Surprise, I'm...trying to update early! Early by my new standards, anyways. Thanks for all the favorites and the reviews...now if only everybody reviewed. Sigh.

And back a few chapters and several bad puns ago, someone made the comment that at least Lloyd was getting hit on and not me...you don't think I got all this inspiration from just bad fanfics, do you? xD

Also, you guys may want to check out my Tumblr (lloyd-the-barista). I made an...interesting proposal.

Disclaimer: If I owned Tales, we'd have a lot more funny skits and a lot less plot holes...


Not Like the Other Girls

"Sorry I'm late!" Lloyd apologized profusely as he burst through the door of his shop class, not even out of breath from running there all the way from the opposite side of the school.

Though the various students all made sounds of cooing, admiration, wolf-whistling, or howls of primal animal lust, no one rose from their woodwork save Mister Dirk. "Lloyd! Ah, we were wonderin' where you were!"

Lloyd grinned sheepishly and tousled his own hair. "Yeah, sorry about that, Dad - Dirk - um..." Shoot, he'd totally botched that!

But Dirk didn't seem to mind. Instead, all he did was chuckle and give Lloyd a swift, hard pat on the back. "Dad, huh? ...Heh, I'll be your Daddy!"

Lloyd gulped quietly. "Huh?"

"Yeah, boy, your baby daddy!" Grinning fondly at Lloyd's mortified expression, Dirk gave Lloyd a much harder smack on the butt, scarring the Eternal Swordsman for life.

He was so going to need therapy after this. Preferably with bubble wrap, chocolate, and plenty of therapeutic screaming sessions that would make Nicolas Cage proud. He had all the time in the world anyways, it's not like he was going to be guest starring in Super Smash Bros or partaking in any...bizarre sequels. And he had a ridiculously rich father to pay for it now (four thousand years of random encounters on the world map had granted Kratos a load of Gald that would make Anise Tatlin get on one knee and propose), so money wasn't a problem. Or maybe he could talk Regal into getting the Lezareno Company to manufacture brain bleach...

Lloyd distanced himself from everyone else while he worked on his wood project in silence. A few people tried to interrupt him, but when it came to shop class Lloyd was in the zone.

"I see you're working with solid oak. One of the hardest woods known to man...BUT MY WOOD IS EVEN HARDER!"

'You're a fine sculptor, Lloyd, but nothing is more finely sculpted than your body!"

"Uh...uh...I don't have a clever pick-up line but let's make out anyways!"

Lloyd unknowingly ignored all these "clever quips" and focused on his figurine, a focus that lasted until a slim finger poked him in the shoulder.

"Huh?" Praying it wasn't Dirk again, he turned around only to be face-to-face with an absurdly dressed Presea. Lloyd wasn't sure what a "Scenie Weenie" was but it was scrawled across Presea's name tag, and this was actually the least eye-catching thing she was wearing. She was clad in a Pikachu knit hat, spiky metal bracelets adorned her wrists, she wore a neon purple bowtie with her uniform's shirt, rainbow tights were underneath her skirt, and her look was finished off with a pair of rubber combat boots with Adventure Time characters running amok on the sides.

Looking warily into her eyeliner-smothered eyes, Lloyd asked, "What is it?"

She replied with no pick-up lines, no boasts, and no offers to take Lloyd on a romantic spaghetti dinner so she could woo Lloyd by offering him the final scrumptious meatball. Instead all she said was, "What're you making? We're all making baseball bats, yet here you are whittling in the corner."

Baseball bats? Maybe he could make Dad One an early birthday present, since the bloodstains weren't coming off his current bat - wait a second! "Um...you really just came over here to see my figurine?"

She blinked. "...Yes?"

"You're not...uh, hitting on me?"

"What? No!" Unaware of Lloyd's awestruck expression, she continued, "Besides, I already have a husband."

"WHAT?! Who?!"

Her eyes adopted a dazed glow and she dramatically held a hand to her fluttering heart, her mind far away as she demanded that particular vital organ to be still and cease its erratic thumping. "Asch from Tales of the Abyss, of course! I swear someday I'll make him real...but even now he's still my kawaii-poo-sama-baby! Luke's kawaii too, but him and Tear are totally OTP!"

