"Ooh, look at that one! That's nasty!"
Another library period at Refuge Combat School was nearing its end. Library periods, in general, were a hard sell for very active teenagers in a school that attracted and fostered the active. This period was ending, as so many others had, with a large group of students having a loud argument.
"What's that called? 'Sulfur Fish'? What kind of a name is that?"
"Hey, don't make fun of it, that thing'll burn you alive!"
At the center of the scrum was a large glossary of grimm with scale drawings. Half a dozen students were crowded around the book, engaged in that favorite pastime of teenagers: calling each other stupid.
"It can't be that bad, look at how small it is."
"You say that until a bunch of them merge together."
"Dude, we were talking about these things individually. That means one at a time?"
"You never find a sulfur fish just one at a time!"
Nearby, two orphans sat, just outside the conversation. The boy was dressed mostly in green and was looking through a nonfiction book on regional food preparation. The girl wore a combat skirt, and the only thing she was studying was the inside of her eyelids.
"Anyway, you gotta admit, getting burned alive is a pretty gnarly way to die."
"It's nothing compared to some of these other grimm. Here, gimme the book… ha! Look at that! Lancers—see the size of those stingers? They'll punch a hole clean through you, latch on, and whip you around. You're dead before you hit the ground."
"All of these things will kill you before you hit the ground…"
"Not a Ziraph! You never hit the ground with that one, it just swallows you whole! One good snap—om nom—done!"
"But that's not scary, you know? It's not painful, it's not… like, if it's that fast, you don't even have time to feel pain or be scared, it's just over. If I'm gonna die, that's how I want to die."
"But you don't die instantly, do you? Don't you, I dunno, get digested or something?"
"Do grimm even digest stuff?"
There was a contemplative silence, during which the nearby girl snorted in her sleep, the boy turned a page in his book, and the librarian pondered the merits of drinking on the job.
"If we don't know, it doesn't count, okay?"
No one could gainsay the reasonableness of that opinion. "Alright, no counting the digestion bit. So, we'll say that if you get eaten, it's an instant kill."
"And I still say that's not too scary."
"Hey, hey! If lancers are scary because of their stingers, what about a deathstalker? Flip over to… there, that one! Look at the stinger on that!"
"But that's not bigger than a queen lancer, so it's a wash."
"Oh, we care about size now? Go to the Solitas section and get a picture of a megagoliath. There's your size for you."
"Same thing as the ziraph, though. That thing hits you, you don't even feel the pain, you just go splat. You never realize you're hurt."
"Yeah, and that's blunt trauma. Blunt trauma's never as nasty as, I dunno, claws and stingers and stuff. That's where you get the blood and guts, right? That's the nightmare stuff."
"Says you!"
"Oh yeah? What do you think is so scary?"
"Give me the centinels. Come on, turn the… wrong way, idiot, still in Solitas… there we go! Read here, it says their acid can eat through rock. What do you suppose it does to skin and bones? You get some of that on you and it's splash, sizzle, screaming."
"But you can fight a centinel, they're not that big…"
"Again with the size thing! What is it with you and size?"
"Shut up! I'm just saying, you come up against a megagoliath, you're running the other direction. Yeah, you die the instant it hits you, but those last few seconds before it does are the worst seconds of your life."
A chime sounded from the overhead speakers, signaling the five-minute warning before the end of class. (The librarian said a silent prayer of thanks.) The sound jerked awake the girl at the table nearby; in a flash she was sitting upright, head whipping about in alarm. Without looking away from his book, the boy extended a hand to her shoulder and briefly flashed gray. The girl took a deep breath of relief. "Oh, right."
"Hey, what about them?" called one of the kids clustered around the grimm book.
"What about us?" said the girl in challenging tones.
"Valkyrie, isn't it? You've been out there, you've seen some of these grimm yourself."
"A few," said Nora Valkyrie warily.
"What do you think? What's the scariest thing out there? What's the worst way to die?"
