I'm not totally satisfied with this chapter, but it's here. Happy holidays everybody! :)
"Good evening, students." Master Wu greets, standing in front of the training mats when the ninja enter the warehouse.
"Sensei," the others say as they bow in unison. The atmosphere is subdued, it's been two days since their encounter with Lloyd, and Kai, Cole and Nya wait tensely for their punishment.
"Today's exercise will be on stealth!" Wu launches into their regular routine, pacing up and down in front of the line of ninja without paying any mind to the elephant in the room. "As will tomorrow's lesson. So will the day after's, until I believe you are finished." Wu faces them and looks them each in the eye. "You've all spent too much time on the battlefield." Cole winces, Nya seems ready to argue, and Kai just looks confused.
"Master Wu?" Kai looks up. "Listen, we didn't do anything wro-"
"Silence!" Wu raps Kai's head sharply with his staff. "You are in no position to decide what is wrong or right." Pacing in front of the group again, he plants his staff on the floor and looks them over. The quiet stretches a long time.
"Your exercise is your assignment from now until I say so," Wu says. "The five of you will be tailing my nephew, all day, every day." His eyes narrow. "Your mission is to keep a clear view of the target at all times, while remaining unseen."
"Um, Master Wu," Jay stammers, unable to keep quiet. "What if we're caught?"
"Lloyd knows you're my students." Wu answered. "He won't hurt you… much." All five ninja start at this, looking at Wu with wide eyes. "Students," their Sensei smiles gently, though his gaze remains serious, "my nephew lives constantly under threat, and too many have shattered his trust already. If he defends himself, you are not to retaliate in any way." The old Master's gaze wanders across the faces of his pupils, before coming to rest on his red, cyan and black ninja. "Perhaps we will all learn a lesson about jumping to conclusions."
The silence settles in again, and Cole, Kai and Nya especially are cringing. Wu lets them hang for just a moment.
"Now then!" Wu's staff makes a tunk on the floor that echoes off the warehouse roof. "You have thirty minutes to work out shifts among yourselves, in pairs of two. Afterward, we will begin some exercises you will find helpful." He turns away, leaving the five teens glancing at each other hesitantly.
Jay, as always, is the first to speak. "Jumping to conclusions?" He hisses under his breath. "What conclusions?"
"He's talking about the other night, motormouth," Cole says while swatting Jay over the head. "Master Wu loves his nephew, and for whatever reason thinks we should like him too."
"Good luck, there's not much to like about the kid," Kai snorts.
"Look-Kai," Cole sighs, and he puts a hand on his forehead, Lloyd's terrified face illuminated by the flashlight slipping into his thoughts.
I thought you guys were heroes!
"Technically this works in our favor," Zane is saying as Cole pulls his mind back to the present. "It will be much easier to find out what he's up to with Master Wu's direct permission."
"Maybe we can get our hands on that book again," Jay says brightly, and Wu's furrowed brow and stern frown flash through Cole's vision.
"Guys, no," but Cole is cut off as Nya says, "any advantage we can get will be useful."
"Alright, zip it!" Cole hisses, forcing himself into the center of their little knot. "Look, guys, this is a good opportunity to get a better feel for Lloyd, but we will keep our distance," he emphasizes the last few words. "The whole point of this is to not be spotted, and that's going to get a lot harder if he starts wondering why his stuff is disappearing." Jay looks ready to object, but Cole steamrolls over him. "We're the good guys, team, and that means we respect our enemies as well as our friends." …heroes! Cole banishes the thought, still confused as to why it carries so much guilt, and stares his team down with a final, warning glare. "Nobody will approach Lloyd, not without my say-so."
The others glance at each other, offering shrugs, small nods and "whatever's," and Cole knows he has their support. Kai does look around again, however, and says uncertainly: "will we include Green on this?"
All the ninja cringe. "I'm afraid not." Cole says with sympathy, but a no-nonsense tone. "We need to have people we can rely on to show up regularly." Kai doesn't argue, just nods, and with a relieved sigh Cole pulls out his phone and opens the calendar app. "Okay, there's only five of us, so we'll need to rotate pairs…" Soon enough they have a rough schedule, still subject to sudden changes via school or Garmadon, but it's a plan.
Lloyd's having a much better time when the incident in the alley, and on the pier, is several days in the past. He comes back to school to minimal makeup work, and Mrs. Laudita is kind enough to waive what he's missed entirely, (Lloyd loves her!) All he needs to worry about after that is history and math, both of which he breezes through easily.