Lloyd was aware he looked like Anna had sideswept him with a frying pan, but...this was better than being hit on. While Presea pulled a box of Pocky from hammerspace and began munching because otakus always carry random Japanese junk food (and red bean paste buns sadly do not fit in pockets. Trust me, I tried and ended up with big red blotches on my white shorts. Talk about awkward...oh, right, I'm writing a story), Lloyd relented and proudly displayed his figurine. "I've been making figurines of all the people I meet!"

And now he could finally add his mom to the collection. Attired in her tunic and leggings and with her sword on her waist, the miniature Anna smiled up at Lloyd with one hand on her hip and her brown hair slightly messy.

He didn't know if this Presea shared her true self's enjoyment of craftsmanship, but all the same she took the figurine into her hands and examined his work with admiration. "Ahh, kawaii! Are you going to sell these at Creep-Con next month?"

"At what? And no, this is a figure of my mom."

She pouted sadly, like she had just been told Jade Curtiss's belt buckle had just gotten into Super Smash Bros. over Lloyd Irving. "Ah, baka-ness. She looks like a JRPG charrie!" And Presea totally didn't with her pink pigtails and horrifying status as the fandom's loli. "And Creep-Con's the city's big convention. It's called Creep-Con because of the crazy amount of guys wanting female cosplayers to take pictures with them and then getting mad when these teenage girls don't want to sleep with complete strangers. Again, baka-ness!"

Lloyd had a feeling he could relate to cosplayers now. Being hit on by a pervert Chosen...

A majority of the class period then went by peacefully, with Lloyd just chatting with the mysteriously celibate Presea. A few times Lloyd was approached by creepers, but then either Lloyd would follow Kratos's advice of excessive violence or Presea would go anime girl and whip a wrench at their heads...and it turned out anime lies, because a wrench to the head does cause more damage than a five-second-long bleeding session and a short yelling match. Lyra ended up going to the nurse's office as a result.

Presea's odd proficiency in dealing with pervs also revealed to Lloyd another of her quirks. "...You're one of those cosplayers you talked about earlier, aren't you?" he determined.

She merely gave a grim nod and made a face that just screamed squick. "If you thought men in their thirties were above trying to fondle a preteen girl in a Hatsune Mike costume...think again. Baka ka otakus, gaah!"

The sheer amount of pop culture Lloyd didn't understand was making his head spin. When this hellish school day was over, maybe he could convince everyone to take a break so Zelos could show them all these movies or something...and Lloyd would beat that man if he tried to jokingly show them porn. "Who's Hatsune Miku?"

"You don't know-"

All work in the shop ceased. The lights went low, noise dimmed, and a fan began to blow at the door (actually Dirk had turned it on because Lloyd made it hot in there...in his opinion), making the newest entry and her blonde hair billow, wearing bizarrely normal clothing and jingling with every step. In fact, the jingling sounded a lot like a certain someone's tambourines...

"Colette?" Lloyd murmured hopefully, though she couldn't hear him.

Presea cocked her head to the side. "Roido-chan-sama-sam-deku-nut? You know Colette?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Well...she's a bit of a dreck."

Even if she could have heard Presea, the words would not have penetrated Colette's self-confidence, for she was a beautiful and unique snowflake who could not be melted by the other girls and their tomfoolery. Unlike the other girls, Colette didn't have a label, for she was above labels in all ways. She wasn't like the other girls and she was aware of it.

Always clad in an array of cute graphic tees depicting various unpopular fandoms that no one but her cared about, such as Attack On Titan and Avatar: The Last Airbender, she skipped down the halls with novels featuring brunette female protagonists in dystopian societies tucked in with her schoolbooks. She listened to indie bands and singers, watched Doctor Who, and played Pokemon. But sadly, she was the only girl who did this, since she just. Was. Not. Like. The other girls.

And if you wore makeup, enjoyed wearing fancy clothing, or talked about shopping every now and then, then you were the she-devil in her eyes.

Brushing past all the foolish teenagers and their arrogance she was above, Colette sauntered right up to Lloyd and Presea. "I heard you're new here, Lloyd Aurion." Instead of waving hi, Colette held out a hand for a handshake because she wasn't like the other girls. "I'm Colette Brunel."

"Uh, hi," Lloyd said with a weak wave.

Presea decided to introduce herself as well, being polite and all even if there were rumors about Colette being a dreck. "Konnichiwa, Colette-chan-ping-pong. I'm-"

"Don't care," Colette intervened, writing off the pinkette's intro. "I don't like you."

