Author's Note: Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am FINALLY updating. I hope you guys don't hate me ... too much. ((ducks as everyone throws rotten tomatoes at me))
Disclaimer: I own Keenan, Bradford, and Stewart. Basically, anyone who wears a lab coat. And the Island is also mine. (Am I the only person who wants to go live there?)
-----
"Insanity — a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world."
-R D Lang
-----
"A bit off his rocker, don't you think?" said Josh Bradford quietly, nodding towards Dr Stewart on the other side of the room.
Keenan poured some cream into his coffee and stirred it. "Nah," he answered after a minute, a half-grin tugging at the corner of his thin mouth. "Just a little desperate for attention."
"Why do you say that?"
"Doesn't want to admit to himself that his time's passed." The two of them sat down at a table together. "I mean, think about it. The man was the genius of his time, the shining star of the university — and now he's ten years gone without a successful experiment."
Bradford raised an eyebrow. "Is that so?"
Keenan nodded, running a hand through his coarse iron gray hair. He took a sip of his coffee and looked over at Stewart, who was sitting by himself drinking his coffee and reading a documentary. Crazy lunatic and his harebrained experiments ... The man was going to get himself thrown into an insane asylum soon if he wasn't careful. One more fruitless experiment was all that it would take...
"Do you think it'll work?" asked Bradford.
Keenan looked up. "What?"
"His experiment. On the teenagers on the Island. Do you think he'll be successful?"
A grin spread over Keenan's face and he chuckled. "Are you serious?" he asked. Bradford just looked at him, and he sighed. "Of course not, the whole thing's a ridiculous last attempt for glory. Honestly, I think all thirty-six of the teenagers are going to die of starvation, and the men in white coats will come and take Stewart away."
"Isaacs thinks it's gonna work," said Bradford.
"Well Isaacs isn't quite the sharpest knife in the drawer, is he?"
Bradford looked blankly at him again. Keenan took another swallow of coffee. This Bradford kid was quite an odd duck, he decided. A little too thoughtful. When he, Keenan, had been in his late twenties like this one, he had been a happy go lucky kid with a degree in psychology.
And now he was an ill-tempered fifty-year-old with a degree in psychology and nothing to show for it.
Funny how things work out that way, he thought musingly.
"Do you really think they're going to send Stewart to the asylum?" asked Bradbury.
Keenan took another sip of his coffee. "Shut up, kid."
-----
SkitteryI'm willing to admit that, within reason, I am a pretty paranoid dude. My name fits my personality pretty well, but I'd like to make it perfectly clear to all that it is not my fault that I'm this way.
Why, you ask? Let's just say I didn't exactly have the nicest childhood.
It was the classic story; my dad was a drunken bastard and abandoned my mom and me when I was about five. We struggled financially for a year or so, and then she made the brilliant decision to go into prostitution.
2031 AD. You'd think that shit doesn't go on anymore.
Well guess what? It does.
I lost my virginity at age nine, my mother at ten, my mind at eleven. And then, on top of all that, I realized that I was actually gay and had no interest in girls whatsoever.
Do you have any idea what stuff like that can do to a guy?? Homosexuality isn't accepted anymore — it goes against the format for society, and society nowadays is based almost completely on conformity. So there I was: the orphan, the reject, the fag, sent to orphanage after orphanage but never really having a home.
I gave up the name Michael long ago. Skittery fit me much better than anything else.
In a way, this bizarre Island was the best thing that had happened to me so far. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who acted vaguely like they kind of liked me. It was a new experience for me.
And then there was Snitch.
I liked him from the moment I laid eyes on him two weeks ago, as cliché as it sounds. He came flying out of the "elevator of doom", as he called it, crashed into me, flung his arms around me, and the pair of us fell backwards into the sand. His chin hit the bridge of my nose, and for about twenty seconds I was literally blinded with pain with him sitting there spurting out apologies a mile a minute.
Yeah, it was love at first sight.
And then, just as I was recovering, Scout came flying out of her elevator of doom and crushed the pair of us all over again. At least she didn't almost break my nose...
So, if you think about it, my acute paranoia was perfectly logical and completely out of my control. I had a pretty fucked up childhood, and now for the first time I actually had something good. To be honest, I was kinda worried that one day I'd wake up and be back at the orphanage, and all this would just be a dream.
"Skitts? You all right?"
I blinked and looked up to see Snitch standing over me, looking concerned. "What?"
"You all right?"
"Oh ... yep."
He sat down next to me and stuck his feet in the sand. "Mind if I hide here with you? Spitfire, Scout, and Flare want to see what I'd look like with my hair in a hundred little ponytails," he said, shuddering visibly.
I laughed. "Sure."