His water bottle is a lost cause, but coming home on the first day back from school he finds a package from Uncle Wu done up in brown paper and green-and-black string. The contents turn out to be a new bottle, stainless steel with a beautiful gold dragon winding around its circumference. Sipping lemonade from it during a movie, Lloyd thinks that first: his uncle is the best, and second: he'll be okay.
A few days pass as Lloyd resumes his normal activities. The man hanging around the history section at the library is gone, to his relief. Lloyd looks over his shoulder more often now, and who could blame him, but so far no other signs of trouble have come his way. Trouble, however, is a narrow definition.
The first unusual occurrence happens while Lloyd's pretending to work on an assignment in Mrs. Laudita's classroom after school. What he's really doing is doodling dragons and caricatures of serpentine in the margins of his essay prompt. A rather offended-looking portrayal of Skales is taking shape nicely where Lloyd's name is supposed to go, and he takes some time to detail the wide curve of Skales' sneer up against the patterns marking his hood.
Lloyd leans back, laughs in satisfaction at his work, and taps his pencil against his upper arm as he stares out the window. Mrs. Laudita is reading at her desk, feet propped up on the surface in a flippant disregard for social etiquette she'd never display during class. Lloyd glances at the clock. The second hand inches it's way around the dial, tick, tick, tick.
He could leave now, technically. This is longer than usual for both him and Mrs. Laudita to stay, but the comfortable silence and waning sunlight have them both pinned in the peaceful, empty classroom. Lloyd blows a raspberry and looks back out the window.
There's a head watching him from atop a nearby building. Lloyd's just about ready to jump out of his seat in panic, but he frowns and takes a closer look. The spy's face is hidden, wrapped in white cloth, and the combination with Zane's cool blue eyes is a dead giveaway.
So, the ninja are watching him. Dandy. Lloyd files the information away and goes back to drawing Skales Junior's adorable swirly eyes.
Jay is in his class the next day. Of course, Lloyd shares classes with several of the ninja, but… Jay is in Lloyd's history class. None of the ninja share this class with Lloyd. Out of the corner of his eye, Lloyd watches Jay take an unassuming seat at the back, trying to look nonchalant and generally screaming don't look too close in his whole demeanor.
It works, this time, and the lightning ninja makes it through without being found out by the teacher. To his credit, Lloyd supposes, though Jay's presence both baffles and concerns him. He mulls it over through his next two classes, classes he happens to share with Cole and Zane, respectively, then enters math.
Kai is sitting in the back of Lloyd's math class. Lloyd knows Kai is several levels ahead of him in math. Well, actually, Lloyd is several degrees beyond Kai, but the teachers won't admit it, so Lloyd remains behind. Kai may like to act suave and apathetic, but Lloyd knows he wouldn't skip math, no matter how hard it was. Uncle Wu forbids it.
Come to think of it, what class was Jay supposed to be in earlier? Lloyd racks his brain and finds he doesn't know, but then realizes Zane would have been skipping training last night to be on the roof near the school. The ninja might be a bunch of, occasionally rebellious, teens, but they take Wu's rules seriously. You show up for training, your show up for battle, and if Master Wu says attend your classes, you attend your classes. Somehow, he always knows.
Uncle Wu. Of course, if Wu can make rules, he can give permission to break them. Lloyd surreptitiously pulls his phone from his pocket and clicks the power button. He has to glance down a few times to enter his password, it's long and complicated, but once he's in he opens his text messages with Wu.
"You sicced your students on me." Lloyd hits 'send' and watches the little spinning wheel carry his message to Uncle Wu. The response is almost immediate.
"It's a stealth exercise. Feel free to throw them around if they're caught." Lloyd laughs out loud to himself, not even angry at being spied on. It's nice to know his uncle cares that much, and… well, the alleyway shook him, even if he won't admit it.
"Mister Garmadon." Lloyd's head whips up and finds, to his horror, his math instructor standing in front of the desk. "Care to share what's so funny with the rest of us?" He asks lightly.
"No, Mr. Moor," Lloyd says, ducking his head and quickly turning off the phone.
"Really," His teacher, Mr. Moor, looks unimpressed. "Let's see then, shall we?" He snatches the phone from Lloyd's lap and clicks it open. It is, of course, locked, and Mr. Moor spends a couple minutes trying out several passwords. Finally he pockets the phone and, with a glare, says, "you may have this back after detention, young man." With that, Mr. Moor returns to the front of the classroom, and Lloyd slumps in his seat as his classmates snicker and whisper victory cheers around him. The thought passes through his mind that teachers shouldn't try breaking into your phone, but he's long since given up spending energy on those worries.