"You've only just met me!" Presea objected, looking like a Valentine's day card had regurgitated on her thanks to her pink hair and angry red face.

"But I can tell if someone's judgmental just by looking at them! You're judgmental! You'll never understand my fandoms!"

Presea glared at Colette's fandom tee shirt. "...You're wearing a Loki shirt."

"Exactly!"

"EVERYONE likes The Avengers! It made a billion at the box office!"

"But do you own as much merchandise as I do? Do you know the names of all the extras like I do? Do you know how many sugars Thor likes in his coffee? Do you know Nick Fury's favored sleeping positions, and Hawkeye's favorite flavor of Pop-Tarts?"

"...No."

"Then you are not a true fan!"

"Hey!" Lloyd broke off Colette, stepping between his corrupted friend and the little cosplayer. "Who cares? Shouldn't you just be happy someone has the same interests as you?"

Colette snootily upturned her nose like Presea was a revolting blasphemer who had just said Avatar was anime. "Lloyd, Lloyd, Lloyd. You're still uncorrupted by them...you're not like the other boys, and I'm not like the other girls. Sweet, gentle new boy, why don't you sit with me at lunch? You might be the only person who understands me and my love for Tumblr, for I'm all alone in this world!"

Lloyd took only a moment to reply, giving Colette that wonderful glare he had inherited from his father. remembering a line he'd heard Sheena say to a Meltokio floozy who had asked to sit by the Regeneration team (but mostly by Zelos) at dinner one day, Lloyd responded, "No thanks. If I'm sitting by such a frigid bitch then my hot lunch will get cold."

With that Lloyd dramatically turned around and towed Presea toward the room's exit, letting his ribbons billow in the fan's wind as all the students collectively sighed at Lloyd's sexy strut.


High school lunchtime: Noun. A time when rabid, wild animals in heat disguised as human children run rampant, seeing who can make the best "That's what she said" joke while feasting on pink slime and toxic waste. Typically takes place in a tiled room reminiscent of a prison. May or may not involve catfights concerning a sleazy boyfriend between two girls who know nothing about how to properly desecrate an opponent, local police officers sexually harassing girls for showing their shoulders because they're bitter about their place in the circle of life, and brats yelling "PENIS!" at the top of their lungs because they believe uttering the names of sexual organs is soooo cool.

This definition is brought to you in part by Urban Fictionary, your friendly neighborhood writer, and viewers like you!

"Zelos!" Lloyd hissed as he and Presea sneaked into the room like descendants of Altair, leaping into trash cans whenever a pervy professor or sleazy student strutted by in search of some Eternal Swordsman to love.

"Hmm?" The Chosen perked up as he recognized the voice. Thanks to being established as "the foreign exchange student who barely spoke a word of the language," he'd barely spoken to anyone all day, and when he did he was ignored because "they'd been told he didn't speak English, so everyone's marijuana must be making them hallucinate." Dumb people.

"Bud?"

"In here!"

Zelos followed the hushed tones to their source and wrinkled his nose. "Yuck, let's get you out of there!" He hauled the younger boy out of the garbage and looked into the adjacent can as well. "Ah, my little rosebud!"

Presea climbed out on her own, scowling at Zelos's offered hand. "I don't need any help from a bad Asch cosplayer! How dare you misrepresent my hubby-chan-baby-muffin-senpai!"

"Say what?" Zelos said, dumbstruck.

"Don't worry about it," Lloyd advised while he peeled a rotten slice of pork butt off his cheek. "I don't know if you've heard-"

"Oh, I've heard plenty today!" Zelos interrupted rudely, wrapping an arm around a very stiff Lloyd's shoulders and failing to notice the way Lloyd squirmed and fretfully bit his lip at the contact. "I can tell you all the gossip I heard today while we wait in line to get you the crap-ton of food you always eat."

"Um, Zelos-"

"For starters, everyone's got these funky name tags they wear, like...Scenie Weenie Rosebud here-"

"Silence, foolish replicaaaaaa!" Presea commanded.

As usual, Zelos ignored the wise demand for him to not be a blabbermouth. "And for some reason all the students are in the same classes together, even though Killia is like eight and I'm in my twenties!"