I looked dreamily out over the ocean, watching the shadows slowly lengthen. (I'm hopelessly romantic, I know, Scout likes to pantomime throwing up whenever I get into this frame of mind...) "Y'know," I said after a minute, "this whole island thing ain't that bad."
"Yeah. I mean, once you get over the initial shock of getting dumped on some obscure landmass in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason," he said seriously. "At least Sapphy stopped destroying our food."
I ran a hand through my hair, which was even more tousled than usual as a result of two weeks in this place, and licked my lips, thinking about what I was about to say. "It's just..."
"Hmm?" He looked at me, eyebrows raised. "Aw c'mon, Skitts, you can't just leave me hangin' like that."
"Well it all just seems too perfect," I said very fast, trying to get it all out at once. "Like, have you ever gotten the feeling that there's something..." I looked out over the ocean again.
"FINISH YOUR SENTENCES!" he yelled.
"That there's some other animal or something out there?"
"What do you mean?"
I leaned closer a little so that our faces were only a couple inches apart. "I know you're just going to call me paranoid, everyone does, but sometimes I feel like there's some other animal living in the jungle that's been following us. I've only been in there a couple times, but I keep hearing things. Leaves crunching behind us, you know? But when I look, there's nothing there."
I sat back, waiting for him to laugh, but he never did. In fact, he looked mildly interested. "You know, Cat said something like that to me a little while back. Said she was getting all creeped out on the second day when we all split up for food."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah ... but you know Cat, I just thought she was messin' with my mind and didn't take her seriously. But now..." He shrugged. "Do you think we should tell the others?"
"FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD! HOT SAUSAGE AND MUSTARD! WHILE WE'RE IN THE MOOD, COLD JELLY AND CUSTARD!" sang Bandit, hopping over to us. "Heya fellas, dinner's ready. And no, Sapphy didn't make it. Nani did, and it smells friggin' good, and she made up a song to go with it so come and eat!"
I grabbed him by the collar of his t-shirt and pulled him down onto the sand. "Have you been hearing creepy things in the forest?" I demanded.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise (which caused his eyebrow piercing to look rather funny). "No ... yes."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean??"
"I'm not sure."
"YOU GUYS COMIN'?" Braids bellowed from where our official camp was set up.
"You're such a mother," we heard Spot cackle.
"Am NOT!"
Bandit ran a hand through his hair, nose wrinkling up as he thought. "I mean, every once and a while I hear stuff — just small things, chipmunks and all that shit. But then the other night I heard something else..."
"What'd it sound like?" I asked, intrigued.
"Like an animal moving around, close to our camp. A big one, I guess." He shrugged. "I dunno, maybe I'm just imagining it, I mean it was real early in the morning and I had a was trying to get all this sand out of my mouth; I was still pretty tired ... Anyway, I'm not even sure I've been completely right in the head since Marie—" He broke off and put his hand over his shoulder.
"Who's Marie?" asked Snitch interestedly.
"No one." Bandit stood up abruptly. "C'mon, guys, let's go and eat." And with that he walked quickly away, hands in his pockets, head bowed.
Snitch and I looked at each other, eyebrows raised. Then I shrugged, and the pair of us got up too and followed in his footprints.
After spending two weeks with the same people, it surprised me that there were still secrets about some of them that I didn't know yet.
Oh well. I've never been the most perceptive person, anyway.
-----
Alaska"So then I was like, 'Listen, dude, if you don't get the hell away from me, I'm gonna pour my Tabasco sauce down your pants'," said Bel dramatically, gesturing animatedly.
"If he had been like that to me, I woulda just peed on him," said Spot and took a bite of his mango. Braids smacked his shoulder, laughing.
"Well I don't have a penis, so I don't have as much control over where my pee goes," said Bel calmly. "Anyway—" she turned back to the rest of us and her voice grew dramatic again "—and so then he's all, 'Make me!' and I'm like, 'Fine!' And I take out my handy bottle of Tabasco sauce that I carry with me at all times, grabbed him by his back pocket and—"
We were all choking on our dinner by now, and Chris had fallen over on top of Specs because she was laughing so hard.
"Did you really do that to your brother??" Mush laughed.
Bel nodded. "He was only five years older than me, I could take him..."
"I really want a raison right now," said Sapphy, poking at our little bonfire with a stick to get it to heat up more.
"You know," said King thoughtfully, "I like it better here than back in the real world."
A moment of silence followed her statement, and I dropped my mango. "So do I," said Nova after a couple seconds. "It seems ... more real?" She said the last few words very slowly, as if they didn't make any sense.
They made perfect sense to me.
I picked up my mango and blew on it, hoping the sand would come off. It didn't. I was just about to go and dunk it in the ocean to see if that would do any good, but before I could so much as move, I heard a rustling noise directly behind me in the forest.
It sounded like the noise squirrels make when the scamper across dry leaves, only about ten times louder. I turned around slowly, eyebrow raised, but there was nothing there. The noise stopped.
