widened to the size of golf balls. "Beg your pardon!"

Sara shrugged, unwilling to be bad-selfish, if anything. "Well, you said we have to pay with our hearts and our strength and all that jazz. Might as well go the whole nine yards, right, Silpheed?" To her surprise, Silpheed didn't say a word.

Mike scratched his head, the little perch-like strand of hair bobbing around as he did. "Ah…hmm…are you sure you want to do that?"

"Aw, phhbt! I'll bet it's as easy as lemon meringue! It's not hard to make a lot of money—"

"—if all you want to do is make a lot of money," finished Mike, who knew that saying very well, as someone in the entertainment field.

"Actually, I was gonna say it's not hard if you don't keep spending everything in your pocket on candy, but that works, too, I guess. So, how much would we need?"

"Oh, boy…well, if you really want to know," Mike counted on his fingers, "if I had to make a guess-timate…the average bill, including promotion, health insurance—you'd definitely need that—living expenses, pet deposits, would be…I'd say…ten billion yen."

The hallway fell lethally silent. Silpheed swayed to and fro, like he'd been slapped by an angry female. Chazz sounded like he was choking. Every hair on Sara's neck and down her spine prickled. Something in her frontal lobe broke, the way a calculator broke when computing a figure pushing a billion.

T-T-Ten billion?! Mother of Mirth, we could probably go on all the rides at Pegasus World, buy everything in the souvenir shop, and still have enough to buy the whole park, then go do other stuff I can't think of, right now! Who knew that show biz was so expensive?

Eh, guess this means no more candy for a while.

Sara made an L-shape over her forehead. "Mikey, consider it done! Not at this very moment, but the moment when we scrape up ten Bs!" At the mentioning of "ten Bs," Silpheed's eyes shimmered like two polished pebbles.

"Really? You have connections?" Mike asked with a wrinkled brow. He meant "connections" as in friends or relations who happened to be billionaires or company share-holders, as most of the student body in Duel Academy had. After all, someone from the average social class could never see ten billion yen in their whole lifetime, no matter how hard he'd try.

Sara nodded, stopping to scratch Silpheed on his head. "We'll get by with a little help from our friends." She paused to pull off her bucket. "And Ojaman's autograph, if that's possible."

So Mike handed Chazz a fat black Sharpie to scribble "Chazz 'Ojaman' Princeton" over the top of her bucket-hat; when he handed it back, Sara felt her heart puffing up again with hope, like fresh helium into a balloon, a sensation that left her head light and feathery. In fact, when she and Silpheed bade the gentlemen farewell, her voice grew shrill, as if she'd swallowed a bit of helium herself.

"Thanks for your blessing, Oja-buddy! Ooooh, just think: we might even all be funny buddies, someday! Wouldn't that be awesome?"

She and Silpheed sped away, her arms stretched like Sonic Duck's wings, with Mike yelling after them, "Break a leg, Sonic Sara! Don't call us, we'll call you!" All T.V. directors said that to people who auditioned for them, though more often than not, they didn't have the courtesy to call.

Chazz shot him a withering look. "Why didn't you just say no?"

A sly grin creased over the businessman's lips. "Oh, Princeton, I couldn't bring myself to refuse such a hopeful face…directly. Besides, it wasn't necessary. If she's really got her heart set on ponying up ten billion yen, then we shouldn't be seeing her again anytime soon…or later."

____________

Just because Duel Academy was one of those formal schools, didn't mean its denizens didn't lose money and small trinkets in cushions of their chairs or behind furniture. They wouldn't be human if they didn't. Sara saw nothing wrong with couch-diving. It was a win-win operation: she and Silpheed could easily collect money that no one else wanted, and all the rooms they rummaged in would get clean.

So they spent the rest of the day hunting in every and any room they had access to, like the duel arena where Ojaman had made his debut or the bedrooms in their own dorm. She wore her autographed bucket for good luck, and carried an ordinary magnet, since they had no fancy metal detector and no one would let them borrow one. Besides, metal detectors were basically magnets with pretty flashing lights.

In one particular room, Sara dissected the couch and tossed the cushions in random directions throughout, while Silpheed helped himself to the panty drawer, for no stone was to be left unturned (he found that as a decent excuse to fiddle with ladies' unmentionables). While no change was yet discovered in this room, she did find a lone Tortilla chip buried in the back, chipped at the corner with a ball of lint crowning the top, like a miniature replica of the island's volcano.

