A companion to The Reed
2nd in the as yet untitled band series. (There's going to be 5 stories altogether)
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Chapter One2006
"You mean you built a time machine… out of a FLUTE?" Martyn asked incredulously, staring down at the shiny instrument (author drools) in the hands of his fellow trumpet player, Kenneth. Around them, the band members milled around the place looking bored and waiting for the newly elected band major to come. Things had been fairly normal the past few days, and the Reed deaths barely a week ago had almost been forgotten.
13-year-old Kenneth shrugged at his section-mate.
"My uncle did it, not me. What'd you think? I'm already failing science on a somewhat regular basis."
"Yeah, but a FLUTE?"
"He just asked me for some shiny metal thing, and I didn't dare to give him my trumpet, because I just got it."
Martyn suddenly realised something.
"Wait… you play the flute?" he asked. "Why didn't you say so when we were allocating you your instruments?"
"I played it in my last band… and I guess I wanted to try something new…"
"Well, that's okay then, as long as you don't play it anymore and ruin your embouchure. We can't afford that if we want to get a gold for our next competition… we need three in a row to get this arts award thingy, and we only have two so far." Martyn paused before continuing. "Oh yeah, so how does the… uh, time machine work?"
Kenneth had been looking guiltily nervous when Martyn was talking about ruining his embouchure, but now his face held an expression of relief.
"I can't really remember that well… I think he said something about how all the notes in C major correspond to a different one-digit number, like C is 1, D is 2, E is 3 and so on until the next octave E which is 0. The sharps and flats don't do a thing, except for B-flat. You're supposed to play it first, to start the thing, then you play whatever sequence of notes you want to enter the date you want to go in the order of year, month, date, hour, minute, second. Once the thing is full it'll stop registering. See, it's displayed here." Kenneth pointed to the smallest of LCD display screens embedded in the foot joint of the flute, currently not lighted up. "Then you play B-flat again to activate them. My uncle said it was powered by sound energy or something, it's just been recharged though."
"Okay, then you get sent to whatever date you put in?"
"Yup. See…" Kenneth blew a few random notes on the flute, and the LCD screen lit up to display the inputted time – 23 July 2001, 2:41 p.m.."
"Uh… would you arrive naked or something?"
"Nah, anything in direct contact with your skin would go along too," Kenneth replied, placing the flute back on the table. "… so your shoes would get left behind if your socks don't have holes in them."
"Well, fine, but all this still doesn't explain why your trumpet mouthpiece has suddenly gone missing."
Kenneth smiled nervously, mentally slapping himself on the forehead. So much for Martyn forgetting how the conversation had started in the first place…
"Uh… I was getting to that… see, my uncle and I tried to test the flute so we strapped my mouthpiece to it and sent it one minute into the future, but one minute later the flute was there and my mouthpiece wasn't. I think it fell off on the journey or something…"
The boy looked up to see Martyn giving him this very sceptical look.
"O…kay. Go ahead and tell that to our SL, but I doubt that Crystal is going to be very impressed by the fact that your mouthpiece was the world's first time traveller."
Kenneth was about to give some answer to that when the band major burst through the door, squishing a clarinettist in the process. (The latter died.)
"OI! EVERYBODY!"
The room went silent. All that could be heard was the sound of the dead clarinettist sliding off the door, leaving behind a streak of blood in his wake.
"The school administration has been complaining of lumps in the school field, so apparently we didn't do such a good job when burying our dead last week," the band major continued. "Right, so I want everybody to get down there now and flatten those lumps."
No one moved. All were staring at a certain corpse lying beside the door.
"Oh, you can take that too."
No response.
"DO IT NOW OR DROP 700!"
The band room was cleared in a record five seconds.
TO BE CONTINUED… Please review! ^_^ Just clicky on that little blue button over there…
Oh, and another thing… what do you think should be the title of my band story series?
1) Weird Tales From Band
2) Bandzone
3) The Musical Twilight Zone
4) One Time At Band…
5) The Rest Are All So Stupid/Corny/Lame/Lousy That I Want This Instead: *insert your suggestion here*