I looked back at the rest of the guys. They were all staring at the forest, eyes wide. "That's it," Skittery murmured to Snitch, nudging him in the ribs. "That's the noise I was telling you about."
"So you've heard it before?" I said to him.
He looked up at me, obviously nervous that I would make fun of him or something. "Um ... yeah. Just a couple times," he added hastily. "But ... well they call me Skittery for a reason, and that noise has been totally creeping me out." He looked around at everyone else as if expecting them to laugh.
"I've heard it too," said Swifty after a minute.
"You have??" Skittery looked appraisingly at him.
"Yep. Scared the shit outta me, I had half a mind to go and stick my head in the ocean just to make sure I wasn't hearing things."
Classic Swifty thing to say.
Sapphy shifted on Race's lap, where she had been happily sitting. He groaned a little and tried to wriggle free, but she ignored him. "So I'm not the only one? I thought I was just losing my mind..."
"Don't worry, you're just as sane as I am," said Swifty, smiling devilishly at her.
"Oh that's reassuring," she said sarcastically.
"Sapphy, get off me, you elephant," said Race fondly.
"I ... I think I saw something the other night," said Bumlets quietly from behind his shaggy black bangs. We all looked at him and he leaned back, apparently taken aback by all the attention.
"Well??" Coin prompted, throwing her mango at him.
"It was real late, and I couldn't sleep 'cause Swifty was snoring," he said. "I was considering shoving my shirt into his mouth to shut him up—"
"Hmm, never thought of that," said Ershey pensively.
"—and then I heard a noise — like that one we just heard. It was about a hundred feet away 'cause I always sleep at the edge of our camp—"
"Antisocial oddball," said Sapphy affectionately, taking a bite out of her fish.
"—but the noise didn't disappear this time the way it usually does. You know how when you look over at it, it usually stops and there's nothing there? Well it didn't this time, it kept going and then..." Bumlets looked kind of out of breath from all this talking, which was understandable considering he spoke an average of three words a day.
"YES??" said Dutchy excitedly. (Actually, screw that last part; the kid was always excited, so there's no point mentioning it now.)
Bumlets folded up the empty skin of his mango and pushed it into the sand. "Well, this big shadow came slowly outta the forest, by where Soaker and Granny were sleeping. I couldn't really see its shape 'cause, you know, it was like midnight or whatever, but I could tell it was huge. It didn't do anything — just stood there for a minute and looked at me. And then it sorta walked away around the edge of the forest."
We all stared at him. "How come you didn't tell us?" King demanded, voicing what everyone else was wondering.
"You must have been scared out of your MIND," I gasped.
Bumlets drew a pattern in the sand with his finger. "I dunno..." he said softly. "I didn't want to be a bother to anyone..."
"BE A BOTHER??" Swifty repeated incredulously. "Bumlets, a big black thing came hopping out of the forest and gave you the evil eye!! You should have told someone, we wouldn't have been BOTHERED by you! Stupid considerate moron..."
Bumlets managed to pull of a half-assed smile as Swifty smacked his chest.
I, on the other hand, was not in the mood to smile. "Guys, you do realize what this means, right?" I said.
"That I'm gonna have competition for my special pee-place tonight?" said Spot. "I'm supposed to be peeing over by Soaker and Granny. Stupid animal, why can't it find it's own toilet..."
"Why are you so pee-oriented today?" Braids demanded as Soaker and Granny pretty much shriveled up and died.
"IT MEANS," I continued loudly, "that we're no longer just the hunter. We're the prey too. You understand that, don't you? There's something out there hunting us."
That was enough to get Spot to stop making jokes about pee.
"Do you — do you really think so?" asked Coin nervously.
Emily looked back at the forest, her angular features outlined in the firelight. "Just because there's some creepy animal in the forest, it doesn't mean it's out to get us," she said reasonably. "I mean, haven't you guys read Dark Lord of Derkholm?"
Everyone stared at her. "You read books?" asked Flare, a look of astonishment on her face. "Where the hell do you get them?"
Emily shrugged awkwardly and shrank back into the shadows. "There are still a few books out there," said David suddenly, coming to her rescue. "I read all the time."
"But it's illegal," said Jack. (I almost laughed; he looked so funny when he was surprised.)
"Well yeah, but it's worthwhile." David smiled at Emily, who blushed very slightly and pulled her knees up to her chest. "And I've read Dark Lord of Derkholm. It's a good book."
"I don't get it," said Race, squirming from under Sapphy. "Why the hell would you read a book if you could just as easily play a video game where it actually takes you there?"
Emily looked kind of embarrassed. "When I read, it's like I'm there..." she said. "I kind of get lost in the book, you know?"
"Yeah," said David.