"Awright! More free food!" Couch-diving was ravenous work, so it helped to find nourishment when she did, mostly crusty potato chips and a Cheeto or two, and with Ojaman's lucky signature at its highest potency, half a cookie. She plucked the lint off the chip and nibbled off the top.

She juggled the morsel back and forth in her mouth before swallowing. "Stale," she muttered, "but satisfactorily salty."

"Ay caramba!"

She and Silpheed sprang up like two prairie dogs. The resident of the dismantled room stood in the doorway, her brown eyes melting into pools of tamale-hot fury.

Silpheed cracked a whistle: "RAWK! What brand of salsa are you? Hot, hot, hot!" He opened his beak wide and stretched out his stubby tongue as far as he could.

"¡¿Qué están haciendo, demonios?!" she demanded.

Sara didn't catch that. She glanced at the half-eaten chip, then up at the girl, then back at the chip. She held it up for her to see. "Got nacho cheese?" she asked politely.

The flame-haired girl cupped a hand over her mouth, like she was preparing to puke. "Ay, grosero! Eating food out of the sofa? Have you no class?"

Sara popped the rest of the morsel into her mouth. "Waste not, want not. Don't mind us; we're just couch-diving for loose change," she informed her as she licked her fingers.

"And panty-diving, RAWK!"

She went back to prodding the sofa with her magnet, oblivious to the girl storming up to her like a Spanish bull until she felt a hand seizing her off of her knees by the ear.

"OW-OW-OWOWOW! Hey, I'm still using that ear!" she shrieked.

The Spanish girl jabbed a finger at her nose. "Look, here, ano estupido! You better put my room back the way it was—"

"'Anal?'" chuckled Sara, in spite of her pain. Her attacker yanked harder on her ear lobe to silence her. Leaning in dangerously close to her face, she hissed:

"You better put my room back the way it was, or mi amor Ty-Ty will have to teach you a lesson…"

That word, Sara recognized; she heard it all the time around Valentine's Day. But wasn't "amor" supposed to be French? "…Wha?"

"Tyson, of course!"

Sara's eyes widened. "Wow, you're dating a boxer? Wait…isn't he, like, dead now?"

"RAWK! Grave-robber!"

"Nooooo, he's not dead! And that's not who I'm talking about!" She dragged Sara across the room with her to flail an arm at Silpheed.

"Shoo, shoo, parásito! Back off from my unmentionables!"

Leaving one of her bras dangling out of the drawer by a hook, Silpheed fluttered over to the opposite side of the room, hitching onto her canopy. "RAWK! Latina spitfire…sexy!" he cackled.

"Leave Silpheed alone! We just want your change!" Sara waved the magnet around as if doing so would get her ear back. What it did do was latch onto the girl's earring, so that they both had a grip on each other's ears. Neither one enjoyed herself, needless to say.

The girls tangled and tangoed in a circle across the room, the Spaniard unwilling to let go of Sara's ear, Sara trying to pull the magnet off of her earring (she might as well have tried to take the whole ear), with more than just a slab of foreign cursing on the disgruntled girl's part. Silpheed stayed on the canopy, cheering them both on.

"Ty-Ty, help me! ¡Ayúdame!"

"What's that mean, 'leggo my ear?' 'Cause I'd be happy to leggo your ear if you leggo mine, poor favor!"

"It's por favor, machacha loca!"

So Sara took the initiative and released the magnet dangling from the back of the Spaniard's ear lobe, thus breaking their tango around the desk by the open window. She in turn released Sara's ear lobe and sent her rear end colliding into the desk.

To the girl's utter dismay, she had had her boom box sitting precariously on the corner; the instant Sara's butt rammed into the desk, the impact sent it flying out the window. All she did was watch in horror as it tumbled down the side of the building before meeting a violent end on the concrete far below them.

Crash!

The Spanish girl's hair flopped over her face like a wrinkled red funeral veil as she dropped to her knees and hung over the sill, arms draped uselessly in front of her. For once, she fell silent.

Sara rubbed her sore bottom as she peeked out the window over the girl. "Wh-What, what happened? Oh…uh-oh. Boom box go boom-boom, huh? Or as you might say, boom box go la bamba?"

The girl, who had her favorite Latin music CD in there before she lost it forever, just started wailing in uncontrollable Spanish, her head buried in her arms. Seeing her shudder with sobs suddenly made the pain in Sara's butt seem insignificant. She lowered herself to the mourner's level and touched her shoulder.

