A&A&A Boarding School
Author's Note: Sorry for the long delay. We did warn you.
This is a transition chapter – the really fun stuff is happening in the next one. This doesn't mean you should hate this one. Just saying, is all.
In case anyone is confused, today in A&A&A-verse it is Saturday.
The Chinese song that the Voice sings later is derived from Bu Pa Bu Pa by Guomeimei, a parody of Dragostea Din Tei. We are very proud to say that we have nothing to do with the ownership of that song, because we do not write trash like that, enough said.
28. Malls and Mental Instability
Everybody was so used to waking up at half past six every morning that their biological clocks had reset themselves to that time. Therefore, at somewhere beyond half past six the more adaptable ones rose from their beds, and their feet were carrying them to the dormitory doors when their minds suddenly woke up and realised it was Saturday.
This had a profound effect on everybody, except Hermione, who carried on as if it was a weekday. Everybody else automatically went back to bed.
By the time Harry had got up on his feet, brushed his teeth, got dressed, gone back and shaken Ron and waited for him to do the same, Hermione had eaten breakfast, gone to the library and done all of Friday's homework that she hadn't finished last night. She was sitting in the Dining Hall as they stumbled in, and the look on her face would have struck guilt into the hearts of anyone who was feeling awake and alert at eight o'clock.
"Sleeping in again, were you?" she said accusingly.
"It's Saturday, Hermione," protested Ron, sinking into his seat and digging into the breakfast Galadriel had supplied him with – today it was muesli. There appeared to be more fruit than muesli in the bowl.
"So," said Harry, attempting to lighten the mood, "are we going downtown today? We've got the whole morning free until CCA Orientation."
Hermione opened her mouth, and Ron hastily cut in, "And we don't care if you want to stay here and mug. We'll just go without you."
Hermione glared at him. "I was going to say, yes, let's go downtown."
Ron shut his mouth and stared at her.
"I'm sure it'll be an interesting experience," said Hermione primly, "and there are some books I promised Evelyn I'd pick up at the bookshop."
"Evelyn?" exclaimed Ron. "You've been talking to the librarian?"
"There's only one Evelyn I know," said Hermione. "Don't look at me like that. She's really nice – there's lots of things we talk about, and I feel we can connect on an intellectual wavelength."
The implied statement was that Ron's intellectual wavelength was several crests shorter than hers. Ron ignored this.
"Why're you buying books for her?"
"Not for her, for the library," corrected Hermione testily. "There's a library fund that she uses, except it's been very hard for her to buy them herself since she died, and no one's been adding to the stock since then!" Her tone suggested that a badly-stocked library was worse than the eighteenth level of hell.
"Oh, very well, buy your books," muttered Ron. "I'm sure there's better stuff to do in the town, right, Harry?"
"Right," said Harry. Although they wouldn't get to do it until Hermione had finished dragging them around every second-hand bookshop, was what he didn't add.
The seniors were truly going all out in marketing their CCAs. Suddenly there seemed to be a lot more of them about the place. The first-years had never really taken much notice of them before this – they had been voices in the ceiling, people you passed on the way to class, inhabitants of the other tables at dinner. Now, however, they seemed to be popping up everywhere. Despite the best efforts of the prefects, they were still ambushing the first-years around corners and showering them with flyers.
"Yes, thank you very much," said Andromache, ducking an armful of flyers that was being waved by a bespectacled member of the Advanced Math Club. She followed Hector and Briseis into the Dining Hall. A large part of one wall had been obscured by a massive hand-painted banner that declared:
A&A&A NCC: YOU CHOOSE.
Achilles joined them at the table some time later. He was ranting, because 'some idiot' had discreetly stuck a bunch of white stickers with large red crosses on his back. Briseis peeled one off. It said, in tiny print:
RED CROSS: WE HEAL.
"Why are they so desperate to get us to join their CCAs?" mused Andromache. "It's not like they even know us that well."
"Ah," said a pleasant voice behind her, "we do it because we need someone to carry on the baton after we leave this school. In my CCA's case, we mean this literally."
Andromache and Hector swivelled around. The young man smiled at them. He looked alarmingly familiar.
"Bruce Banner," said he by way of introduction. "Track and Field."
Andromache stared at him. "Have we met? You look – very familiar."
Bruce Banner considered this. "No, I don't think so."
"You run, do you?" called Achilles from across the table.
"No, actually, I'm a fielder," said Bruce Banner. "I throw things." He handed Andromache and Hector a small green flag each. On each was inscribed in shiny pen:
TRACK & FIELD IS A PERSONAL CHALLENGE
"We're holding our auditions on the track this afternoon," went on Bruce Banner. "It'd be nice to see you there."
After he left, Andromache was still trying to figure out where she had seen him before. "He really is very familiar, face-wise," she was saying as she and Briseis brushed leftover muesli into the bin. "Like…his ears. I've seen his ears before."