We all just stared at them. "Okay!" said Irish in a very Wayne-Campbell-esque fashion, brushing her hair behind her ears. "In any case, there is a big animal hopping around out there and we don't know what it is. What should we do?"
The way she said it made everyone laugh. "I vote we go to bed!" yelled Bandit, and he leaned against King and promptly fell asleep.
I'm not kidding. He seriously fell asleep just like that. How the guy does it, none of us will ever know...
"I agree with Bandit," said Itey in mid-yawn. "If I have to eat another bite of fish, I'm going to hurl all over Specs."
Specs stiffened slightly and scowled at him. "That is NOT funny."
"And I'll sing you all a lullaby!" said Nani excitedly.
"THAT'S NOT FUNNY EITHER!" yelled Specs.
-----
Shoutouts!!!
ershey: Yes. Mangos are officially the best food on the planet, next to red onions. And now — ((takes out magic wand)) — I dub you Namer of the Places on the Island. You are now officially allowed to call it "Mush Beach" and "David Hill" and all that good stuff. Thanks for reviewing, I love ya!
tinydanceremily: God, I love Elton John. And I love you, because your name always makes me think of Elton John. And because you're so incredibly agreeable! HOW DO YOU DO IT!?! lol, thanks for reviewing, I love ya!
Madison Square: My dialogue describes action?? I feel so ... good-writer-ish!! (Ohh I can just see my English teacher shriveling up right now...) Thank you SO MUCH for the review, I love ya!
Repeat: HAHA! My romance (or lack there of) doesn't smell either ... of course, you guys are stuck on an island without any showers, and I'm planning on keeping you all there for at least a month. Dude, even Spot's gonna be looking pretty grim by the end of this story ... I suppose then your romance will smell quite lovely. Lol, thanks for reviewing, I love ya!
KyrielF: I feel so bad that I'm making Skittery gay ... I just figured that I'd rather have all the Skittery fans hate me than one love me and the rest hate me and each other. (Wow, my logic confuses me...) Ah well, I'll have you guys hangin' out together, ok? Thanks for the review, I love ya!
Written Sparks: Note to Self: Next chapter must have section from Nova's point of view. Don't let me forget!! I'm so sorry I haven't had her as outgoing as you'd like, I'm having issues keeping track of all of the personalities. (This could quite possibly be the last casting call story I do, I have a tendency to focus on like three or four of the characters and ignore the rest. It's not because I don't love you guys, though, I ADORE Nova!) Thanks for reviewing!! :-D
Soaker: I must put you in more. I think all I did with you this time was have Spot threatening to pee on you, and that just ain't right, lol. Thanks for reviewing!!
SpotLover421: Yeah, I had to have Spot running around shirtless at one point. I think it's happened in every single one of my stories where he is one of the main characters. That's just sad ... Anyway, thanks for reviewing, I love ya!
Sapphy: ((dangles fish in front of your face)) Ohh I'm so evil ... ((starts to cry)) That was MEAN! I feel HORRIBLE, I'm sorry, I won't do it again... ((gives fish to Bumlets)) Thank you so much for the review, you cracked me up! MWAH!
nani at 12 o'clock: Yes, I like Spot with no shirt on. Maybe I'll have him lose it later on so that he'll be FORCED to walk around shirtless ... Ohh I can see it now ... ((cackles evilly)) Thank you for your review and the good ideas your reviews give me, lol!
Coin: lol! Yes, I would like nothing more than for Racetrack to throw himself on top of me. ((cuddles him)) ((Race runs away looking terrified)) They always seem to do that ... ah well, thanks so much for the review, I love ya!
klover: THANK YOU! ((hugs you))
Ccatt: lol!! I snort all the time when I laugh, it's really quite embarrassing ... Thanks so much for the review, I love ya!
Cassies-Grandma: Awwww, I'm sorry!! :-D I tried not to mention your height in this chapter, did you notice? Lol, thanks for the review, I love ya!
Scout73: SWOON! A good word, I daresay. SWOON SWOON SWOOOOOON! Just makes you want to sing, doesn't it? ((begins singing)) I like to swooooooooon, by the light of the moooooooooooon, in a blue lagoooooooooooon, with the newsie named Boooooooooooooots!! ((Boots runs away looking terrified)) lol, thanks for reviewing, I love ya!
Dakki: BLUSHTRACK! God I love you, Dakki, we MUST MUST write something together (although it would be complete bedlam, don't you think?) Anyway, tell Dalton that I love him because I do. He's hysterical. Thanks for reviewing, I love you!! :-D
-----
Author's Note: Omg my reviewers are so NICE!! I love you guys to death, thanks SOOOOOOOO much for reviewing! And I shall now go and finish my homework because, unfortunately, I do have a life and teachers who like to torture me. Leave a review and I'll love you forever!!
-Saturday