"Hey, hey, don't cry. Maybe it was time for it to go home to the Radio Shack in the sky? Maybe they'll send you a new one?" Boy, if she had the money, she could perhaps replace it herself. She stopped to take off her hat, in which she kept a small empty oatmeal container marked "Money." Popping it open and spilling the contents in her hand, she tapped on the girl's head.

She whirled around and glared at her, her running mascara striping her olive cheeks. Sara took her hand and dropped everything they had found so far since they had started into her palm. Duel Academy was a big place; surely they would find more loose change to compensate?

Sara smiled. "And if they don't, use this to buy a new one. Five hundred yen; hope it helps. Now how's about we see a smile?"

She didn't get a smile. Instead, she got a girl standing up straight and tall, nostrils flaring, hair raised as if she were a bull ready to gut her with her horns. But she didn't charge at them; she threw the offering to the ground and started gushing out another furious stream of Spanish…or to be precise, switching back and forth between Spanish and English, making some sort of threat about this "Tyson" character coming around to set them straight. The magnet swung around with every swivel of her head.

Sara started to back away, because frankly, even if she couldn't comprehend, the girl was starting to scare her. She tried to keep the smile on her face, though, squeaked, "You're welcome," as she reached up to rip Silpheed, who was looking around for a rose, off the canopy and slipped out the door.

"RAWK! Call me, señorita!"

That marked the end of the hunt, in the girls' dorm, anyway. However, after that, Sara kept a fleeting lookout for a guy with boxer gloves.

___________

5:15, read the digital clock on Zane's night stand. As of 5:15, it had been nine hours since Syrus had confiscated his deck, and he had not returned since then. Trapped in a spell of inertia, Zane hadn't been left to many devices other than the T.V. remote and his imagination as to what kind of rigorous training his brother must've been subjecting himself to. Atticus hadn't visited since two days before. Not that he expected him to show up every hour, on the hour; he had his own problems to deal with. They all did.

Since he'd found nothing on the T.V. except the usual sundry jive, he fixed his eyes on the bleak white ceiling. He wondered if the deck would cause Syrus as much pain as it caused him. He wondered how Syrus was holding up. He wondered about his opponent, Makoto—who technically, had become Syrus's opponent, as of the previous night—and what kind of tricks he planned in order to destroy his dojo. Zane didn't usually fiddle away his time by wondering so much, but when one was stuck in bed with no deck, no company and nothing watchable on T.V., what else could he do?

He wondered in the back of his mind if it'd always be that way from then on: lying there with the shades pulled shut, asinine as the fear was (dare he consider it a fear, even an anxiety). He rolled over so he faced the closet door, his eyelids becoming heavy with tiredness.

Zane could've fallen asleep, had a ruckus not bolted his eyelids wide open—

VVRRRRRRR!

—the sputtering of a vacuum cleaner's engine. A ruckus that drilled so thoroughly into his skull that it had to be close, somewhere in the very room he rested in.

He turned in the opposite direction, towards the window. Someone was in his room, all right, completely oblivious to the fact that a patient was trying to get some much-needed sleep as she caught the string inside the hose and yanked the shades up to the top. The afternoon sunlight flooded the room and pierced Zane's eyes.

Well, actually, there were two people, or to be more accurate, a person and a bird. He noticed the bird's crest feathers protruding from the top of the lamp shade, for birds didn't like loud noises that didn't come from their own beaks.

He recognized the silhouetted bird in the lamp shade, right away, as he did the girl with the vacuum cleaner…not that he was too happy to see them. He would've gone with perfect isolation over their presence. Heaven knew how they managed to waltz in, but he knew one thing: he'd see them out.

Screaming over a vacuum never did anyone any good, so he mustered up whatever strength he had regained to sit up in bed. Sure enough, he found the power cord attached to an outlet on the floor, between the lamp and the night stand. With a little strain, he leaned over and wrapped his fingers around the cord, then pulled.

The vacuum cleaner died with a fleeting growl. As soon as it did, Sara stopped pressing the hose against the window sill. She held it up to her face and peeked down the hole. "Hey, what gives? Silpheed, did you kill the power again?"

The cockatoo's head popped out of the lamp shade. "Nuh-uh! Talk to Buzzkill! RAWK!"

Sara turned around. As soon as she noticed Zane sitting in bed, holding up the cord like a fisherman with a catch, she flashed that trademark infantile smile. "Well, I'll be! What'cha doing here, Ziti?" How amazing that no matter what kind of encounter they'd had before, she'd be just as cheery when she returned, like it'd rolled off her back like a duck.

"This is my room," he answered, stopping himself before he could say "you twit."