Lloyd, while trying to free himself from Zelos's half-hug without revealing how distressed he was, twisted his head around, and his eyes bugged out. "Hey, Zelos-"

"Not to mention apparently Martel is the nurse here. Man, I kind of hope I get injured, I'm sure her lovely body will be enough to cure me!"

Lloyd gave up on trying to warn Zelos. The pervert Chosen said he'd wanted to visit the nurse, anyways...

"Plus, I heard Raine's a real-"

"THE EXCHANGE STUDENT IS TOUCHING MY FUTURE BOO!" Killia shrieked in outrage from behind their backs. Flexing her fingers and their nine inch nails, she went and ruined her perfect maincure by sharpening her claws with Zelos's face.

Lloyd came to his aid...after a second or two.


Children always assumed the teachers' lounge was this ominous, majestic place where teachers drowned out their sorrows in champagne and got the party down with their educational compatriots. This was a totally false assumption...except in this case, since this realm had been created by a child anyways and was therefore that party spot. It was more uproarious than a frat house toga party in this teachers' lounge.

In fact, every staff member was enjoying being away from all those ungrateful brats except Kratos. Anna at least was delighting in free cheese cubes she was munching on, but Kratos was just hunched over on a couch, faintly scowling and clenching his hands together, which was the Kratos equivalent of a freak-out session.

"Why are you so gloomy?" Anna asked as she finally found her husband by his lonesome. She playfully tried to feed him a cheese cube but the seraph was unresponsive, even when she smashed it against his cheek. "Err...gloomier than usual, I mean?"

"Aside from us being surrounded by pedophiles?" Kratos replied, smacking the cheese away. "I would rather not say."

Up until now he had forgotten how Anna had been out of the loop. Upon hearing Kratos's first sentence, Anna went on red alert, trying to grasp a sword she didn't have at the moment while scanning the crowded room with frantic, furious eyes. "Who's after our baby now?" she growled, snapping a toothpick in twain in her rage.

"Just about everyone," Kratos replied. "I tried to keep Lloyd in my office for safety precautions, but he flat out refused. He already found Sheena and he refused to leave her with all these wild animals."

"These people surely aren't as creepy as Zelos," said Anna doubtfully.

"Humph. Listen for yourself."

Tuning in with her new found angelic hearing, Anna cupped her hands around her ears to properly funnel the noise. What she heard would never be forgotten.

"That new boy is quite the sweet thing, isn't he?"

"Quite the pair of sexy chops on him."

"Totally worth any legal trouble from a seductive student-teacher romance."

"I'd love to give him some private lessons."

Anna let her cheese cubes clatter to the ground, her delectable dairy products forgotten in favor of her maternal fury. "And he's been dealing with this all day?" Kratos grunted in affirmation. "Why, though? I've never seen a fanfic where every person liked the same boy, you'd think that would distract from whatever actual couple is supposed to be front and center of the story."

'Because it's not just fan fiction anymore," Kratos explained with eyes like a raging firestorm. "The authoress is specifically targeting Lloyd. She hates him."

Anna just gawked at him. "...Whaaaaat?!" she finally blathered.

"Either she sees Lloyd as the largest threat to her mysterious plans or she's just an insane sadist who finds this corruption amusing. Whatever the case, I'm certain she knows what she's doing, as much as we underestimated her at first. I thought she was simply a poor authoress who had grown a huge enough presence to abduct our traveling companions, but this seems far too well-planned. She's an expert."

Indeed, the authoress found the twisted world she had made amusing. And the writer who had made the world of the authoress who had made this world was amused as well. And the parents who had made the writer who had made the authoress who had made this world did not find this amusing, because if they found out their daughter was writing fan fiction instead of doing her summer calculus homework then they'd kill her in a brutal fashion.

"Have you seen Lloyd yet today?" Anna asked, her hands clenching into fists in anxious worry.

"I did," Kratos sighed, letting his hair hang in his eyes as usual. "Though he hid it well, he seemed...shaken. He isn't used to this kind of attention-"

"And he shouldn't need to be," Anna growled.

"And his experience with Zelos scarred him more than I first thought," Kratos went on. "He came into my class with several people trying to...molest him, and he was not merely annoyed. He was terrified...what are you doing, Anna?"