Nora surged to her feet. "Al-right! Those are my type of questions!" She crossed her arms and adopted the posture of someone deep in thought. Beside her, Ren turned another page in his book, utterly unperturbed.
"Well?" prompted one of the kids at the table.
Nora snapped her fingers. "Alright, I got it!"
"Well?!"
She slammed her palms on the table. "The ultimate enemy, the worst way to die… is dysentery!"
The group at the table had no way to process this pronouncement. One of them, frowning, took the grimm index and turned to its table of contents.
"You won't find it in there," Nora said dismissively. "It's not a grimm, it's a disease."
The group at the table groaned. "Another ditzy move from Nora," one of them said.
"No way a disease is scarier than a megagoliath."
"No way a disease is scarier than a Beowolf!"
"Ha!" Nora said, hands on her hips. "You just say that 'cause none of you have ever had to survive in the wilds! Seriously, have any of you done real wilderness survival before?"
The group went back to being flustered. One of them said, "I've gone camping a lot," and another offered up, "I lived in a remote village."
"Pfft, then none of you know the true terror of dysentery. It's the worst, isn't it Ren?"
Ren nodded and gave a slight shudder.
Nora watched as the kids at the table shared skeptical looks. "Let me lay out a tale of horror," Nora said, sweeping over to the table. She started flipping through the book as she spoke. "There you are, out in the wilds between kingdoms, days from the closest town. Your water ran out two days ago, and your throat is burning. You know you'll die if you don't get a drink soon."
She came to a picture of a lake. "This looks like a perfectly innocent place to get water, right? You can't see anything wrong. Would you drink from this?"
Her gaze swept across the faces at the table, daring one of them to speak. "Grimm?" one of them whispered.
"Nope!" said Nora. "You get down to the edge of the water, fill your canteen—no grimm. That's when you relax. If there's no grimm, nothing bad can happen, right?"
She slapped the table. "That's your fatal mistake. You drink the water. It tastes good, so you drink some more. You fill your canteen again and go on your merry way.
"Nothing seems wrong, at first. You go a whole day thinking you got away clean. That's when the fever starts. You don't notice at first, since you're moving around all the time anyway. You do notice when you start getting cramps. Before you know it, you've really, really got to take a crap."
There were a few chuckles at that. "You think that's funny, huh?" said Nora ominously. "You probably would, at first. So you do your business, and it's all runny, but it doesn't bother you much. Until you realize you still feel like you need to crap. You just crapped, but you feel worse than you did before. Then the cramps get worse. Then the fever gets worse.
"You try to keep moving, but every step gets harder. Soon you have to crap again. You go and do, and it's almost straight water this time. Now you're starting to get worried. You're crapping out all your water, and you're sweating from the fever, so you know if you don't get more water you're in trouble. So you drink from your canteen.
"And that's your last mistake. Because the same little nasties that were in the lake are in your canteen. Now… you're… dooooomed."
She leaned deep into the table, and though her voice was quieter than before, it seemed spookier for the change. "The only way to not die is to drink water. Every time you drink, you get reinfected. The cramps are so bad you can't walk. The fever is so high you can't think. You can't do anything but sit there and crap and reinfect yourself, losing water every minute to an enemy you can't fight.
"That's how you die: wallowing in agony and regret, desperate for water you can't drink, drowning in a pool of your own crap."
She crossed her arms triumphantly and sneered at the book. "You think big things are scary? Nah, the scariest things are the ones you can't see. I'll take on any grimm you can imagine before I'll drink water I haven't boiled."
The chime sounded again, announcing the end of the period. "Alright!" Nora crowed, dancing back to her table to pick up her things. "That means it's lunchtime! I've got noodles to kill! See you there, Ren!"
Ren nodded serenely as Nora dashed away. He looked at the table of silent students still gawking after Nora. "You did ask," he said.
He and the librarian shared a fist bump as he left the library.