"Oh. Oh, right. Here I was, thinking that this was Don's room. You know, Don…Keybutt?" Judging by her lip-biting giggling, Zane guessed that that was a lame joke that was supposed to get him to say something stupid. He didn't bite.

"Whatever hair-brained scheme—"

"Ah, ah, ah! We prefer the term 'birdbrained scheme,' thank you."

Zane narrowed his eyes. No matter what term was used to describe the scheme, it would still be something obnoxious. Anything associated with Scinner was bound to be obnoxious. "Whatever scheme you're up to this time, how's about taking it somewhere else?"

Squawked Silpheed, "Like up the butt? RAWK-AWK-AWK!"

Sara's giggling combusted into full-fledged cackling. She held onto her sides and lurched over, like she'd been punched in the gut. "Or-Or-Or up…up the donkey butt!" She laughed even harder, if that was possible, until she became cherry-red and wound up tripping over the vacuum cleaner and landing—THUD!—on her rear with her legs caught over the machine.

Zane felt like an old lion beleaguered by hyenas. All of that laughter can't possibly be normal.

She raised her head to wipe a tear out of her eye. "Don't you love toilet humor?" she wheezed.

"No. Now take your vacuum and leave."

"Aw, come on, we don't mean no harm!" Zane couldn't help but notice that double-negative, as if it were her clumsy way of saying, "We mean harm."

"We're just cleaning up—"

Cleaning up what, your act?

"—your room!"

Well, that made as much sense as a deck that gave you a heart condition. No, actually, that made much more sense than busting in to clean a hospital room, which had a reputation of sterility in the first place.

Sara, tongue in cheek, noticed his coat hanging from a chair. "Your coat's looking kind of dirty. Like us to shake it out?"

"I'd much rather that you left my things alone." Predictably, Sara didn't listen. As soon as she pulled herself off the vacuum and the floor, she yanked it off the chair by the broad shoulders and held it up like a sheet going on a clothesline. Its tail trailed along the floor, being bigger than the person holding it.

"Boy, this thing's sandy! What were you doing yesterday, building sand castles with Atty?" She hopped in a circle, waving the coat all around like a patriotic flag until handkerchiefs of sand coated the floor and the foot of Zane's bed.

"RAWK! Sand castles?" cried Silpheed, as though they'd done much more than build sand castles.

Why did he have to be bedridden today? On the other hand, predicaments like this were the reason the merciful King of Games gave people the nurse call button. Zane wasted no time in pressing that device with all the finger strength he had.

Unfortunately, Miss Fontaine didn't show up quick enough. Sara dropped the coat on the table and exclaimed, "Looks like a job for Mr. Suckerman!" While she scrambled for the power cord—which Zane had made the mistake of releasing as soon as he'd unplugged it—Silpheed kept chanting, "Suck! Suck! Suck!" in the background.

It turned out that Sara's foot had flipped a switch on the vacuum when she had tripped over it, from "suck" to "blow" (why vacuums would even have switches like that, Zane could never figure out, sharp as he was). The instant Sara thrust the plug into the outlet, Mr. Suckerman became Mr. Blowerman. It rattled the atmosphere with its hiss, spouting out thick, rusty swirls of dirt wherever the writhing hose pointed that had Zane wondering if she'd been previously sweeping up the whole outdoors.

"Mr. Suckerman!" shrieked Sara, tackling the machine like a wrestler and somehow getting tangled up in the hose and being ineffectual in general. Silpheed just ducked into the lamp shade to wait out the commotion. So Zane bent over the side of the bed to pull the plug, again.

By the time he had, the air had become so grainy and polluted that everyone present came down with a coughing fit. Zane could've sworn that he'd pulled an intercostal muscle with that last cough: a milder injury than a heart attack, but painful, nevertheless. Dust frosted his sinuses.

All of that happened before Miss Fontaine burst through the door, clipboard nestled under her arm. "What's going on in here?" she demanded.

Had he not known any better, Zane might've asked, "What the fuck took you so long?" But since he did know better, and because his hand was cupped over his mouth, he scowled with his eyes and gestured to Sara with his other hand.

She looked up, her face feverish and caked with dirt. "M-Miss F.! Ah, M-M-Mr. Suckerman threw up all over the place; y-you ought to look at him!" She would've handed the lifeless vacuum for Fontaine to see for herself, had she not still had the hose knotted around her shoulders. She looked so…pitiful, squirming around on the floor like an unearthed worm, with Fontaine squatting down to help ease her out of the tangle.

