Chapter 3: Discovery
Rina's eyes widen as she stared at the electronic backpack just sitting like that on her bed. "—No, this can't be true! It's just a dream… just a dream..." she kept repeating to herself, as she closed her eyes, and slid down against the door, into a sitting position on the floor, with her knees slightly bent, and her arms resting on them, with her head hung down forwards.
A few seconds later, there was a knock on her door, which made her head spring up, and she then did a quick forwards roll towards her bed, instantly getting up, and then frantically grabbing a whole load of sheets, before jumping right onto the bed, covering over backpack, just when her door slid open, revealing her mother. "Hurry up Rina, you only have 7 more minutes until school starts." She then walked out, as the door automatically slid shut.
Rina sighed with relief, and then got off her bed, pulling the sheets back off, and uncovering backpack. "I don't know how you got here, or what you're doing here, or why you're here, or—" she took a quick glance at the digital clock on her bedside table, making her eyes widen, and then looked back at backpack. "I don't even know if you'll still be here when I get back from school, but if you are, I'll deal with you later." She then went and put on her shirt which was the last thing she needed to put on, and grabbed her school backpack before exiting out of her room, then the house.
Once outside, she started running towards the school instead of walking, because she knew that if she didn't hurry, she would surely be late.
But she managed to get there just in time as the bell sounded, and crowds of students filed into the school.
Rina followed everyone inside, and didn't even bother to stop by her locker; instead she just headed straight to her first class being Physics, and barely making it in time as the last of the class were just entering the room as well.
Rina spotted Valery, and walked over to her, sitting in the free chair next to her.
"Wow, you're late. Where have you been?" Val asked.
"Uh… just some early chores I had to do." She lied, just as the teacher entered the room, and stood behind the front desk, facing the class.
"Alright class, today we'll be experimenting on electrical conductors. On your desk as you can see are the assortments of different materials we'll be using for today.
You will simply set up by connecting the power box with a light bulb via electrical wires, and then connect a spare wire to the light bulb and another spare wire to the power box as well. Therefore you should have two free ends of two wires. In-between the ends of these two wires, you will place the material you wish to test first, and if the material is a conductor, the light bulb should light up. However, if the light bulb fails to light up, the material is surely an insulator. Now enough peppy talk, let's get on with the experiments." The female teacher then sat down at her desk, and almost immediately the students started moving around and setting up.
Rina turned to face Valery. "So… uh, wanna be my partner?" she asked.
"Sure." Val replied before starting to set up the equipment, with the help of Rina.
"Hey, why don't we just write down the answers instead of doing the experiments." Rina said
"And get them all wrong? Uh, I think I'd rather be safe than sorry."
"Who said we'd get them all wrong? Don't you already know the answers?"
Val blinked. "Uh… no, not exactly. Why, you do?" she asked.
"…Well…I mean, I… yeah."
"You do? How?" Val asked, sounding more interested.
"I don't know, I just… do." Now that she thought of it, she didn't know how she knew them.
"That's impossible, you have to of learned it or read it from somewhere."
"Uh… not that I recall. Oh well, if you want to do the experiments, then let's do them."
"Wait. If you're really certain that you know them, then we can just skip the experiments, because personally I don't feel up to doing any experiments today." Val told her.
"Alright, I'll write them down." Rina then took out a pen and paper, and started scribbling down the answers with her usual messy writing.
As Rina was writing down the answers; in order to stay preoccupied, Val started toying with the lightning bulb, but just then a light flickered inside the lightning bulb, making Val jump, and almost drop it.
She was curious as to what conducted the electrical current, so she thought back to what she was doing with it that could have lit it, but nothing special came to mind.
She then had a thought… but knew that it couldn't be true. Although it could miraculously somehow be possible, so she decided to give it a try. She held the glass of the light bulb with one hand, and with the other hand, she slowly moved it towards the bottom of the light bulb where the metal surrounding was. She then lightly touched it, and it took a second for the light in the light bulb to flicker back on again.
Val's eyes widened as she couldn't believe what she was seeing. She was the conductor of the electricity which made the light come on. But she quickly brought back her hand incase anybody else saw what she was doing, and then placed the light bulb back gently on the desk, and waited for Rina to finish writing.
Rina soon finished, and showed Val the answers. Val nodded, so Rina then took the sheet of paper up to the teacher, handing it to her.
The teacher was surprised. "Wow, done so soon?" she asked.
"Yep." Rina answered.
The teacher quirked an eyebrow, and then glanced down the sheet at all the answers, so far unable to spot any incorrect or missing ones. The teacher then looked back up at Rina. "Alright, I'll take a look at this later." The teacher then put it away, and started writing on some other work, as Rina walked back to her seat.
Class was soon over, and all the students exited out of the room, then headed towards their next classes, including Val and Rina.