"Lots of people have ears like that," replied Briseis. "Hector's got ears like that, for one."
"Yes," murmured Andromache to herself. "Hector. Hmmm."
They didn't all go at once; they went in dribs and drabs, wandering down the rocky paths, down the slope of the hill, to where civilization nestled at its foot like a respite. Some of them hung around the halls of A&A&A, thinking of homework, doodling on worksheets – but eventually they all made their way downtown.
The path down from the school led straight to the town square, a spacious paved area surmounted by a decorative fountain. Neat, tidy shops lined its sides, with orderly streets leading off into other parts of the town. It was, on the whole, a pretty place.
The shops sold, among other things, all manner of foodstuffs. There was an ice-cream parlour, a doughnut shop, and various cafés and bars. The Short Alliance descended on all this with undisguised delight, clearly intending to clean it all out by afternoon.
The Company of Heroines passed them on their way through town. Holly jostled past Merry and Pippin, who were desperately pooling cash to buy a Triple Choc Cream Sundae, and hurried to keep up with the others. Elizabeth was peering into store displays with a critical eye.
"I don't…" panted Holly, "…really like…the look of that…"
"Oh, Holly, don't worry," said Elizabeth distractedly, running an expert eye over an ice-blue sash. "You can leave all this stuff to me – I know about dresses."
"I bet you do," muttered Anna, shooting the more off-the-shoulder designs a distrustful glare.
Éowyn saw her brother across the square, and was about to call out a greeting to him, when she saw the people he was with. Faramir waved at her. Éowyn nodded coolly at him, and then pointedly examined a pink lacy skirt that she would have died before wearing.
Faramir looked helplessly at Boromir, who began to whistle.
Grantaire, dragging Courfeyrac and Joly behind him, cut across their path and headed straight into the nearest bar. His goal was to get stone drunk before ten a.m.
Hermione, dragging Ron and Harry behind her, crossed the square and headed straight into the nearest bookshop. Her goal hardly needed explanation.
Andromache was trying to get Hector to convince her to buy one of the turquoise necklaces at a jewellery stall. Behind her, Achilles looked bored. Briseis wasn't talking to him; she was, in fact, busy consuming a chocolate lollipop. He was thinking instead of all the things he could say, if he were Hector.
There was a scream from the fountain, as Chix Verbil attempted to chat up some of the maidens of the town.
Everyone found their way here, sooner or later.
Artemis Fowl, who normally avoided going anywhere near tourist shops, had followed the crowd downtown.
Currently he was standing in the shade of a pillar outside the town bank and surreptitiously taking notes on its security system, in the event that he ever got bored over the weekend and required self-entertainment.
The security guard had very bad taste in music, and was humming a particularly trashy tune and not at all noticing the pale kid in the tinted glasses scribbling busily in a notepad.
Because he had finished his field survey, and because the humming was beginning to get on his nerves, Artemis abruptly left the bank and walked off down the cobblestone street.
Perhaps it was just his irritation, but the humming didn't seem to decrease in volume as the distance between him and the bank grew. In fact, it appeared to intensify.
Then he turned the corner and realised that the humming wasn't coming from the guard at all. It was coming from inside his head.
Artemis stopped in the middle of the street. He carefully put his notepad into his jacket pocket, very slowly, and then he suddenly spun around and, addressing the air in an irate tone, snapped: "Stop that!"
An elderly cleaner paused in his sweeping to stare curiously at Artemis, who was glaring very hard at an embarassed patch of moss on the wall.
Inside, the Voice was raucously singing. Artemis didn't have a problem with Chinese music – in fact, he occasionally listened to inspirational flute melodies – but this particular song had a ghastly tune, and seemed to be lamenting the trials of cockroach phobia.
"Stop it," repeated Artemis. "Your musical taste is atrocious."
The Voice stopped singing long enough to pull a face that only Artemis saw. Outwardly he grimaced.
I'm going mad, he thought. Me. Going mad. What a terrible waste.
Aw, pish.
Shutup! cogitated Artemis fiercely. Shutupshutupshutupshutup!
The Voice was so delayed in replying that Artemis thought it had gone away at last. But suddenly it hit back – and not with thoughts, but with a cramping pain that hammered iron locks around his cranium.
Artemis grabbed his head and fell against a nearby brick wall, gasping in pain.
A giant dustbin rolled past, and stopped. The cleaner watched him with interest – the town lacked common street entertainment, and this was certainly well worth viewership.
Artemis took no notice of him. He stumbled away from the wall and staggered past, clutching at the dustbin for support, the pain intensifying with every step.
Help, he was thinking, his mind curled up against the pain. Help.
From down here, the path up to A&A&A seemed a very, very long one.