He couldn't help but feel almost remotely sorry for her. Even if that person was a ditz, it was difficult to scorn someone wrapped around a vacuum hose on the floor while one was trapped in bed, which he soon transitioned from to his wheelchair out in the lobby until his room was fit to breathe in again. And it wasn't so much that he scorned people, really; he simply preferred to be alone, especially if all they were going to do was make nuisances of themselves.

Was "nuisance" the proper word for this case? It sounded like an understatement. Whatever the term, the incident with Mr. Suckerman didn't chase her off. Almost fifteen minutes later, as he gazed out at the view, she and her pet snuck up on him. Well, the idea was to sneak up behind him, but he could hear her footsteps squeaking against the linoleum before she made it across the room. With a gait as bold and noisy as hers, sneakiness was impossible. Besides, he saw her reflection in the glass.

His eyes remained on the outside. He sensed her energy as she leaned in too close to his ear and said, "Nice view, huh?" Like they were chums.

"Ooh, I think I see gulls out there!" Her arm jetted by his head. "See those white feathery specks? Look how far they're going." How old did she think he was, four?

"RAWK! Going all the way!" It felt as though a needle had been shoved into his ear; how could anyone stand having a chatty cockatoo on his shoulder all of the time? He wheeled away from them by a foot or two, all the while keeping his eyes on the sky.

"Huh? Oh…hey, um, we're sorry we trashed your room, Ziti. It it's any consolation, we didn't find any loose change. We'd've cleaned up the mess ourselves, except Miss F. said we can't mess around with Mr. Suckerman, anymore."

THAT'S why you barged into my room, to look for change? After all the hell you've raised here, what I'm wondering is why Miss Fontaine hasn't kicked you out.

"How're you feeling? Have you mended your heart yet?"

"Whatever happened to keeping to yourself?" he grumbled.

For perhaps the first time since they'd met, silence fell between the three of them, however brief. Then Zane saw her arm dangling over his head, blocking his view of outside. She waved her deck in front of the tip of his nose, almost close enough to scratch it.

"Hey, I know what'll cheer you up: a good, clean, old-fashioned, just-for-kicks duel! What'd'ya say?"

"No, thanks."

He heard her heels squeaking backwards, her gasp knocking the wind out of her. "A rejection to a duel?! Even we know that's not normal, 'specially coming from you! Silpheed, quick, pinch him out of it!"

Zane could see her obliging pet's reflection hovering over his shoulder, but he shot up a hand before he could get there and start pinching holes into his cheek. "I'm thinking quite clearly, thank you very much."

"If that's true, then how come you don't want to play?"

"Number one: I don't play; I duel. Number two: I don't duel 'just for kicks.' Number three: even if I did want to duel with you, I couldn't—"

"'Cause you're in a wheelchair? Don't you still have your arms? You only really need your arms to duel, and a heart and a head. Besides, we're on wheels all the time, and we still get around! Standing's overrated, anyhow."

"RAWK! Concur!"

"—duel without a deck," he deadpanned. The response was another short-lived bout of silence.

Sara shoved her tongue into her cheek. "Huh…guess you're right about that; if you don't have a deck, then you're just playing charades—what happened to yours? Oh, my gosh…you're not, like, quitting, are you?" she asked in an uncharacteristically quiet voice.

"That's none of your business, is it?"

"We're only asking because we care."

"Tch, you and everyone else on this God-forsaken planet."

Suddenly, her reflection reddened to a beet shade. Sara stamped both her feet, her tone swinging to the other extreme. "Well, you know, Sunshine, I might be a selfish shellfish and all, but if caring about people and wanting to see them happy makes me selfish somehow, at least it's a good kind of selfish! I think.

"You? I-I may not know how you broke your heart, but from where I can see, you're too selfish to let it mend! B-Bad-selfish!"

Silpheed looked too stupefied to crack a crude one. That pout on her lips quickly shielded itself behind her hands as she swayed to and fro, her face aghast with the realization of what she'd just said.

Zane hadn't been yelled at like that since the days when his friends badgered him to go back to his old ways. She hadn't called him "Sunshine" in a long time. He felt no offense, nor rage nor spite nor pain. Rather, he raised an eyebrow, slackened his jaw, said not a word.

How passionate. She almost convinced me that she knows what she's talking about…almost. And this is coming from a girl who trashed my room just so she could find loose change.

Zane turned around to watch her and Silpheed vanish. When they did, he folded his arms over his chest and shook his head, unable to decide between mild amusement and pity.

TO BE CONTINUED…