"Giving everyone a piece of my mind," she replied tersely, standing up on the couch and shouting over the music. "LISTEN UP!" Someone dimmed the music and all eyes and ears turned quizzically to Anna as she leveled them with a stern glare worthy of Kratos's pride. Hey, there was a good reason why he fell in love with her. "Now I understand that, for some inexcusable reason, you're all trying to make romantic or sexual advances on my son, and I only have one response to that - get lost! If anyone wants to come onto my son, they're going to have to go through us first!"

All was still in shocked silence, then Botta approached the Aurions and knelt prone at their feet. "Then may I have permission to court your son?" he begged.

"That's not what I meant!" Anna screamed as Kratos booted Botta in the jaw.


Of all things for this world's Yuan to be, lunch lady was the last thing Lloyd had expected. Yet here the half-elf was, with his electric blue hair cowering under a hideous hairnet, wearing a white cape as an apron of sorts and wielding a ladle full of something that surely was not meat.

"So you've come like a moth to the flame, Lloyd!" he declared fiendishly.

Lloyd wasn't impressed, he was too busy giggling at the hairnet. "Yeah, whatever. What's, uh...whatever you have in that vat?"

The Wonder Chef, obviously the cafeteria's main chef, shoved Yuan away to steal Lloyd's attention. "That would be my homemade meat surprise, Lloyd Aurion!"

"What's the surprise?" Lloyd had to ask.

"That's the surprise, there is no surprise!"

"...That doesn't even make any sense!"

"It doesn't need to make sense," the Wonder Chef argued as Yuan grumpily ladled some of the sloppy radioactive goo onto Lloyd's tray. "You eat my meat, Lloyd Aurion. You eat it."

Yuan briefly gave the Wonder Chef a warmongering glare as he went back into the kitchen, then his glare turned seductive as he turned on Lloyd. "He merely stole your attention...but Lloyd, next time we meet, you're mine." With that he gave his meat-slathered ladle a long, drawn out, sloppy lick, never taking his eyes off a slightly ill Lloyd...and then a camera flash went off.

Both Yuan and Lloyd glanced to Zelos, standing behind Lloyd in line with a camera in hand. "Sowwwy!" he spoke in the phoniest accent imaginable. "Souvenier for home country, yaaaah!"

Even though the picture had been Yuan stupidly licking a meaty ladle with a hairnet on, Yuan decided to buy that baloney story and turn back to Lloyd...who was already long gone. "Agh, damn!"

Zelos grinned and bought his lunch, with Presea not too far behind. Finding Lloyd hidden behind a door, the two of them ushered the swordsman to an empty lunch table. "Well Yuan was creepy as all hell, but on the bright side I got some juicy new blackmail!"

"I'm getting sick of all this," Lloyd moaned, trying to ease his queasy gut.

"This has happened to you before, Lloyd-chan-sake-sokka-poodoo?" asked Presea.

Zelos was actually the one to wince at that question, gritting his teeth and glaring at his feet. "Let's not talk about that one...let's just eat, Bud!"

They all took their seats, but Lloyd just stared blankly at his food. "It's weird, but...I'm not hungry."

"Come on, Lloyd!" Zelos said, teasingly trying to spoon-feed Lloyd before remembering that did not look very good right now. "You know food always makes everything better-"

"No, I'm really not hungry...I don't even feel hungry."

He stated it so matter-of-factly that it left Zelos stumped. "...Huh?"

"Nii-san-domo-arigota-robato...and you, Foolish Replica Zelos, look over there," Presea interrupted, pointing to the other side of the lunch room.

At their own table covered with a hot pink satin tablecloth were Sheena and the other popular kids. Sheena herself was feasting on sushi long since spoiled thanks to sitting in her locker all day, a zero-calorie can of air since even diet drinks and water can be considered fattening now, and a king-sized Snickers bar because canceling out diets is funny.

Sitting all by her lonesome a few tables away was Colette, earbuds in her ears for a Simple Plan jamfest to compliment her self-pitying mood ("How could this happen to meeeeee?"). She was eating an almond butter and marmalade sandwich because she wasn't like the other girls with their PB&J sandwiches, and she was reading The Fault In Our Stars because she was deep, unlike the other girls.

Right now, Colette and Sheena had nothing in common...except that they were both staring at Lloyd. And they were both packing up their belongings. And they were both now walking toward the Eternal Swordsman.


...Can a poor writer get some reviews? *grins hopefully*