They had to look in the children's section for Holly's clothes. It was quite demeaning.
It was a pretty decent dress, though – black, and sparse in ornament. Admittedly it was sleeveless, but Elizabeth pointed out that only Puritans went to balls dressed head-to-toe in full-sleeved black.
Now they had removed themselves and their purchases to the ice-cream parlour, and were perched in a row on stools before their ice-cream cups. In the way of all-girl gatherings across the world, they had unconsciously arranged themselves in order of height, with Holly at one end and Anna at the other.
Eponine looked across her lemon sorbet out of the wide glass windows of the ice cream parlour at the bar across the road, and saw Courfeyrac trying to drag Marius into it.
Abruptly she got up, pushed her ice-cream to Holly and told her to finish it. Then she turned to Elizabeth. "Can I borrow five quid?"
Elizabeth, too shocked to refuse, handed the money over.
"Merci," said Eponine, used one of the coins to pay for the ice-cream and marched out of the door and across the road. They watched her disappear into the bar.
"Dear me," said Elizabeth into the silence. "What's she up to?"
"I think it's not hard to guess," replied Éowyn.
In the bar, the conversation at the French Revolution's table died down as Eponine sauntered over nonchalantly. She glanced at all of them in turn, her gaze resting last on Marius in the corner, and then she grinned.
"So. What's a girl got to do to get drunk around here?"
Artemis, after a climb immemorial, plunged through the double doors of the Entrance Hall. Some intrinsic survival force, beating beneath the waves of pain cramping his brain, was directing his feet on a path he himself wasn't even looking at.
He stumbled into the Dining Hall and into the tip of an umbrella.
"Avast!" cried a voice, "and take a fl – oh dear, are you all right?"
Now having to contend with the pain in his chest as well as his headache, Artemis fell over backwards.
Hands were dragging him upright. Two faces peered down at him; their features zoomed in and out of his blurry vision. Artemis coughed violently, tried to speak. The brain function in charge of that part spontaneously combusted.
Voices were coming to him from a very long way away. One of them was saying in strong accents, "…you done, Westley? If the prefects find out we murdered a junior we are kaput."
"I didn't murder him!" exclaimed the other voice, "look, he's still breathing. I repeat, are you all right?"
"Aaargh," Artemis told them sincerely, lurching out of their grasp and away.
Inigo and Westley stared after him as he rounded the corner and disappeared, leaning heavily on the wall.
"We were just trying to help," said Westley, slightly hurt.
"Damn juniors," said Inigo with feeling, "no respect for their seniors." He squinted into the distance. "Wait a minute. Is that who I think it is?"
"What, a prefect? It's Neo Anderson, for goodness sakes', run, Inigo, run!"
The two renegade fencers pelted off, trailing their replacement umbrellas, followed by a shout across the hall: "STOP RUNNING!"
Eponine was discovering that, contrary to her original reservations, getting drunk was fun. Very, very fun.
"I never wore dresses," said Courfeyrac.
"You're bloody pickin' on me," laughed Eponine. She drank from the glass. No one else did.
"I never," slurred Grantaire, "nevernevernever – uh, wha'ave I nev'r done before? I never been to the library."
"Merde," said Eponine, and drank again. "Don't tell me the rest of you never been to library. Awful place, anyways. My turn, issit? 'Kay. I never kissed a boy."
Grantaire leaned forward and tipped the contents of the glass down his throat.
"You don't say!" exclaimed Joly, refilling the glass. "Who was it?"
"N'telling," muttered Grantaire.
Joly shrugged. "I never caught hypothermia."
No one drank. "You bloody hypochondriac," muttered Feuilly, "All those times you complained you had, and you never."
Joly shrugged again. "Your turn, Marius."
"All right," said Marius. "I've never been in love."
"You're sad," Eponine told him. She pulled the glass across the table to her and drank all of it.
"Hey," said Grantaire, "you ain't s'posed to drink the whole thingy."
"Can if I want," snapped Eponine. "All about proportion, innit? I drink the whole glass, means I'm so damn head-over-heels in love. Innit? And you know the worst thing? My goddamned love, is unrequited. Stupid, innit?"
She took the bottle from Joly's puzzled hands and sloshed some more alcohol into the glass, which she tipped down her throat.
"But that's it for you," she finished, coughing slightly. "L'amour est un salaud. So damn cruel."
The rest of her fellow drinkers said nothing.
Marius said, after some time, "I think we've all had enough to drink."
"Ohnononono," interjected Grantaire hastily, "never c'n'ave enough to drink, pass me the bottle, hohoho……"
"We'd better be getting back to the school, it's nearly noon," went on Marius, ignoring Grantaire. "I think the rest of you should drag him. I'll handle Eponine."
"Getchor hands off me," said Eponine miserably. "I'm not drunk, I ain't."