A while later---
After all the other classes, there was one more class left for the day, and that was Gym. Val and Rina both happened to be in this class together as well, so after collecting their gym bags from their lockers, they headed down towards the changing rooms while chatting to eachother on the way there.
A few minutes later after they've changed, they walked into the large gym, looking around the room, seeing a set up obstacle course which they figured that they were probably going to do in class.
They thought right. The gym teacher entered the room a few minutes after, informing the students that they'd be doing an obstacle course this lesson.
"Heh, I can handle that." Rina stated.
"Yeah, it doesn't look that difficult at all." Replied Val as she examined the courses they had to face.
"Alright, everybody gather 'round. We're gunna have two teams. Boys against Girls." At that point, mostly all the boys snickered and received high-5's from eachother.
The coach then lined up the teams at the start of the obstacle course, and went through explaining the obstacle course. After the explanation, he asked the class if anyone had any questions, and without any answers, he blew his whistle, indicating the start of the race, and the first person of each team immediately headed off.
A little while later once about 3 quarters of each team have completed the course, the guys were winning by only a little.
The person who was next on the girl team was Val. She was excited, and really wanted to beat the guys, so as soon as the person who had just finished the course tapped Val's hand, off she went.
She went by the first half of the course fairly easily, but there was a slight mishap when she reached the monkey bars.
For some reason while she was trying to swing across them, her hands felt as if they were magnetized to the metal poles when she touched them and this was an issue, as it slowed her down majorly. "Ugh… what the heck is up?" she asked nobody in particular, as she struggled to transfer her hands from each pole.
Her teammates all the way back from behind her were shouting at her to hurry up, but it wasn't her fault, she wasn't able to go any faster. This gave the boys the biggest advantage to their winning.
Yes, the girl team did end up failing greatly at the end.
The class was finally over, and Val immediately walked away without speaking to anybody, but Rina managed to catch up to her.
"Hey, what's wrong? If it's the monkey bars that's still bothering you, don't worry about it, a lot of people have fears." Rina told her, trying to cheer her up.
"I wasn't… afraid…" Val said.
"Ok, well you were probably just tired then."
"I wasn't tired either. You don't understand, something's wrong with me. And I don't know what it is. But I just want to leave. Bye Rina, I'll see you tomorrow." Val then continued walking forwards, leaving Rina standing left behind.
Later on that day, Rina arrived at home, and immediately headed up to her room, remembering backpack.
Her door opened, and she entered, looking around. "Alright Backpack, if you're here, then come out." Rina commanded, and backpack came scurrying out from underneath her bed.
Rina then walked over to it, and picked it up before sitting down on her bed. "What I really don't understand, is why you're here. Too bad you can't talk, is there any other way you'd be able to show me why you're here?" she asked, and backpack stayed motionless for a few seconds before the back of it opened, and a mini screen extended out of it, and started slide showing images of Richie/Gear. "This doesn't make any sense to me backpack. Unfortunately I'm going to have to return you to the store." The screen folded back into the inside of backpack, and backpackcrawled off of her, and headed out of her window. "Wait! Backpack! Where are you going?" she quickly stood up, and ran over to her window, looking out of it to see Backpack crawling down the wall, and heading towards the road. "Backpack! Wait!" she then crawled out of the window, and dropped into the bush below. "Ah!—Owch.." but she wasted no time, and shuffled out of the bush as quickly as possible, then ran after backpack.
Backpack then lead her to a worn-down abandoned gas station, which made her wonder why exactly she was brought there, but she knew that whatever it was would probably help her understand why backpack came to her, so she followed him inside the gas station, which was all dusty and old, looking like it hadn't been used in centuries. "Geez backpack, why'd you bring me here?" she asked, looking around while watching her every step.
Backpack then crawled into a locked chest after unlocking it with a key, which made Rina curious about what was inside, so she slowly approached the chest, and reached her hands out for it, then slowly and cautiously opened it, and to her amazement, there lied the neatly folded costumes of Dakota's three most famous dead heroes, Static, Gear and Shebang.
Rina's eyes widened, as she couldn't even come to believe that all these miraculous events have just been happening to her like crazy. But the one question that really bugged her was, why her? Although, right now she was too amazed that she could barely even think.
But her senses soon came back to her and she reached down to the costumes, pulling them out of the chest, and after being there for ages, they were extremely dusty, so she dusted them off before looking around for some sort of bag that she could carry them in.
She soon found one, and placed the costumes in there, then continued looking around the place. "Wow, this must have been like their secret base or something..." she said, just when she noticed all the designs and writings made by Gear, posted all over the walls.
But something seemed strangely familiar to her about the writings, so she took a closer look at them, just when it hit her, and she suddenly noticed that the writings on the walls made by Gear was the exact same handwriting as hers.