"You are," returned Marius evenly. "Come on, you don't want to miss CCAO, do you?" He took Eponine by the wrist and led her outside and across the square. She followed, bewildered. Behind them, Feuilly and Joly tried to manhandle Grantaire through the door, with Courfeyrac pushing.
"Anyway," went on Eponine in a singsong voice as they crossed the square and left the town, "why've you never been in love, m'sieur Marius? Fine young man like you, surely there's plenty of girls love to give you their pretty hearts. Why've you never been in love?"
"I don't know," said Marius shortly. "I just haven't."
Artemis couldn't see. His vision was a supernova of brightly-coloured flashes and neon comets. He was now moving only by feel. Nor had he any idea where he was.
The air seemed to move, there was a loud crash, and suddenly the back of his head appeared to be in contact with something hard and painful.
Artemis couldn't find any more of the iron will in him that had kept him moving. He lay there, pain swaddling him like a helpless infant, the Voice cackling evilly in his head.
Something touched his head – a cool, fresh touch, that started off as a single point on his forehead, and then the feeling spread and washed through his head, melting the pain as it went. The shrieking of the Voice was suddenly muffled.
Artemis opened his eyes – a feat startling in its simplicity – and saw one of the nicest visions one could possibly wake up to: the face of the Lady Galadriel bending over him.
A less nice vision, in the form of Professor McGonagall, stood off to one side.
"You never told me, Minerva," said the Lady to her, in tones of faint reproach.
"I didn't know," argued McGonagall. "It was silver – I diagnosed it as the sort Matilda had. I didn't know it went any deeper."
"It probably didn't, at that time," agreed Galadriel. She bent over the prostrate Artemis again. "When did this…Voice start talking to you?"
Artemis wasn't thinking. It was so nice to not think, for once. However, the Voice, keen to make its presence known, said in his words, "Thursday."
Galadriel nodded, and turned back to Professor McGonagall. "There. It was in there all along, dormant at the time of your diagnosis – but exposure to such a…different…environment must have given it the stimulus to break out."
McGonagall seemed to agree with this. "So…I'll leave it to you, your Ladyship. It is, after all, more your field than mine."
"Yes," agreed Galadriel equably, "it is."
McGonagall left, footsteps echoing primly down the corridor.
Galadriel leaned over and extended her hand. Still in the blissful state of not-thinking, Artemis mechanically took it, and she pulled him back onto his feet.
"And now, my dear," she went on as if they had been conducting a relaxed stroll down the corridor all along, "there is someone I would like you to meet."
"So," said Jean Grey affably, "you're a friend of Sam's?"
"I know him," answered Artemis. He was still feeling slightly detached from his surroundings. The Voice was muttering to itself in the back of his head, biding its time, not daring to break out with the presence of Jean seated opposite Artemis, and Galadriel standing over the two of them.
"Nice kid," continued Jean. "Of course, what he does isn't really what we do. His is a sort of nature thing, you see; our – let's avoid the word magic for the time being – power is in the mind."
Huh, echoed the Voice. Yeah, right. Who does she think she is, anyway?
Jean shut her eyes. Artemis nearly flinched when he next heard her voice coming not from her mouth but from somewhere inside his head. I have a Voice too, it said menacingly. Would you like to meet it?
The Voice shuddered and curled up in a dark corner of his brain, for which Artemis was vindictively glad.
"Nicely done, dear," said Galadriel, beaming approval at Jean. She turned back to him. "You will have to learn to control it, Artemis. Only then can you unleash it for your own purpose. Jean and I are here to help you in that. From now on you will take your Magic lessons in a separate class – my special class – and Jean will be your senior. She will keep an eye on you when I am helping Sam."
Artemis nodded mutely. Ordinarily he'd be feeling all elitist about being in a special class, removed from common mortals – but at the moment, the most attractive thing about the whole idea was dealing with the Voice.
Galadriel smiled at them both, then rose. "That reminds me – I must be checking on how the CCA booths are getting along. Fare thee well, my dears." She swept out majestically.
"Right, CCAO," said Jean, getting up. A flick of her eyes, and a strand of red hair that been hanging inconveniently across her line of vision automatically tucked itself behind her ear. "I have to get back to the ISGS booth," she said. "Can't trust the second-years to set up properly. You play chess, don't you? Come and see us later."
She left Artemis standing in the empty classroom.
Well, smirked the Voice, of all the –
Artemis turned around, shut his eyes and squished, like Jean and Galadriel had shown him, forced the Voice into its dark corner, crushed it like a troublesome beetle.
He opened his eyes, panting. The Voice mewled pitifully.
Artemis smiled, his trademark supercilious smile, and went downstairs to find some lunch.
End of ChapterNext chapter coming…CCAO and the Clash of the Seniors